Stories that conjure imagined worlds

REVIEWS BY LACEY GALBRAITH

Fiction has always benefited from experimentation, and several recent short story collections show just how well a new generation of writers has taken to the challenge. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is the debut short story collection by Laila Lalami. Born in Rabat, Morocco, she is the creator of the literary blog Moorishgirl.com, and she opens this series of linked stories with an illegal nighttime voyage. A group of Moroccan immigrants have their hopes set on Spain and the trip across the Strait of Gibraltar is the only way there. In the stories that follow, Lalami focuses on a chosen four: a young mechanic with a young wife, a woman and her three small children, a university student who has recently taken to wearing the hijab, and a young man who, like the others, has dreams bigger than his means.

Lalami aims to fill a reader's senses. Throughout the book there is the aroma of the mint tea served at every meal, the joyful cries of children playing soccer, the sound of the muezzin's call to prayer. Chief among them, though, is the pull of her characters' hope. As determined as her characters, Lalami sets out to prove the strength of the human spirit.


Willful Creatures is Aimee Bender's third work of fiction, and unlike most any other writer working today, she follows Aristotle's adage: "That which is probable and impossible is better than that which is possible and improbable."

Fairy tales for the 21st century, Bender's stories conjure worlds where a man takes a Lilliputian for a pet and a couple with pumpkins for heads gives birth to an iron-headed child. The author's delivery is straightforward and matter-of-fact. The surreal and the magical, as well as the normal and the traditional, coexist so perfectly that one is no better—no more "real"—than the other.

Often, Bender's narrators display a detached calm, the voice sure and even as it describes cruel teenage torment or the curiosities of an unexpected romantic relationship. Precisely because of this style, she is able to highlight those universals of love, hurt, family, loneliness and grace to a higher clarity. The truth is not obscured by the common and everyday. The Lilliputian is his owner's desire for connection made incarnate, and the iron-headed child is the vehicle by which Bender is able to show the limitless boundaries of a family's love. Through fairy tales, fables, imagined worlds where the impossible becomes true, Bender pulls you in. More importantly, she makes you believe.


Yiyun Li lives in the United States, but she was raised in Beijing. In her new collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, her native country becomes a silent character, quietly informing her writing. Li has an elegant way of delivering a story; both The New Yorker and The Paris Review have published her work and there is a gracefulness to her style, a subtlety that runs throughout.

In "After a Life" a couple learns what it is to sacrifice for love, while in "Death Is Not a Bad Joke if Told the Right Way" the young narrator comes to learn as an adult that, "Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he'll become tomorrow." There is wisdom hidden here, and it's told in prose gentle and quiet, yet so very strong and true.


In Music Through the Floor, Pushcart Prize winner Eric Puchner shows just how startling a first work can be. The nine stories included here wake you up to the joy and oftentimes heartache of a tale well told. In "Children of God," the misfits in the story are not the two developmentally disabled adults but rather the parents and "normal" people surrounding them. "Child's Play" tells of little boys behaving like the cruelest of monsters. By the end, the reader is thoughtful at the implications of their actions and haunted by their subsequent future.

Puchner refuses to pander to his readers, and he faces the truths of the world with honesty. Love, family and the ways in which people go in search for both: it's all here. And where some authors might struggle with endings—their last lines and paragraphs dull clinks of disappointment—Puchner's final words are full and satisfying. It's storytelling that lingers long after the last page is turned.


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