3 Scary Short Story Collections #WickedGoodReads

October is #WickedGoodReads Month here at Outlandish Lit and GXO. And it's the last week and my last post! Today's topic: scary short stories (see the full list of discussion topics here).

SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER BY THOMAS LIGOTTI

This is by far one of the best collections of supernatural horror that I've ever read. It does not at all feel like a contemporary read, so prepare yourself for that. Once you get used to his style, you can fully appreciate the scares and disturbing plots he has created.

Songs of a Dreamer was Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of supernatural horror stories. When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris’s Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick extolled: “Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.”

THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES BY SHIRLEY JACKSON

Honestly, everything Shirley Jackson writes is amazing. If you didn't have to read The Lottery in school, READ IT NOW. Another horrifying story I love (I don't know if it's in this particular collection) is The Summer People, so google that.

The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.

THREE MOMENTS OF AN EXPLOSION BY CHINA MIEVILLE

I didn't love this collection, but I do love China Mieville. He's one of the most original minds in fiction/genre fiction today. It would be a mistake not to mention this book, just because it has a few of the scariest short stories I have ever read: The Condition of New Death, In The Slopes, Sacken.

London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse's bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?

What are your favorite scary short story collections? I need more in my life!

That's it for #wickedgoodreads! I hope you enjoyed it and read a ton of scary books this month.

Quick Reads, Quick Reviews

Even when I'm not reading as much as normal, it's hard to resist the pull of a short book. They're the perfect thing to jump start your reading. Here are three that I recently read.

Vertigo by Joanna Walsh
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project. 2015.
Genre: Short Stories
Source: Independent Bookstore
Pages: 120


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My daughter has made her first sacrifice to fashion. She has bought a short pink skirt with lace, which does not suit her and for which there is no suitable season or occasion. It will remain unworn, but beautiful. When she wears it, it stops being beautiful. When she takes it off, there it is, beautiful again. For this, she has given up her money.

This book engaged me like no other book could one day when I was up in the middle of nowhere with a stack of books to keep my company. I was slumping hard, but once I started this collection of vignettes, I couldn't stop. The packaging itself is stunning, the book almost square, and the words inside are also beautiful. It was one of those reads where I could tell that what I was reading was beautiful and fascinating, but I also felt not completely smart enough to get all of it. Each story takes you deep into the head of a woman (sometimes different, sometimes the same as an earlier story as far as I could tell). For the most part, we get to observe small moments but overall are given powerful insight into things like love, loss, being a person, etc. Walsh's minimalism was so elegant, I could hardly handle it. I was greatly moved by a number of these stories.

One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun, Jung Yewon (translator)
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press. Oct. 3, 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Friend



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Yeah, like me, I said, and then it hit me. I looked down at my feet, and sensed something odd about the way they were outlined, against the pine cones and white oak leaves splayed over soft soil. My shadow, spread out thin, very thin, stretched out from the little toe of my right foot all the way into the thickets.

Even though I give both this and Vertigo four stars, I liked this book better. If you like your novellas in translation with a hint of creepy magical realism, this is the one for you. Set in a slum electronics market in South Korea, a girl starts to notice that her shadow is rising. Other people gradually notice the same thing, their shadows becoming their own quiet, autonomous entities. But what does it mean?? All of the relationships between the characters are so interesting. Hwang Jungeun's writing is very subtle and the strange tale was completely riveting. Jung Yewon did a fantastic job translating this novella into stark, atmospheric English. Han Kang (author of The Vegetarian) is giving this book publicity, and I have to say that I liked it more than The Vegetarian. Not that it's a contest. This is a strange, gently unsettling novella that gave me all sorts of feelings.

The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón
Publisher: Melville House. August 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Friend
Pages: 208



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It is impossible to tell apart the animals.

I wanted to like this novella a lot more than I did. Despite being over 200 pages, The Subsidiary took around 20 minutes to read max. That's because each page is no more than a sentence. We've got an experimental format on our hands!! Our main character is an office worker trapped in his building when there's a mysterious power outage. The gimmick? He's writing the book using stamps. So, visually, this book is quite stunning. The story gets a little bit dark, a little bit absurdist. Some weird shit goes down in this Latin American subsidiary office. A lot is unexplained: all of the workers seem to be disabled, there's a child there (??), there's some weird sex stuff. So it seems as if none of us, the readers nor the characters, know fully what's going on. And that's totally fine with me. There just wasn't enough substance to carry the gimmick, in my opinion.

Would you check out any of these quick reads? Have one to suggest?

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein :: Review

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein
Publisher: Picador. September 13, 2016.
Pages: 240
Genre: Short Stories
Source: Publisher



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Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.
Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society.-Goodreads

I haven't been this excited about reading a book in what feels like forever. I knew that I'd like this collection of short stories. It was pitched to me as akin to the TV show Black Mirror, which I absolutely loved. And they weren't wrong about that. Here we have a collection of stories that are all speculative. Set in the very near future, things are just a little different from how they are now. People are a little more hooked into technology, the environment is more fucked, etc. Our scenarios are set up quickly and with apparent ease, and we then get to see normal people interacting with each other in these worlds. The result is at times funny, at times devastating, often both. Weinstein provides riveting stories about being human as well as biting commentary on our world. In the stories, we've got robotic siblings to help out with biological children, and what you do when they malfunction. Enlightenment as a drug (Moksha). Manufactured memories. Support groups for the loss of virtual children. It's all so good, and none of it feels wildly off base from where we are as a society right now.

Moksha, it turned out, wasn't bullshit. It'd just gone into hiding ever since the twenties when the U.S. cracked down on Nepali distribution. There had been nonstop busts at yoga studios and health spas in the U.S. An oxygen bar in Sedona had been found with makeshift crown plates hooked up to an old Sega Genesis console.

I really emphatically enjoyed this whole collection. The only thing keeping me from loving it unconditionally is the fact that none of the stories have a female main character and none of them pass the Bechdel test. To be fair, two of the stories have weird formats and don't actually have a character. One of the shorter stories never specifies the gender. But it was still disappointing. I get if you're somebody who writes about a certain thing. I do. But to both 1) not take up the challenge to write about somebody different from you, or 2) not see females as "just another kind of person" that should be relatively easy to write about because, again, they are just another kind of person, is a disappointment. If the plots of the stories weren't so intriguing, I probably would've begun to find the "wearied male trying to make his family/life work" character that reappeared in most of the stories boring.

It was Rocket Night at our daughter's elementary school, the night when parents, students, and administrators gather to place the least-liked child in a rocket and shoot him into the stars.

Truly, though, that is my only qualm with the book. I want everyone to read these stories, but my point above is something to be aware of and think about. This is one of the most consistently solid collections of short stories that I've read in a while. I've actually sat and read them aloud to people, they're so good. Dark, cleverly written, and brilliantly imagined. I laughed and I cried. Alexander Weinstein gets it. He fucking gets it. And, if you were wondering, my favorite story was "The Cartographers."

"I'm afraid all of your family is corrupted," the supervisor told me. "You'll just end up bringing the virus with you. It's an easy process to reboot. Simply hold down the power button on your console for twenty seconds and--"

"These are my children!" I yelled.

"If it's any consolation, they won't feel a thing; they're just data."

Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu :: Review

Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press. May 2016.
Pages: 166
Genre: Short Stories
Source: Publisher



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“The Return to Monsterland” opens 'Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone,' a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In “Rokurokubi”, a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in “The Inn of the Dead’s Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost”. In “Girl Zero”, a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don’t die but are simply reborn without their memories.

Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we, as individuals and as a society, are at our most vulnerable.-Goodreads

Reading this collection of short stories rich with magical realism was such a delight while I was in Japan and afterward. For months beforehand, I had been watching a lot of Japaneses TV and listening to a lot of Japanese podcasts to work on listening comprehension. One of the things I watched was a kids shows that told simplified, cartoonized Japanese folktales. So as I read this book, there were a lot of moments where I already knew the story it was based on and I feel like I got more out of some of them. But, at the same time, there were several things that were very surprising to me (such as the long neck demon Rokurokubi, which is probably even more unsettling than it sounds). Both situations were fun to be in. Each story dives headfirst into a creatively imagined world where something from Japanese popular culture (i.e. Godzilla) or folklore (i.e. the kappa) is real. I loved this book for its fearlessness and its strangeness.

As is expected with short story collections, there are going to be some that are better than others. The ones that were good were really good. I think Girl Zero would have to be my favorite, due to how much gasping I did while reading it. There are a lot of moments of beauty throughout. But, unfortunately, a few of the stories fell kind of flat despite their interesting concepts. In a couple I just wasn't 100% sure why I was reading what I was reading, which isn't a great feeling to have. The stories that are good are magical and creepy and funny. It would be a shame for anybody interested in Japanese folklore and popular culture to miss out on these tales.

Sidenote: I went to Sequoia Nagamatsu's reading which was a ton of fun with a big crowd, but I was sad to find out that he had other readers there because that meant he only read one story, and it wasn't a favorite. I wanted him to read more!! Oh, also I won a big stuffed Godzilla at the reading, so I'm pleased. And this does not affect my review at all because it was a random raffle and I need my bribery to be more direct than that.

My favorite stories:

1. // Girl Zero
2. // Rokurokubi
3. // The Peach Boy
4. // The Inn of the Dead's Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost

3 Startling Short Story Collections

One of my favorite parts of #weirdathon has been the chance to jump around and explore a bunch of short story collections. And I found some really good ones. These stories will startle, unsettle, and intrigue you. Don't worry, they're not all scary. They're just the right amount of strange.

A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel
Publisher: Riverhead Books. 2013.
Genre: Literary Fiction - Short Stories
Source: Independent Bookstore
Pages: 208


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I am going to try to be brave like you asked me to, but I don't have any idea yet what that means. Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or is it braver to let you drift out into what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and be happy to think of your joy there? I hope, Petra, that I get it right.

This collection of short stories made me ugly cry twice, then tear up another time. Right out of the gate, Ausubel hits hard with her surreal, but emotionally direct, creations. Some stories are stranger than others. There's a ghost, there's a man who grows a cabinet of drawers in his chest, a ship with only confused grandmas on it, and a world where people grow arms only when they love someone (and there's no limit as to how many that could be). You're thrown immediately into these less than normal scenarios, or you watch them grow over time and share the fright of the characters as they change.

No matter what outlandish method is used to explore life in these stories, they're all about how our bodies and our selves are not entirely our own. How we belong to others, and how the loss of others affects us. Unafraid, Ausubel visits all different sorts of humanity and graciously takes us with her. Her writing is absolutely stunning, where her stories go will surprise you, and she will give you all sorts of feelings.

Warning: In the story Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations, one of the main topics is the loss of a pet cat in an accident. It gets minorly borderline gory. If this is a topic that you'd find upsetting, skip it. It's one of the weaker stories anyhow.

FAVORITE STORIES: Poppyseed, Chest of Drawers, Safe Passage, Magniloquence

Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti
Publisher: Subterranean Press. 1986.
Genre: Horror - Short Stories
Source: Library
Pages: 288



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It was those stars, I knew that now: certain of them had been promised specific parts of my body; in the darkest hours of the night, when one is unusually sensitive to such things, I could-- and still can, though just barely-- feel the force of these stars tugging away at various points, eager for the moment of my death when each of them might carry off that part of me which is theirs by right.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is startling in a completely different way than A Guide to Being Born. This is by far one of the best collections of supernatural horror that I've ever read. At first I was a little off put by Ligotti's flowery often-gothic language, but I got used to him playing with styles and using it to his advantage in exploring old horror tropes with new breaths of imagination. I got a lot of The King in Yellow vibes in that a frequent topic was whether or not madness was actual insanity or knowledge of a different plane of existence. Ligotti's stories are so original, that it was hard to guess where their dark paths were leading. Very creepy, very otherworldly. Definitely the kind of horror that I'm into. I'd highly recommend it to any horror fan who's tired of reading contemporary haunted house kinds of stories.

I read these out of order over a long period of time (shortest first, because I read them aloud over a campfire while camping in the summer). When I started reading them again from the beginning, I learned that the first story (The Frolic) about a criminal psychologist and his patient packs a huge, creepy punch. You can read it here. It's not gory, but it's not for the faint-hearted. Prepare to be all SORTS of startled.

FAVORITE STORIES: Vastarien, The Music of the Moon, Drink to Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes, The Frolic

Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce
Publisher: A Strange Object. 2013.
Genre: Literary Fiction - Short Stories
Source: Gift
Pages: 170



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A sharp, crunching sound pulled his eyes to one side, where they fell on the wet-haired boy. The child looked away quite obviously -- he had been watching him. To be observed so closely by a child felt a great honor.

I'm not sure why I expected this collection of short stories to be creepy, but I did and I was slightly misled by that. Though certainly strange, they're often delightful or beautifully haunting. Bizarre things happen, like people growing tails or a toaster predicting how people will die, but these are fully stories about reality and humans' relations to one another.

All of these stories are based in or focused on Japan, where Luce lived for three years. What was so lovely about these stories was how they were all told by or about outsiders, be they gaijin (foreigners) or Japanese people who feel like they are on the outskirts of their communities. I was startled by the appearance of demons and magical karaoke machines just as much as I was by how gently Luce could break my heart and tenderly stitch it back together again with her hope for our world.

FAVORITE STORIES: The Blue Demon of Ikumi, Ash, Rooey, Cram Island

What startling short story collection have you read recently?

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin: Review

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. August 2015.
Pages: 432
Genre: Short stories
Source: Library



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A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.- Goodreads

I wasn't going to review this book. I really wasn't. Because how does one even begin to go about describing what it feels like to be in love? Ok, maybe that's hyperbolic, but at the same time I'm feeling the same excitement and utter loss for words. I almost skipped this book because of all the hype. Because that's the kind of person I am. I figured there's no way I won't be disappointed by a book getting this much press and acclaim. But I am here to tell you that I, the coldest heart this side of the Mississippi, always ready and willing to hate, believe the hype is entirely justified and that this book needs more. This collection of short stories is a masterpiece.

I've only had this feeling with a few other authors. Shirley Jackson, Lydia Davis, Vladimir Nabokov. You just have a moment when you're reading where you go "wow, this person is actually a literary genius and I am not worthy." Prepare yourself for that feeling. Lucia Berlin is incredible in the least pretentious way possible. When you read her stories it's like being told a story by a friend. Granted, a friend who's seen a lot of life. Her writing is beautiful without it being easy to put your finger on why. Not a word is wasted and her voice is so strong and compelling. Normally I mark a bunch of passages that I like, but I had to give up with Berlin, because I loved it all so much. I was running out of book darts.

After a long time the cranes did come. Hundreds, just as the sky turned blue-gray. They had landed in slow motion on brittle legs. Washing, preening on the bank. Everything was suddenly black and white and gray, a movie after the credits, churning.
As the cranes drank upstream the silver water beneath them was shot into dozens of thin streamers. Then very quickly the birds left, in whiteness, with the sound of shuffling cards.

The stories in this book are a selection of her best works put in order chronologically. What's brilliant about this is that Lucia Berlin writes very autobiographical stories. It essentially feels like you're growing beside her, like you're watching her life unfold. And this lady has been through all sorts of shit. For a while she lived in mining camps in America, then she moved to Chile where she lived flamboyantly into her 20s. She moved back to America and lived much less flamboyantly. She worked as a maid. She was married 3 times, had some kids, had some affairs, and struggled with alcoholism for most of her life. Most of her stories are about poverty, alcoholism, relationships, family, death. That's part of why I thought I wouldn't be interested, but I was wrong. Berlin is sharp as a tack, she has all sorts of hutzpah, and boy can she tell a story (often in only a few pages or less).

Women’s voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats.

I still really don't know what to say about this collection of short stories. I'm tongue-tied. I don't want to try to describe the pieces, because I know they'll all fall flat in my summation. All I can ask is that you please take the time to AT LEAST read this excerpt from it. "Carpe Diem" was one of the stories that really got to me and you can read it online here. I'm so grateful to have read A Manual for Cleaning Women. I genuinely feel lucky to have had the opportunity, which is an incredible feeling to have after reading a book. I want you to feel that too.

The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.

My 5 Favorite Stories in Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce

Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce Publisher: Riverhead Books. January 8, 2015.
Pages: 304
Genre: Short Stories
Source: Library
First Line: Mawmaw's throwing the party, and her own son is three hours late.


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I'm so happy I read this book of short stories! I was really close to not reading it. Want to know why? The cover was too good. Yup. Luckily I changed my mind about not reading it after looking more into it. These stories were weird and often moving. Even when they get really surreal, deep down they're about people and their relationships with each other. AND the stories are (mostly) all interconnected very sneakily, which I always love. Here were my favorites:


1. Shirley Temple Three

A man works for a tv show where they clone long-extinct creatures from their DNA. Due to some strange rules, if they accidentally clone two, they have to kill one of them. But instead of killing an extra dwarf wooly mammoth, he sneaks it home to his mother in the south. She keeps it in her back yard. She's frustrated with the situation, but at no point is this like the weirdest thing that will ever happen to anyone ever. Watching the woman's relationship with the mammoth and her son really affected me.


2. The Real Alan Gass

I brought the synopsis of this up at work and it sparked a lot of debate. In it, a physicist alerts her boyfriend that in her dreams she has a husband. And it isn't him. His name is Alan Gass, and he doesn't exist in real life. The dreams are really vivid, to the point where she is practically just living another life with another man in her sleep. Of course, she wants her boyfriend to be cool about it. And he tries to be cool, but he can't help himself from grabbing a phone book and trying to find out if Alan Gass is out there somewhere, dreaming about his girlfriend. Very bizarre. I would not be cool, for the record.


3. Grasshopper Kings

I liked this one a whole lot. A father brings his son to a Boy Scouts-esque camping trip, only to learn that this group is a little bit cult-ish. I was so in. Even though this story is weird and kind of creepy, it's more about the strained relationship between the father and son, as well as how humans relate to each other in group dynamics.


4. Videos of People Falling Down

This story is so clever, I can hardly stand it. This story consists of many small segments that each start with a class youtube falling video name like "CRAZY WIPE OUT FUNNY" (not a direct quote, but you get what I mean). In each, a person falls. But we also get to know them and see what was going on in their lives and their heads around the time of the fall. It's hard to think about the stars of videos like these as real people with real concerns, and this story highlighted that excellently. And all the falls are interconnected, YES.


5. More Soon

A man comes to the airport to pick up the body of his dead brother that was just shipped overseas to him. Much to his surprise, the body wasn't on the plane. It turns out that it had to be reexamined. Then eventually quarantined, because they believe it holds a deadly disease. When it starts killing doctors and scientists who come in contact with it, it's classified as a biological weapon. An interesting look at and interpretation of grief and family.

--------------

My only issue with these wonderfully strange stories was that a lot of them just kind of stopped. Not an enormous amount of clear resolution. I think that was mostly frustrating to me for two reasons. 1) I felt like it was probably profound in some way, but I didn't have the energy to figure out in what way it was profound. 2) I really just did not want these stories to end.




Some Quotes:

"Inside every group, he decides, there are more groups. Circles within circles, and inside of those, more circles still, all of them infinitely divisible. You could spend your whole life wondering which ones you're in and which ones you're not and which ones really want you and which ones are holes that have no bottom." - 79, Grasshopper Kings

"Sometimes when he hears Hungarian Dance No. 5 he has a funny feeling that is difficult to explain to others. He's told only one or two people about it. The feeling involves the possibility of a past life." -144, Videos of People Falling Down

"Directly behind us in line, a man with a comb-over fished around in his neon green fanny pack and produced two Wetnaps, one for himself and one for his wife, a somber-looking woman in a zebra-print dress that I gathered she had picked out specifically for this excursion. I watched them unfold their antibacterial napkins with care and scrub every inch of the hands--palms, fingers, creases, wrinkles, even up past the wrists. Watching them groom was exhausting. All of this was exhausting." -224, Hall of Small Mammals


Outlandishness Rating: 8/10

Top Ten Tuesday: Short Stories/Prose Available Free Online

The Broke and the Bookish runs this business.

This week is a freebie, which obviously immediately filled me with fear and anxiety. Like most healthy human beings, I am infinitely more comfortable being told what to do. So after a few hours of sitting at the computer paralyzed, I decided to just look at the list of old topics and choose one of those. But none of them really spoke to me. And I noticed something. None of them specifically mentioned short stories.

Short stories are my shit. I am endlessly impressed by writers who can leave a huge impact on me with a minimal amount of words. Often, I feel like I enjoy short stories more than novels. I don't know. Don't ask me to back that up with logic. Free things on the internet are also my shit. So here is a list of my top ten favorite short stories that I was able to find published online. Spreading the wealth or something. I'll try not to list anything you read in high school.

Short Stories/Prose Available Free Online

1. The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami. Not my absolute favorite from The Elephant Vanishes, but one of the better ones. Murakami has an amazing way to make magic in the mundane. Dreamy and weird story about married life and armed robbery of eating establishments.

2. Healthy Start by Etgar Keret. Probably one of the first stories to get me really into short stories post-high school. Keret's writing is fresh, and the ending of this story about stolen identity always gets to me.

3. The School by Donald Barthelme. If you haven't read Barthelme before, read this. It's short, I promise. One of the forefathers of experimental literature, his stories are strange and often funny. This is one where he doesn't do experimental formatting, but the story is mildly demented and great.

4. A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger. Ok, this might be high school territory. But if you haven't read this Salinger classic, you have to. Even if you are over liking Catcher in the Rye. I mean it. Very powerful story.

5. Escort by Chuck Palahniuk. This dark story, which I believe is at least inspired by Palahniuk's real life, gets me in the heart. As always, Palahniuk is creepy and almost gruesome. But despite the disturbing content, this story is heartfelt and very real. And super short!

6. Brita's Holiday Village by Karin Tidbeck. Weird, magical realism/sci-fi. Tidbeck is incredible at writing surreal, very Scandanavian fiction. And she translates it to English herself! Creepy and dreamy. I don't even know how to describe what this story is about. If you like this, check out her other short stories in Jagannath.

7. The Summer People by Shirley Jackson. If you liked The Lottery, you have to check out this horror story by Shirley Jackson. She is the master of suspense. The Summer People is about a vacation by a lake that isn't quite what it seems. It's slow and creeping, filling you with a sense of unease when nothing is really happening. But it's well worth the wait. Stick with it, it pays off!

8. This Person by Miranda July. So twee, and I don't even care. Miranda July's stories are refreshing. This story from No One Belongs Here More Than You is quite short, but it packs a heavy punch at the end of it. Prepare for some self-reflection. She's good.

9.  The Youngest Doll by Rosario Perre. A great feminist piece, that's also surreal! Objectification of women and marriage gone horribly wrong. Very powerful piece. Could only find a slightly blurry copy of it, sorry!

10. Billennium by J.G. Ballard. Maybe not my favorite, but I just read it recently and thought I'd include it. Classic sci-fi piece confronting the future issue of overpopulation. Made me feel very claustrophic. It definitely felt important to read.

Bonus: 20 Reasons Why I Want to Fuck my Cat by Mira Gonzalez. Perhaps not a short story, but I think listicles count as prose. Especially when by an alt-lit writer. So hilarious. Don't be frightened by the title, it's a good time. I feel Mira's feelings. And I want to post this to my facebook, but I also want to get hired for jobs in the future.


Happy reading! Do you normally read short stories? What are your favorites?

Review: Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck

Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
Publisher: Cheeky Frawg Books. September 2012
Pages: 114
Genre: Short Stories, Speculative Fiction
Source: Library
First Line: Franz Hiller, a physician, fell in love with an airship.


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Karin Tidbeck's got something crazy going on and I am just so glad that she exists. This book of 13 short stories is a quick, baffling, and exciting read. They were translated from Swedish to English and didn't manage to lose any of their Scandinavian weirdness. They're often dark, often whimsical, and always beautifully written and imagined. I still can't stop thinking about the unique plots and characters that inhabited Tidbeck's worlds, whether I fully understood them or not.

One of my favorites is "Brita's Holiday Village", which you can read here. Another is "Pyret" which is a fascinating story presented like a research essay. It's about a creature that shape shifts to hide among herd animals like cows and eventually, in the case of one village that's mentioned, people. It changes from historical to present-time when she visits the old mostly abandoned village to see if there are any pyrets still there. What she finds is disturbing, it almost feels like horror. The ending is so poignant, it took my breath away. All of her stories had that kind of effect on me.

A story that shows off just how bizarre these stories can get is "Aunts." It's one of, if I remember correctly, two stories that are set in a kind of antiquated, royal, Alice in Wonderland kind of world. There are a set of three women whose sole purpose in life is to eat. A lot. So much so that they can't move. They're brought food in this little dome in an orchard until they actually burst. Once that whole mess is cleaned up, typically a new tiny aunt is clinging to the old one's heart. The story explores what happens when there isn't a tiny aunt waiting inside. Going to be honest, I had no idea what was going on, but it was certainly interesting and disturbing.

This hardly scratches the surface of the stories. There are people who are in love with machines, human bodies run like air ships by tinier people inside (sort of), world changing telemarketing, alternate dimensions, creature creation, fights with god, and more. If you're willing to open your mind for some really fantastical, almost mythical stories, Karen Tidbeck is an incredible writer with amazingly original stories to tell. They're inspired by sci-fi, folklore, and Nordic tradition. I heard that she has a novel out in Swedish, and I'm devastated that it is not translated and in my hands right now. I was really impressed by this collection of stories and can't wait to read more of Tidbeck's.


Some Quotes:

"'I have to know,' said Augusta. 'What is the nature of the world?'
The djinneya smiled with both rows of teeth.
'Which one?'"

"When a creature chooses to die surrounded by keepsakes from a species to which it doesn't belong, leaving an imitation of language behind--has it acted out of instinct or intelligence?"

"The sight brought a painful sensation Cilla could neither name nor explain. It was like a longing, worse than anything she had ever experienced, but for what she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen, and she was terrified that she would miss it."


Outlandishness Rating: 9/10 

I can't even begin to explain how weird these stories are. Just read them.

Review: No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July
Publisher: Scribner. March 2008
Pages: 205
Genre: Literary fiction, short stories
First Line: It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious.


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Miranda July's short stories are beautiful and startling. I had only read one of her stories, Shared Patio, which is the first story in the book, and I didn't like it quite as much as I thought I should. All of the other stories I adored, though. Most of them involve love or relationships in some sense, but often in surprising ways. There are characters in love with best friends, characters who try to seduce those who are too young, concerning sibling relationships, surprise homosexuality, imaginary relationships, and more.

What's most exciting about these stories isn't their quirky content, though. It's how personal and small most of these instances are. Many of the stories are incredibly small, both in length and in the moment being recorded/created. You see private, sometimes what one would expect to be mundane, instances. And they turn incredibly beautiful when you allow yourself to look at these often unseen moments.

Miranda July's style is clean and crisp, making this book of short stories a quick read. If you're annoyed by a trendy lack of quotation marks, be warned, you will find no ""s here. Most of the stories feel like a stream of consciousness, but I recall at least one story being more detached from the main character. I often would stop reading to turn to a friend and read parts and whole stories aloud. It's absolutely a book that I'm going to want to buy and revisit.

For a more specific review, and to be used as a taster, here's a very very short story from the collection called This Person. This story really got to me. Despite its length, it gets a very emotional response from me, which always impresses me with short stories. The ending is sort of painful, because I think July catches a very human behavior of withdrawing from others. It's hard to see it happen, because it's easy to recognize this behavior in ourselves. We want the main character to be better than ourselves. Any short story that moves me and leads me to do some amount of self reflection is good in my book.

Some Quotes:

"It's not agoraphobia, because I am not actually afraid of leaving the house. The fear hits about twenty-seven steps away from the house, right around the juniper bush. I have studied it and determined that it is not a real bush, and I have reversed this theory, and I have done everything I can not to turn around and go home, even if it means standing there forever." - The Boy from Lam Kien

"We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn't force her. I wouldn't have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don't know anything. Call me when you've cured AIDS, give me a ring then and I'll listen." - The Sister

Outlandishness Rating: 7.5/10   

The atypical sexual relationships and peculiar logic held by the characters get this collection of stories a 7. The story about teaching people to swim without a pool, alone, gives it an extra half a point. Pretty weird, but not the weirdest.

Recommended For:

Anybody who likes strange little contemporary stories. They're quirky and unabashedly personal. Highly recommended.