ColumnRead a short story. Sustain your mind.

Once upon a time, I thought short stories were just for us kids – mini-books for mini-people, kind of like the lamb chops my mother fed me when she was serving steaks to the “big people” at the table. I figured what was on my plate was the same stuff as theirs, just kid-sized – a perfect portion for my (relatively) tiny self. Of course, it turns out that short stories are about as different an animal from long-form novels as lamb is from beef. Turns out, too, that they can be acquired taste – one that, to be honest, took me a long time to come around to.

Over the years I’ve discovered I’m not alone. Just this morning, in fact, a friend (a voracious reader) asked me what this week’s column was going to cover. When I told him “short stories,” I got a sigh followed by a quick (and somewhat terse), “Oh, well, I’ll look forward to your next one, then.”

“Not into short stories?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. ‘They’re too…uh… short.” It’s a sentiment I’ve come across a lot, from casual and dedicated readers alike. It got me thinking about how I finally – and somewhat begrudgingly – have come around to the form.

In those single-digit days, wonderful (and digestible) classroom reading included the likes of The Ransom of Red Chief and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, memorable short works from O. Henry and Washington Irving, respectively. These functioned not only as entertainment, but also as an introduction to literature (the pump having been primed at an even earlier age by Aesop, Hans Christian Anderson and a host of other great “children’s” authors). In many ways, the only form I knew was short, but I was nevertheless delighted to make the jump from spoon-fed to self-inflicted fiction, desiring to receive my stories on my own terms.

I grew frustrated with short stories as a teenager as I began to feel a sense of constriction when reading even the best of them. Characters seemed underdeveloped, plot lines abbreviated, the distance between “once upon a time” and “the end” maddeningly compressed. It’s not that short was dumb (Salinger‘s stories rocked), but there was only so much an author could do in so few pages (I thought). Meanwhile, my first novels were proving to be intensely compelling.

I realize now that I was being trained to process fiction “Dickens style” – not a bad thing on its surface, but a perspective that didn’t leave a lot of room for quick takes or fragment-like construction, among other approaches to storytelling. Indeed, poetry and experimental prose were also off the table back then; for the most part it was go long or not at all. Eventually my reading time became almost exclusively dedicated to novels, and I gladly chose For Whom the Bells Tolls over Hills Like White Elephants, Jay Gatsby over Benjamin Button, Holden over Sergeant X.

Looking back, I feel like I missed out—I wish my teachers had used short stories (and collections) as more than a springboard for reading longer novels. (By late high school, we were done with Nine Stories and well into Moby Dick.) Today, my knowledge of short fiction by renowned greats such as Raymond Carver, John Cheever and even Dorothy Parker (unforgettable quotes aside), is limited at best, much to the chagrin of many of my better-read friends. Sure, I picked up collections here and there over the years (from Hemingway and Flannery O’Conner to John Updike and Ann Beattie), but I almost always opted for a novel when I had an option.

In recent years, however, I’ve revisited the short story form, in part due to pressure from those friends I mentioned, (some of whom have an almost cult-like love for the approach). And here’s the deal: I’ve discovered that all along I have been looking at this kind of fiction through the wrong lens. I know I’m speaking extremely broadly, but it is precisely their abbreviated length that makes short stories work the way they do. They’re different from novels and when read as something other than mini-tales, they jump off the page in a whole new kind of high relief.

A couple of observations for you fellow resisters out there: When reading short stories, consider that “negative space” – what isn’t said – becomes intensely critical and powerful. Take just a few minutes (another nice thing about short stories) and read Hemingway’s Hills (trust me) and ask yourself, “What exactly is the procedure they’re talking about? What does the lack of directness mean and how does it make you feel?” More: What did the father do to the boy in Philipp Meyer’s gripping One Day This Will All Be Yours? In John Collier’s beloved The Chaser, what was it about the old man’s curious mixtures? More so than in more elaborated fictions, in stories like these you find yourself providing your own context and ideas – your imagination becomes an absolutely critical part of (even the plot) experience. Yeah. That works for me.

Another great aspect of short fiction is that brevity lends itself well to presenting summations and snapshots of themes and plots. Just like life, right? I mean, aside from the work of some notable authors, we generally don’t think or experience or even remember in novel-like form (which conversely is one of the things that can be so compelling about a good, long book), but rather in bits and shards and self-prioritized life-bites. Like poems, short stories tap into our collage-oriented, postmodern minds. Even stories that cover a lot of ground (must) offer washes and inferences to paint larger pictures and elicit deep feelings. Indeed, today I see short stories in many ways like I do poems. I’m not there for a “traditional” narrative in first place. I read them to get a feeling. And the best collections of stories result in a very powerful emotional response that novels sometimes just can’t accomplish.

I still have to force myself to reach for a short story collection over the next “book” on my list. But recently I did just that and once again I was handsomely rewarded. (Ironically, though, I read Adam Levin’s fabulous Hot Pink not only because I heard nothing but great things, but also because I just couldn’t bear to pick up his much-lauded debut novel, The Instructions, which weighs in at 1,030 pages.) In fact, it was this collection (covered below) that inspired this column.

Here are six collections that might turn you on to the form (give it a chance) or, if you’re already a fan, you might have overlooked. There’s one from each of the last five decades, plus one released last year that spans the career of one of our most celebrated novelists.

Distortions, Ann Beattie (1976)

Profound, intense and often funny, yet submerged in a malaise that defined an era, Ann Beattie’s debut collection reads fresh in today’s fragmented and technologically fueled “here, but apart” world. The usual workaday aspects of characters’ lives are tinged with the strange, as simple worlds want to be. With the mundane functioning as petri dish, Beattie grows and exposes our odd attempts and failures at connection and meaning (divorce and adultery are themes here) in a middle-class world. Published when she was 29, Distortions (released the same year as her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter) immediately established the author as an unflinching whistleblower of that “Me” generation.

Girl with Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace (1989)

Published two years after his decidedly “audacious” first novel, The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace’s debut short story collection showed (showed off, some said) the versatility and extreme intelligence that would mark his sadly shortened career and earn him a legion of zealous fans. In Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace paints a cultural portrait of fixation, obsession and celebrity (from Alex Trebek to David Letterman) against a backdrop of our yearning and reaching for love and intimacy – and he does all this in wholly unpredictable ways that can have you utterly transfixed one moment and out of breath the next. Using popular media touchstones in combination with deeply idiosyncratic characters, Wallace exposes and pulls apart human desires with his signature observational focus and wit.

Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)

Her third collection of short stories, Birds of America solidly established Lorrie Moore as one of the great short story writers of our generation – and one of the most popular, as well. This New York Times bestseller goes deep and dark, while maintaining an intelligent sense of humor. The combination allows us to stare at and even enjoy these troubled characters as they navigate lives where the line between stable and painfully untethered is sometimes suddenly, and sometimes subtly blurred. Moore’s gift of language is riveting – you’ll roll sentences around in your mind and repeat them out loud for their cadence and truth. From their sexual frustrations to their family “issues,” Moore’s protagonists are at once utterly unique and instantly recognizable – a reader’s dream.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro (2001)

To many, Alice Munro is hands-down the greatest working master of the short story form. Each new collection by the Canadian author is snapped up, scrutinized and lavished with critical praise. Munro’s female protagonists in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage each embody a complex, yet fundamental internal struggle between universal recognizable poles – family and independence, home and away, personal identity and the weight of interpersonal relationships. Munro’s stories have an emotional span to them that goes beyond the full lifetimes they sometimes portray. Also assisting is the Canadian landscape, which provides a sparse stage that allows emotions to register in a very pure form – an unmistakable and wholly accessible style.

Hot Pink, Adam Levin (2011)

The literary world is staring at Adam Levin. How could they not? His first novel, massive and reportedly brilliant in both concept and language (The Instructions, 2010) was met with immediate acclaim and comparisons to the late David Foster Wallace. Mercifully, Levin’s follow up, Hot Pink, is a wonderfully manageable, wildly creative and deeply insightful collection of short stories. Love is a theme (though an extremely unreliable ally) for Levin’s characters as they march through personal changes, fate and life’s pure weirdness, all the while trying to stay upright and attempting to anchor to something – anything – that might prevent them from drifting away. Oh, and his wordsmithing? You’ll set this book down more than once, smiling and shaking your head – clever. Very clever.

The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo (2011)

A collection of stories from America’s postmodern master, The Angel Esmeralda – Nine Stories brings together the author’s short-form work from 1979 to 2011. Both within themselves and taken together as a collection, these snapshot tales present the often abstract and fragmented darkness that hovers over our transition from the 20th to the 21st Century. Some see Don DeLillo’s work as prescient, but a more accurate description is unflinchingly mirror-like, allowing every trick of modern hyper-light to illuminate our way forward. Each story here pokes at often-mundane instances and interactions, fascinations and obsessions that are arrestingly lifelike in both chance and relevance. (From “Book ’Em: 10 Best Reads From 2011.”)

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly column, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

ALSO CHECK OUT:

InPrint: Albert Camus and the Biggest Question of All

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InPrint: Gatsby, Paradise and the 1% – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pre-Occupation

InPrint: Not for Kids Only – 10 Young Adult Novels You Need to Read

InPrint: On the Road, Again – Revisiting Jack Kerouac

Top image: colindunn

The post InPRINT: Small Packages: A Few Words on Short Stories and 6 Must-Read Collections appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnRead a short book. Sustain your mind.

When I was a teenager, I related more to books than I did to most other kids – and certainly to most adults. There was something about Huck and Holden and Ponyboy and their stories that was more real to my inner thought-space than were the characters who populated my adolescent landscape – teachers who didn’t get it, kids and cliques who judged without so much as a hint of eye contact, adults who seemed to have long forgotten the angst of their own youth.

Great fiction (whose net was cast wide enough to include my age group) didn’t talk down to me. It didn’t mock or tease or obfuscate. The characters were my comrades – respectful, smart and compassionate, and in some private way, just between them and me, they seemed to have my back. They respected both my sensibilities and civil rights. They were mature like me, of course, and they spoke the way I spoke inside my head – indignantly, sometimes with rage, yet often with a fearlessness that I didn’t possess. They unraveled their worlds to understand the wrongness of their shame and guilt and I was grateful to have them to show me the way through difficult times.

Great fiction is just that – great fiction. And great characters, regardless of their age or yours, always illuminate your way. Speaking on behalf of my inner kid and his fictional comrades, what was and is now designated as “Young Adult” literature is not, contrary to popular belief, a genre that’s dumbed down, a mere pat on the head for all those precious little readers out there. What it is is literature that happens to examine subject matter through characters that appeal to teens.

What does this mean? According to Katie MacBride, of the Mill Valley [CA] Public Library, who helped me compile the list below, what adults don’t get (especially those engaged in the twisted and ongoing battle to censor what teens see and read, including virtually every book included here) is that young adults live – wait for it – here on Earth, just like us, and not in some sterilized prep-room for “real” life. “Personal crises, sex and gender issues, violence, class warfare, politics – they experience and have to process it all,” she says. “If a book truly reaches young people, it’s a great book – and it will likely reach you too.” Amen. Unless of course, you somehow lost your depth as you grew older. (A concept that perhaps is more common than we’d like to admit.)

Arresting plotline? Universal themes? Relatable characters? Forget the “target age group” and dig in. Here are 10 books (an insanely partial list) even mature adults need to read – or reread, as the case may be. I know not every Young Adult title (specifically, for ages 12-17) is right for “Adult” Adults, but these are. (Oh, and we don’t do spoilers here. So read on…)

Some Stalwarts: Three Classics

Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951) – Mark Twain’s Huck Finn aside, Salinger’s masterpiece is perhaps the greatest “crossover” novel of all time. Here, in a work not specifically directed at a young audience, we see through the eyes of the everlasting and ultimately relatable 17-year-old Holden Caulfield, the embodiment of teenage angst and alienation. His flashback story exposes cultural and interpersonal superficiality, and explores the challenge of maintaining authenticity in a postmodern world.

Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954) – The story of a group of young boys forced to create their own civilization on a deserted island is a perfect lens for the examination of the greatest and most horrifying human impulses. The struggle between the urges to live and function as a society and the lure of power and corruption is front and center in this classic novel that’s as much about grand human needs, desires and flaws as it is about anything specific to teenage years.

The Chosen, Chiam Potok (1967) – Set in the insular microcosm of the Jewish community of 1940s Brooklyn, New York, this celebrated novel explores issues of friendship, family and diversity, and the struggle to find oneself in a world where entrenched forces have the power to lock in an individual’s destiny. Fifteen-year-olds Bobby and Danny represent a sort of yin and yang existence, and the trials of their relationship offer timeless insights that reach far beyond their age and culture.

New Tales for New Times: Three More for the Canon

The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993) – Joining the lofty ranks of 1984, Brave New World and A Handmaid’s Tale, this great dystopian achievement presents a bleak future as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy named Jonas. Occupying a pivotal role in his pathologically calculated society, Jonas functions as a bridge between the memories of the old world and the blankness of the new as it is forcibly transitioned to a horrifying “Sameness.” Like it’s heralded predecessors, this novel offers us a look at where we are as a society and what we are becoming.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky (1999) – A series of letters written by a high school freshman reveals the challenges he faces as he tries to merge a complicated and confusing personal life into a mainstream world. The story deals with issues ranging from homosexuality to rape and suicide, and examines how the painful details and idiosyncrasies of one’s life can lead from withdrawal to participation and back again – a challenge not uncommon to anyone, at any age, in any culture.

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson, 1999 – It’s hard to speak about Speak without “spoiling” the plot. Suffice to say that Melinda Sordino enters high school with a secret – a secret so deeply painful that she cannot even think it to herself, let alone share it with the world around her, which is now threatening to leave her behind. A novel that takes on issues that far outscope adolescence, Speak seeks to adjust our vocabulary and thinking around suffering and self-blame. For this, it has become a favorite target of censors across the country – efforts that are, in this case (and in this writer’s opinion), criminal in their own right.

Read On: The 2000s

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak (2006) – “Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.” So says Death, who knows all and tells a tale of young Liesel Meminger (alternating with her own accounts) as she navigates Nazi Germany in this story of survival and discovery. Somewhere in the abstract sadness (Death likes to distill feelings and happenings to a macabre and basic color scheme) and primal reality of the events that swirl around her, Liesel scratches out a life for herself that features some semblance of humanity. Among her coping skills is her budding relationship with books, some of which she rescues from Nazi book burnings as she dares to feel in the face of fate.

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, 2008 – Okay, okay, calm down, I’ll say it. Yes, this is a great book. A killer read, in fact. This dystopian bestseller, the first of a trilogy that’s taking the world by storm, is the first person account of a great heroine – the “girl on fire,” Katniss Everdeen – who is one of many children forced to pay for the sins of their parents (daring to rise up against a post-apocalyptic Totalitarian regime) in a annual, government-sponsored, unspeakably horrifying spectacle. Thick with cultural symbolism and metaphor (everything from consumer and celebrity culture to class warfare and environmental degradation comes to mind), The Hunger Games is also a spectacular thriller of a novel. Put it down. Dare you… and “may the odds be ever in your favor.”

Jumpstart the World, Catherine Ryan Hyde, 2010 – Thrust into an adult living situation (that is to say, living alone) while still in high school, Elle faces an all-too-sudden and accelerated need to occupy into her own emotional self. A literal cast-off, she’s forced to quickly react and assign meaning to unfamiliar relationships and people and their roles (gender and otherwise) in her jumpstarted life. “Independence has no reverse gear. Fear or no fear,” realizes Elle. The struggle then becomes to “just be as close to yourself as you can possibly bring yourself to be.” Sound wise? Simple, almost effortless prose belies life’s certain complications in this great read from the author of Pay it Forward.

The Fault in Our Stars, John Green, 2012 – Suffering, dignity, destiny, coping with the diminishing returns of life. Alas, “the world is not a wish-granting factory” and cancer survivor (for the time being), 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster must deal with that fact. A deep and intensely philosophical book, The Fault in Our Stars boldly submits that “some infinites are bigger than others” and then crawls inside a few unfortunately smaller ones, bravely exploring shortened lifespans from the inside looking out – without the polite pulling of punches. How does love and life appear through such a prism?  How can such a read shed light on your own life experience? In a world where life is “a side effect of dying,” you might ask, what’s it worth to you? Yong Adult fiction? Read it and you tell me.

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly feature, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

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InPrint: On the Road, Again – Revisiting Jack Kerouac

InPrint: Les Histoires De Paris & Two Novel Additions

Between the Lines: The Power of the Written Word

InPrint: Small Presses, Big Fiction – 2 Books You Shouldn’t Miss

Top image: Pink Sherbet Photography

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