Short Story

Borges and His Precursors

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres‘ August issue included three stories that influenced some of Borges’ most famous stories in Fictiones. The stories are a fascinating look into Borges process of thought and creation and worth a look for any fan of Borges. While the stories are available on-line in Spanish, they are not on-line in English. However, two are more or less easily available in reprints, while a search for the third on the web will easily bring up a result. The three stories by Borges are the Library of Babel, Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote, and the Shape of the Sword.

Of the three, the precursor to the Library of Babelis the most interesting. Written by Kurd Lasswitz, the Universal Libraryis a mathematical exploration of a library that contains every possible book, those with errors, those that we know, and the billions of others that do not exist now. What sets the story apart from Borges is the idea that there is some sort of true volume by each author, whereas Borges focuses more on the metaphysical complications of a library that has every possible book. Both stories authors posit intriguing ideas on the shape of ideas, but for Lasswitz the library he envisions is a mathematical monster, one that would be so large that laying the books end to end would take two light years to get from one end to the other. Even though Lasswitz sees it as finite, in practice it is an infinite library. For Borges the intrigue is more in what happens if the library already existed, how would knowledge exist. He goes one step beyond Lasswitz, one step beyond the reader’s history with true volumes, and reflects on more than the mathematical possibilities, but the ontological possibilities. 

The precursor to Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote has the most Bogesian changes. Corputby Tupper Greenwald is the story of a professor who so loves King Leer that when he finally takes the time to write his own play, what he creates is an exact copy. Greenwald’s protagonist is more of a lost man who has so imbibed a work he is unable to differentiate himself from the work.  The story is psychological more than literary and it suggests that the professor has become senile. Borges, on the other hand, places the focus of the story less in the copying of the Quijote, and focuses on the interpretation, the way a work is understood through time. When the narrator of Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote describes the book he changes the terms of interpretation so that what in Cervantes’ day was considered a medieval way of writing, in Perrie Mendardbecomes a briliant exposition of criticism. Even though they are the same text, the interpretations have changed. Corput, while interesting, is no where near as interesting as Perrie Mendard Author of the Quijote.

The final story,  Shape of the Sword, I won’t cover here but is based on W Somerset Maugham‘s the Man with the Scar.

As in reading Boccaccio’s Filocolo before reading Chaucer’s the Franklin’s Tale, or reading Plutarch before reading Shakespeare, reading the sources of Borges will not diminish the quality of invention in his stories, but will magnify them.

A New Unpublished Bolaño Short Story

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

60Watts, a relatively new Spanish language literary journal, has published an as yet unpublished short story by Roberto Bolaño, El contorno del ojo (The Contour of the Eye). The story was presented at a literary contest in Valencia in the 80’s so Bolaño could earn some money. Perhaps it is good. I haven’t had time to read it, not translate anything from it.

You can read the story at 60Watts and read a short article in La Vanguardia, all in Spanish.

La Semana De Colores, by Elena Garro – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Elena Garro is not well known in the English speaking world, or if known, she is unfortunately known as the wife of Octavio Paz. She has been called the most important Mexican woman writer after Sor Juana, but for the most part her importance has dimmed over time so that only two books are in print in English.  La semana de colores is not one of those books, although the story Es la culpa de las tlaxcaltecas (It Is the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas)is quite famous.

The stories in La semana range in style from magical realism to stories of criminal twist. Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas is the best story in the book and shows a mastery of the magical and historical in a story that blends 500 hundred years of history. Garro tells the story of a woman who meets an Indian on the side of the road. He is dressed for battle and keeps mentioning battles of in the distance. Margarita, a woman domineered by her husband, talks with him, but doesn’t understand what he is doing on the side of the road. Latter she sees him in Mexico City and around her home. The Indian, though, is just more than an aparation of the past, he is her cousin and husband, and Margarita continually says she has betrayed him. Yet she has to wait for him in the home of her husband in Mexico City and even tells him about the Indian, which makes him think she is crazy. Throughout the story Margarita shifts between these two realities: the modern Mexican life, and the Indian who is running from a defeat in battle; a loveless and violent marriage, and the true husband. Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas plays with the idea of a golden past, the past before the Spaniards came, to create a work that criticizes the macho world Margarita lives in. In the house she is a prisoner; outside she is free. The link is made all the more clear by the repeated references to the Tlazcaltecas who were the tribe who helped Cortés defeat the Aztecs. And when she says she was a traitor she plays on the story of La Malinche who helped Cortés and became his mistress. Garro uses these elements to create an opposing world where she would be free from the machismo of her house in Mexico City. There is also a longing to correct the mistake La Malinche made in becoming Cortés mistress. For Margarita to free herself of her husband, to do what she wants to do, is the way to break with the last 500 years of history and return at once to the past and the future.

If Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas masterfully blends the magical and the historical, some of the other stories are not quite as well rounded and tend towards a mix of peasants and ghosts or peasants and crime that is tiring. More than a few times I thought I was reading a mix of Juan Rulfo and Edgar Allen Poe. An example of the latter is Perfecto Luna where a man who was so overcome with guilt about killing a friend and disposing of the body parts in the adobe of his home he begins to hear him everywhere. Finally, he has to flee his home and town. As he is fleeing he finds a man on the side of the road and tells him everything. The next morning they find the killer dead. Perfecto Luna like other stories has several elements that run through many of the stories and grow a little tedious: peasants who believe in spirits and which manifests itself as a simple mindedness. While these stories were written in 1964 before Magical Realism became the dominant style, at this point to read stories about ghosts or devils or superstitious people who believe in them seems to insult the characters.

The other story that had some real merit was El arból. El arból while using a twist device at the end shows class tensions between an upper class woman and an illiterate woman from the country. The story, of course, shows the classest and racist attitudes of the rich woman, but it dwells more on how those fears become self fulfilling. However, there is, as always in these stories, a question of whether the attitudes bring on the rich woman’s violent end or was it something super natural. Where as some of the stories rely on the simplicity only of the characters, El arból allows for a broader range of thoughts and emotions between the two characters which makes it a richer story. Unfortunately, the ending is a little bit of a one liner that seems a little easy.

While the stories seem uneven, except for the Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas, there are sufficiently well written to warrant reading one of her few works that are translated into English.

Manuel Sánchez Wins 6.000 Euros for 1 Sudden Fiction

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El País reports that Manuel Sánchez has won the 2nd SER Sudden Fiction Contest (edición del concurso de microrrelatos de la SER). Here it is in its entirety:

I recognized the look in the photo. It was the same pig from the alley. The cop nodded his head and gave the photo to the other cop. ‘Write an order to find and capture him,’ he said. The next week they called me to pick him from a line up. They put me behind a window and five guys came in. ‘Which one of them?’ they asked me. I doubted for a moment, but after examining the eyes of all of them I was clear: ‘The one in the blue shirt.’ The other four left, but I followed the one in the red shirt to his house. I took out my scissors and said, ‘Do you remember me?’

“Entonces reconocí la mirada de la fotografía. Era aquel cerdo del callejón. El policía asintió con la cabeza y le dio el retrato a otro agente. ‘Dicta una orden de busca y captura’, le dijo. A la semana siguiente, me llamaron para una rueda de reconocimiento. Me pusieron tras un cristal y entraron cinco hombres. ‘¿Cuál de ellos lo hizo?’, me preguntaron. Dudé un instante, pero después de examinar los ojos de todos lo tuve claro: ‘El de la camisa azul’. A los otros cuatro los soltaron, pero yo seguí al del jersey rojo hasta su casa. Saqué las tijeras y le dije: ‘¿Te acuerdas de mí?”.

José Emilio Pacheco and Elena Poniatowska in La Jornada

~ bythefirelight

There is an excellent, if writterly, appreciation of José Emilio Pacheco in this Sunday’s cultural supplement in La Jornada. It is certainly worth a read if you have an interest and know Spanish. Pacheco is the author of Las batellas en el desierto (The Battles in the Desert) which I reviewed sometime ago and remains one of my most popular posts. Poniatowska focuses on three things: his relation to the past; why young people are so dedicated to him; and what has made him the writer he is. On the first count he is an other of memory but not nostalgia: “José Emilio cree en la memoria, a la nostalgia la repudia.”  Which Poniatowska points out in quoting from the end of Batallas en el desierto

They demolished the school, they demolished Mariana’s building, they demolished my house, they demolished the Roma neighborhood. That city is gone. That country is gone. There isn’t any memory of Mexico form those years. And it doesn’t bother anyone: who wants to remember that horror? Everything goes like the records on a record player. I will never know if Mariana is still living. If she was a live she’d be 70.

Demolieron la escuela, demolieron el edificio de Mariana, demolieron mi casa, demolieron la colonia Roma. Se acabó esa ciudad. Terminó aquel país. No hay memoria del México de aquellos años. Y a nadie le importa: de ese horror, quién puede tener nostalgia. Todo pasó como pasan los discos en la sinfonola. Nunca sabré si aún vive Mariana. Si viviera tendría sesenta años.”

Second, the youth like Pacheco because he is like them and respects them. Part of this is his focus on youth and part of it his willingness to meet with them. When his conferences have filled up he has given two conferences, one in the conference hall and the other outside where the students are waiting for him.

The young who still live their memories of childhood find themselves in El viento distate, El pricipio del placer, Las batallas en el desierto (The Battles in the Desert) and through Condesa neighboorhod of Moriras lefjos and they celebrate the novelist and short story writer with never ending gratitude. It is rare to feel gratitude for a living writer but Jose Emilio gathers all their devotions. When the boy Carlos in Los batallas en el desierto confesses, “I never thought that Jim’s mother was that young, that elegant, least of all that beautiful. I didn’t know how to tell him. I can’t describe what I felt when she shook my hand,” readers relive the torment of their first love. The same occurs with the stories in La sangre de Medusa written between 1956 and 1984. Jose Emilio touches fibers in which they recognize themselves, in which you and him and I and we identify with. On reading it, everyone rewrites “Tarde o remparano”. His is ours. We make the book with him, we are his part, he changes us into authors, he reflects us, he keeps us in mind, he completes us, and the reading takes away our problems. We owe him being readers, as much as we owe him for life.

According to him, those truly unhappy loves, those terrible loves are amongst the young because they have no hope. “In any part of your life you have some little possibility of reuniting with the person you love, but when you are young your history of love has no future.”

Los jóvenes que todavía viven sus recuerdos de infancia se encuentran a sí mismos en El viento distante, El principio del placer, Las batallas en el desierto y hasta en la colonia Condesa de Morirás lejos y le brindan al novelista y al cuentista un testimonio de gratitud interminable. Es raro sentir gratitud por un escritor vivo pero José Emilio reúne todas las devociones. Cuando el niño Carlos de Las batallas en el desierto confiesa: “Nunca pensé que la madre de Jim fuera tan joven, tan elegante y sobre todo tan hermosa. No supe qué decirle. No puedo describir lo que sentí cuando ella me dio la mano”, los lectores reviven el tormento de su primer amor. Lo mismo sucede con los cuentos de La sangre de Medusa escritos de 1956 a 1984. José Emilio toca fibras en las que se reconocen, en las que tú y él y yo, ustedes y nosotros nos identificamos. Al leerlo, cada quién escribe de nuevo “Tarde o temprano”. Lo suyo es nuestro. Hacemos el libro con él, somos su parte, nos convierte en autores, nos refleja, nos toma en cuenta, nos completa, nos quita lo manco, lo cojo, lo tuerto, lo bisoño. Le debemos a él ser lectores, por lo tanto le debemos a él la vida.

Según él, los amores verdaderamente desdichados, los amores terribles son los de los niños porque no tienen ninguna esperanza. “En cualquier otra época de tu vida puedes tener alguna mínima posibilidad de reunirte con la persona que amas, pero cuando eres niño tu historia de amor no tiene porvenir.”

Finally, he is a writer whose history has been influenced by some of the greats of 20th century Mexican Writing. Moreover, his family had been part of the great events of the 20th century, his father escaping execution only through the intervention of President Obregon.

Some of these family friendships were liberal like Juan de la Cabada and Hector Perez Martinez and most of all Jose Vasconcelos. Carlos Monsivais remembers that Jose Emilio used to invite him to eat at his house and they would both listen seriously and quietly to Vasconcelos, an absolutely fascinating personality. Together they would also go to visit Martin Luis Guzman who both of them admired, and don Julio Torri who would tell them in a low voice the secret history of Mexican pornography.

Algunas de esas amistades familiares eran libertarias, como Juan de la Cabada y Héctor Pérez Martínez, y sobre todo José Vasconcelos. Carlos Monsiváis recordó que José Emilio lo invitaba a comer a su casa y ambos escuchaban muy serios y callados a Vasconcelos, personalidad absolutamente fascinante. Juntos iban a visitar también a Martín Luis Guzmán, que es una de las admiraciones de los dos, y don Julio Torri les hablaba en voz baja de la historia secreta de la pornografía mexicana.

Pakistan at Words Without Borders

~ bythefirelight

Words Without Borders is featuring writing from Pakistan this soon to be finished month. Always worth a look.

New Story By Hanan al-Shaykh

~ bythefirelight

Hanan al-Shaykh has a new story available in English. I’m a big fan of hers and it is nice to see something new available. I think the last book available was Only in London. You can read a little about her newest endeavor at the Saudi Gazette. (via Words Without Borders)


Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue

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I finished reading Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue a week ago and have sometime to think about the quality of the stories. Before I start, though, I must say it was a pleasant surprise to have the text both in English and Spanish, which gave me a chance to read the stories in the original.

On the whole I wasn’t impressed with the stories. Many of them just weren’t that interesting to me. I’m not sure exactly why. Some of it was the writing style, which didn’t interest me too much, but mostly it was the choice of subjects. The worst was the story about the porn actor. I stopped reading it after a page and a half.

There were several stories, though, that did stand out. Tuesday Meetings by Slavko Zupcic was probably the best. The writing was fresh and the story about inmates in an asylum waiting for the pope’s visit was interesting and funny. Insular Menu by Ronaldo Menéndez from Cuba talk of the privations in Castro’s Cuba with a humor that didn’t dwell on the politics but human survival, although, cat lovers shouldn’t read the story. An Open Secret by the late Aura Estrada had some nice touches, although I think the story had more to do with Juan Rulfo than Borges. And, finally, Family by Rodrigo Hasbún was had some nice shifting perspective.

Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue isn’t the best of Latin America, but a sampling of young writers. Some of these writers are very good and are worth a further look. Considering it can take years before young writers can make it into English, this is a good collection even if it is a little uneven.

New Los Noveles Is Available

~ bythefirelight

Edition number 34 of Los Noveles is now on-line. I haven’t had much time to read it, but it does look promising with a mix of fiction and essays.

Jetlag – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Jetlag by Etgar Keret is a short but fascinating collection of five short stories set to drawings by five different Israeli artists: Mira Friedman, Batia Kolton, Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert. Keret, one of Israel’s best writers, creates what might be better called fables. His stories are brief and always have an element of unrealty to them. The unreality, though, is designed to turn the reader back to the strangeness of reality.

The first story is about a magician who suddenly begins to have trouble pulling the rabbit out of the hat. One time he pulls a bloody rabbit’s head from the hat and in a another he pulls a dead baby. But the audience seems to love it and a child keeps the bloody head of the rabbit as a memento. Instead of magic revealing the wondrous, the unfathomable becomes the way the audiences accept death and the grotesque as entertainment. The magician gives up his trade, and finishes the story saying,

…I don’t do much of anything. I just lie in bed and think about the rabbit’s head and the baby’s body. As if they’re some clues to a riddle, as if somebody was trying to tell me something; that now it’s not really the best of times for rabbits or for babies. That it’s not the best of times for magicians.

In the story Jetlag the narrator finds himself on an airplane where a flight attendant is paying extra attention to him. At first it seems as if she wants him to join the clichéd mile high club with her. A ten year-old girl at his side tells him he should go have sex with her, then claims she is a 30 year-old dwarf smuggling heroin. Eventually, the narrator goes to the back of the plane to talk to the flight attendant. She doesn’t want to have sex with him, but instead, wants to give him a parachute because the plane has orders to crash. The flight attendant says they crash a plane every year or two so that passengers will take flight safety seriously. As the story ends he says, the rescue looked quite heart warming on TV. Again, Keret takes liberties with a reality that has become all too common—the disaster coverage on TV—and uses it as an opportunity to look at it as a fiction, switching genres to make it observable. What should be a horror, becomes just entertainment.

In each of the stories Keret is able to say something about modern society, its violence, its loneliness, its spectator culture, and question how it effects us. His stories are marvels of compression and an unreality that seems real.

Flannery O’Connor Discussed on Leonard Lopate and NYRB

~ bythefirelight

A new biography of Flannery O’Connor has led to a lengthy review of the book and an appraisal of her work by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books, and an interview on the Leonard Lopate Show with the author of the book. Both are quite interesting for anyone who has enjoyed her works.

From Oates’ intro:

Short stories, for all the dazzling diversity of the genre, are of two general types: those that yield their meanings subtly, quietly, and are as nuanced and delicate and without melodrama as the unfolding of miniature blossoms in Japanese chrysanthemum tea, and those that explode in the reader’s face. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) came of age in a time when subtlety and “atmosphere” in short stories were fashionable—as in the finely wrought, understated stories of such classic predecessors as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and James Joyce, and such American contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Jean Stafford.

But O’Connor’s plainspoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish, and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable. The novelty of her “acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages”—as Brad Gooch puts it in his new life of O’Connor—lay in their frontal assault upon the reader’s sensibility: these were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means.

Javier Sáez de Ibarra Wins the First Internacional Prize for Short Stories

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El País reports that Javier Sáez de Ibarra has won the first Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero (International Prize for Short Stories Ribera del Duero). I don’t know what weight to put in awards, even ones that come with €50,000. However, the article and accompanying interview has some interesting items that makes me want to find an example or two of his writing.

The short story is a genre that is not well esteemed by editors, little ready by readers, and not well understood by critics: there still are those who criticize a story that doesn’t have a surprise. Inovations are not well received.

“El cuento es un género poco estimado por los editores, poco frecuentado por los lectores y mal comprendido por los críticos: todavía hay quien le reprocha a un relato que no tenga efecto sorpresa. Las innovaciones no son bien recibidas”.

He also said that the Internet is helping to save the shor story.

In a certain sense the short story has taken refuge in the Internet. There are many blogs that publish stories and those that criticize stories. An example? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue or the critic Fernando Valls’s.

“En cierto sentido, el cuento se ha refugiado en Internet. Hay muchos blogs que publican cuentos y en los que se hace crítica de cuentos. ¿Algún ejemplo? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue o el del crítico Fernando Valls”

I’m not sure if I believe that in the US we pay more attention to short story writers. He did list a few other autors of note: Hipólito G. Navarro who was on El publico lee and sounded interesing; from Peru Fernando Iwasaki; from Guatemala Eduardo Halfon; from Mexico Pedro Ángel Palou; and from Spain Luciano G. Egido y Juan Carlos Márquez.

Zoetrope Featuring the Latin American Issue

~ bythefirelight

Zoetrope’s latest issue focuses on Latin American fiction. It sounds interesting, a kind of post boom manifesto, which if you don’t follow Latin American Literature, it sometimes seems if it is still 1969 and Gabo is just publishing 100 Years. Perhaps that is unfair, but short story collections often show this weakness. (hat tip to MOLESKINE LITERARIO)

The research for this edition of Zoetrope: All-Story began with an anthology called El futuro no es nuestro (The Future Is Not Ours), edited by Diego Trelles Paz and just published in Argentina by Eterna Cadencia. That collection includes twenty writers from more than a dozen countries but does not pretend to be anything more than a snapshot of a Latin American moment. It is not comprehensive—for a region this large and diverse, how could it be?—just as this edition of All-Story isn’t. Still, we have attempted to show some of the talent that exists among this new generation; and it’s no coincidence that the writers here are all under forty years old, therefore born after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I’d Like – A Review

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I’d Like is not just a collection of stories, but a way telling them that is fresh and reinvigorates the form. Amanda Michalopoulou has constructed a reinforcing set of insights into story telling that is not consumed in the tediums of art about itself. The focus on reworking how stories are told does not hobble the stories, though, instead it adds an element of mystery and metaphysical shifting as if the epiphanies and narrative truths that so permeate the genre once reached are then undone as the story is revealed to be part of something different. The revelation shifts the meaning of the stories and ultimately the conclusions one can draw about the stories.

Michalopoulou, though, is writing neither theory nor dense esoteric investigations. Instead she uses a sparse prose that features fleating references to other stories or other characters. She seldom describes the environment her characters inhabit; description would distract from the multiplicity of voices and root them into conventional frames. She also uses first person only to make the stories float into each other. It is not always clear at first who is speaking. Is it a character in a story as it is in the eponymous I’d Like, or is it the character of the author who talks to her story—one surprisingly similar to I’d Like—in a restaurant and argues about whether it is full of clichés? It is an instant critique of what seemed like a good story of a marriage grown tiresome and an escape to New York. There is an air of disappointment in her thoughts

Ever since she was born I only read short stories. Novels are like murals would take a lifetime to finish one. And poetry makes my hormonal issues even worse. I sit there and cry because Hermes, who wanted to be a perfumer, suddenly dies at age twenty-seven, in a Syrian seaport. Or because the sy is a blue and gold mistake.

Short stories suit new mothers who love to read. They open the back door for you, let you peek in at reddish beards, chambermaids, women who turn into tables. You sign into an imaginary neck and it’s over.

Clearly, Michalopoulou is interested in story telling, yet there is a connection not only to the everyday experience of the reader, but the experience of the characters of her stories. The story is grounded in the actual, but still how the story is told is important.

I’d Like also uses reoccuring images to to work the conections between the stories into the reader’s mind. The connections are subtle and serve to add curiosity—didn’t that appear a couple stories ago—rather than function as clues to that weave a complete narrative together. A red barrette, for example, is stolen from the top of a corpse on a gurney. It is a impulsive act, but in most stories it would be just a stream of consciouses moment that doesn’t mean too much. Latter, though, the barrette appears as the trademark hat of a beloved sister. The sister though, is based on someone the writer knows. The barrette functions, then, as a narrative image for the stories that are written by the character of the author, the influence that links the character of the author’s reality with her stories, and a narrative image for the reader that links each of the different realties—the fiction and the meta fiction—to each other.

Thematically, Michalopoulou’s stories revolve around the lives of the character of the writer and two sisters and their family. The two sisters come and go through the stories at different ages and phases of life. The glimpses are brief and give just enough of the tensions that exist between siblings. The tensions, though, are not banal or insipid, but reveal the way siblings interact in simple every day ways. The writer’s theme is about writing, not so much about what makes good writing, but what it is from one’s own life that becomes writing. Michalopoulou, too, is interested in how the writing reflects back on to the writer. If a story effects the reader, can’t a story effect the writer. Again, it is the criss crossing of narrative realties that becomes one of the themes.

Michalopoulou can be a funny writer and Light is the best and funniest story in the collection. One of the sisters loses her sister in a car crash and the day she learns about the accident two Mormons come to her door. Feeling lonely, she invites them in and they talk. She doesn’t know anything about mormonism, but she keeps having the Mormons back to her home to talk and pray even though she doesn’t really care that much. At the end of the story her sister returns in a dream. She ask sher sister

“Did Moroni send you?”
“No, your gulability did.”

The levity underscores the tension between the sisters, whose separation has been much trouble for the survivor. The balance between the humor and the sadness is perfectly balanced and quite funny. It is part of the playfulness of the stories that make them so good.

I’d Like is a great collection of stories that blends genres and styles to create a unique collection of stories that moves short story writing past the problem becomes realization formula.

Castellanos Moya in Words Without Borders

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There is a short story by Castellanos Moya in Words Without Borders (via, Conversational Reading). It is a funy story about a three way trist in Madrid with a good twist ending, and usually I don’t like twists too much. The more I read of Castellanos Moya, the more I appreciate his humor.

In One Story: Groff, Jodzio, Grattan

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I finished reading several issues of One Story the other day. I tend to let them stack up and then read them all at once as if they were in a collection of short stories. Four stories caught my eye and I thought it would be good to mention them here since usually its books that get all the press (and so I can remember the authors two months from now).

Sir Fleeting by Lauren Groff was the best of those that I read. Filled with excellent turns of phrase and a story that winds through 40 years, it describes the love affair that never was between two people. I particularly thought the narrator was well drawn with a cosmopolitan sensibility that doesn’t make one like the character, but at least respect her. Given that Groff has several published books, she is worth reading more.

Flight Path by John Jodzio and Foreign Girls by Thomas Grattan were both well written and did not have those coying ephinanic I-learned-that moments at the end of stories, which can be a little tiring.  Grattan had some nice moments and left plenty unsaid, and was able to brining a story about cultural alienation of Gorgian emigrants to a close in a way that related that alienation to something most Americans have experienced.

If you haven’t checked out One Story, I recommend you do. It is a refreshing way to present short stories.