What I am reading now -- short story edition

So I always thought of short stories as something you read in English class ("The Yellow Wallpaper"! "The Lottery"! Poe and O'Henry) or maybe when you picked up one of those highbrow New York centric magazines while waiting in an airport, but this year, I read quite a few short story collections and loved them.

The first was Spoiled by Caitlin Macy. All of her characters are flawed and, well, spoiled women who are confronted by their own moral failings and often don't live up to the challenge. I felt she really got inside her characters heads and pointed out uncomfortable truths for her readers (which is why I think reviewers tended to malign her work -- it hit too close to home). While reading her stories, I found myself asking, "Am I like that? Am I becoming that?"



Next was Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters, a collection of sweet, but sad stories about children with a touch of the fantastic. I was utterly transported and they all left me with a lump in my throat by the end. You must finish reading them, Es! I also loved the homage to the Garment District and the rooms of old dresses all arranged by color. You can read some of her stories here on her website.










The next book purports to be a novel, but it is more of a collection of short stories with overlapping characters. A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert provides glimpses into the lives of five generations of women, all descended from a suffragette who starved herself to death in protest. Cheerful, I know. She writes intelligently about the struggle to find meaning in daily life and how to define oneself as a woman with each character placed in a different historical context. Littered with casual references to literature, anthropology, evolution...I loved it. You can read one of the chapters here.




Lastly, right now I am working my way through Vanishing by Deborah Willis, a Canadian author who was recommended by NPR. Thanks to Charles, I now understand her references to Loblaws and the Bloor Aqueduct. In the interview with the author she says,"As a kid, I grew up reading people like Stephen King and Elmore Leonard, and though I'll never be able to write books like theirs, they left me a sense that stories should generally have a good plot. Though my stories are short, I want them to have movement and drama." She lives up to her word with well-drawn characters and plots that say almost as much as they don't say, leaving you to imagine the rest. You can read one of her stories here.