This recently won the White Review short story prize, and it’s not hard to see why. Things get stranger and darker, and Blasim lays his tale out with a wonderfully dry bar-room simplicity that makes the ending all the more explosive.
In Baghdad’s Green Zone, Hajjar keeps a rabbit while waiting to be briefed on an operation. This story, from The Iraqi Christ, published by the excellent Comma Press, is by turns terrifying and wonderfully banal. The Green Zone Rabbit by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright This story, of a robbery that starts off violent before fizzling out into a chat about football and a lift home, is told in a jarringly languorous and anecdotal tone, which both draws you in and leaves you uncomfortably dissonant.ħ. Thank You by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowellĪs is usually the case, I’ve only just started reading Zambra after years of being urged to do so. The recurring refrain that “Kindness is late” is brilliantly deployed, and the whole story quietly makes the point that hair is always political. The News of her Death by Pettina Gappahįive women talking in a hair salon while one of them has her braids done: this is all the narrative structure Gappah needs to build a complex social landscape, telling these women’s stories through perfectly pitched dialogue and delicately measured details. “It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings.” We lean in, and listen on.ĥ. “So I bought an old hotel on the fjord of Killary,” the narrator tells us at the outset of this one, and we can already hear the sigh in his voice. A real feat of imagination, and all the more terrifying for being set in the made-newly-strange streets of my Norwich childhood.īarry is great at drawing you quickly into the confidence of his voice the first few sentences of any of his stories have that quality of strapping you in for the ride. It’s an apocalypse tale, of which we seem to have had many lately and for which I am quite the sucker, but it’s a whole other and new form of apocalypse, wherein a howling wind rips everything loose from the ground. This does one of my favourite things in a story: something you weren’t expecting. It also has beautiful sentences, and there are not enough of those in the world. This story begins at the dawn of time and ends round about now, which is expansive enough for anyone, I feel. I’m increasingly drawn to any story that has a more expansive sense of a story’s possibility than the “snapshot of life” model insisted upon by the Carver/Hemingway school. This was my personal standout in the already very strong New American Stories, edited by Ben Marcus. On the last page, you can see Saunders looking at the options he has created for himself and simply opening his hands a little wider and saying, ‘Yes, we’ll have both of those.’ It also offers a dazzling response to the writer’s dilemma of whether to move to a happy ending or a sad ending. This story starts awkwardly, in tune with its two gangly teenage protagonists, and stutters through a lovely character study to suddenly burst into an action tale and an unlikely outbreak of heroism.
With this story, and the rest of the collection it comes from, Tenth of December, he was clearly taking his gifts for voice, character, and satire, and pushing himself to do something much harder and more humane. Sorry to be so predictable, but I do love George Saunders. I look forward to having my reading horizons broadened in the comments. Clicking on the titles will lead you to the stories themselves, if you haven’t already read them. My choices are, simply, 10 tales from this century that I have read and that I think do something interesting or startling or just downright swoony with the form of the short story. This list, then, is not hierarchical or canonical. Where do I even begin? Where are all the stories I haven’t read, or have loved and then unfaithfully forgotten? (I am a fickle and forgetful reader.) Guardian, please! There are approximately 17m to choose from.
It’s her favorite – Santa’s Favorite Story) 19 Ancient America Views The First Christmas Please be advised that all the Christmas Stories have been copied/moved to a new site: The links here will continue to work – but the plan is to have be the sole location.