Short Stories

I have had ambitious goals for summer reading, thinking I would make a whole syllabus for myself. But I’ve been jumping around different projects and ideas too much to really attain this goal.

Besides for finishing Marylin Robinson’s Housekeeping, the only fiction I’ve been reading has been short stories. There’s a lot I like about this form, particularly the time it takes to complete a work. Whereas novels can do a lot with change over time and different sorts of development, short stories can provide very interesting perspectives on particular moments and states. Yet it’s been hard for me to find the kind of short stories I most enjoy. Basically, I’m looking for short stories offer some sort of radical perspective or perspectives on some aspect of life. My favorite examples are just about anything David Foster Wallace has written. He’s able to do all sorts of things to cut into a scene from different angles to make it fresh and provocative. Yet, I also like more traditional narratives that usually rely on the thinking of thoughtful and original character’s to complexify and turn over their realities into something interesting. A good example of this that I picked up recently was the neurotic minds in Richard Ford’s Women With Men, a collection of three long short stories (an awkward phrase, I know, but I think that’s the language of the trade these days).

But I’ve been trying to get away from the old standbys and seek out some new writers. Since I don’t have many fiction-reading friends now (except you, Dave, who I should turn to), I’ve just been searching for new writers that literary magazines or other authors have named as good ones. I checked out a couple of short story collections based on Granta’s list of Best of Young American Novelists. I read a smattering of stories from writers on this list, and so far didn’t find anything close to what I was looking for.

Another tactic I’ve tried is reading stories from the collection Best New American Voices 2007 guest edited by Sue Miller. This is an anthology that every year selects stories solicited only from writing programs, from summer programs to M.F.A. programs to more community-based classes like Boston’s Grub Street or The Loft in Minneapolis. This year, and perhaps every year for all I know, both the series editors forward and the guest editors introduction begins with a defense of M.F.A. writing programs. One interesting observation made in both pieces is how writing workshops and small literary journals (often associated with academic institutions) have come to exert a much larger influences on the short story scene as general interest magazines publishing fiction have declined. Sue Miller makes the argument that with the new diversity found among students in these programs, American short stories have become more “multifarious, stranger, richer . . . less responsive to any particularly aesthetic.”

I’m not so sure. I think many of these stories do have a “workshoppy” quality, though I don’t know if this says as much about the students in writers workshops or the editorial regimes. More than anything, in these sorts of collections, I feel like I read a lot of good writing without insight. Certainly, I recognize that kind of insight I’m looking for only represents one way of making a good story (I also really like many stories without this quality), I just don’t know why this kind of writing is so hard to find. It seems to me that there’s a real fascination with what I might call, very cautiously, simple-minded characters in short stories. These characters might be portrayed as having complex lives, ambivalent feelings, etc. Some represent sophistication in an urbane sort of way. But rarely do writers tap into the struggling minds of the characters to flesh out original or jolting ways of perceiving the world.

If anyone has some suggestions for contemporary books that might fit what I’m looking for, drop me some recommendations.