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ff the beaten path There are still places in America where one can get lost on country roads and meet people whose families have lived on the land for generations. Bobbie Ann Mason writes about these places and people in her new collection of short stories, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. The award-winning author of In Country, Shiloh and Other Stories and Clear Springs now gives us a group of tales about life in the new South, filled with memorable characters going about their daily activities. What makes these stories masterful is that while Mason creates a distinctive place and ambience, the rich inner workings of the individuals are only hinted at, glimpsed around the next bend in the road. Human nature in all its surprising mystery is described in an eloquently hypnotic voice that, without fail, makes us wish there was more of each story to be read.

Underlying many of the narratives is a sense of sadness, the realization that the world is not always what one hopes it will be. Often, too, the characters seem helpless against the inertia of their lives and isolated from the ones they love. In “Tunica,” Liz, a stubborn girl with a weakness for gambling also has a weakness for her ex-con husband. Though she knows he is wrong for her and can identify the familiar patterns of their dysfunctional relationship, she is swept along by the tide of his personality. “Thunder Snow” introduces us to Boogie, the personification of good old boy, who struggles with his wife’s independent nature and refusal to talk about her experiences in the Persian Gulf War. With Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, Bobbie Ann Mason has produced another collection of stories that reveals the transitions we all experience, whether we travel the world or circle the same small patch of land. These powerful stories stick in the memory like the sight of a loved one’s face upon return from a long journey or the smell of morning coffee, astonishing in their ability to comfort and settle the spirit.

ff the beaten path There are still places in America where one can get lost on country roads and meet people whose families have lived on the land for generations. Bobbie Ann Mason writes about these places and people in her new collection of short stories, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. The award-winning author of […]
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by Elizabeth Spencer spans an acclaimed 57-year writing career that includes five O. Henry Awards. Returning many out-of-print works to circulation, this prestigious Modern Library collection of 26 stories and a novella will be a welcome addition for Spencer’s many fans and will deservedly bring her work to the attention of a new generation of readers.

Born in Mississippi, Spencer lived in Italy and Montreal, Canada, before settling in North Carolina, and she brings an international perspective to her Southern story-telling roots. A lifelong friend of Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren, Spencer writes with the simple charm of Southern eccentrics who often learn about life through travel. An early coming of age story, “The Eclipse,” narrates a young boy’s journey with his beautiful music teacher. The seemingly simple tale is rich with detail (“he could tell the engineer by the great big cuffs on his gloves”) and grows into allegory as the young man both clings to and outgrows his boyhood devotion.

The theme of illusion versus reality recurs often in Spencer’s work, most notably in her million-selling novella The Light in the Piazza. Recounting a story of young love complicated by handicap, Spencer details the intertwined lives of an American mother and daughter and the young lover’s Italian family. It’s a haunting story of a mother’s anxious hopes for her special daughter that unfolds against an Italian backdrop of shifting light and shadow.

The six new stories included in this volume continue to explore the complications of family life. In “First Child,” Spencer brings the family into the 21st century with a modern tale of reluctant quasi-parenthood. “Owl,” the final tale, narrates the quiet search of an empty nest woman for a remnant of meaning in her life.

Spencer writes with simplicity and clarity about people you will recognize. While she respects the intelligence of her readers don’t expect a pat ending all tied up with a ribbon Spencer unfolds her stories through straightforward narrative, with just the right dusting of evocative description: “He let the sea sound, the salt air, invade him, like water permeating dry fabric.” [from “First Child”] The Southern Woman is great literature, written to be enjoyed by everyday readers like you and me.

Mary Carol Moran is the author of Clear Soul: Metaphors and Meditations (Court Street Press). She teaches the Novel Writers’ Workshop at Auburn University.

by Elizabeth Spencer spans an acclaimed 57-year writing career that includes five O. Henry Awards. Returning many out-of-print works to circulation, this prestigious Modern Library collection of 26 stories and a novella will be a welcome addition for Spencer’s many fans and will deservedly bring her work to the attention of a new generation of […]
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Here's an interesting bit of literary trivia: trade paperback books those appealing, affordable little volumes that bibliophiles just love to collect first made their way onto the market in 1954. That year, publishing magnate Alfred A. Knopf announced a debut list of very special titles, a group of hardback classics that would be reissued in handsome paperbound editions by a new division of his company. That imprint was none other than Vintage Books, and its inauguration 50 years ago was a watershed moment in the world of literature. Of course, readers are now familiar with the Vintage miracle the magical transformation of great hardcover titles into irresistible paperbacks, complete with eye-catching jackets and distinctive typefaces.

Now, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, Vintage is giving book lovers another reason to browse the shelves: Vintage Readers, a group of attractive, budget-friendly anthologies designed to give an overview of a particular author's work. Vintage Readers covers an international roster of writers, with volumes on V.S. Naipaul, Martin Amis, Joan Didion, Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami, Langston Hughes, Oliver Sacks and others. Each of these special literary samplers offers selections of essays, short stories, poems and novel excerpts, featuring lesser-known material and work never before collected in book form. The volumes also include brief author biographies. There are 12 books in the series so far, each just over 200 pages in length and priced at $9.95. This month, BookPage pays tribute to the Vintage vision by spotlighting some of the entries in the new lineup.

Sandra Cisneros
A favorite with fiction lovers, best-selling author Cisneros is a one-of-a-kind writer whose work distills the Latina experience. Cisneros' work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she has won numerous awards. Vintage Cisneros, with excerpts from the novels Caramelo and The House on Mango Street, poems from My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Women, and stories from Women Hollering Creek, is the perfect introduction to one of the strongest voices in contemporary literature.

James Baldwin
A groundbreaking African-American author, Baldwin produced classic works of both fiction and nonfiction over the course of his career. His writings on race during the 1960s were definitive, provocative and explosive, and they're featured in Vintage Baldwin, which includes excerpts from his nonfiction works Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time. Baldwin's fiction is also represented here, with the timeless short story "Sonny's Blues" and an excerpt from the novel Another Country.

Barry Lopez
Although he made his name as an essayist and nature writer, Lopez has also produced several masterful collections of short stories. Vintage Lopez provides a broad sampling of his work, with choice pieces from the nonfiction books About This Life and Crossing Open Ground, as well as the National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams. The volume also features a generous helping of Lopez's fiction, with stories from Field Notes and his recent book Light Action in the Caribbean.

Alice Munro
Mistress of the modern short story, Munro writes narratives brimming with crystalline moments of revelation. This National Book Award-winning writer has earned international acclaim by bringing her corner of Canada to life. Vintage Munrospans the beloved author's long and distinguished career, featuring stories from much-praised collections like The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Open Secrets and her most recent book, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Here's an interesting bit of literary trivia: trade paperback books those appealing, affordable little volumes that bibliophiles just love to collect first made their way onto the market in 1954. That year, publishing magnate Alfred A. Knopf announced a debut list of very special titles, a group of hardback classics that would be reissued in […]
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The king of the blockbuster courtroom thriller has succeeded at stepping into a new genre—short fiction—and created seven rich and enticing narratives.
 

In Ford County, John Grisham’s first collection of stories, we meet a weird and endearing group of misfits with one thing in common: each has lived in Clanton, the seat of fictional Ford County, Mississippi. There’s Sidney, a separated husband whose only solace comes in breaking the town’s casino; Gilbert, who enjoys exposing mistreatment at nursing homes; and Raymond, an inmate on death row who’s written a 200-page autobiography. We are privy to each of their twisted desires, and although we may not agree with all of these protagonists, we can sympathize with their individual plights: to escape from a dull existence; to give life a jolt; or, sometimes, just to survive.

 

Grisham’s prose is smooth and controlled as he deftly moves between narrators and storylines, and his skilled storytelling makes even the wackier scenes believable. One of Ford County’s greatest assets is its abundant but understated humor. When Calvin, a young virgin, hits a strip joint in Memphis en route to donating blood, the omniscient narrator comments dryly: “It was a life-changing experience. Calvin would never be the same.” 

 

Predictably—and thankfully, since it’s what the author does best—there is no dearth of lawyers in this collection. Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, was also set in Clanton, where “a town of ten thousand people provided enough conflict to support fifty-one lawyers.” Readers will enjoy getting sucked into this world of small-town corruption and Sonic drive-ins, kind-hearted neighbors and sleazy businessmen. And although there’s little doubt that Grisham will return to the thrillers that made him famous, here’s hoping that Ford County is the precursor of many collections to come. 

The king of the blockbuster courtroom thriller has succeeded at stepping into a new genre—short fiction—and created seven rich and enticing narratives.   In Ford County, John Grisham’s first collection of stories, we meet a weird and endearing group of misfits with one thing in common: each has lived in Clanton, the seat of fictional […]
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If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may be renewed interest in short stories in the literary marketplace. Of these numerous new releases, six debut collections stand out.

ZZ Packer’s story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead, $24.95, 238 pages, ISBN 1573222348) is one of the most heralded in recent years. The title story, which appeared in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue three years ago, focuses on Dina, a black Yale freshman engaged in “orientation games,” group activities meant to promote bonding among students. In one such game Dina proclaims that if she were an inanimate object, she would choose to be a revolver a comment that transforms her from quiet honor student to dangerous outcast and ultimately to the realization that “‘pretending’ was what had got me this far.” In Packer’s stories, the protagonists, primarily young African-American women on the verge of some formative encounter, discover that they are outcasts, and that structuring their identity is more complicated than merely understanding the stereotypical difficulties associated with being black and female. They often pretend in order to get by or to get anywhere, then realize they’re not where they wanted to be. Packer’s beautifully constructed narratives and realistic dialogue mark this collection as the debut of an assured and original voice.

In Beth Ann Bauman’s Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage, $18.50, 186 pages, ISBN 1931561354), issues of identity once again play key roles. Bauman’s girls, teens and young women are waiting for their lives to “unfurl,” to see what lies ahead and who they will become. This process is never obvious, but is revealed through subtleties of language, dialogue and characterization. Bauman herself has been on the same road. The New Jersey native moved to New York City to become a writer a decade ago, temping by day and writing by night. Just days before September 11, 2001, in order to continue writing, she turned down a more permanent assignment at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm hit hardest in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. A year later she signed a deal to publish Beautiful Girls. It was a bittersweet triumph in light of losing so many friends, and that quality is present in most of the stories. But these characters are scrappy, “beautiful” girls, and the whole collection shines with a sense of hope, not sentimentally won, but acquired through perseverance.

What Packer and Bauman achieve with witty, yet truthful, voices and modern-day American situations, Mary Yukari Waters in The Laws of Evening (Scribner, $21, 192 pages, ISBN 0743243323) accomplishes by setting her stories in post-World War II Japan and relying heavily on the inner thoughts of her characters. What could have been a risky approach works admirably due to Waters’ attention to detail, a way with description that mirrors the fragility of a country re-imagining itself after so much upheaval. As a result, quiet pervades these stories. The characters have lost family, property and traditions, their world forever changed by the war. Even in stories set in the present day, memories of World War II affect the way the characters treat one another. Of Japanese and Irish-American lineage, Waters lived in Japan until she was 9 years old, and her understanding of her characters’ struggles with the intersection of East and West is first-hand and intimately felt.

The clash of cultures also features prominently in Oscar Casares’ Brownsville (Back Bay, $13.95, 176 pages, ISBN 0316146803). The title refers to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Mexico, in view beyond the banks of the river. Casares grew up there, and his stories ring with crisp dialogue and situations that explore the melding of American ways with Mexican traditions, a melding that produces not a hybrid life, but rather a double consciousness the idea of what seems possible for immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States compared to the reality of living here. Casares’ characters are trying to figure out their identity, too, and, as in Water’s stories, that identity is intensely defined by place, by being on the border of Mexico and the edge of possibility. Joshua Furst’s characters are defined by their ages. Furst, who taught for a decade in the New York public school system, convincingly writes of the trials of childhood, and his characters speak with the realistic voices of children, teenagers and young adults. Unlike the other collections featured here, Short People (Knopf, $23, 224 pages, ISBN 0375414312) includes short shorts vignettes under 200 words that, in this case, spotlight some aspect of child abuse or neglect. All in all, the kids in these stories are not living the happy childhood of their dreams. In fact, with few exceptions, these stories depict the difficulty of being young, the confusing nature of constant change and growth, and the helplessness of dealing with it all when you’re too small to understand what’s going on or to have any legal rights in enforcing some measure of control. The characters in John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies travel all over the world and yet remain disengaged from their own emotions. Murray, a medical doctor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as an author, takes the scientific, analytical approach of his career and applies it to his writing. Most of the book’s protagonists are scientists themselves or intimately involved in the natural world. If they evade their own emotional attachments and knowledge of their own intentions, they certainly know how to catalog their difficulties metaphorically by family, genus and species. All of them try, it seems, to find their places in a world made complicated and frightening by everything from political fallout to disease. But just as a good scientist looks to empirical evidence and follows stringent methods to prove his theories, these characters apply the same kind of methodological thinking to prove their own existence, their importance in this life.

These debut collections are all auspicious introductions to writers from whom much will be expected in the future. What these books show is that their authors are all storytellers in the best sense writers who know how to reflect the truth and make it clearer. They use fiction as a mirror to highlight aspects of our own lives. That is the revelation of short stories.

Bonnie Arant Ertlelt is a writer in Nashville.

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may […]
Review by

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may be renewed interest in short stories in the literary marketplace. Of these numerous new releases, six debut collections stand out.

ZZ Packer’s story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead, $24.95, 238 pages, ISBN 1573222348) is one of the most heralded in recent years. The title story, which appeared in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue three years ago, focuses on Dina, a black Yale freshman engaged in “orientation games,” group activities meant to promote bonding among students. In one such game Dina proclaims that if she were an inanimate object, she would choose to be a revolver a comment that transforms her from quiet honor student to dangerous outcast and ultimately to the realization that “‘pretending’ was what had got me this far.” In Packer’s stories, the protagonists, primarily young African-American women on the verge of some formative encounter, discover that they are outcasts, and that structuring their identity is more complicated than merely understanding the stereotypical difficulties associated with being black and female. They often pretend in order to get by or to get anywhere, then realize they’re not where they wanted to be. Packer’s beautifully constructed narratives and realistic dialogue mark this collection as the debut of an assured and original voice.

In Beth Ann Bauman’s Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage, $18.50, 186 pages, ISBN 1931561354), issues of identity once again play key roles. Bauman’s girls, teens and young women are waiting for their lives to “unfurl,” to see what lies ahead and who they will become. This process is never obvious, but is revealed through subtleties of language, dialogue and characterization. Bauman herself has been on the same road. The New Jersey native moved to New York City to become a writer a decade ago, temping by day and writing by night. Just days before September 11, 2001, in order to continue writing, she turned down a more permanent assignment at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm hit hardest in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. A year later she signed a deal to publish Beautiful Girls. It was a bittersweet triumph in light of losing so many friends, and that quality is present in most of the stories. But these characters are scrappy, “beautiful” girls, and the whole collection shines with a sense of hope, not sentimentally won, but acquired through perseverance.

What Packer and Bauman achieve with witty, yet truthful, voices and modern-day American situations, Mary Yukari Waters in The Laws of Evening (Scribner, $21, 192 pages, ISBN 0743243323) accomplishes by setting her stories in post-World War II Japan and relying heavily on the inner thoughts of her characters. What could have been a risky approach works admirably due to Waters’ attention to detail, a way with description that mirrors the fragility of a country re-imagining itself after so much upheaval. As a result, quiet pervades these stories. The characters have lost family, property and traditions, their world forever changed by the war. Even in stories set in the present day, memories of World War II affect the way the characters treat one another. Of Japanese and Irish-American lineage, Waters lived in Japan until she was 9 years old, and her understanding of her characters’ struggles with the intersection of East and West is first-hand and intimately felt.

The clash of cultures also features prominently in Oscar Casares’ Brownsville (Back Bay, $13.95, 176 pages, ISBN 0316146803). The title refers to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Mexico, in view beyond the banks of the river. Casares grew up there, and his stories ring with crisp dialogue and situations that explore the melding of American ways with Mexican traditions, a melding that produces not a hybrid life, but rather a double consciousness the idea of what seems possible for immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States compared to the reality of living here. Casares’ characters are trying to figure out their identity, too, and, as in Water’s stories, that identity is intensely defined by place, by being on the border of Mexico and the edge of possibility. Joshua Furst’s characters are defined by their ages. Furst, who taught for a decade in the New York public school system, convincingly writes of the trials of childhood, and his characters speak with the realistic voices of children, teenagers and young adults. Unlike the other collections featured here, Short People includes short shorts vignettes under 200 words that, in this case, spotlight some aspect of child abuse or neglect. All in all, the kids in these stories are not living the happy childhood of their dreams. In fact, with few exceptions, these stories depict the difficulty of being young, the confusing nature of constant change and growth, and the helplessness of dealing with it all when you’re too small to understand what’s going on or to have any legal rights in enforcing some measure of control. The characters in John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (HarperCollins, $24.95, 274 pages, ISBN 0060509287) travel all over the world and yet remain disengaged from their own emotions. Murray, a medical doctor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as an author, takes the scientific, analytical approach of his career and applies it to his writing. Most of the book’s protagonists are scientists themselves or intimately involved in the natural world. If they evade their own emotional attachments and knowledge of their own intentions, they certainly know how to catalog their difficulties metaphorically by family, genus and species. All of them try, it seems, to find their places in a world made complicated and frightening by everything from political fallout to disease. But just as a good scientist looks to empirical evidence and follows stringent methods to prove his theories, these characters apply the same kind of methodological thinking to prove their own existence, their importance in this life.

These debut collections are all auspicious introductions to writers from whom much will be expected in the future. What these books show is that their authors are all storytellers in the best sense writers who know how to reflect the truth and make it clearer. They use fiction as a mirror to highlight aspects of our own lives. That is the revelation of short stories.

Bonnie Arant Ertlelt is a writer in Nashville.

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may […]
Review by

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may be renewed interest in short stories in the literary marketplace. Of these numerous new releases, six debut collections stand out.

ZZ Packer’s story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead, $24.95, 238 pages, ISBN 1573222348) is one of the most heralded in recent years. The title story, which appeared in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue three years ago, focuses on Dina, a black Yale freshman engaged in “orientation games,” group activities meant to promote bonding among students. In one such game Dina proclaims that if she were an inanimate object, she would choose to be a revolver a comment that transforms her from quiet honor student to dangerous outcast and ultimately to the realization that “‘pretending’ was what had got me this far.” In Packer’s stories, the protagonists, primarily young African-American women on the verge of some formative encounter, discover that they are outcasts, and that structuring their identity is more complicated than merely understanding the stereotypical difficulties associated with being black and female. They often pretend in order to get by or to get anywhere, then realize they’re not where they wanted to be. Packer’s beautifully constructed narratives and realistic dialogue mark this collection as the debut of an assured and original voice.

In Beth Ann Bauman’s Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage, $18.50, 186 pages, ISBN 1931561354), issues of identity once again play key roles. Bauman’s girls, teens and young women are waiting for their lives to “unfurl,” to see what lies ahead and who they will become. This process is never obvious, but is revealed through subtleties of language, dialogue and characterization. Bauman herself has been on the same road. The New Jersey native moved to New York City to become a writer a decade ago, temping by day and writing by night. Just days before September 11, 2001, in order to continue writing, she turned down a more permanent assignment at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm hit hardest in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. A year later she signed a deal to publish Beautiful Girls. It was a bittersweet triumph in light of losing so many friends, and that quality is present in most of the stories. But these characters are scrappy, “beautiful” girls, and the whole collection shines with a sense of hope, not sentimentally won, but acquired through perseverance.

What Packer and Bauman achieve with witty, yet truthful, voices and modern-day American situations, Mary Yukari Waters in The Laws of Evening (Scribner, $21, 192 pages, ISBN 0743243323) accomplishes by setting her stories in post-World War II Japan and relying heavily on the inner thoughts of her characters. What could have been a risky approach works admirably due to Waters’ attention to detail, a way with description that mirrors the fragility of a country re-imagining itself after so much upheaval. As a result, quiet pervades these stories. The characters have lost family, property and traditions, their world forever changed by the war. Even in stories set in the present day, memories of World War II affect the way the characters treat one another. Of Japanese and Irish-American lineage, Waters lived in Japan until she was 9 years old, and her understanding of her characters’ struggles with the intersection of East and West is first-hand and intimately felt.

The clash of cultures also features prominently in Oscar Casares’ Brownsville. The title refers to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Mexico, in view beyond the banks of the river. Casares grew up there, and his stories ring with crisp dialogue and situations that explore the melding of American ways with Mexican traditions, a melding that produces not a hybrid life, but rather a double consciousness the idea of what seems possible for immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States compared to the reality of living here. Casares’ characters are trying to figure out their identity, too, and, as in Water’s stories, that identity is intensely defined by place, by being on the border of Mexico and the edge of possibility. Joshua Furst’s characters are defined by their ages. Furst, who taught for a decade in the New York public school system, convincingly writes of the trials of childhood, and his characters speak with the realistic voices of children, teenagers and young adults. Unlike the other collections featured here, Short People (Knopf, $23, 224 pages, ISBN 0375414312) includes short shorts vignettes under 200 words that, in this case, spotlight some aspect of child abuse or neglect. All in all, the kids in these stories are not living the happy childhood of their dreams. In fact, with few exceptions, these stories depict the difficulty of being young, the confusing nature of constant change and growth, and the helplessness of dealing with it all when you’re too small to understand what’s going on or to have any legal rights in enforcing some measure of control. The characters in John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (HarperCollins, $24.95, 274 pages, ISBN 0060509287) travel all over the world and yet remain disengaged from their own emotions. Murray, a medical doctor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as an author, takes the scientific, analytical approach of his career and applies it to his writing. Most of the book’s protagonists are scientists themselves or intimately involved in the natural world. If they evade their own emotional attachments and knowledge of their own intentions, they certainly know how to catalog their difficulties metaphorically by family, genus and species. All of them try, it seems, to find their places in a world made complicated and frightening by everything from political fallout to disease. But just as a good scientist looks to empirical evidence and follows stringent methods to prove his theories, these characters apply the same kind of methodological thinking to prove their own existence, their importance in this life.

These debut collections are all auspicious introductions to writers from whom much will be expected in the future. What these books show is that their authors are all storytellers in the best sense writers who know how to reflect the truth and make it clearer. They use fiction as a mirror to highlight aspects of our own lives. That is the revelation of short stories.

Bonnie Arant Ertlelt is a writer in Nashville.

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may […]
Review by

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may be renewed interest in short stories in the literary marketplace. Of these numerous new releases, six debut collections stand out.

ZZ Packer’s story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead, $24.95, 238 pages, ISBN 1573222348) is one of the most heralded in recent years. The title story, which appeared in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue three years ago, focuses on Dina, a black Yale freshman engaged in “orientation games,” group activities meant to promote bonding among students. In one such game Dina proclaims that if she were an inanimate object, she would choose to be a revolver a comment that transforms her from quiet honor student to dangerous outcast and ultimately to the realization that “‘pretending’ was what had got me this far.” In Packer’s stories, the protagonists, primarily young African-American women on the verge of some formative encounter, discover that they are outcasts, and that structuring their identity is more complicated than merely understanding the stereotypical difficulties associated with being black and female. They often pretend in order to get by or to get anywhere, then realize they’re not where they wanted to be. Packer’s beautifully constructed narratives and realistic dialogue mark this collection as the debut of an assured and original voice.

In Beth Ann Bauman’s Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage, $18.50, 186 pages, ISBN 1931561354), issues of identity once again play key roles. Bauman’s girls, teens and young women are waiting for their lives to “unfurl,” to see what lies ahead and who they will become. This process is never obvious, but is revealed through subtleties of language, dialogue and characterization. Bauman herself has been on the same road. The New Jersey native moved to New York City to become a writer a decade ago, temping by day and writing by night. Just days before September 11, 2001, in order to continue writing, she turned down a more permanent assignment at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm hit hardest in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. A year later she signed a deal to publish Beautiful Girls. It was a bittersweet triumph in light of losing so many friends, and that quality is present in most of the stories. But these characters are scrappy, “beautiful” girls, and the whole collection shines with a sense of hope, not sentimentally won, but acquired through perseverance.

What Packer and Bauman achieve with witty, yet truthful, voices and modern-day American situations, Mary Yukari Waters in The Laws of Evening accomplishes by setting her stories in post-World War II Japan and relying heavily on the inner thoughts of her characters. What could have been a risky approach works admirably due to Waters’ attention to detail, a way with description that mirrors the fragility of a country re-imagining itself after so much upheaval. As a result, quiet pervades these stories. The characters have lost family, property and traditions, their world forever changed by the war. Even in stories set in the present day, memories of World War II affect the way the characters treat one another. Of Japanese and Irish-American lineage, Waters lived in Japan until she was 9 years old, and her understanding of her characters’ struggles with the intersection of East and West is first-hand and intimately felt.

The clash of cultures also features prominently in Oscar Casares’ Brownsville (Back Bay, $13.95, 176 pages, ISBN 0316146803). The title refers to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Mexico, in view beyond the banks of the river. Casares grew up there, and his stories ring with crisp dialogue and situations that explore the melding of American ways with Mexican traditions, a melding that produces not a hybrid life, but rather a double consciousness the idea of what seems possible for immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States compared to the reality of living here. Casares’ characters are trying to figure out their identity, too, and, as in Water’s stories, that identity is intensely defined by place, by being on the border of Mexico and the edge of possibility. Joshua Furst’s characters are defined by their ages. Furst, who taught for a decade in the New York public school system, convincingly writes of the trials of childhood, and his characters speak with the realistic voices of children, teenagers and young adults. Unlike the other collections featured here, Short People (Knopf, $23, 224 pages, ISBN 0375414312) includes short shorts vignettes under 200 words that, in this case, spotlight some aspect of child abuse or neglect. All in all, the kids in these stories are not living the happy childhood of their dreams. In fact, with few exceptions, these stories depict the difficulty of being young, the confusing nature of constant change and growth, and the helplessness of dealing with it all when you’re too small to understand what’s going on or to have any legal rights in enforcing some measure of control. The characters in John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (HarperCollins, $24.95, 274 pages, ISBN 0060509287) travel all over the world and yet remain disengaged from their own emotions. Murray, a medical doctor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as an author, takes the scientific, analytical approach of his career and applies it to his writing. Most of the book’s protagonists are scientists themselves or intimately involved in the natural world. If they evade their own emotional attachments and knowledge of their own intentions, they certainly know how to catalog their difficulties metaphorically by family, genus and species. All of them try, it seems, to find their places in a world made complicated and frightening by everything from political fallout to disease. But just as a good scientist looks to empirical evidence and follows stringent methods to prove his theories, these characters apply the same kind of methodological thinking to prove their own existence, their importance in this life.

These debut collections are all auspicious introductions to writers from whom much will be expected in the future. What these books show is that their authors are all storytellers in the best sense writers who know how to reflect the truth and make it clearer. They use fiction as a mirror to highlight aspects of our own lives. That is the revelation of short stories.

Bonnie Arant Ertlelt is a writer in Nashville.

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may […]
Review by

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may be renewed interest in short stories in the literary marketplace. Of these numerous new releases, six debut collections stand out.

ZZ Packer’s story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead, $24.95, 238 pages, ISBN 1573222348) is one of the most heralded in recent years. The title story, which appeared in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue three years ago, focuses on Dina, a black Yale freshman engaged in “orientation games,” group activities meant to promote bonding among students. In one such game Dina proclaims that if she were an inanimate object, she would choose to be a revolver a comment that transforms her from quiet honor student to dangerous outcast and ultimately to the realization that “‘pretending’ was what had got me this far.” In Packer’s stories, the protagonists, primarily young African-American women on the verge of some formative encounter, discover that they are outcasts, and that structuring their identity is more complicated than merely understanding the stereotypical difficulties associated with being black and female. They often pretend in order to get by or to get anywhere, then realize they’re not where they wanted to be. Packer’s beautifully constructed narratives and realistic dialogue mark this collection as the debut of an assured and original voice.

In Beth Ann Bauman’s Beautiful Girls, issues of identity once again play key roles. Bauman’s girls, teens and young women are waiting for their lives to “unfurl,” to see what lies ahead and who they will become. This process is never obvious, but is revealed through subtleties of language, dialogue and characterization. Bauman herself has been on the same road. The New Jersey native moved to New York City to become a writer a decade ago, temping by day and writing by night. Just days before September 11, 2001, in order to continue writing, she turned down a more permanent assignment at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm hit hardest in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. A year later she signed a deal to publish Beautiful Girls. It was a bittersweet triumph in light of losing so many friends, and that quality is present in most of the stories. But these characters are scrappy, “beautiful” girls, and the whole collection shines with a sense of hope, not sentimentally won, but acquired through perseverance.

What Packer and Bauman achieve with witty, yet truthful, voices and modern-day American situations, Mary Yukari Waters in The Laws of Evening (Scribner, $21, 192 pages, ISBN 0743243323) accomplishes by setting her stories in post-World War II Japan and relying heavily on the inner thoughts of her characters. What could have been a risky approach works admirably due to Waters’ attention to detail, a way with description that mirrors the fragility of a country re-imagining itself after so much upheaval. As a result, quiet pervades these stories. The characters have lost family, property and traditions, their world forever changed by the war. Even in stories set in the present day, memories of World War II affect the way the characters treat one another. Of Japanese and Irish-American lineage, Waters lived in Japan until she was 9 years old, and her understanding of her characters’ struggles with the intersection of East and West is first-hand and intimately felt.

The clash of cultures also features prominently in Oscar Casares’ Brownsville (Back Bay, $13.95, 176 pages, ISBN 0316146803). The title refers to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Mexico, in view beyond the banks of the river. Casares grew up there, and his stories ring with crisp dialogue and situations that explore the melding of American ways with Mexican traditions, a melding that produces not a hybrid life, but rather a double consciousness the idea of what seems possible for immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States compared to the reality of living here. Casares’ characters are trying to figure out their identity, too, and, as in Water’s stories, that identity is intensely defined by place, by being on the border of Mexico and the edge of possibility. Joshua Furst’s characters are defined by their ages. Furst, who taught for a decade in the New York public school system, convincingly writes of the trials of childhood, and his characters speak with the realistic voices of children, teenagers and young adults. Unlike the other collections featured here, Short People (Knopf, $23, 224 pages, ISBN 0375414312) includes short shorts vignettes under 200 words that, in this case, spotlight some aspect of child abuse or neglect. All in all, the kids in these stories are not living the happy childhood of their dreams. In fact, with few exceptions, these stories depict the difficulty of being young, the confusing nature of constant change and growth, and the helplessness of dealing with it all when you’re too small to understand what’s going on or to have any legal rights in enforcing some measure of control. The characters in John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (HarperCollins, $24.95, 274 pages, ISBN 0060509287) travel all over the world and yet remain disengaged from their own emotions. Murray, a medical doctor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as an author, takes the scientific, analytical approach of his career and applies it to his writing. Most of the book’s protagonists are scientists themselves or intimately involved in the natural world. If they evade their own emotional attachments and knowledge of their own intentions, they certainly know how to catalog their difficulties metaphorically by family, genus and species. All of them try, it seems, to find their places in a world made complicated and frightening by everything from political fallout to disease. But just as a good scientist looks to empirical evidence and follows stringent methods to prove his theories, these characters apply the same kind of methodological thinking to prove their own existence, their importance in this life.

These debut collections are all auspicious introductions to writers from whom much will be expected in the future. What these books show is that their authors are all storytellers in the best sense writers who know how to reflect the truth and make it clearer. They use fiction as a mirror to highlight aspects of our own lives. That is the revelation of short stories.

Bonnie Arant Ertlelt is a writer in Nashville.

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may […]
Review by

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may be renewed interest in short stories in the literary marketplace. Of these numerous new releases, six debut collections stand out.

ZZ Packer’s story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is one of the most heralded in recent years. The title story, which appeared in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue three years ago, focuses on Dina, a black Yale freshman engaged in “orientation games,” group activities meant to promote bonding among students. In one such game Dina proclaims that if she were an inanimate object, she would choose to be a revolver a comment that transforms her from quiet honor student to dangerous outcast and ultimately to the realization that “‘pretending’ was what had got me this far.” In Packer’s stories, the protagonists, primarily young African-American women on the verge of some formative encounter, discover that they are outcasts, and that structuring their identity is more complicated than merely understanding the stereotypical difficulties associated with being black and female. They often pretend in order to get by or to get anywhere, then realize they’re not where they wanted to be. Packer’s beautifully constructed narratives and realistic dialogue mark this collection as the debut of an assured and original voice.

In Beth Ann Bauman’s Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage, $18.50, 186 pages, ISBN 1931561354), issues of identity once again play key roles. Bauman’s girls, teens and young women are waiting for their lives to “unfurl,” to see what lies ahead and who they will become. This process is never obvious, but is revealed through subtleties of language, dialogue and characterization. Bauman herself has been on the same road. The New Jersey native moved to New York City to become a writer a decade ago, temping by day and writing by night. Just days before September 11, 2001, in order to continue writing, she turned down a more permanent assignment at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm hit hardest in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. A year later she signed a deal to publish Beautiful Girls. It was a bittersweet triumph in light of losing so many friends, and that quality is present in most of the stories. But these characters are scrappy, “beautiful” girls, and the whole collection shines with a sense of hope, not sentimentally won, but acquired through perseverance.

What Packer and Bauman achieve with witty, yet truthful, voices and modern-day American situations, Mary Yukari Waters in The Laws of Evening (Scribner, $21, 192 pages, ISBN 0743243323) accomplishes by setting her stories in post-World War II Japan and relying heavily on the inner thoughts of her characters. What could have been a risky approach works admirably due to Waters’ attention to detail, a way with description that mirrors the fragility of a country re-imagining itself after so much upheaval. As a result, quiet pervades these stories. The characters have lost family, property and traditions, their world forever changed by the war. Even in stories set in the present day, memories of World War II affect the way the characters treat one another. Of Japanese and Irish-American lineage, Waters lived in Japan until she was 9 years old, and her understanding of her characters’ struggles with the intersection of East and West is first-hand and intimately felt.

The clash of cultures also features prominently in Oscar Casares’ Brownsville (Back Bay, $13.95, 176 pages, ISBN 0316146803). The title refers to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Mexico, in view beyond the banks of the river. Casares grew up there, and his stories ring with crisp dialogue and situations that explore the melding of American ways with Mexican traditions, a melding that produces not a hybrid life, but rather a double consciousness the idea of what seems possible for immigrants and Mexican Americans living in the United States compared to the reality of living here. Casares’ characters are trying to figure out their identity, too, and, as in Water’s stories, that identity is intensely defined by place, by being on the border of Mexico and the edge of possibility. Joshua Furst’s characters are defined by their ages. Furst, who taught for a decade in the New York public school system, convincingly writes of the trials of childhood, and his characters speak with the realistic voices of children, teenagers and young adults. Unlike the other collections featured here, Short People (Knopf, $23, 224 pages, ISBN 0375414312) includes short shorts vignettes under 200 words that, in this case, spotlight some aspect of child abuse or neglect. All in all, the kids in these stories are not living the happy childhood of their dreams. In fact, with few exceptions, these stories depict the difficulty of being young, the confusing nature of constant change and growth, and the helplessness of dealing with it all when you’re too small to understand what’s going on or to have any legal rights in enforcing some measure of control. The characters in John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (HarperCollins, $24.95, 274 pages, ISBN 0060509287) travel all over the world and yet remain disengaged from their own emotions. Murray, a medical doctor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as an author, takes the scientific, analytical approach of his career and applies it to his writing. Most of the book’s protagonists are scientists themselves or intimately involved in the natural world. If they evade their own emotional attachments and knowledge of their own intentions, they certainly know how to catalog their difficulties metaphorically by family, genus and species. All of them try, it seems, to find their places in a world made complicated and frightening by everything from political fallout to disease. But just as a good scientist looks to empirical evidence and follows stringent methods to prove his theories, these characters apply the same kind of methodological thinking to prove their own existence, their importance in this life.

These debut collections are all auspicious introductions to writers from whom much will be expected in the future. What these books show is that their authors are all storytellers in the best sense writers who know how to reflect the truth and make it clearer. They use fiction as a mirror to highlight aspects of our own lives. That is the revelation of short stories.

Bonnie Arant Ertlelt is a writer in Nashville.

If, as someone once said, a novel is an evolution and a short story is a revelation, then this publishing season has brought revelations via new short story collections as prolific as summer raindrops. Since publishers usually see larger sales from novels, the number of collections being released this spring and summer suggests there may […]
Review by

In her previous best-selling novels, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, Ann Packer proved her agility at inhabiting people who live through unspeakable events: What happens when a restless young woman’s fiancé becomes a quadriplegic on a fun day at the lake? What happens when a model mom’s kids are her life, and then her daughter attempts suicide? These are complicated scenarios without easy resolution, but Packer’s characters are fully developed with emotions that feel authentic.

The stories in Swim Back to Me, Packer’s new collection, are equally powerful. They focus on situations that make us uncomfortable to varying degrees—from the disorienting feeling of misjudging a co-worker, to the adolescent recognition of being ditched by a friend, to the excruciating pain of losing a child.

Packer conveys the dark pleasure of a grieving mom lashing out at the woman inadvertently responsible for her son’s death—and how daring this act feels. (“Blood sloshed around inside Kathryn’s head. The skin around her mouth tingled. Time passed, a second or a minute or ten.”) She captures the precipice between the expectant joy and wariness of a first-time dad. She tracks the jarring sensation of a teen recognizing that a friend’s parent, and his own parents, have flaws.

Those disappointed that Packer chose to publish stories instead of another novel needn’t worry: The narratives in Swim Back to Me add up to a satisfying whole that will linger in the mind.

 

In her previous best-selling novels, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, Ann Packer proved her agility at inhabiting people who live through unspeakable events: What happens when a restless young woman’s fiancé becomes a quadriplegic on a fun day at the lake? What happens when a model mom’s kids are her life, […]
Interview by

Somewhere in Edward P. Jones’ apartment, mixed in among his collections of American stamps and thimble-sized Japanese netsuke figurines, is a Pulitzer Prize for his 2003 debut novel, The Known World. The Washington, D.C., native moved just north of Georgetown following a book tour two years ago but has yet to unpack his sizable book collection or even acquire furniture. Forced to leave the Arlington, Virginia, apartment he’d called home for two decades due to noisy neighbors, he’s literally waiting for the other shoe to drop on this place before he commits.

"They assured me I wouldn’t have a noise problem because this place is carpeted, but last August I started hearing a lot of stomping and that really got me," he says. "I don’t want to take my stuff out of boxes if I’m going to have a noise problem."

It’s a problem he won’t have to worry about for a while. This fall, Jones is back on tour with All Aunt Hagar’s Children, his second extraordinary short story collection that explores the unseen Washington where African Americans struggle with poverty, racism and violence.

How do you follow a Pulitzer-winning performance like The Known World, a sprawling historical tour de force based on the little-known fact that freed blacks actually owned slaves? Jones found inspiration in the characters and storylines in his debut collection, Lost in the City, which garnered a National Book Award nomination nearly 15 years ago.

"You could read nine or 10 of the stories in Lost in the City and pick them up in some cases and continue them in All Aunt Hagar’s Children," he says. "I never thought about revisiting that place. It’s just one of those strange things that happen when you have an imagination. Once you start pulling out the thread of that big ball, it continues and continues and can go on until you just put a stop to it."

Written in Jones’ deceptively simple prose style, the 14 stories collected here crackle with life as the author explores the inner lives of dreamers, redeemers, rendered families and troubled souls who transit through the District. Jones focuses on the African-American sections, primarily north and northwest, where the grandsons and granddaughters of Southern sharecroppers eke out a living in the service industries. It’s an area Jones knows well.

Unlike Lost, which took place in ’60s and ’70s Washington, this collection spans the 20th century; as a result, many of the stories are prequels rather than sequels to their Lost companion pieces.

One of Jones’ great gifts is the telling detail, whether it’s the war-shocked Korean War vet who lovingly dresses the body of his ex-girlfriend for burial in "Old Boys, Old Girls," a Hi-C-sipping Satan in "The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River" or an R-rated mynah bird who punctuates the title story with heat-of-passion exclamations.

If Lost in the City was modeled on James Joyce’s Dubliners, these expansive new stories, several of which emotionally qualify as novellas, carry a whiff of the fantastic that brings to mind Calvino or Borges, two authors Jones admits he has only read sparingly.

A peaceful sanctuary is particularly important to the 55-year-old bachelor and admitted homebody whose childhood was one of constant relocation within the nation’s capital. His mother, who worked minimum-wage jobs to feed her three children, could neither read nor write, but instilled in Jones a love of learning. Except for his college years at Holy Cross in Worchester, Massachusetts, where he earned an English degree, Jones has lived in and around Washington all his life.

In fact, nightmares of moving plague Jones to this day. A non-driver, he once said he would not want to own a car because he could not bring it into his apartment at night.

"You wonder, how can I get my whole life into this one room, or this one apartment, or the next apartment?" he says. "If I knew a way that I could write something that would kill off all those dreams, I would do it, but I don’t. My plan one day is to write a story that begins, ‘We never get over having been children.’ "

His Pulitzer Prize, followed quickly by a MacArthur Fellowship, gave Jones the freedom to write fulltime. Prior to that, he worked for 19 years summarizing articles for a nonprofit organization.

Jones develops his fiction entirely within his mind; he wrote only six pages of The Known World in 10 years "and three of those were the final chapter," he says. "I like knowing where a story is going to go before I sit down and start working," he explains. "That’s probably why I do a lot of things in my head. The way the world works, you never know when you might end up one day in a dungeon where there’s no paper available."

There’s one downfall to his method, however: "One of the problems of thinking it through all the way to the end is you second-guess yourself every other day."

Although Jones’ nonlinear storytelling makes his mental gymnastics seem all the more remarkable, for him it’s merely organizational origami. "I always thought that you try to kind of ball it up and not have it all in one straight line," he says. "You just had to pluck out the numbers and if you line the numbers up sequentially, you would come out with a linear story. It just so happens that I take those numbers, one through 10, and sort of ball them up there on the page."

Readers won’t find many autobiographical tidbits about Jones in his fiction; he’s saving those for his golden years.

"Although the second stories in both collections ["The First Day" in Lost; "Spanish in the Morning" in All Aunt Hagar’s Children] have a little bit of my own life in both of them, everything else in those collections is all made up. Maybe it’s good that I do that because one day when I have less of a brain, less of an imagination, then I can start using stuff about friends and my own life. But if I start using that stuff up now, once I get to the point where I have less of an imagination, what will I do?"

Jay MacDonald recently moved from Mississippi to Texas.

Somewhere in Edward P. Jones’ apartment, mixed in among his collections of American stamps and thimble-sized Japanese netsuke figurines, is a Pulitzer Prize for his 2003 debut novel, The Known World. The Washington, D.C., native moved just north of Georgetown following a book tour two years ago but has yet to unpack his sizable book […]
Interview by

When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal human rights activist and almost serenely continued to produce novels and stories, at least a few of which rank among her best. With Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, her 11th collection of stories (and 25th work of fiction), Gordimer, 84, continues to perturb and delight readers with her mastery of the short story form.

"I love to write stories. It’s such a wonderful form, like poetry, because it’s so distilled," Gordimer says during a call to her home in Johannesburg. Gordimer has lived in her " big old house" and written on an electric typewriter "in a very small room downstairs" for most of her adult life. She chose to remain in South Africa even after the government banned three of her books. Her husband, to whom the new collection is dedicated, died six years ago, after 47 years of marriage.

Gordimer says that the remarkably tight construction she achieves in her stories is a subconscious process. "I’m not conscious of compressing it while I’m doing it. If there’s something that captures my imagination or that I begin to ponder, I know right away whether it’s going to be a short story or whether it’s the germ of a novel. To me a short story is like an egg: When the beginning comes to me, I have the end. It’s complete. It’s got its white and it’s got its yolk and it’s got its shell containing it. I have it there complete, as if in the palm of my hand."

The textures and resonances of the stories in Gordimer’s Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black are as varied as an omelet, a soufflŽ and a hard-boiled egg. In the title story, for example, Gordimer continues to explore the scars left on the souls of South Africans by apartheid. Her protagonist, an intellectual and former anti-apartheid activist, goes in search of evidence of his own racial identity, after pondering the likely history of his great-grandfather’s time in the diamond mines.

"I got the idea from an announcement [about Beethoven] I heard on the radio," Gordimer says. " I thought, what does this poking back into the personal life, the DNA really, of a very, very great composer matter. But of course in some circumstances it could matter very much, and that’s where my story comes from. There’s a longing among many white South Africans to find what was denied before. You know, tucked away in a cupboard somewhere there was a black grandfather, or great-grandmother. I think it’s a natural impulse for people to want to explore that. And an honest one. That honesty was missing before."

In a story called "Gregor," Gordimer shows a playful side, writing with light and shadow about a cockroach stuck under the small viewing screen of her electric Olivetti, summoning also the spirit of Franz Kafka.

"I’ve resisted over many years any reference to Kafka or any kind of Kafka pastiche because everybody drags Kafka in," Gordimer explains. "But this is the only story in the book that is about something that really happened. That beetle or cockroach was there in my typewriter. Writing is a solitary business and having this unwanted partner or overseer was a very strange experience. I couldn’t resist. I named him Gregor. How could I possibly do anything else?"

Among Gordimer’s own favorites is a story called " Dreaming of the Dead" in which the author summons three departed friends Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Anthony Sampson to a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York. It is a story about friendship, vivid conversation, writing and political commitment, at once both sorrowful and funny. "It’s the only story I’ve ever written that way," Gordimer says. "It’s a kind of homage to people that I loved who have gone. But I also, of course, amused myself as I know they would do to me by making fun of them."

Turning reflective, Gordimer says, "I began to write very, very young in the small gold-mining town in South Africa where I was born. I didn’t come from a family with any literary tradition, but my mother read a lot, [and] she encouraged reading. Indeed the most formative thing for me was that she made me a member of the children’s library in this little town. And every Saturday, we would go to the library and select three books each for the week. And then when there were birthdays and Christmas and so on, the presents for me were always books. That was what I wanted and what I got. By the time I was 12, the librarian at this local library, who was also a friend of my mother’s, allowed me the freedom of the library. I wasn’t confined to the children’s section. I read everything from D.H. Lawrence to Thucydides. Nobody was guiding me. I was like a pig in clover and I found what I wanted and what was nourishing to me. The local library was unbelievably important to me. It was my real education."

Gordimer says that even in her 80s, she maintains the same writing routine she developed in her 20s. " My writing routine was constricted because I had a small child and was divorced and was living alone with her. My writing time was when she was at nursery school in the morning. I think it was good that it was constricted because when you’re a writer, you’re your own boss and unless you’re disciplined, you’re never going to get down to it. Later on my circumstances changed but I still kept to my routine."

"Indeed," Gordimer adds with a laugh, " I just finished a new story last week. A weird little story. I have no idea what will happen to it."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal human rights activist and almost serenely continued to produce novels and […]

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