Three Short Story Collections I've Recently Read
After a long period of reading novels or nonfiction, I've recently been reading short story collections, possibly as a result of my slightly shorter attention span in recent weeks.
I discovered Treats by Lara Williams in a charity shop shortly after reading the author's debut novel Supper Club, which was released last summer. This very short collection - 21 stories in just over 100 pages - published in 2016 by the now-defunct Freight Books contains more of the same sharply observed prose about modern life, usually from the viewpoint of characters in their millennial years. As a result, Williams excels at demonstrating how reality does not always match expectations, whether it's graduate job hunting, post-university relationships, or creative writing classes.
Her stories in the second person are also very effective - a difficult perspective to master. Overall, this is a vibrant contemporary collection written by a compelling new voice.
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Ryan O'Neill's debut novel, The Weight of a Human Heart, was also published a few years before. Their Brilliant Careers was one of my favorite novels last year, and it's an excellent literary satire. This 2012 collection demonstrates some of the early promise that was later realized in that novel, particularly in O'Neill's experiments with form. The most creative stories here are similarly literary-themed, such as 'Seventeen Rules For Writing a Short Story,' which does exactly what it says, and 'The Footnote,' about a failed novelist named Thomas Hardie, where the "real" story is revealed in the footnotes, though reading this one on a Kindle where flipping between pages repeatedly is not as easy as it is in a physical book. There are also a few stories set in Rwanda, where O'Neill lived and worked as an English teacher for two years. These are more traditional stories, such as 'The Cockroach,' about a ten-year-old Tutsi girl fleeing the Hutu genocide. Those who enjoyed O'Neill's debut novel should read his early work in 'The Weight of a Human Heart.'
Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women has been on my TBR list for quite some time. While I usually read short story collections in one sitting, I found it best to dip in and out of 'A Manual for Cleaning Women' over several weeks in between reading other things. 'A Manual for Cleaning Women,' which was relatively unknown during her lifetime, was published posthumously in 2015, 11 years after Berlin's death at the age of 68. This is a significant collection of 43 stories - slightly more than half of what Berlin published during her lifetime - that draw directly on her very eventful life. She was born in Alaska and has lived in Chile, Mexico, and various parts of the United States, where she has worked as a cleaner, teacher, and emergency nurse, among other things. She married and divorced three times, had four sons, and struggled with a variety of health issues, including alcoholism and scoliosis, which resulted in a punctured lung.
Her stories are quirky and very pithy, and she is a master of the killer opening sentence ("I've worked in hospitals for years now, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the sicker the patients are, the less noise they make"). - Temps Lost, p. 98). It comes highly recommended.
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