A forty-three-year-old woman takes a vacation from her life after a breakup.

(From This Is Not Your City)

She’d begun the trip staying in youth hostels because they seemed more adventurous, but the lounges were full of people like Tick, drinking Metaxa and strumming guitars and looking askance at her, the middle-aged woman who clearly didn’t belong.

This is another strong story. The narrator is a woman who stayed too long in a going-nowhere relationship, past the point at which she was able to have a child, which she very much wants.
I generally hate stories about women who want babies, but this one is so well written and true to the narrator that I didn’t mind.

I’m really impressed by the way in which Horrocks is able to capture the lives of females of various ages, backgrounds, and socioeconomic classes. Each story feels totally whole and completely its own. Did I mention that you should buy this collection? You should. “The Lion Gate” is online. Read it here.

A woman learns to accept her life.

(from This Is Not Your City)

“You need one of those shots?”

“Tetanus? I’m fine,” he said, but there’s no way of knowing with Leo if he meant fine because he’d had one or fine because fine’s what you are when you don’t think too much about yourself, about how you’re really doing and what you really need. We’re both of us fine most of the time.

The above description doesn’t do this story justice: “a woman learns to accept her life.” By the end, she does, maybe. Or she tells herself she does. It’s just hard to write in a single sentence what this story is about. It’s about a sister who only sends postcards and a mother who never much cared; it’s about a lover who works in a slaughterhouse and collects dogs to sell to the USDA for testing. It’s about a woman who lives in a better house than she’s ever lived in before, but still makes six dollars an hour working at Goodwill. Sometimes I’m bothered by well educated, middle class people writing stories about poor people, and it bothered me a little bit–it did–but this story feels authentic, true. And I don’t know how Caitlin Horrocks grew up. Maybe she knows these people better than I assume she does. I doubt it, but maybe.

Anyhow, it’s a very good story and Caitlin Horrocks is a talented writer. This story won a Pushcart. You can read a little bit of it here. And here is the author’s website.

A teenage boy wants to be seen by his mother.

(from Honeymoon and other stories)

In everyday life, she was vague, sometimes absentminded, wandering the house while my father was at work while she was half asleep. In my dreams, I see her standing in an almost dowdy, unrevealing floral dress, an I-Love-Lucy dress, standing just inside the doorway of her bedroom, pausing, with one hand on the dresser, and trying to remember–you could see it in her face–what she had wanted from there.

I love “Red Dress.” The writing is clean and direct, and I put the book down several times to admire it. It’s the kind of story that feels like the writer needed to tell it, like he had felt what this boy had felt, and seen what this boy had seen. It’s the kind of story that makes me want to copy it, steal it. That makes me glad to be a writer.

I was slightly disappointed in the end because I knew it was coming and I’ve seen it done in other stories; it was the one thing I didn’t quite believe. This story is online and you can read it, and you should. You should also, immediately, go pick up Canty’s first collection, A Stranger in this World, which is amazing. It’s one of my top-five collections of all time.

A Wyoming woman whose parents are from Kerala, India moves to Chennai, but finds herself neither American nor Indian enough.

(from American Short Fiction Fall 2009)

In Chennai, paradise could be found on every road. The Jolly Paradise Bakery was on one street, on the next, Paradise Tailors. The New Paradise Hotel was squeezed between a juice shop and a beauty salon. Paradise Biryani was alongside a chicken shop, while two streets over was a Paradise Medicals.

I love stories about Americans in foreign lands, perhaps because it’s my only means of international travel. I’d never be brave enough to move to India myself, or even visit, probably.

This story could have gone badly. It’s a travel story. It’s a fish-out-of-water story, stuck between two cultures. It doesn’t fall victim to cliches or easy answers, though. The voice is clear and honest, and the writing vibrant. The author has a nice website and a book coming out later this year, Cowboys and East Indians. You should pick it up. I’m going to.

“Curating Your Life” isn’t online but check out her website, where you can read the title story from her upcoming collection, which originally appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review.

A poor, sad-sack loser inadvertently changes the life of a neighborhood girl.

(from American Short Fiction Summer 2009)

There wasn’t much chance for you (or Malinda, or my mother, or Bill, who killed himself a few years after your death) to turn out much differently than you did, the pathetic, the pitiable, the poor. In order to turn out any differently, one had to leave that place. One was, for a time, glad to do it–one was free–free!–one felt oneself weightless. And yet something about being poor stayed with a person and managed to trouble that new person’s life, no matter how far away she traveled.

I picked up some back issues of American Short Fiction at AWP in Boston. I picked up nine back issues, to be exact, and they were heavy but worth it. I’ve never heard of this author before, who has several books out (three, I think). Anyhow, this story, which is long, nearly novella length, really blew me away. It’s so, so good. It’s a story about Elwood LePoer, “dumb as a stick, a sock, a bag of rocks,” and yet he changed the course of the narrator’s life for the better. He did it unwittingly, same as he died, but he did it nevertheless. You can read some of it here.

In other news, American Short Fiction has announced its relaunch, which I’m really excited about. You can expect a new issue out this spring/summer.

A pretty fifth-grade teacher dies of tuberculosis and her students mourn her loss.

(from Nothing But You: Love Stories From The New Yorker)

We meant to have her for our teacher forever. We intended to pass right up through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades and on to high school taking her with us. But that isn’t what happened.

This story is so simple, so straight-forward that I couldn’t quite see its allure. I thought it was well written, but there wasn’t a whole lot more than what was happening on the surface: a pretty teacher dies and the children are sad. We don’t get to see how it affects them, what it means for them. Perhaps the first person plural kept me from attaching to the narrator sufficiently. Or perhaps I just found this simple tale unsatisfying, and wonder why The New Yorker found it worthy of publication.

It’s really short. You can listen to Tony Earley read it here.

A woman put on bed rest for anxiety loses her mind.

(from The Yellow Wall-Paper)

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw–not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

But there is something else about that paper–the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.

Originally published in 1892, this story has been anthologized a lot. I hadn’t read it until yesterday, though (or if I read it before I don’t recall). It feels very modern and is written in a style that’s accessible to modern readers. It’s really compelling, and gets stranger and stranger as the narrator becomes unhinged.

You can read it here. You can watch the movie version here. I listened to it on iTunes at Bedtime Stories: Classic Tales for Sleepy Grownups (January 9, 2013), which I highly recommend–I really like the woman’s voice. She also reads an essay by Gilman, which discusses why the story was written. Apparently, the most common treatment for depression and anxiety used to be complete bed rest, which drove people completely mad.

The summer after their fifth grade year, two unpopular girls create their own world. 

(from This is Not Your City)

It is July and we are a miraculous age. We have been sprung from our backyards, from the neighborhood park, from the invisible borders that rationed all our other summers. We are old enough to have earned a larger country, and young enough to make it larger still.

I got this story collection last night at a swap in which everyone brought a book they hate, it seemed like, or at least something they would never go looking for. It was kind of sad, but I get it. It’s hard to give away your favorite books. I had helped my friend carefully select This Is Not Your City (so I cheated a little bit). I should probably give it back to her once I’m finished.

Anyhow, I liked this story a lot. It’s so much more than two misfits who create their own world. It’s also the story of cruelty and death, as well as the narrator’s later life (marriage and children). It spans decades. I have no idea how Horrocks manages to fit all of this into one twelve-page story and make it coherent, but she does. I’m really impressed by the writing, the honesty. You should read it. You can do that here.

A woman’s life is changed by her new job as an organ transplant coordinator.

(from Zoetrope Vol. 16, No. 1)

Words and phrases we’re taught not to use when dealing with the donor family: harvest, excision, cadaver, organ procurement, dead as a doornail.

Words we do use: saving the lives of others, donation, transplant, every form of to give. We talk about the patient in the past tense—What would she have wanted?—even as the blip of the heart monitor persists in the background.

This is the prizewinning story from the 2011 Zoetrope Short Fiction Contest, and it’s good. I’ve never read a story about organ donation before, and LaBrie seems to know what she’s talking about. The structure also works really well. We get to see the way the narrator’s home life is affected by her job, how it changes her.

This story is online and it’s worth a read. Also, I like her blog.

A woman meets a rich man who buys her fancy dresses, takes her to fancy dinners, and then cuts the dresses off of her and makes her stare at herself in the mirror.

(from Kissing in Manhattan)

Rally touched her cheek, tested its softness. She was worried by Patrick’s grin.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s working,” said Patrick.

This story reminded me of American Psycho, which was published ten years before this collection came out. It’s probably just that the guy is named Patrick. And we don’t know what he’s up to. And at one point he pulls out a knife. A friend sent me this collection along with Lunar Park for Valentine’s Day. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking so much about Ellis…

Anyhow, I liked this story. It kept me guessing and the author writes a pretty believable female narrator. I thought it ended a bit early and unexpectedly, though, and the narrator did seem naive for a thirty-one-year-old NYC travel writer. Also, what beautiful woman wears pigtails and overalls to a New York City nightclub? That’s just odd.

I’ve only read one story in this collection so far, so I don’t want to judge just yet, but this blogger calls these stories “anti-feminist fables.”