Vheissu

I’ll close this four-story visit to The Masters Review (volume VI) with a paragraph I really liked from Roxane Gay’s three-page introduction to the volume ( available online ). “When I am judging a literary contest, I am often asked what I am looking for in a good short story or essay. I offer up the kinds of work I am not really interested in reading—stories about college students, stories about writers, stories about sad white people in sad marriages, stories about addiction, stories about cancer. This probably seems overly prescriptive but when you read a certain kind of story too many times, you develop emotional callouses. The only thing that heals those emotional callouses is a great writing that offers up something refreshing and unexpected, whether it’s a writing style or a unique character or a rich sense of place or an unforgettable plot.” It made me think of Michael Chabon’s description of the predominant type of short story these days as the “contemporary...

This story is my fourth and final stop on these comments about pieces from The Masters Review Anthology, Volume VI (2017). Four powerful stories in a single volume is quite good, much better than your typical “best of” anthology. Rachel Engelman’s compelling story succeeds by combining the bouncy, noncommittal language of fairy tales with the harsh, bodily, tyrannical world of courts. The narrator is an indomitable character who grew up hunting wild animals in the forests of Italy. She was captured and taken as a curiosity for the queen of France, whose retinue she joined as a lady-in-waiting. Court life is not the glamourous affair from fairy tales: the ladies-in-waiting have to remove warts and pubic hair and have to smother and kill the babies resulting from the queen’s affairs. They themselves engage in multiple affairs and are often raped by drunken brutes bearing royal titles.

This story is another highlight from The Masters Review Anthology, Volume VI (2017). It’s available online ,  so you may want to take a look before reading all of the plot spoilers that lie ahead. The story begins with a contradiction: a family is leading a rugged, nearly colonial life in Montana, while being constantly recorded by cameramen who shadow them wherever they go. This life, we soon learn, is staged for a reality show in which three ordinary families are subjected to the living conditions of “genuine Montana pioneers” (p. 2) for six months. Tom signed up for the show because he wanted to toughen up his son, Ajay. Helen, Tom’s wife and Ajay’s mother, doesn’t seem to be as committed to the show as Tom. Ajay is becoming hardier, it seems to Tom, and has befriended the Dukes, a group of boys that indulges in rough games and seems to Tom to be a good match for Ajay. The story is set in motion when Ajay walks in with a broken pinky finger. Later, off-cam...

Another solid story in The Masters Review Anthology, Volume VI (2017), is “Little Men,” by Matthew Sullivan. Lois is at her son’s baseball practice one day when a little man (“Three, four inches” tall [p. 63]) lands on her sandal. She takes in the little man and keeps him fed and cared after in a tin box or a shoebox for some time, while we witness the harshness of her day-to-day life: her son, Alan, is a criminal in the making, who crushed a fellow player’s mouth with a bat in practice and who enjoys torturing animals and toys. Lois gets visions of him in the future, committing crimes. Her husband, Howard, claims he’s traveling for work while he’s on week-long escapades with prostitutes. She sticks with Howard into old age, and in the dramatic present of the story, forty years after Lois found the little man, we see Howard forgetful and oxygen-dependent, looked after by his wife. Lois is having serious issues remembering things, so the many flashbacks and memories...

This is a powerful story, one of the highlights of the Masters Review Anthology , Volume VI (2017). The voice is that of a young girl, Emma, probably around eleven years old, who lives in a very chaotic home. Our first impression is that Emma’s father, Jackson, is a domineering character who rules over his wife and his two daughters. He hates and berates his wife just as much as he loves and pampers his dog. Emma doesn’t seem to hate her father, but early on he takes her father’s prized dog, Loretta, and ties her to a tree in the woods, with the intention of letting her starve to death. Since Jackson loves the dog so much, Emma clearly wants to hurt him through the dog. Life carries on in its usual messiness, but then Emma has her first period. Her sister, Abigail, who always sleeps with her father in the bed while their mother is cast out elsewhere, gives Emma a tampon and tries to cover for her. Shortly after that, we realize that Abigail’s murky relatio...