Review: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzales

title: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories [support an independent bookseller and buy at Powell's]
by: Manuel Gonzales
genre: short stories (speculative fiction/science fiction)
pages: 304
published: January 2013
source: I received an advanced reader's copy from Riverhead via LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

Manuel Gonzales' first collection of short stories was a truly unique but quick read.  Ranging from the speculative to the supernatural, Gonzales' subject matter ranged from plane hijackings to zombie attacks, but to varied levels of success.

Some highlights:

• Pilot, Copilot, Writer:  The premise:  the main character, a writer, is on a plane that is hijacked.  Instead of the hijacker holding the passengers for ransom or rerouting the plane to a different location, the hijacker chooses to circle Dallas.  For about twenty years.  Now, the premise alone presents so many obstacles and creates so many parameters for a writer, but Gonzales manages to shatter them and creates a truly original piece.  One of the strongest pieces in the collection.
• The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe:  Brilliant!   Love love LOVED this story.  The premise:  Two anthropologists almost pull of a hugely successful hoax on academia:  they publish study after groundbreaking study on a deeply isolated tribe THAT DOESN'T EXIST. Superbly woven together.  Tight, purposeful plot structure.  Bravo :)

Almost there:

• All of Me: The first of two (TWO!) zombie-centric stories in the collection, this piece is from the perspective of a zombie, disguised as the very much alive, going about his nine-to-five life, trying to resist the urge to eat the faces of his coworkers.  He also has a crush on a female coworker.  The voice is incredibly original and very funny, though I feel like the plot devolved from something super original to something super expected.

Skip these:

• Life on Capra II:  The voice Gonzales employed for the main character in this piece really didn't work for me.  He felt more like a caricature than a character, and maybe that was the point. There was a distinctly video-game-esque feel to the piece, as the action seems to progress, then regress, as if player one lost and the game reset to the beginning of the level, and the reader was inside the brain of the avatar. Regardless, the voice was just so over the top at times that made it hard for me to care about him or what happened to him.  Then there were the guns.  And the robot attacks.  And the swamp monsters.  It just got to be a little much.  I'm the wrong kind of nerd to appreciate that story.
• Escape from the Mall:  A story about a group of people trapped in a janitor's supply closet during a spontaneous zombie uprising at their local mall.  I feel like, even if you're not into horror/zombie movies, we've all seen this movie.  Over the past 3-5 years as pop culture became obsessed with all things zombie , this plotline somehow found its way into America's collective unconscious.  When I first started the story, I was excited.  I thought Gonzalez was going to do something really original with this very done premise.  Nope.  Personally, I feel like Gonzales took such creative risks and thought so outside the box for many of the other stories in this collection that this story just felt too easy.  It was a great starting point, but I feel like if, as an author, you choose to take on a premise that's been done to death, you better bring something original to the table, and unfortunately, in this case, Gonzales does not.

My personal feeling:  Gonzales shines when he sticks to more to the realm of speculative (particularly when the speculative topics delve into academic topics...it's clear Gonzales is, himself, super intelligent and very well read!) but struggles when he veers to far into the land of science fiction.  All in all, some blazing moments of brilliance tucked in between pieces with potential to be developed into something worth reading.  Definitely worth checking out from your local library.

Rubric rating: 5.5.

Review: Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

title:  Battleborn [purchase here]

author:  Claire Vaye Watkins

pages: 287

genre: short stories

published: August 2012

source: I received an advanced reader's copy from Riverhead via 

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

    "'Dudes,' Danny says, 'that was fucking beautiful.'
     A laugh spreads across Jules's big bright face, ravenous the way a wildfire is.  'I know, right?'
     I laugh too.  These are my friends.  These are the funny, empty things we do so we can be the kind of funny, empty people who do them." (page 257-258, Virginia City)

Battleborn has been my constant companion during my commutes for the past few weeks, and I'm actually pretty disappointed that I finished the book.  I was floored by how talented Claire Vaye Watkins is...her short stories are practically flawless!  Tight, incredibly thoughtfully crafted, richly descriptive...I have a feeling this is a collection I will read and reread for years to come.  

A few standout stories (and it was hard to choose just a few!!!):

The Archivist  The moving account of a woman as she, post-breakup, preserves her past and imagines her future.  Raw and delicate at the same time.

The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past     An Italian tourist visits a brothel as police comb the desert for his missing traveling companion. The way Watkins chose to end this story was unbelievably perfect.

The Diggings    Imagines two brothers as they travel West at the height of the California Gold Rush, and how their relationship changes when they fail to strike it rich.  Watkins imagery and use of subtle metaphor in this piece was particularly striking.  

Ghosts, Cowboys    Addresses her own family history, which is a big a part of the history of the contemporary American West (her biological father, Paul Watkins, was an early member of the Manson Family, but never participated in the murders and ultimately testified against Manson).  

This marks the first time I have ever said this:  GO BUY THIS BOOK.  NOW.  WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING AT THE MOMENT CAN WAIT.  BUY IT.  You will thank me.  Or wait until I buy it for you.  Chances are, if we're friends, and you're a lit nerd like me, I'll be buying you a copy.  But buy it anyway.  Then you'll have two.  So when you lend it to someone, and they fall in love with it as well and "forget" to give it back, you have a backup copy.

Rubric rating:  8.95  I can't give her a nine, because this is her debut collection...but you bet I will be keeping an eye out for more of her genius.

Review: Understories by Tim Horvath

title: Understories [purchase here]

by: Tim Horvath

pages: 252

genre: short stories

published: May 2012

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy from Bellevue Literary Press via

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

"It was the comfort of your tongue tripping on your own sweat, a friendly reminder that of the world's salt, a share is yours." (p. 14, Circulation)

The back jacket copy is what compelled me to request Tim Horvath's Understories from the May Early Reviewers batch on LibraryThing:  "What if there were a city that consisted only of restaurants? What if Paul Gauguin had gone to Greenland instead of Tahiti? What if there were a field called Umbrology, the study of shadows, where physicists and shadow puppeteers worked side by side.  Full of speculative daring though firmly anchored in the tradition of realism, Tim Horvath's stories explore all of this and more, blending the everyday and wondrous to contend with age-old themes of loss, identity, imagination, and the search for human connection. Whether making offhand references to Mystery Science Theater, providing a new perspective on Heidegger's philosophy and forays into Nazism, or following the imaginary travels of a library book, Horvath's writing is as entertaining as it is thought provoking."

As a collection, Understories was a bit uneven.  Not all of the stories seemed like they belonged in the same book.  That said, there were more than a few that stood out to me as really quite good:

• Runaroundandscreamalot   By far, my favorite story in the book, but also the story that felt the most misplaced.  The action follows a divorced father as he takes his daughter, Sasha, to a local indoor playground and the relationship that develops between himself and the mother of a child named Hahn.  Really tight with strong, compelling characters...I just really bought into this slice of the characters' lives he allows us to peek in on.
• Altered Native     This piece ponders what would have happened if Gauguin found his inspiration in icy Greenland, as opposed to tropical Tahiti.  Particularly deliciously crafted for the reader who knows a bit about Gauguin's Tahiti experiences...
• The Conversations    Spontaneous combustion sporadically occurs across the globe during specific types of discussion, and Horvath explores what happens when we worry as much about what we shouldn't talk about as what we're trying to communicate.
• Urban Planning: Case Study Number Seven  A City in the Light of Moths     Horvath imagines a world where film is shown 24 hours a day on every available square inch of surface, and his world building and description in this piece is exceptionally strong.
• The Understory      Heidegger.  A Jewish arborist.  An unlikely friendship.  Nazis and philosophy and trees.  Horvath's result is nuanced and balanced. 

In between many of the stories were short pieces entitled Urban Planning, created I imagine to weave the stories together into a cohesive collection.  A couple of these, particularly Case Study Number Six and Case Study Number Eight, were delightfully strange taut little mini-stories and would have worked out of the context of the greater collection as well.

Horvath's strength is absolutely concept:  he imagines places and scenarios, and "what ifs" himself into the most interesting premises.  To be a fly on the wall in that man's imagination...which also sounds like a plausible premise for one of Horvath's stories...

One thing I did notice is that Horvath does have a tendency to use several words where one would suffice, so if economy of word is your thing, he might not be the right writer for you to explore. 

Rubric ruling: 7

I have no idea why, but my reading has tended toward the dystopian/surreal/ speculative/downright bizarre lately.  Just wait until I share with you my thoughts on Blake Butler's There Is No Year... I'm beginning to have some really strange dreams, and I absolutely blame Butler...I think it might be time to crack into Anna Karenina and The Dud Avocado!  

Review: The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck

title:  The Old Child & Other Stories  [purchase here]

author:  Jenny Erpenbeck

translated from German by: Susan Bernofsky

genre:  novella, short stories

pages: 120

published: 2005 (translation date)

source:  New York Public Library

"The girl used to be constantly looking around to the right and left to be sure of doing whatever the right thing was, but now that she can see more clearly and perceives the great variety of human beings moving all around her in a thousand different ways, she can no longer choose what is right, she no longer knows what the right thing is.  Everything she does seems to her wrong even while she is doing it, so utterly wrong that she'd like to take it back again--never would she have wished to offer offense to anyone, but now she is forced to realize that there is virtually no action at all that is free of the possibility of causing offense.  At the same time, this state of being prevented from acting cannot merely be described as a lack of independence, as is so often done by the girl's teachers with pedagogical intent, it is more like a paralysis.  Even transforming a simple thought into action, such as, for example, wanting to lift one's hand, is becoming more and more impossible for the girl the longer she remains in the institution.  If you lift your hand, you must, a moment before, have wanted to lift your hand, if you laugh, you must have wanted to laugh, if you say no or yes, you must have wanted to say no or yes, in other words every time you do something, you must have wanted, a moment earlier, to do what you are doing.  The moment you do anything at all, your volition can be seen standing naked behind it, and this the girl finds so utterly embarrassing that she chooses to want nothing.  She wants what all the others want, but there is no such thing.  And the moment she realizes this, she realizes also that her strength is waning."  (p. 65, The Old Child).

If Melissa Pritchard, Anne Carson and Herta Müller could somehow procreate, their child's writing might sound like Jenny Erpenbeck, which in my book is a wholehearted compliment.  

In this collection of short stories and a novella, Erpenbeck's characters are hauntingly memorable and scenes vividly dreamlike.  

The title novella, The Old Child, tells the story of a young girl, found  standing in the street, devoid of memory, with an empty bucket in her hand.  The girl is then taken by the authorities to an children's institution where all possessions are communal, and she finds comfort in the anonymity of routine and procedure.  Throughout the novella, the reader watches the girl gain, then lose, discover then reject parts of her authentic self as she struggles to find her place among the other children.  The telling of the story was so nuanced and the character of the girl so complex...I have a feeling I'll discover something new with each reading, which is the mark of true craftsmanship on the part of Erpenbeck.  I keep coming across the phrase "verbal economy" associated with Erpenbeck's writing, and it's an apt one; what she is able to accomplish in 120 pages, lesser authors spend 300+ pages attempting.  

Other highlights:

Hale and Hallowed:  The story of a woman who pays an unexpected nighttime visit to the woman she shared a hospital room with at the birth of her son, and the pace/cadence of this story was phenomenal.  

Light a Fire or Leave: Erpenbeck is supremely skilled at dropping right in to the core of the matter in a way that just reverberates for the rest of the story.  The first few lines: "That I was going to die, this I always knew.  Already at ten, at twelve, I could see myself lying there: in the deepest forest, in a puddle, unburied, my body a home to vermin.  What I didn't know is that I could grow old.  My life seemed to me only a rough draft, a sketch to which I could keep applying the eraser, it seemed to me I was simultaneously at home in all my ages, I saw the phases of my life sitting in a circle around Death, the way the twelve months in the fairy tale sit around the fire.  I never believed age could really drive two people apart, I thought everyone knew everything at all times, and the only difference was in the concrete shapes this knowledge assumed.  I always felt I had plenty of time."  (page 117).  

Rubric rating:  9.  Reading this collection was like taking a master class.  Erpenbeck is ridiculously talented and I'm absolutely going to read everything of hers I can get my hands on, such as Visitation and The Book of Words.

Update:  I've now finished 5 of the 30 titles (25 to go!) on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with a few more in progress.

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta    (in progress)  
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (review coming soon!!!!!!!)

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

Review: Salinger's "Franny and Zooey" & "Celebrity Chekhov" by Ben Greenman

This week I knocked two titles off my "30 Before 30" literary bucket list.  Not bad at all...

title:  Franny and Zooey [purchase here]

author:  J.D. Salinger

genre: short story & novella/fiction

pages: 201

published: 1961

source:  New York Public Library

I certainly have nothing wildly original to contribute to what's already been written about Salinger and his work.  Originally published in the New Yorker and focused on the youngest of the Glass children, Franny focuses on the genesis of Franny's spiritual/existential crisis and the companion novella Zooey tackles Zooey's reaction as Franny brings her breakdown to the family home in Manhattan.  Salinger's narrative voice is so strong and his characters so dynamic and vibrant.  My favorite scene takes place in the Glass family bathroom as Zooey's bath is interrupted by Bessie, his meddlesome mother. Whether meant as a religious parable or love story, it's certainly thought-provoking and rife with memorable moments and enviable dialogue (I *wish* I could be as intentional, witty and, when appropriate, eviscerating as Zooey when I speak!).

Rubric rating:  8.  I wasn't crazy about Catcher in the Rye the first time around (but then again, the first time around I was a 14 year old girl) and Franny and Zooey made me want to give it another shot.

title:  Celebrity Chekhov [purchase here]

author:  Ben Greenman

genre: short stories/adaptations

pages: 205

published:  2010

source:  New York Public Library

The circumstances surrounding my reading of Greenman's Celebrity Chekhov were, fittingly, Chekhovian.  In March, I was seeing someone who is a fairly substantial Chekhov enthusiast.  He had taken me to see Chekhovek!  (which we decided must be Russian for "bad acting"), a staging of a series of Anton Chekhov's short stories, which piqued my interest in Greenman's "celebritization."  (More on my life's Chekhovian plot twist post-rubric-rating.)  Thankfully, Greenman has a far deeper understanding of Chekhov than the men of Chekhovek!...

Greenman's premise is simple:  he believes that Chekhov's understanding of human nature and error is timeless.  In his introduction he says:

"Chekhov drew his characters from all levels of Russian society in his time: peasants, aristocrats, intense young clerks, disappointed wives.  Today, in America, we have a simple way of identifying these flawed specimens of humanity ruled by ego and insecurity.  They are called 'celebrities.'"

My personal favorite story:  Greenman's retelling of "The Death of a Government Clerk" entitled "The Death of a Redheaded Man," where he recasts the government clerk as Conan O'Brien and the general in the Department of Transport as Larry King.  Super insightful and pitch perfect recasting.

Rubric rating: 8.  I am a New Yorker junkie, so I figured I'd love this collection.  Really want to move his collection "What He's Poised To Do" up in my insanely long "to read" list.

And how were my circumstances Chekhovian, you ask?  Chekhov's characters tend to wear their emotions on their sleeves and are usually either pining over someone they can't have (Chekhov is HUGE on unrequited love) or battling distinct dissatisfaction with their lives and circumstances.  In my case, the gentleman I was seeing, whom I had developed pretty strong feelings for, has recently discovered he does not feel the same about me and ended our affair.  After dealing with the sadness, more bitter than sweet, I've been in a pretty intense state of ennui.  I would laugh at how life has imitated art...if I wasn't so weary...maybe I should work?  

30 Before 30 Literary Bucket List: 2 down, 28 to go!

Classics:  

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **

Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov

Contemporary:  

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe

Blindness by Jose Saramago **

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 

Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky

The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Zona by Geoff Dyer

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford

** rereading

Review: Drifting House by Krys Lee

title: Drifting House [purchase here]

author: Krys Lee

genre: short story

pages: 224

source: I received an advanced reader's copy via Netgalley 

in exchange for an honest review.

"After a few minutes he reappeared from the kitchen with a low table heavy with rice, soybean paste soup, beef rubs marinated in honey and soy sauce, and pickled vegetables.  There was her favorite banchan: beef-stuffed chili peppers and candied lotus flower roots.  Men rarely entered the kitchen; the store-bought banchan arranged on small plates was his usual plea for forgiveness.

'I made dinner for you,' he said.

As she sat on the floor and ate his lie, he watched, delighted.  He kissed her on the throat, the earlobe, the mouth, until she said, 'That's enough.'

He kneeled on the bamboo mat beside her.  'I'm a foolish, weak man.'

'I know.'

'I want to be the universe for you.'

She tapped the thin fuzz on his scalp with the fat end of the chopstick.  'That's impossible.'"  (page 154-155, A Small Sorrow).

Lee's debut collection of short stories is a bit uneven, but remarkable nonetheless. Set in both Korea and America, her stories are at times tragic, at times haunting, and always richly tonal.  Lee also seems to be one of the rare contemporary writers who trusts in the intelligence of her reader, in their ability to interpret and infer, which I absolutely appreciate.  

A couple highlights...

A Small Sorrow:  My personal favorite, and in my opinion, the strongest story in the collection, A Small Sorrow takes a peak inside the marriage of Eunkang and  the monogamously-challenged Seongwon.  LOVED the way Lee slowly and deliberately laid out each moment with such lyricism.  If this is any indication of what Lee is capable of, I'm really excited to read more from her!

The Goose Father:  a father, after sending his wife and children to America, takes on a tenant who believes that his pet goose is his mother reincarnated.  I felt that the story itself was stronger than the way it was told, but the story itself was almost otherworldly and far made up for the telling.

Rubric rating: 7.5.  Definitely looking forward to read her novel, How I Became a North Korean, which is coming out next year :)

Review: The Odditorium by Melissa Pritchard

title:  The Odditorium  [purchase here]

author: Melissa Pritchard

genre: short stories

pages: 252

source:  I received an Advanced Reader's Copy from Bellevue Literary Press 

in exchange for an honest review.

Melissa Pritchard has some legit authorial street cred.  Thus far, her short fiction has won:

• the Flannery O'Connor Award,
•  the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, 
• the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize,
• a PEN/Nelson Algren Honorary Mention
• TWO O. Henry Prizes,
• TWO Pushcart Prizes,
• the Ortese Prize in North American Literature from the University of Florence,
• the Barnes & Noble Discover Award,
• fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hawthorne Foundation of Scotland, the Bogliasco Foundation of Italy, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University

AND she's been chosen for NPR's Summer Reading List AND her work has been anthologized many times over.

To say Pritchard was immensely talented would be a careless understatement.

Now, I usually grab short story collections as my subway reading.  I like the feeling of accomplishment I get from being able to finish a short story or two while crushed against complete strangers during my commute. 

 (sidebar the first:  did anyone else die laughing watching Liz Lemon's morning commute on 30 Rock a few weeks ago?  For those of you who don't live in New York, that was not at all exaggeration for comedy's sake.  That was EXACTLY what Newt Gingrich's "elite" New Yorkers face between the hours of 8-10am and 4:30-7:30pm EVERY SINGLE DAY.  Which is probably why we New Yorkers have the reputation of being a bit cranky.  The only thing missing from 30 Rock's vignette was the smell. When you're smashed against multiple people in several compromising positions, there's inevitably someone in close proximity who does not believe in deodorant.  Or likes to pile on the perfume/cologne.  Or who hasn't bathed in several moons.  Or probably should see a physician re: what is making their feet smell like moldy cheese.  Or all of the above.  sidebar the second:  perhaps I hold a grudge for an excessively long time, but I'm still in awe of how out of touch Newt Gingrich's comment about "elite" New Yorkers ride the subway.  In my job, when I'm out working with schools, I ride the subway all day.  I would like to personally invite Newt to commute with me for a day, on my dime, and then ask him how "elite" he feels....might also impact his stance on public school education...two birds, one stone. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...)

However, this is not the ideal collection for short bursts of reading, because Pritchard is one of those amazingly rare contemporary authors whose prose is so lyrical and so thought-provoking that you're going to want a nice window of quiet time to savor it, like a well poured glass of Malbec on a chilly November evening.  (Also, any author who can use the descriptor "labial pink" in a story without it feeling as tawdry as a bodice rippers' various "throbbing members" is truly a master of their craft). Each story in her collection defies the notion of genre, and as uniquely structured as each piece is, as a whole they form a coherent and well curated collection.

A couple highlights:

Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Medical Hospital:  My absolute favorite in the collection, this story focuses on Captain Brown, poetry enthusiast who's somewhat incongruous to what one typically pictures as a military commander, as he takes command of the Royal Victoria Medical Hospital post D-Day.  The descriptions of the hospital itself are as haunting as many of the images and characters Pritchard conjures.  A highlight of the collection.

Ecorché: Flayed Man: This story felt a bit like the love child of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence and anything by the Marquise de Sade.  It follows the crucial players who, while performing their collective tasks of "Collector," "Director" and "Anatomist," work to create and maintain 1798's version of the Bodies exhibit.  I admire Pritchard's graphic and lyrical yet concise language as she describes the various exhibits and the men who maintain them.

Rubric rating: 8.5.  One of the most unique collections I've read in ages.  I can't add her to my "personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers" YET, but I have a feeling once I read more of her work, that's where she'll end up.

PS Check out this piece of marketing genius from Bellevue Literary Press:

Review: The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow

title:  The Uninnocent

author: Bradford Morrow

genre: short stories

pages: 272

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy 

via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I have a confession:  I didn't exactly finish this story collection.  Usually, I have a policy of not reviewing things I haven't finished.  But since it was my fault I didn't get finished (I completely forgot that my ebook would expire after 2 months!!) and since this was a strong collection of short stories, I'll talk about the ones I did read.

Strong start:  The Hoarder

The story's main character is obsessed with collecting things, but his penchant for acquisition takes a dark turn when he sets his sights on his brother's girlfriend. Quiet and deliberate, this story moves with a dull weight.

My favorite: The Uninnocent

This one stuck with me.  Two children, in desperate need of a good psychologist, "deal" with the death of their brother by looking for messages sent by him from beyond, and carry out what they interpret as his instructions with disturbing results.  Poor Butter.

Fell flat: Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace didn't work for me.  It just seemed a bit too easy in terms of the choices Morrow made.  Man loses sight.  Man becomes a motivational speaker. Man miraculously regains sight only to learn he may have been better off left in the dark about what his family had been up to behind his back (pun absolutely intended).  Overly reliant on religious crutches, at times cliche...I felt like I always knew exactly what was going to happen next. This story is actually why I didn't finish the book. Morrow is so touted as a master of American noir, and when I read this genre, I prefer mine to be a balance of the quiet/familiar with the disturbing/unexpected. 

Rubric rating:  6.  I definitely want to finish this collection.  

Sidebar:  I have been finding lately that the bulk of the content of my reviews has been coming to me while I'm in the shower.  Apparently, I do my best reflection on my reading mid-lather.  The trouble is, by the time I get out, I can't remember some of the strongest points I wanted to make.  Now, I've tried keeping a pen and some paper on the sink next to the shower, but that just results in wet, runny paper...so I was thinking:  what if I installed a small white board in my shower?  Like, in a place where the water won't hit it directly?  So, I can at least get my thoughts down before I lose them? Super practical? Or is that REALLY weird?  Thoughts?

Review: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

title: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk [purchase here]

author: David Sedaris

illustrator:  Ian Falconer

pages: 159

genre: short stories/fiction

published: 2010

source:  New York Public Library

If Rudyard Kipling and Aesop had been able to spawn, their hypothetical offspring would have LOVED this short story collection. 

Sedaris' short story collection is hilarious and poignant, bizarre and familiar, all at the same time.  A few highlights:

• The Toad, The Turtle and The Duck:  three title characters wait in line a ruminate over the irritations that accompany bureaucratic formalities.
• The Parenting Storks:  explores how storks answer the inevitable question:  "Where do babies come from?"
• The Faithful Setter: deals with infidelity and sexual mores among canines
• The Grieving Owl: an owl, befriending a hippopotamus with leeches living in her anus, comes up with an interesting solution to her problem, which involves a gerbil...Richard Gere may have been a source of inspiration on that one...

Loved this book.  It was perfect for my morning commute; not only was each story compact, but Sedaris' clever story lines  and sometimes caustic characters brightened my morning mood.

Rubric rating: 8.  Sedaris is one of my favorite New Yorker contributors and I'm definitely looking forward to exploring the rest of his work.