Helle Helle, “Pheasants”

He used to live here. OK if he just looks around?

(from Tin House, vol. 7, issue 3)

Short, precise, first-person present-tense story about a guy coming back to the apartment he used to live in years ago to look around and pick up some things he left in the basement. Of course you’re on edge. He’s nosy, he’s strange, he’s a mystery. He could be up to no good. In the end though, he seems like an honest guy, although the narrator comes off less than genuine. I mean, totally understandable, but not as sincere as her unexpected guest.
Helle Helle is an excellent name, worthy of a Scandinavian death metal band. In actuality, she is a Danish author. This story was translated by Mark Kline. On Friday I purchased a book entitled Danish Made Easy: Phrases & Information for Your Stay in Denmark (published by Høsts Lommeparlører, 1958) for one dollar. I’ve had a thing for Denmark for years.

Here are some useful Danish phrases:
I have very delicate skin.
Jeghar meget om hud.

When can I see you again?
Hvornår kan vi ses igen?

May I introduce you to my friend JT Leroy?
Må jeg praesentere min ven JT Leroy?

Your beef is so pale.
Dered oksekød er så lyst.

I want real red beef, not heifer meat.
Jeg ønsker rigtig rødt oksekød, ikke kviekød.

Excuse me.
Undskyld.

Steve Almond, "The Law of Sugar"

Matesh is blabbing on about sugar, but who can pay attention when his nameless sister is so hot and wild dogs are fast approaching?

(from My Life In Heavy Metal)

Matesh's sister had caught sight of the dogs. She had sunglasses on, but you could see she wasn't happy about it. She whispered to Matesh, but he waved his cigarette, erasing her with smoke.

This feels like a chapter from some travelogue novel road movie thing, with frantic globetrotting adventures and breathless romance around at every stop. On it's own? Yeah, it's cool. It's a short one, which is about right. Read it here.

George Saunders, "Brad Carrigan, American"

Brad's trapped on a TV show where TPTB keep changing things in a desperate ratings grab.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

It also seems like the real world and its horrors are creeping in, too. This was funny and nonsensical and fast-paced, and yet it kinda dragged on. Al in all, glad I read it. Here's an excerpt.
I'm down and tired and go Flyers. Good night.

M.J. Cohen, "Outside Havana"

Wait, you're leaving me? But, but, I just started making that corn chowder we bought.

(from The Rambler, Jan./Feb. 2006)

Sometimes a short story works when it's really just a long joke. The details and and action and everything all lead up to the final moments wherein the punchline is delivered and everything falls into place. That's the deal with this one, wherein the guy can't understand why his wife left him. He mulls over the events surrounding her leaving, but all he can come up with are anecdotes about the making of corn chowder, and some things he knows about Hemingway. The guy has nothing much to say about the pre-corn chowder era of his marriage, so you know something's coming. A punchline.
Here's a link to The Rambler.

John Haskell, "Galileo"

A play about the scientist puts playwright Bertolt Brecht and actor Charles Laughton into a similar situation.

(from A Public Space)

This reads like a smart monologue, wherein small-ish plots are told matter-of-factly by an unknown narrator. "Reality" intertwines elegantly with the plot. Cool.

Also cool is this, the first issue of A Public Space, featuring lots of fiction, lots of poetry and a sweet cover photo by Zoe Strauss.

Charles D'Ambrosio "Drummond & Son"

Drummond repairs typewriters, takes care of his mentally challenged son and depresses us.

(from The Dead Fish Museum)

Soft and ambient, with memorable tactile imagery, this story is self-assured in its tone. And a total downer. You're introduced to a situation you figure is hopeless. Then a brief flicker of hope appears. Then it gets snuffed out bluntly. Back to square one. And, sadly, the whole thing is BYO Diff'rent Strokes References.

Andy Henion, "Behold the Half Man"

He loses half his body in a thresher accident, but it's his dad who can't deal.

(from Thieves Jargon)

Crazy. For a short short story, the plot and mood really take some interesting, unexpected turns. Although I have no idea what is meant by this lunatic, humorous, oddly melodramatic tale, I appreciated it every step of the way. Very cool. Read it here.
I'm usually a paper-based reader, or "snob," but I must say I like Thieves Jargon's style. They seek out, "stories about drifters and hustlers and dreamers," at least according to their manifesto.

George Saunders, "93990"

Test monkeys cannot win.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

Only one animal within this high-dose group, animal 93990, a diminutive 26 kg male, appeared unaffected.

This reads like a lab report of monkeys being injected with a toxic chemical certain to kill them horribly. This was a slightly tweaked version of what I believe was the first George Saunders story I ever came across, back in McSweeney's #4.
Hilarious and bleak. Read it here, as part of Saunders' Institutional Monologues.

Done? Feel sort of empty and defeated? Replenish your soul with Regina Spektor's new one, Begin To Hope. For this occasion, I recommend "On The Radio."

George Saunders, "Adams"

Something has to be done about the neighbor.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

Okay, I have no idea why the neighbor was in his underwear in our protagonist's house. But we're seeing everything through the vaseline lens of a well-meaning-ish unreliable narrator who would never figure such things out anyway. So right on. I can't really wrap my head around the particulars of this half-scary/half-funny little parable, but it ends as I figured it would. So, peace.
Read it here.

Yes, it has occurred to me to read something other than George Saunders.

George Saunders, "Christmas"

Some roofers have no money and don't know what to do with it.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

“Are you saying,” said Gary/Terry, “that his gambling, in terms of how much does it suck, sucks exactly as much as does suck his roofing?”

Excellent, heartbreaking little story. But isn't it not actually a short story at all but an essay about things that actually happened in George Saunders' actual life? That's how it was presented in the New Yorker, under the name "Chicago Christmas, 1984." Anyway, it's re-written here somewhat (changed names, smoother sentences). Couple that with the verifiable fact that everything written down ever is fiction, at least a little, and we can let this little genre-hopping slide.
Read the New Yorker version here.

Rainer Maria, "A Better Version of Me"

George Saunders, "The Red Bow"

A dog attacked a kid. Shouldn't something be done about all the dogs?

(from In Persuasion Nation)

Lawrence my God, said Uncle Matt. Do you think I like this? Think of what we've been through. Do you think this is fun for me, for us?

As sharp and considerate an allegory for the War on Terror as you'll find anywhere. You will find it here.

Black Sabbath, "Paranoid"

George Saunders, "My Amendment"

Banning gay marriage is not thorough enough for this letter writer.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

His theory is thatbanning gay marriage doesn't tackle the whole issue, like what about "feminine" men marrying "masculine" women? Is that also an affront of some sort? It's a crazy and funny story.

Susan Perabo, "This Is Not That Story"

A boy falls off a dorm balcony.

(from The Sun, March 2006)

After yesterday's reading, with "writer" in the title, turned out not to be writerly and metafictiontastic, I guess I was fooling myself with this "Story" story. Well, it wasn't meta, but it was grimly self-aware of writer tricks and purpose. Each segment offers insight into the people who happened to be nearby when the boy died, and hints at those characters' backstories, then wraps it up with the zinger "but this is not that story."
So, fine, the author does eventually get to "the" story, then pontificates for a little bit about truth and rumor, and damn if the previously wallpapery narrator (an all-knowing and impossible creature) doesn't show up for the closing argument in first person. So yeah, this was very writerly.
So, it should have been a cup of tea other than my own. But I liked it. The story achieved its primary purpose, to tell a story, several stories, and to shine light on interesting facets of an incident and of people, saying something larger than its plot. And it stimulated and entertained as it did so. So. Right on.

Here's some info on Susan Perabo. She's in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Here comes The Sun.

Manuel Gonzales, "Pilot, Co-Pilot, Writer"

A writer is trapped on a plane that can never land.

(from One Story #66)

We have been circling the city now at an altitude of between seven thousand and ten thousand feet for, according to our best estimates, around twenty years.

Yeah, it's got "writer" in the title, but if this is meta-fiction then the metaphor is so obscured as to be rendered harmless. This is a think piece on what it would like to live the rest of your life on a peaceably hijacked plane. Food and fuel concerns are sci-fi'd away, and other technical objections are ignored, so the reader's concentration is directed mostly at the interaction between passengers, and the way they while away the time. It's an interesting enough premise, and the premise serves as the plot, with nothing much happening besides the hijacking that sets the table in the first place. So you're along for the ride, upon an interesting idea with nowhere to land.
Here's an interview with Manuel Gonzales specifically about this story.

Recently, Dan Wickett of The Emerging Writers Network, asked me to join an "e-panel" wherein literary-minded bloggers are all asked the same questions via email. Then their answers are intermingled into something resembling a roundtable. Here's the link to that interview. As always, please tolerate my typos.

They Might Be Giants, "Shoehorn With Teeth"

George Saunders, "Jon"

Corporate-adopted trendsetters discover love and sex in their sheltered world of product testing.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV’s “Hot and Spicy Christmas” (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled-up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot ‘n’ Nasty Positions before the end of “We Three Kings,” only then, sadly, during Her on Top, Thumb in Mouth, the Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me saying, Oh, Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.
And then she kissed me with a kiss I can only describe as melting.

This one's so pretty and heartbreaking and funny and crazy. Saunders is the king of the company-man narrator. An excellent, rewarding reading experience. What else to say?

Read it here in a strangely horizontal format or here on some message board looking thing.

George Saunders, "My Flamboyant Grandson"

Grandpa's racing to get his son to the theater, but he has his obligations to advertising to think about it.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

All around and above us were those towering walls of light, curving across building fronts, embedded in the sidewalks, custom-fitted to light poles: a cartoon lion eating a man in a suit; a rain of gold coins falling into the canoe of a naked rain-forest family; a woman in lingerie running a bottle of Pepsi between her breasts; the Merrill Lynch talking fist asking, "Are you kicking ass or kissing it?"; a perfect human rear, dancing; a fake flock of geese turning into a field of Bebe logos; a dying grandmother's room filled with roses by a FedEx man who then holds up a card saying "No Charge."

That's a rather long excerpt, I know. "My Flamboyant Grandson" portends a ghastly future wherein every citizen is obligated to endure the advertising the corporations have created just for you. Now, the machine being satirized here is not the sort of stuff I'm currently worried about. It's very Minority Report, very Reaganomics. But hey, it funny and pretty in its own way. And, while it doesn't feel quite as relevant to this modern world as it could be, it hits its targets with with finesse and humor. Read an oddly horizontal version of it here.

George Saunders, "I CAN SPEAK!(tm)"

Dear consumer, please reconsider your decision to return the freaky talking mask designed to make your baby more interesting.

(from In Persuasion Nation)

So funny, weird, and screwed up. I'll probably be saying that sort of thing a lot as I work my way through this collection.
I couldn't find this story for you online, but in Googling the ICS2100 — the I Can Speak (tm) model that more closely resembles your baby's face — I did find this:
Eurologic's Elantra iCS2100 allows users to take advantage of the availability and scalability offered by shared storage configurations as well as the low cost infrastructure of existing IP based Ethernet networks.
Whatever that is, I don't recommend strapping it to a human face.