First-time writers test the waters with outstanding collections

REVIEWS BY HARVEY FREEDENBERG

Despite its honored tradition, the short story remains the orphan of the literary world. Judging by these striking debut collections, there's hope that an adventuresome group of writers will help rejuvenate the form and attract a new generation of readers.

Extraordinary teenage tales

Karen Russell's startlingly original collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, features graceful and seductive prose that transports the reader into surreal and yet utterly plausible realms. Many of the stories are set in Russell's native region of South Florida, but it's not the familiar territory of high-rise condos and golf courses—it's a world of alligator-infested swamps, ghosts and spectral moonlight. The adolescents who people these mostly first-person tales aren't hanging out at the mall or gabbing on cell phones. Instead, they seek their identity in a kind of edge world that features such exotic venues as the girls' home of the title story.

Highlights include "Haunting Olivia," in which two young brothers engage in a daring nocturnal diving exercise searching for their drowned sister, and "from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration," a one-of-a-kind story of filial devotion. In every story, Russell demonstrates a mastery of her craft, an achievement made even more compelling by the fact that she's only 24 years old.


Welcome to an uneasy future

Ryan Boudinot boasts an MFA from Bennington College and works as an editor at Amazon.com. His first short story collection combines his literary sensibility with a keen eye for the oddities of contemporary American society.

The stories in The Littlest Hitler veer between those set in a recognizable world and others that take place in some dystopian future. The former category features "Sex and Relationships," where the tensions between two childless young couples, friendly on the surface, are peeled back until a shocking secret is revealed. The latter includes "The Sales Team," which involves a group of murderous salesmen whose only product seems to be a talent for terrorizing their customers. In the title story, a fourth-grader appears for the school Halloween party dressed as Adolf Hitler, only to be confronted by a classmate dressed as Anne Frank. Boudinot's gift lies in his ability to move beyond the shock value of the story's premise to offer a tender account of a single father's fumbling effort to help his son.

Fans of the short fiction of George Saunders will find a kindred spirit in the writing of Boudinot and they'll no doubt be waiting eagerly for more of his offbeat take on American life.


Fundamentals of fiction

Home Remedies, by Angela Pneuman, offers eight stories that revolve around a unifying theme: the struggle of girls and young women raised in fundamentalist Christian families to resolve the tension between their upbringing and the values of contemporary society. Despite their brevity, many of the stories have an almost novelistic depth, a quality best illustrated by "The Bell Ringer," the story of a troubled young woman's descent into madness as she mans a Salvation Army bucket in the depths of a Minnesota winter.

Not all of Pneuman's stories offer such unremitting bleakness. "All Saints Day" is the often hilarious tale of two sisters' efforts to enliven a Biblical costume party at the church that's auditioning their father for its pulpit. Others, such as "The Beachcomber," portray the sexual awakening of young girls in sometimes startling, but sympathetic terms.

Pneuman's view of fundamentalist religion is frank but not unfair. It will be revealing to see her apply her talents to other subject matter as her career unfolds.


History's horror

Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harrowing events of that time ripple through the lives of her characters, both past and present, to indelibly shape their identities.

Nayman is adept at reversing the reader's expectations as her characters grapple with the weight of the burden history has placed upon them. In the first two stories, "The House on Kronenstrasse" and "The Porcelain Monkey," the protagonists make startling discoveries about their parents that transform the way each looks at the world. In "Dark Urgings of the Blood," the novella that makes up half the book, Nayman brings to bear her training as a clinical psychologist to tell the haunting story of a psychiatrist and her patient, unknowingly linked by tragic circumstances.

As befits their subject matter, these four stories are dark and often troubling. Nayman's talent lies in her ability to illumine the essential humanity at their core.


Harvey Freedenberg writes from Pennsylvania.

Big names, tiny packages

It's not only newcomers who are drawn to the short story form—some of literature's brightest stars have recently released new collections.

-Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín (Scribner, $24, 288 pages, ISBN 9781416534655). Irish author T—ibín has been on the Booker Prize shortlist twice, and this new collection, with its tight focus on the mother/son relationship, doesn't disappoint.

-The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin, $23, 224 pages, ISBN 9780618596744). Bass started his career with the short story collection The Watch; 22 books later he returns with a third set of tales told in his famously economic language.

-Severance by Robert Olen Butler (Chronicle, $22.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9780811856143). Pulitzer Prize winner Butler has written an unusual, if a bit grotesque, set of 62 stories told from the perspective of beheaded individuals real and imagined.

-Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese, $23.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780385503846). Atwood's brilliant collection is novel-like in scope as it goes back and forth through the life of a Canadian woman whose existence is as mundane as it is universal—and enlightening.

—TRISHA PING


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