Vheissu

Just a quick note to complete unfinished business: when I posted some comments on McSweeney’s 31 , I mentioned it came with a “summertime sampler.” I said I’d probably talk about this sampler later. So here’s later. The sampler is 16 tabloid-sized pages long, and it includes samples from three novels published by McSweeney’s: Bill Cotter’s Fever Chart , Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent , and James Hannaham’s God Says No . You can read shorter samples of the first two of those novels here and here . I guess a sampler is meant to entice you, so that you can’t wait to get your hands on the full-length novel. With that in mind, the only sample that made me want to read ahead was that of Cotter’s Fever Chart . It’s about a man who recently left the Boll, a psychiatric center. All sorts of foul things happen to him on the outside, from a house without a heater in winter to the same house, whose heater doesn’t switch off now and is thus out to spew mattresses in balls of fire. A...

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 17. A few weeks ago, I mentioned some ebullient first impressions of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 31. Today is a good time to look at its innards. McSweeney’s 31 (titled Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed ) set out with an interesting idea: to produce contemporary versions of dead or feeble genres. They picked nine: two of them are types of poetry (Malaysian pantoum , Japanese senryū ), two are dialogues (European whore dialogue, Socratic dialogue), and the rest are prose forms (Icelandic legendary sagas, Chinese biji , Spanish nivola , Anglo-American Graustarkian romance, medieval European consuetudinary). None of these genres is what you would call a short story. In my defense, in order to slip this post fairly into the short story month, McSweeney’s 31 does come with a separate “summertime sampler” that includes three excerpts from novels that can pass as short stories. (I may talk about them in ...

So I recently got this book from Dzanc Books called Short Story Month: A Collection of Essays and Reviews on the Art of the Story . It’s got nice, tidy, tiny pieces on different stories, both classic and contemporary (mostly the latter). One of its boons is that it really opens up short story venues for you (at least for me). I had no idea about One Story , for instance, but how can you not love the idea? Well, in order to pay homage to the short story form in general (my take has changed quite a bit since I last wrote about short story collections ), and because I’ve been reading a bunch of short stories lately, I’ve decided to set myself up for a challenge: during the month of August, I’ll be writing a short entry every day about a single short story. In order to avoid nagging, I’ll try to stick to short stories I generally like. We’ll see how it goes from there. So, the blog is unsuspended (for now). PS: If you haven’t gotten your hands on McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 31, man, y...