The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken

The stories in The Souvenir Museum  are a delight. Elizabeth McCracken's cleverness had me laughing out loud, but her quirky characters also elicit emotional investment and deeper reflections on life and love. One paragraph, I would be laughing and quoting lines to my husband, and another paragraph I felt my heart tugged. 

McCracken's characters struggle with love, finding it or losing it, committing or running away.

A woman with a broken heart checks into a hotel and meets a well-known radio personalty who dealt out terrible advice. He suggests that she is young and that she must 'change her life, and to be kind, even when life is cruel. 

A father takes his river-loving son rafting at a theme park, embarking on a fearful journey, imagining "The Raft of the Medusa at the Waterpark." 

A boy runs away to study with a ventriloquist. The story gave me my 'Sunday Sentence' on Twitter:

His body hadn't changed yet, but his soul had: this year he had developed delusions of grandeur and a morbid nature and a willingness to die for love; next year, pubic hair and broad shoulders.~ from The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken 

A children's program actress imagines suicide, and on a cruise falls for a man who makes balloon animals. 

What could be sadder in a marriage than incompatible feelings about bagpipes? Ought they still marry?~from The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken 

You can read one of the stories, Two Sad Clowns, published in O the Oprah Magazine here. It begins with the the marvelous sentence, "Even Punch and Judy were in love once." The story is the beginning of Jack and Sadie's love affair; the couple appear in four of the stories.

Who can predict the vicissitudes of life?~ from The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken

Twenty years into their relationship, Jack convinces Sadie to marry and they honeymoon in Amsterdam. Discovering they are going the wrong way through a museum, the reluctant bride asks, Do you think we should start at the beginning?  Her new husband answers, no; let's fight the current. Stick to your mistake."

Perhaps that is the best way to live. Own your mistakes. Own going against the current. Why question things we can not change? Love the unsuitable. Embrace our imperfect life.

Entertaining and thoughtful, these stories are wonderful.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Souvenir Museum: Stories
by Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco
Pub Date: April 13, 2021 
ISBN: 9780062971289
hardcover $26.99 (USD)

from the publisher

A Most Anticipated Book From: OprahMag.com * Refinery 29 * Seattle Times * LitHub * Houston Chronicle * The Millions * Buzzfeed

Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date

In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children’s game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half brother. A mother, pining for her children, feasts on loaves of challah to fill the void. A new couple navigates a tightrope walk toward love. And on a trip to a Texas water park with their son, two fathers each confront a personal fear. 

With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken traces how our closely held desires—for intimacy, atonement, comfort—bloom and wither against the indifferent passing of time. Her characters embark on journeys that leave them indelibly changed—and so do her readers. The Souvenir Museum showcases the talents of one of our finest contemporary writers as she tenderly takes the pulse of our collective and individual lives.

The Decameron Project: 29 Stories from the Pandemic

 When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it.

Early in the lockdown I was jarred by television images of people at parties and large groups, people not wearing masks, family gatherings around dinner tables. None of it reflected my reality: my spouse and I isolated in our home, walking in freezing weather before anyone else was on the street, learning Instacart and Doordash and Zoom.

This collection of stories caught my attention because they were reflections of this new reality. And, seeing the top-notch writers who contributed, I knew I would not be disappointed.

The stories reflect the shifting concerns and fears we experienced and are experiencing.

Oh yes, the early dearth of toilet paper! In a panic, my spouse ordered some from Amazon at an exorbitant cost. It took three months to arrive from Asia. 

Zooming, homeschooling your kids, the obsession with news, watching for a glimmer of hope. The daily deaths. Learning how death can show up any time. 

The fleeting happiness of isolating in place with another. Dreading that this is the new normal for ever. Teenagers obliviously carrying on as usual. Making masks. Scarfing up Chromebooks.

We are sharing a nightmare. Those who escape will be haunted. Some of these stories stick in my mind as perfect reflections of what haunts me.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic
by The New York Times
Scribner
Pub Date: November 10, 2020  
ISBN: 9781982170790
hardcover $25.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio’s “The Decameron.”

When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it.

In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote “The Decameron”: one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables.

In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction?

These twenty-nine new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and offer perspective and solace to the reader now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory.

Lost Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

After reading a sample story from I'd Die For You and Other Lost Stories on NetGalley I purchased the volume upon publication. Edited by Anne Margaret Daniel with insightful commentary and photographs, the volume includes stories and movie script rejected for publication during Fitzgerald's lifetime.

The magazines and the reading public wanted Fitzgerald to be a Johnny-one-note and the darker twist to these stories didn't fit with the persona based on his iconic Flapper stories of the 1920s.

I enjoyed reading these stories, some for their artistic merit and others for insight into the author and his times.

I felt a warm response to the 1935 story The Pearl and the Fur which Fitzgerald wrote about a girl his daughter's age. Daniel informs that a previous and a later Gwen story was published but after three revisions, requested by the Post, Fitzgerald never resubmitted this lost one.

Scott and Scottie, photo from I'd Die For You

The fourteen-year-old Gwen's father is hard-pressed for money. Gwen and a youthful cab driver become involved with returning a fur coat and is offered a reward. She relinquishes the reward to help the boy.

"She was happy, and a little bit older. Like all the children growing up un her generation she accepted life as a sort of accident, a grab bag where you took what you could get and nothing was very certain."~from The Pearl and the Fur by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Thumbs Up was inspired by a story Fitzgerald's father often told of a Civil War-era incident. He rewrote the story as The Dentist Appointment.

Other stories are set in hospitals, such as The Women in the House influenced by Fitzgerald's own health problems and Nightmare set in a mental institution.

The title story, I'd Die For You, was rejected because of the threats of suicide in the plot. It is set in the mountains of North Carolina, where Fitzgerald himself attempted suicide and where his wife Zelda was hospitalized. The story feels as if the author himself were speaking to us:

"What do you mean when you said you'd lived too long?"He laughed but at her seriousness he answered:"I fitted in to a time when people wanted excitement, and I tried to supply it.""What did you do?""I spent a lot of money--I backed plays and tried to fly the Atlantic, and I tried to drink all the wine in Paris--that sort of thing. It was all pointless and that's why it's so dated--it wasn't about anything."

This is a must-read for all Fitzgerald fans.

I'd Die For You And Other Lost Stories
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Edited by Anne Margaret Daniel
Scribner
Publication April 10, 2018)
$17 paperback
ISBN13: 9781501144356

from the publisher:

A collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “A treasure trove of tales too dark for the magazines of the 1930s. Lucky us” (Newsday). “His best readers will find much to enjoy” (The New York Times Book Review).

I’d Die For You, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, is a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories never widely shared. Some were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald.

Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that. Readers will experience here Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.

Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

We Love Anderson Cooper by R. L. Maizes

What a fantastic title! We Love Anderson Cooper is the title and a line in R. L. Maizes first short story in her collection, a parental response to their thirteen-year-old son's inability to be frank about his sexual orientation until he chooses the absolute wrong moment to out himself. He imagined it all going down differently. It is hilarious and heartbreaking.

"We love Anderson Cooper" therefore you should know I would accept you. Does it really follow? 'I'm not prejudiced' --fill in the blank for any person or idea. Isn't that what we do? I have black friends/gay friends/lesbian buddies/Muslim or Jewish or Christian or Hindu friends. How can you think I am prejudiced?

Geez, guys, just tell your son you love him!

Oh, we do love to feel superior to people who struggle and fail when we know what they should do. And these stories are filled with folk whose actions don't make sense to us.

And yet it is the best they can do.

We are all doing our best, and the even most wise and centered and rich and sane of us can find ourselves veering off into the gray and cloudy areas, just like the people in these stories where animals hold special places in people's lives and magical abilities and influences sway lives and jealousy and change brings division. We laugh, we feel empathetic pain, we recognize social and cultural truths.

Maya spent fourteen years caring for her employer-turned-lover and at his death found herself unprovided for. His kids dismissed her without a thought. Now she has to find her own way.

A talented artist whose art isn't selling becomes a tattoo artist and finds not only success but perhaps the ability to not only alter but to change lives.

A mid-life Jewish man is jealous when his cat prefers his lover. Worse yet, she is suddenly introducing Christmas into his life--cookies and trees and carols--and the cat likes it. "This is how assimilation begins--with baked goods," he thinks.

After her father's early death, Charlotte's mother gets a bird and transfers her affection to it. The sin of omission is strong in Charlotte's life.

At the last minute, a bride stops her wedding.

A couple are adopted by a sometimes vicious feral cat which their daughter adores and imitates. The parents are at loggerheads over the cat's place in the family.

A man is relieved when he losses his high-pressure, lucrative job. His wife can't believe he is happy delivering pizza. He can't convince her to downsize their life.

A therapist's heirloom couch breaks and seems irreplaceable. She finds the 'right' one, which affects her clients in a positive way.

A girl adores her aunt but is jealous of her aunt's adoration of her son. She gets even in a very dark way.

After nursing her ill husband, the loss of their dogs causes him to leave her.

These are memorable characters.

I read a copy purchased by my local library at my request.

We Love Anderson Cooper
by R. L. Maizes
Celadon Books
On Sale: 07/23/2019
ISBN: 9781250304094
hardcover $11.99

from the publisher:In this quirky, humorous, and deeply human short story collection, Pushcart Prize-nominated author R.L. Maizes reminds us that even in our most isolated moments, we are never truly alone. 

In We Love Anderson Cooper, characters are treated as outsiders because of their sexual orientation, racial or religious identity, or simply because they look different. A young man courts the publicity that comes from outing himself at his bar mitzvah. When a painter is shunned because of his appearance, he learns to ink tattoos that come to life. A paranoid Jewish actuary suspects his cat of cheating on him—with his Protestant girlfriend. 

In this debut collection, humor complements pathos. Readers will recognize themselves in these stories and in these protagonists, whose backgrounds are vastly different from their own—we’ve all been outsiders at some point.

about the author R.L. Maizes was born and raised in Queens, New York, and now lives in Boulder County, Colorado. Maizes's short stories have aired on National Public Radio and have appeared in the literary magazines Electric Literature, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, Slice, and Blackbird, among others. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lilith, and elsewhere.  

Maizes is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Her work has received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest, has been a finalist in numerous other national contests, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. We Love Anderson Cooper: Short Stories is her first book.

Maggie Brown & Others by Peter Orner

What kind of word magician writes a novella in short stories that leaves me in tears when a character dies? These snippets pieced together a life, a community. And I hated to leave.

I had heard a lot of buzz about Peter Orner's Maggie Brown & Others. And it was on my pre-approved NetGalley shelf. I squeezed it into my reading schedule.

The early short stories captivated me. Twice I quoted the book for David Abrams' Sunday Sentence on Twitter, where people post 'the best sentence' they read that week:

An old boyfriend once told her that she had a way of using magnanimity as a weapon. 

Shouts in the dark. Maybe that's the best we can do to reach beyond ourselves.

I noted lovely sentences such as, "Her shoulder blades are still shaped like the prows of rowboats." And pointed insights like "There's something so ruthless about optimism."

The diverse stories are insightful and I loved meeting all of these people, learning so much about them through these small slivers of life.

In the fourth section of the book, Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella, we meet a good man with a small life, a broke man rich in love. The stories jump through time, building the story of Fall River in New Jersey and the remnant community of Jews--those who have died and "the ones waiting for the opportunity."

You have to love people like Walt and Sarah Kaplan who ask "you wanna" and then push their twin beds together, never having considered purchasing a queen bed.

I could return to these stories again and again.

In one story a writer is told there is no money in writing short stories! I would guess that is true, but I am sure glad writers like Orner still employ the form.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Maggie Brown & Others: Stories
by Peter Orner
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date 02 Jul 2019
ISBN 9780316516112
PRICE $27.00 (USD)

This is Not a Love Song, Stories by Brendan Mathews

Last year I enjoyed reading Brendan Mathew's first novel The World of Tomorrow. Reading his first collection of stories This is Not a Love Song brought me a new appreciation of Mathews. If World was a fun romp into the past with an action ending, the short stories are an examination of the human experience on a deeper level. I was moved, I related, and I was entertained.

There are stories about we believe we know--about love and family and life--but discover aren't true. Stories about coming to terms with life, or not coming to terms. 

The first story, Heroes of the Revolution, was also one of my favorites. An American female college student is responsible for providing visiting foreign journalists with typical American experiences. She takes them to pick apples, but walking through the orchard stirs memories, revealing the student's sheltered life while the journalists grapple with the lasting damage of the atrocities they personally lived through.

This is Not a Love Song questions the nature of art and friendship as one woman pursues a music career while her friend captures her life on film.

I loved Airborne, the story of how having a child transformed a couple's life and relationship, the crazy obsession over a child's safety, which in the story goes to an extreme, but which I well remember with the birth of my only child.

How Long Does the First Part Last? is about unrequited love.

Dunn & Sons is "the story my father never tells;" three generations of men share stories that connect them and those that split them, and the stories that "might save us" if "ever told the right way."

Look at Everything is an amazing story about a photography student who by accident causes a fire and responds by taking photographs instead of reporting it.

The Drive takes an ironic peek behind the ubiquitous story of a dad taking the babysitter home.

Henry and his Brother speaks to the bonds of fraternal love and a mutual need that transcends family ties.

In Salvage, a man working in the shady business of removing architectural pieces from ruined buildings finds the item that he thinks will finally change his luck and life.

The last story, My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer, reads like a parody and comedy but feels like a tragedy involving the love triangle between a clown, a tightrope walker, and a lion tamer.

I can't wait to see what Mathews does next.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This Is Not a Love Song
by Brendan Mathews
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date 05 Feb 2019
ISBN 9780316382144
PRICE $26.00 (USD)

A Beautiful Place to Die by Sam Bigglesworth

Sam Bigglesworth's collection A Beautiful Place to Die demonstrates his ability to capture a character's pivotal moment. I often found myself invested in the characters to the point I wished their story continued.

The fourteen stories are quite diverse. Some are open-ended, some have a surprise or shock ending. Characters have a moment of life-altering clarity, lessons are learned, frailties uncovered, alliances made or severed. Shocking conclusions come in several of the stories.

The Watcher Woman is set in a dystopia where starving women living in urban decay encounter a callous, well-fed man.

The Soldier of Luxury is about a competitive, self-satisfied man trusting in the wrong things.

In The Wizard of the Forest a son watches his idolized father wield 'tree magic' but soon learns the limits of influence. A father teaches a life lesson to his daughter in The Coral Tailed Waffle Bird.

A dementia patient challenges her care workers in Where's Amit. A Beautiful Place to Die tells the heartbreaking story of a dying woman endeavoring to control her last days, cast out by a cold world.

The protagonist in The Dog Whisperer needs a purpose in life and adopts a rescue dog. The story recalled my own experience of adopting a troubled but lovable puppy mill rescue dog.

The writing is very descriptive and engages all the senses. Each story is illustrated with quality black and white art.

The stories are set in and around Manchester, England, where Bigglesworth lives.

I asked Bigglesworth to talk about his writing.

My writing career started in 2014 with a blog; in 2015, I decided to commit to writing fiction long term. 

Towards the end of the year, after a few online courses and a great deal of time writing, I self-published my first novella, a character based comedy about one man’s love affair with nature, entitled ‘The Woods, The Jungle, The Sea’. It was inspired by experiences I had visiting remote parts of Patagonia, Bolivia, and Colombia. It has sold one-hundred copies and received generally positive reviews. 

From that experience, I decided to wait longer and take each project through more edits before self-publishing it. I wanted to try writing in different voices, from a variety of characters' perspectives, and develop my writing style, so I began writing this short story collection.

I wrote this collection because I love stories which humanise people and show their flaws. Many people who appear unremarkable from the outside have remarkable stories to tell. Pain and growth are common to all our lives. 

It began as 23 stories, then I picked the very best fourteen stories of those and polished and re-wrote them until I was proud of them. Add a set of illustrations from Henry Boon and editing advice from a professional editor and we have something really special that I am very proud to show the world.

Some of the stories are literal, but most of them have a hidden deeper meaning which take a little thought to understand. I really hope you enjoy them and I would love to hear what you thought and how you interpreted the stories!

I received a free ebook from the author in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Find A Beautiful Place to Die at Amazon for $2.99.

Mini-Reviews: Sontag and Knauusgaard

This post consists of shorter reviews of several books I am reading. At this time I have not finished these books, but likely will before year's end.

Debriefing by Susan Sontag gathers her short stories together in one volume. I will admit that I have never read Sontag, although I remember when her many books came out and garnered a great deal of press. I won this book from the publisher in a giveaway.

The first story, Pilgrimage, excited me. I related to the lightly fictionalized character, based on Sontag herself, who is overwhelmed when she has tea with Thomas Mann, a writer whose books had left an impression on the teenager. I discovered Mann as a teen, his story of Tonio Krueger especially resonating with me with it's view of the artist as outsider. I had collected his novels afterward, but never read them all.

In the story, two teenagers contact Mann and are invited to visit him over tea. "We were prodigious of appetite, of respect, not of accomplishments," we are told. The teens struggle to know what to say, and listen to Mann talk. What she remembers best was embarrassment.

The first time one meets one's idol can be a shock, learning "the gap between the person and the work" a jolt.

The narrator seeks to escape "childhood's asphyxiations, the "long prison sentence of childhood" and its enforced culture of suburban life which held no meaning for her.

In one story a successful man--good job, wife, children--is tired of his life and creates a robotic substitute to take his place. The original man just bums around, but is more content with sleeping in the train station. What a condemnation of the Middle Class way of life!

Many of the other stories left me perplexed and unsure of my own intellectual capacity: what was I missing? I asked myself. Some experimented with form, such as Unguided Tour which reminded me of a Monet painting of Rheims Cathedral, leaving an impression without real detail or form. Whereas Monet leaves me with an emotional reaction, Sontag seeks to elicit an intellectual one.

Are some of these stories inaccessible to the general reader, or are they mere failures in storytelling? I would guess it is some of each.

Debriefing: Collected Stories
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374100759
Hardcover $27.00

Winter by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is the second in his series of essays and letters written to his unborn daughter. Knausgaard is well known for his six volume biography My Struggle. His writing breaks all 'rules' about writing, and is spontaneous, unstudied, often confessional, and sometimes mundane. 

In almost daily meditations over December, January, and February, the author wrote about whatever was on his mind. Owls, Christmas, people he knows, the mythical legend Loki, and even toothbrushes. In the first letter, he warns his daughter that we expect life to be full of joy and light, but instead we encounter pain and suffering and loss. At times he shares an insight that sparks a new way of looking at things, such as the thought that society is based on a belief in the fiction that a coin has intrinsic value, but if our belief vanishes, so does a coin's value. He tries to describe inanimate things, but I note that his descriptions include concepts that are not concrete, which seems to defeat his intention. Some essays just left wondering what the point was.

I have been reading several essays each night before bed. I will finish the book, just to plumb it for those unexpected gems.

I won this book on a Goodreads giveaway.

To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts by Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie's ten stories in To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts are heartfelt revelations into the universal experience of loss and grief. Told in the first person, each story offers a fully rounded and complex character caught in crisis. The stories are set in the upper Midwest where people 'grew up cold'.
The writing is lovely and evocative, transporting us into another's life and world.

• A girl whose father is a WWII pilot the admits that the war's generals were spoken of as if her family knew them personally. "I knew these men better than my father." 
• A woman's sister dies in a car crash. Their mother had died choking on a peanut butter sandwich. (This is not a joke. I was barely twenty when I met a man whose sister chocked to death on a peanut butter sandwich. I worry about this every time I have a PB sandwich.) The woman misses being close to her brother. She drinks too much. 
• I related to a woman who lasted only six months in New York City, lacking inner city street smarts and an understanding of the rules. My husband and I lived in the inner city for a year and a half before leaving. 
• The fierce need for independence drives a paraplegic to the family's deep woods cabin after his divorce. His brother fears for his safety living alone and pressures him to return.
• A woman visits her grandmother in the nursing home. She is desperately curious about her grandmother's sister, who no one speaks of. Yet that sister's name is embroidered on the family patchwork quilt. The woman asks her mother about this missing family member and is told that the grandmother asked her not to talk about it, "not to carry that particular ghost through the generations." The woman presses for information, battling over who would control the past.
• A man who grew up on a farm grapples with his son's wanting a different life for himself. The son fears his newborn son will never understand who he is without understanding the farm. 
• The death of a grandfather brings division between sisters, one who attended him in his illness and death while the other stayed away. Their own needs drive them apart as they try to find reconciliation.
• A single mother watches her only child, a daughter, leave for college. She had gone to California instead of taking a college scholarship, returning home pregnant. Now she is a mother, learning how to let go.
• An elderly man is bedridden in his son's house, his memory teeming with ghosts. He knows his son and daughter-in-law are getting weary while he lingers on. I was reminded of my grandfather Milo, my grandmother's second husband. He lived to be over 101, outlasting two wives and a daughter and three step-children. He wondered why God did not take him. He was unable to walk and was blind, living in my aunt's home. To have one's mind and a failing body is a horrible fate.
• After a miscarriage, a wife takes a break, leaving her husband to struggle on his own for a few days. He is comforted by a neighbor's dog who has adopted him as a surrogate owner. The neighbors are friendly but keep to themselves. The man realizes he did not even know his own wife's heart. He contemplates loss and grief and how we are all separate and alone in grief.

I purchased this as an ebook and read the stories over several weeks. I love these short stories; they are like a concentrated laser light into the human soul.

Owner of Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, promotion for books, authors, publishers, and literary organizations, Caitlin has represented several books I have reviewed, The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber, This Is How it Begins by Joan Dempsey, and Wild Mountain by Nancy Hayes Kilgore. Read an interview with Caitlin about her personal library at David Abram's blog The Quivering Pen.

The Expense of a View

Polly Buckingham's short story collection The Expense of a View from University of North Texas Press is the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Ficiton winner. I read the fourteen short stories one at a time over a month. Each story is a gem, moving and often heart rending, probing the deep sorrows and despair of persons in crisis.

Loss and grief, desertion and emptiness, alienation, regret, and despair are probed with beautiful language and compassionate insight. The characters are the homeless and runaways, children and parents, male and female, covering the scope of human experience.

You may think, how crushingly sad these stories are, how could you read them? Partly because the writing is luminous, but mostly because I felt a better person after reading them, more understanding and open. Suffering and need surrounds us, but we do not see it. Great literature can bring us inside the lives of others, revealing what we choose to ignore, and make us responsible for our reactions.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"My characters are typically deeply introspective, often rural and often under great psychological duress or up against enormous changes in their lives. They find themselves lost, disoriented, and unclear about what is real and what is not. My intent is to push readers to value those moments of hesitation so that they too might slow down and appreciate the world for its greatest mysteries: the dream world, the natural world, and the world of the psyche. " Polly Buckingham

Press release: https://s3.amazonaws.com/netgalley-media/media/92480/57697c05e485a.

The Expense of a View
Polly Buckingham
University of North Texas Press
Publication Date November 15, 2016
$14.95 paperback
ISBN:  9781574416473

Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist

Imagine ten perfect jewels of deep clarity that catch the ambient light and focus it into prismatic rainbow arches against the darkened corner of the room. Link then together in a stunning chain that takes your breath away and illumines the room.

Then you can imagine reading these ten stories.

I am not exaggerating. I am not saying this because I was given this ebook free from Algonquin Books via NetGalley so I could review it for this blog. Gilchrist's stores are just that powerful.

No none escapes life unscathed, not even the rich and successful. And everyone can find joy in the life they have, no matter how troubled.  There is war. There are tornados and hurricanes and floods and death and disease and accidents. How we respond to what happens to us defines who we are more than anything else.

These stories about people, ordinary people, who come face to face with tragedy or loss, or love and grace, teach the reader about how to live.

"We are born of risen apes, not fallen angles...The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen." Robert Ardley

This quotation, here abridged, sets the tone for the stories. For what we read are incidents where ordinary people rise to their better angels and are transformed by the experience.

People in the stories go into disaster zones after tornados, hurricanes, and floods. They lose loved ones. Their vacations are stopped by bombs. They face deliberating or fatal disease.

We learn about life and what matters along with the protagonists, and they show us how to live and about what really matters.

Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist
Algonquin Books
PAGES: 256
ISBN: 978-1-61620-110-4
LIST PRICE: $23.95