Short Fiction
 

Is about all I've been reading lately. It's a genre that I hadn't delved into much, with the exception of Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn, and Saffron and Brimstone, by I don't remember who but it was fantastically weird, and Murakami's shorts. I love love love it. EH1812 mentioned Speaking with the Angels, which is edited by Nick Hornby, yesterday, and I happened to run across it at the library just last night. They didn't have Arafat's Elephants, the collection I had gone it for. Anyways, the Hornby book is sooooo magnificent. I just finished reading The Department of Nothing, which is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read.

In class this past month we've read a good bit of short fiction. If you haven't read The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick, by Elizabeth Gilbert, then your life is sorely incomplete. All My Relations, by (I think) Barry Hannah, was some fantastic reading as well.

It pains me that this genre is so overlooked by most people.

I love shorts. Short fiction, short films, short people...

There's something beautiful about a story told sparsely and succinctly. I have often times gotten more out of a brief literary or filmic encounter than I have in the long-form, because there's no dead air, no thing to lean on, just one whole juicy bite.

I recommend the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (who also wrote The Namesake) - it won the Pulitzer in 200.

Another collection I love is Ryan Boudinot's The Littlest Hitler. He's cheeky - so cheeky that I never noticed the sucker-punch to my gut until my eyes were stinging.

I will definitely check out those collections, LS. Thanks!

I'm done with the Hornby book now and it was ohsogood. I'm beginning Arafat's Elephant on the recommendation of the teacher of the writing class I'm currently in. His own stories (my prof.'s) are dark and brilliant. I recommend Cairo by Midnight.

In school my current writing focus is on shorts and I really like it. Since becoming so obsessed with writing I find that I dream in story. Dark, weird stories in which I am never a character. It's kinda cool actually.

I love good short fiction. I just don't think that good short fiction is as common as anthologists believe. So I usually end up being frustrated by them, especially single author anthologies since even the best, in my opinion, only hit about 30% of the time.

With a regular novel if I am not feeling it I don't really feel obligated to finish, but with a short work I am too much of the mindset "it is only 30 more pages, just tough it out." Which is fine with one story, but not so much with 8 out of 12. The end result being I put the book down before I've found all the good stuff.

So I tend to just stick with reading magazines where an occasional piece of good short fiction will be published. Or essay anthologies. I do enjoy those much more consistently.

I haven't read enough anthologies to have experienced a great deal of that. In the few that I have read, the stories have ranged from pretty good to ohmyfvckinggod.

Of the stories I've searched out online, I've found a lot of crap, even in some pretty respectable journals. The New Yorker has a hilarious story by T.C. Boyle in the most recent issue. It's The Lie and is online as well.

Love T.C. Boyle - and Granta is the journal I subscribe to - London based quarterly mostly focused on fiction and essays and travel writting. They just got a new editor so I'm waiting to see if the same quality continues.

My recent favorites are:
Big Cats (which you've already read) :) [Did you know that author (Holiday - I love that name!!!) is married to "Dwight" on The Office?]

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

Kelly Link's work (she has two collections, Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners)

How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry - by Elizabeth McCracken

The short fiction of Aimee Bender.

And very funny but not for the faint of heart, Benjamin Weissman's Headless or Dear Dead Person and Other Stories.

And if you also like personal essays, I recommend anything by George Orwell. And my favorite writing by Virginia Woolfe is a short essay entitled, "A Street Haunting."

I love short stories. Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Fitzgerald ( 'Babylon Revisited' is one of my all-time favorites), Poe, London, Twain, Dickens....the list goes on and on. Nearly every great writer has written short fiction- magazines and anthologies were a way into the public eye and paid the bills while they worked on their longer masterpieces. I think the Norton Anthologies have done a great job compiling these works and they usually have top-notch translations for the foreign language stories.

All this time I've been thinking she was married to Buster on Arrested Development.

Shirley Jackson is also a favorite. I LOVE her novels, as well.

I didn't know about Dickens short fiction. I have a feeling I'd much prefer that to his "chock full" novels. Very cool.

I love Poe's short story's some of the best.

While I usually don't like Steven King or Dean Koontz they both write excellent shorts.

'A Christmas Carol' is really more of a short story, and a good example of how shorter works can be better. I love Dickens, but he does run on in some of his stories...... Many of his longer works were actually serializations- published in penny papers and magazines and then compiled into novel form later.

Murikami and TC Boyle both have fantastic collections of short stories.

Yes, I had to drag myself through Great Expectations, and didn't give him another try. Perhaps I should. I found the filler chapters (where I assume he simply ran out of something to say at the moment but had to deliver a chapter for that week's publication) really, really grating.

I feel similarly about Neil Gaiman. Love his comic books and short fiction, and don't care for most of his longer novels.

Then never EVER try reading any unabridged versions of Victor Hugo's works.

There isn't any padding in Les Miserables! The unabridged version is the only one worthy of reading. (Though that is about as far from "short fiction" as you can get.)

Hunchback, however, can be trimmed down to about 25 pages without serious harm.

I've only read Hunchback, which is one of my favorite books. I love Hugo's writing style. Dickens far less.

Ah, I think I disagree. I loved reading him going on and on about architecture, but that's a particular passion of mine...

Can I de-rail for a second?

Headliner (my daughter age-12) came up with an interesting idea today. After we take a little time to flush it out I'd like to present it to a publisher.

My questions include:

Who to bring it to, can it be a draft or do you need a complete project?
Etc...

It would be marketed at Girls pre-teen to teen.

Thanks for any help.

This month's EQMM has a fun read from Janwillem van de Wetering called The Bleeding Chair. Weird and improbable? You know it, baby! Fun? As if you need to ask.

Great thread revival!

This summer I read all of Amy Hempel. Now my heroine. If there were a poster of her, I'd put it over my bed. She is master of white space. I'm going to try hard to get into the summer writing institute that she teaches at in 2010. I'm just not ready for it this year.