On “The Brazil Reader” edited by Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti ***

There's a second edition of this work with different editors that I realize now may have been better to read insofar as it would have included another twenty years of writing—that is, it would have included the Internet age, which was barely getting started when this first edition came out and plays no role in this volume. I chose the first edition, however, because it seemed organized in a manner more in keeping with what I was looking for. The first five parts are mostly readings that follow the historical development of Brazil, and the last four parts focus on cultural subjects—namely, women, race, economics, and popular culture (mostly music). The other subjects, of course, come up in the first five sections, but there's a nice balance here in terms of giving a reader a very general sense of the Brazilian experience.

I had read chapters about Brazil's history in books about Latin American history, so I didn't think that a book just recounting the history of the country was going to be as helpful to me as a book that would more fully also explore the country's culture. This book was a nice balance. Each of the parts comes with a short introduction, so essentially one stepped through history while reading the book. But then that history was backed up by primary documents from the period in question and sometimes further historical articles on a specific aspect of the period involved.

The first part revolved around Indian life and the explorers. Included among the readings was a creation myth that was more easily approached than many Native American stories in that regard. There were also Western accounts of Indian culture. The second part dealt with the colonial period and the familiar story of how Portugal's monarch actually came to be in Brazil for a while and liked it so much he didn't want to return to Portugal but was forced to do so. Part 3 dealt with slavery and its aftermath. Part 4 dealt with the Vargas period, when Getulio Vargas essentially ruled as a dictator after having come to power in an election. And then part 5 dealt with the military dictatorship that followed and finally the reestablishment of democracy, which at the time this book came out had only been active for about a decade. It was trippy seeing the names of some politicians who are still active in Brazil in that last historical section and to think the Brazilian democracy has managed to survive a couple of decades more.

Along the way one learns about how the arts didn't seem heavily impacted by the dictatorship, which seemed focused more on practical things. As such, subtle critiques of the regime often snuck by in music and literature, before being banned. One learns about racial dynamics in Brazil, which of course mythically are said to be nonissues but really are just like so many other areas of the world: the lighter your skin, the more advantages you have. There's a little about sport, a lot about music, making me wish that I'd more often had access to the Internet while reading so that I could play some of the styles of these songs to know what the authors were writing about.

Overall, one gets the sense of a country that is, unfortunately, like so much of the third world, a study in contrasts: a small very rich class and a large very poor one. There was one essay about a movie from the 1970s that focused on children growing up in the latter milieu and what became of them (though as stars of the film their lives had opportunity to go farther than most others, at least for the star of the film, things ended up badly); the film itself sounded a lot like the 2000s film Children of God but a whole lot more bleak: gangs and crime aplenty, with little way out.

On "Beyond the Great Snow Mountains" by Louis L'Amour ***

Only one story in this collection is a Western; most fall under the adventure or crime/detective genres, but this was the only book available by L'Amour in the library, and I wasn't going to skip him in a reading list on Westerns.

A friend of mine growing up was a huge fan of L'Amour, had probably read all of this stuff. The friend could read at an incredibly fast clip, but if he had only read L'Amour, I would likely not be impressed, now that I've read this writer. The reading is not challenging. My friend, though, who had mastered speed reading to such an extent that he could look not just at sentences at a time but whole pages, would read Leon Uris or Charles Dickens novels in a night, so I know that he wasn't sticking just to short, simple books when he bragged of finishing so much so quickly.

That said, his admiration of L'Amour does make me think that perhaps he was more inclined to like heavily plotted material rather than strong characters. Indeed, from the collection, I would get the feeling that that is really all L'Amour was about. Sometimes, character motivations and actions seem secondary and nearly defy logic. Then again, I was reading a book published after L'Amour's death, made up of stories he did not publish in a collection in his lifetime, which suggests that even he may not have thought this his strongest work.

The collection consists of four stories. The sole Western, "Roundup in Texas," involves the familiar tale of a cattle rustlers and a man who sets out to save the cattle for a gal, ending, of course, in a shootout.

Among the adventure stories is "By the Waters of San Toledo," about a woman whose father dies and who is stranded in a faraway place with a man who she doesn't like but who thinks she should not belong to him. There is gunfighting, and a daring escape attempt. "Crash Landing" is about a man attempting to save passengers from a plane wreck that is precariously propped on a mountainside. "Coast Patrol" involves World War II pilots and ship captains and takes the prize for the most ridiculous character transformations--a woman whose father dies (a common trope, it seems, in these stories) is now due to be married to one of the seamen, having known him for a year and come to depend on him; Turk Madden, however, a U.S. flying ace who is flying for Russia, after discovering much of the ship's crew dead, tells her that the seaman is the one responsible and, in fact, that he is a traitor to the United States government who is on Japan's side. The woman immediately, despite receiving nothing but Madden's word, turns sides, taking up for Madden, and disavowing the seaman, her fiancee, despite his protests. After Madden kills the traitor, she and Madden get together. Not sure why she would betray her one true love on the word of a stranger. The title story also fits the adventure model, this one about a woman stranded in a faraway Asian country, who marries a local and who finally has a chance to return to the United States, but whose true desires are very much tested.

"Meeting at Falmouth" involves a twist ending that is hardly worth the fifteen or so pages it takes to get to it.

Two stories involve boxing and tough guys' attempts to make boxers throw fights for gambling money--"Sideshow Circus" and "The Money Punch."

Contemporary crime stories include "Under the Hanging Wall," about the murder of a mining employee, and "The Gravel Pit," about a man whose attempt to take off with a company's payroll goes awry such that he has to kill another man.

A man who writes adventure has to know how to describe a fight, I suppose, and L'Amour was certainly good at that. Much of many of the stories runs through the various punches each character throws, and somehow, one is able to keep track of what is happening. It's good action--but often not much more.

On "Scenes from the Heartland" by Donna Baier Stein ***

A standard writing exercise consists of taking an image and writing a description of it. Sometimes this can lead to more, especially as one comes to know the scene or the persons inside the image. This was essentially the process the Stein went through in writing this book. The title of this collection, thus, is an apt one. The scenes here, however, are not photographs but lithographs, all of them created by Thomas Hart Benton, an artist whose work I have only lightly been familiar with before. As an exercise, each story finds success at putting a story to the image. Stein descends into the lives of each character in each piece.

In her afterword, the author notes that she wanted to get out of herself, to write about things that were less familiar to her. The lithographs were a means toward this. The exercise resulted in some very heartfelt meditations. That said, there's a part of me that felt like most of the stories strained at times to overcome a setting in time and place that was not the author's own--by that I mean that many of the tales, while well researched, seemed impersonal and even, to an extent, to fall back on the kind of Hollywood stereotypes one would expect when looking at the image rather than thrusting readers into something unfamiliar and extraordinary.

The best stories, though, do manage to do something to that effect. The most impressive of all is the opener, "A Landing Called Compromise," a tale that seems deceptively mundane but that builds to a great emotional catharsis.

"Trouble at the Dance Hall" explores racial relations at a country bar.

The title "Morning Train" is a play on words, as the story concerns a family whose son is about to go off to war, to the mom's grief and consternation.

"Pointing East, Where Things Happen" revolves around a revival meeting and concerns about faithfulness.

"For Her Own Good" focuses on two children whose father sends his wife (their mother) away for "woman troubles"--as in she has grown dispondent and doesn't do her chores in a satisfactory way. The children, of course, don't care about this--they want mom, and they want to enjoy the fair that they were promised to be able to attend. There's a grief and sorrow that runs throughout this piece, though it's not quite as finally crafted as in some other pieces.

In "The Sweet Perfume of Somewhere Else," it hasn't rained in a long while, and the main character dreams of being somewhere else--or more specifically being with someone else, her teacher. But what she wants proves not to be what she imagined, and the story makes an awful turn that has the girl wishing for childhood.

"Prodigal Son" is a heartbreaking tale about a son who has difficulty dealing with an injury to his father, in some sense blaming himself. The difficulty causes him to desert his family when it needs him most--this for a woman who becomes a quick study in booze and grift.

"Spring 1933" focuses on lost love an abusive father/husband.

The collection ends strongly with "Under the Weight of His Mother's Body," this one about a woman who marries beneath her expectations. I love a story that ends with an opening--especially to more trouble and concern. I'm reminded of a Raymond Carver story called "Neighbors," which ends with a couple who has been doing a bit more than house sitting when taking journeys into another person's house being locked out. That moment bears so much more than the simple pressing against the door. In this tale, an orphan from a small town named Arthur falls for a woman in the big city. A kind man, he's not ready for the demands this woman will make of him or for the demands his small town will either for that matter.

Some common tropes arise throughout the stories. At least two men marry women who then descend into various levels of alcoholism. At least two women mourn over sons. At least two fathers prove abusive of their families to various degrees. In fact, if one were to craft a common trajectory in the stories, it is one of disappointment with life's expectations and hopes. That's not to say the stories are all gloomy--in many cases, the characters find something redeeming among the sad events. Another things Stein does well by the collection is to present us with a view of a community at a particular time and place, the kind of linking that I often enjoy in story collections.

On "Always Happy Hour" by Mary Miller ***

There is much that I enjoy about Mary Miller's writing. It's accessible; it's gritty; it's realism in the form that I much enjoyed when I was younger: dirty. These are stories about plain, old everyday life. They're not going to wow you with narrative innovations; rather, they're going to plod along wowing with the content of the words.

"Introductions" is a case in point of how good Miller can be when she is "on." This story is about an insecure woman fretting over her fairly secure relationship. Is she smart enough to be with her well-read boyfriend? good enough? pretty enough? Why is he still with her? Will they last? It's true to the feel of a lot of relationships, which makes me wonder to an extent why we live this way, why we want relationships when we don't feel ourselves worthy of them.

"The House on Main Street" focuses on a similar gal, though here insecurity is replaced by a kind of willingness just to be and a longing to be more. The narrator lives with a Yankee, both students in an MFA program in Mississippi. The New York City roommate frets constantly over how backward the South and southerners are, though showing herself not much more sophisticated than those around her at every turn, except in superficial ways (she drinks wine!). The narrator has settled into a pseudorelationship, a friends with benefits relationship, with another grad student who would marry her in a heartbeat. She thinks a lot about her ex-husband, even calls him occasionally, though she also wonders why, since she tells us she no longer knows what she saw in him. We're left wondering why the heart wants what it wants.

As the collection continues, some of the stories fall into a rut, becoming different versions of one another and harder to distinguish. In "Proper Order" a new (visiting?) professor invites students to her house for a party, largely with the intention of sleeping with one of them. She knows this is a horrible idea, but it's beside the point. Her life choices have generally been bad, and she thinks of how her students still have the ability to make the right decisions and choices, leading to better lives--this, even though the teacher is only shortly out of grad school, though not writing, after publishing a first book.

"The Longest Covered "Walkway in the World" seems a somewhat less effective version of the opening story of the collection. A woman goes out with her boyfriend, a divorce with a child he shares with his wife, taking daily turns at custody. The woman expects, at any time, to be rejected, for the man to go back to his wife. She aims to be a better person, worthy of love, but constantly believes she is incapable of that.

By contrast, "Uphill" is a fun story that seems somehow less than the sum of its parts. In it, a woman travels with her boyfriend to do a favor for a "bad guy"--a friend of the boyfriend's--taking a photo of a woman for which a substantial amount of money will be given, because, you know . . . The whole mystery at the center of this tale is part of what makes it so intriguing. Bad things are probably happening, but you're never certain exactly what those things are. As Mark Richard once said in a workshop I took from him, not knowing is often more powerful.

"Dirty" features some really memorable lines and some interesting characters, though the story as a whole doesn't seem to go much of anywhere. It features a gal and her boyfriend and their close other friend, who is dating a fat girl but won't admit it.

"He Says I Am a Little Oven" is about a woman on a cruise with her boyfriend an his parents. As with the main character in most of the stories in this collection, the relationship seems temporal and unsteady, the woman herself unsteady and often unemployed, dependent on the boyfriend.

"Where All of the Beautiful People Go" is a story about a pool party. A gal is hanging out with a much older female friend who debates whether to return the furniture she racked up on her newly dead mom's credit cards, who has prostituted herself because her husband can't get it up anymore, and who had an accident that may have affected her brain years before the narrator and the woman met. It's also a story about how accidents (and accidents of the mind) can change our whole being and circumstances, how utterly unpredictable our lives can be.

"Love Apples" is a story about a woman throwing her life away, at least that's how I read it. She has a fairly decent, if boring, husband, who she is divorcing to run off with a man from the Internet, her "boyfriend," whom she has never met in real life and who doesn't really know what she looks like. It seems to be a story about really bad decisions we make in pursuing dreams or in living them--for the moment.

The weather plays the role of an important secondary character in "Hamilton Pool," where drought has sapped the landscape in which Darcie and her ex-con boyfriend trundle along in survival mode, not really working, trying to deal with a past that was hard and brutal, one the boyfriend tells first wanted then unwanted stories about.

The title story serves as a kind of template for the book as a whole, insofar as it includes a typical female narrator and her boyfriend. The latter is jobless, has a child he shares with an ex, and the former feels very lucky to have him in her life--so much so that she worries about losing him, even as she drinks a lot.

"Little Bear" does something similar in a very short space, but the focus in this one is on the mom (who is actually married) with her child. She thinks on how ephemeral all these family blessings are and hopes desperately that things don't fall apart.

"First Class" is one of my favorites in the collection. Although boyfriends also feature in the background of the story, the focus is on the friendship between two women, one a spendthrift lottery winner and the other her unhappy hanger-on. The two take a trip with each other, the latter traveling on the former's dime. The hanger-on doesn't like her friend or the trips they take, and yet she finds herself oddly compelled to stay. The story answers the question why.

"Charts" focuses on the relationship between two sisters, one adopted, the other a divorcee who relishes the home, the things, she got in the divorce but who like most of the characters in the book has anxiety issues, such that when her sister comes to visit, she does her best to avoid serious social interaction.

In the end, the collection is, as one review states, a book about Texas (and Mississippi) women making bad choices. And in a sense, it is--but those choices are grounded in a sense of anxiety about losing love or not believing in the value of one's mundane life. And if that's one thing about Miller's stories that places them into a sector of fiction, it is the focus on the mundane, which much like Ann Beattie's or Bobbie Ann Mason's work, eventually makes most of them seem much the same.

On "Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson" edited by Robert Polito and Mihael McCauley ***

Often, there are good reasons certain works are lost or left unpublished, but fame has a way of making such miscellany valuable to others. Such is the case with this collection of Thompson's uncollected shorter work.

Arranged in a rough chronological order, the first section from his 1930s and 1940s writing, includes quite a bit of nonfiction written in a fictional vein. In "The Strange Death of Eugene King," Thompson takes on the voice of a transient looking to solve the murder of another transient, a technique popular in thriller magazines of the era apparently. "Oil Field Vignettes" and "Thieves of the Field" both provide first-hand insights into the oil industry that I'd likely never have thought much about otherwise. The first is mostly character sketches of oil workers--one who likes complete silence, one who is scared of drilling, and one who is constantly marrying bad women who take advantage of him and leave him. There's something of a folk tale quality to these bits, as in the stories told in "Thieves," where Thompson ruminates on how pipe can be (and is) stolen and sold. "Snake Magee's Rotary Boiler" is a tall tale about a blown-up boiler that sends a man clear back to bed.

The True Detective pieces show how Thompson became the writer he did. There's a quality of the unknown, as is typical of mystery in each of the true crime pieces, a mystery with a twist usually at the end. "Ditch of Doom" explores the life of an insane man who murders his wife--or is it a planned murder for his former wife? "Oklahoma's Conspiring Lovers" follows the unfortunate story of a man beat up by a horse--who in fact is not beat up by said horse. "Illicit Lovers and the Walking Corpse" tries to figure out how a man's wife survives being accidentally killed by the man--and just how many wives the man has.

"A Penny in the Dust" is an unfinished novel from the period. Seemingly autobiographical in its first passages, it lacks for polish, but the ickiness typical of Thompsom becomes apparent in the final scene provided.

"Character at Iraan" recounts life among oil workers between jobs, as they sleep in a cheap hotel, gamble, and drink. Although published in Prairie Schooner, the piece does not seem to fulfill its literary pretensions.

The second section focuses on Thompson's writings during the 1940s and 1950s, which would have included the time of his most productive output. "Death Missed a Beat" is a straight story about a man who in an effort to get to work on time the next day picks up a hitchhiker to drive him and ends up the object of a murder. "Murder Came on the Mayflower" is a short account of an early colonial murder. "Exactly What Happened" plays to a weird twist in a story in which a man attempts to rob his boss by pretending to be a coworker. "The Threesome in Four-C" is an account of a man who has gone insane because of his conscience. "The Dark Stair" is the basis for Thompson's book No More Than Murder; a true story, the mystery hinges on the contents of a movie. "Forever After" revolves around a woman who, tired of her marriage, plots the murder of her husband via her lover but who, as in "Exactly What Happened," finds the situation reversed on her. "John Stink" is about a Native American whose tribe takes him for dead, so much so that when he finds his way out of the shallow grave they take him for a ghost they must ignore so that he'll go away. "Blood from a Turnip" centers on a watch that hustlers attempt to turn for a profit.

"The Cellini Chalice," one of the longest stories in this section, shows Thompson at his top form, as he is in his better novels. The story centers on a hustler named Mitch. He cons a chalice off a woman who thinks him a vagrant in need, a chalice that is worth much more than she knows. Alas, Mitch isn't an antiques expert, so he thinks he fares well getting a thousand dollars for it but is disappointed when he finds out it's worth at least fifteen times that. Mitch learns that there's another chalice like it and aims to get it with the woman's help. What he doesn't know is that the woman is in on the con--of him. Many pages later, Mitch finds himself in some extenuating circumstances that require him to use all the street smarts he has to extricate himself from.

"The Frightening Frammis" picks up where the previous story left off, once again following Mitch on his efforts to con people out of cash. Having been the victim of a recent swindle, Mitch feels down on his luck, but he soon falls into an opportunity to earn fifty thousand dollars. This story doesn't have the same weight as the previous. The circumstances that lead to Mitch's opportunity seem too haphazard: he's hitchhiking, a couple picks him up, the man dies, and Mitch just happens to look like him, and there just happens to be fifty thousand in the car, and so on. Mitch's wife seems too forgiving, after all that he's put her through in both this story and the last. As such, the plot twists overpower the sense of characterization, and the story loses punch, which is a reason I have tended not to care as much for genre fiction in the past.

The same point could be used to denote why "Pay as You Exit" and "The Flaw in the System" are disappointing. The first involves a hitchhiker who aims to rip off the woman he manages to stop by flattening her tire, only to find out that she might well be just as dangerous as he is. The second involves people at a company who are conned.

"An Alcoholic Looks at Himself" seems a bit disorganized, but it is a sad, autobiographical portrait of Thompson as a drinker, a man who has squandered chunks of his life and talent in an effort to get the next bit of the liquid elixir. I say disorganized, but it is in chronological order. It's just that, being "real life," there doesn't seem much in the way of an arc or growth--it's just random discussion of drinking, stopping, then drinking again.

"The Tomcat That Was Treetop Tall" is a crime story about a man who decides to rip off a couple in a bar and the man who decides to stop him. Here, the story's violence seems as if it is on the page for thrills rather than for a purpose inherent to the story.

We then move to the last two decades of Thompson's life and writing. The middle of the book seems the strongest part; by this era, Thompson's work has become something of a parody of itself. "A Horse in the Baby's Bathtub" revolves around an incest story. A young man who is, in his mind, clever and smart, takes an interest in his father's new bride, his stepmom. He kills off dad and takes up with her, but his interest in her is, in part, one of contempt. In the end, he opts to do some violence to the family next door, who has lost a child--and that's where one learns the meaning of the tale's title.

"The Red Kitten" is the start of a longer work--a promising start. A man marries a woman, but with an understanding that the inheritance the two of them will get requires them to stay married. The will is set up in such a way that it essentially forces the two to despise one another but stay married--or find some way to knock the other off. Alas, the piece ends there.

"The Slave Girl in the Cellar" is a summary of a true crime story, a case of modern slavery. The piece is interesting for the case itself.

"Sunrise at Midnight" is a strange piece, a piece that seems in many ways like male wish fulfillment. The first section focuses on a man married to a stripper who is forced into her profession by a crooked cop. But just as the husband begins to build a plan for taking care of matters, the story backtracks to that same man taking an interest in helping out a much-younger woman in a dead-end job. After he buys her new clothes and sets her up rather well, she insists on going to bed with him against his will and then they get married. The man loses his job as a reporter and thus fall the events that force his wife into stripping--and the man into seeking revenge. Like so many of the pieces in this last section, this one seems unfinished.

I didn't much care for "Hell" from Ironside, the one published piece in the last section, a lyrical exploration of killing and crime.

"This World, Then the Fireworks" closes off the collection and might be the most finished of those works falling in the last section. Full of familiar Thompson tropes, the piece seems a bit over the top. It involves a set of twins who witness their father killing a cop who discovers said father cheating with the cop's wife. The wife commits suicide, the dad goes to jail, and the kids grow up to be troubled. They get into the grift, but their main desire is somehow to avenge or to understand their father's deed. And so goes the tale as the male twin opts to get involved with a female cop.

The book made me feel like Jim Thompson's best material was long form and mostly during the period for which he is most famous, when he wrote so many books in such short order. I wouldn't have bothered with the text were it not one of the few available to me to read on my Jim Thompson list. This is a collection, I'd say, largely for Thompson scholars, who can used it to see how his writing developed.

On "The Complete Stories" by Evelyn Waugh ***

Waugh isn't famous for the short story form, and I can see why. The stories are certainly accomplished, but they don't have a lot of zip and zing to them. They aren't the sort that I'll be coming back and rereading or that greatly made me think or feel.

The collection runs in roughly chronological order starting in 1926, and then has two sections in the back, one of juvenilia and one of college stories. The latter are interesting to read in terms of seeing his development. I've sometimes wondered, reading classic stories from decades before my birth, whether I'd be as unimpressed by the unpublished stuff from the era as I often am by most amateur stories now.

Waugh is not known for being experimental, but the first story in the collection is a foray into that. It feels quite modernist in what it tries to do, which is essentially translate silent film into writing, while also focusing on a couple of audience members. I found it difficult to follow--and unfortunately not interesting enough to really want to try to parse it apart.

From there, we move to more traditional faire. "A House of Gentlefolks" focuses on a man who is hired to be a tutor to an idiot and to accompany him abroad, but once we meet the idiot's parents and family, we have reason to question who in the family is the real dolt.

"The Manager of 'The Kremlin'" is backstory about a man who runs a bar that is reminiscent of Russia. We learn how he was in the army and fell into poverty and the lucky break that got him where he is today. The real power of this story, however, comes in its last line. He's lived a good life, but you come to realize that it is still a life of loss.

The next two stories seem to be somewhat veiled explications of Waugh's first marriage. As such, they are both quite accomplished.

"Incident in Azania" draws from the same characters as Waugh's novel Black Mischief. As such, it is in part about colonialism. In this tale, the daughter of a colonial authority comes to live in the colony and is thus the heartswell of most of the other men who have come from overseas. Her presence proves to be very disruptive, until she disappears, as happens in "these kind of places."

"Bella Fleace Gives a Party" is about a ninety-something woman who decides to throw a ball. Not knowing any of her neighbors and rarely leaving her mansion, the venture brings new life to her. There's a certain sadness at the end of the story, with Fleace's seeming lack of success, but Waugh cuts it down by mostly playing it for irony rather than pity. I could see the tale being something truly cry-worthy in the hands of another master.

I must really like dark and twisted stories because one of my favorites in this collection reminds me much of other stories I like so much. "The Man Who Liked Dickens" is in the realm of many of Paul Bowles's stories; it's about a man who goes overseas and finds himself in a situation far beyond what his own cultural understanding will allow him to deal with. It's a kind of kidnapping story, a story about a trap, a story that takes something we usually love and makes it dreary and scary. In a sense, one could read it as a tale about the dangers of illiteracy and about the even greater dangers of cultural illiteracy.

That story also ended up being the ending of Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust. "By Special Request" brings back the characters of Brenda and Tony Last, giving a separate and happier ending to that Waugh's novel. Having just finished the novel a day earlier when I read the story, it was hard for me to read the story as a piece on its own. Rather, I kept putting it into the context of "alternate ending." As an alternate ending, it did not leave the novel with much in the way of gravitas, as Brenda's horrid actions come to be merely a fun and temporal diversion. The story then hints at Tony's conceivable revenge, though one that is hard to fathom given his ultimate loyalty to his wife. Good it is that the other story became the novel's climax.

"Period Piece" is a forgettable tale about woman who in old age has taken up reading novels in zest. When confronted with how they are so "made up" and ridicilous, she goes on a long diatribe about how life was actually "like that" in the old days. It is the diatribe that makes up most of the story.

"Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" is similarly cruel in its ending, with that ending being its seeming main purpose. Years earlier, Loveday was committed to an asylum for a murderous crime. A woman visiting her father notices how seeming sane Mr. Loveday is. In fact, the asylum director says that the man helps out the staff constantly and would greatly miss the man, who has no desire to leave, though he clearly doesn't need to be locked up anymore. So the woman sets about to free the man, who does not wish to leave save to do one little last thing he greatly desires.

"Winner Take All" is another rather cruel story, one that seems to be something of a recurring theme in Waugh's work: of a passive man taken advantage of by others, most especially by women. Here, that man is the second son of a noble family who sees every piece of good fortune that comes his way redirected to his older brother by his ever-dominating and -interfering mom.

Another of the better stories in the collection is "An Englishman's Home." Save for the trick ending, this story is one the riles the emotion and the brain with its discussion of the dynamics of village life and local politics. Mr. Metcalfe owns a small villa that normally includes about sixty-six acres. But he doesn't really need or want the other sixty and so doesn't buy the adjoining farmland. All is fine on his six acres until a developer one day buys the other sixty, putting the entire community at risk of seeing itself changed overnight. Of course, it being land that normally adjoins Metcalfe's property, the community believes Metcalfe should buy the developer out; meanwhile, Metcalfe, who neither needs nor wants the extra sixty acres, thinks the community should bind together to buy the extra land, that he should only pay about one-fifth of the total property. Fights ensue. Selfishness threatens all.

"The Sympathetic Passenger" is a silly short piece about a man who hates radios but whose hate is compromised when he meets yet another man who hates them to a great, insane degree more.

"Work Suspended: Two Chapters from an Unfinished Novel" isn't really a story but rather exactly what it says it is. In another way, it is about the way that war interrupts life, for it is war that essentially draws the novel to its close, suspends it. The novel itself is about a writer of thrillers who is having a hard time writing, having grown tired of formula. This writer also loses his father in an accident, the man who caused the accident becoming something of an acquaintance and a drain. Meanwhile, the writer falls for a married woman named Lucy, the wife of a friend. He builds a new country home. The two spend much time together, but she has a baby and that's where it ends. And also, there is a sycophantic young woman who is in love with the writer and his work who chases him around until she realizes he loves Lucy. It is a rather great start to a book and a shame in some ways to have come to an abrupt end.

Another story that feels more like a work not completed is "Charles Ryder's School Days," perhaps an unpublished excerpt from Brideshead Revisited or a character study for the work. The story recounts the early years of Ryder, during the First World War, when his mother is killed. Off at boarding school, he is granted a certain sympathy. But the real focus of the story is the pecking order among the boys and the faculty's effect on it. Though three kids are ahead of him (including Ryder) in seniority, O'Malley is chosen to monitor the dorm, because, as the headmaster explains, O'Malley needs discipline. He has less character than the other boys. Ryder is asked to support O'Malley numerous times, both by O'Malley himself and by the teacher. As children (really, teens) refuse to go to bed on time "Tacitor to participate in prayer at the chosen moment, O'Malley is faced with choosing between loyalty to his friends and doing his job, the latter generally being his ultimate decision. But the story does not seem to go beyond that; Ryder is the same kid at the start as at the end, and there doesn't seem to have been any moment of decision or chance to change, which is why this piece ultimately feels less like an independent story to me and more like a descriptive background study.

A long but gorgeous story is "Scott-King's Modern Europe." This piece reminded me a bit of Nabokov's writing. It's about a middle-aged man who teaches classics at a public school, a job that is becoming more obsolete with each passing school year, as fewer students sign up to Greek, Latin, and the classics. Scott-King has taken an interest in an eighteenth-century writer named Bellorius and studies him in his spare time. One day, he receives an invitation from the fictional country of Neutralia, Bellorius's nation, which is to hold a grand festival in the writer's honor. As it turns out, most of the invitees know little of the writer, and as the festivities continue, it becomes clear that the country is in the midst of a civil war of sorts. A scholarly trip to nostalgia turns into a nightmare attempt to escape. Ironically, it is just such escape that moves Scott-King to embrace older times rather than the modern ones.

"Tactical Exercise" is another of Evelyn Waugh's exercises in the clever and macabe. Here, Waugh explains how a couple marries later in life (by mid-twentieth-century standards) and grows to hate one another. Finally, tired, they head off to vacation. Here, the husband plots to kill his wife, setting up rumors about her sleep walking and feeding her drugs, only to find that the circumstances are not as they seem.

"Compassion" reads like a magazine puff piece in parts more than as a story. It is about a military officer who sees his job primarily as one involving military missions but who is slowly won over to aiding displaced Jewish persons in the Yugoslavic areas of Europe as World War II draws to a close. In that conversion, he runs into many a military man who thinks as he once did, and he finds that a lack of success, of being unable to stop suffering, is also a means of learning.

"Love among the Ruins" is a sci-fi story that reads like any other number of works about technologically advanced societies verging on totalitarian: Brave New World and The Clockwork Orange being two that come most readily to mind. Here, people get new faces, get sterilized or have abortions to maintain careers, go through prison reformatory systems, and get free euthanizations by the state because they are bored, bored, bored. Among these people is Mile Plastic, an orphan with a penchant for starting fires who has been sent to prison and reformed. The sole graduate of the program, the state has much interest in touting his successes. But much like the people around, he finds very little meaning to his existence and longs for a return to prison, until love provides something that at least seems real.

"Basil Seal Rides Again" returns to the character of Basil, who figures prominently in the very first story of the collection and who also plays a role in many of Waugh's novels (alas not anything more than a mention in any of the novels that I've read). Here, Basil is concerned about a certain young man named Charles Albright, who seems to be up to no good: he borrows shirts, plays guitar, has little wealth, and so on--in other words, he's like Basil was at an earlier age. The most interesting passages have to do with Basil's going away to a resort to lose weight, however, as his daughter covorts with an unknown suitor. The cruel and self-interested ending, I suppose, is standard behavior for Basil.

The book ends with a collection of Waugh's juvenalia and college stories. The juvenalia supposedly is to show what a genius he was for storytelling at a young age (twelve), but I didn't find the stories all that unusual for a child that age with a literary bent: a heavy emphasis on action, unncessary details when provided. However, by the age of twenty, Waugh's stories start to take on a certain panache. The start of a novel, while beginning with the cliché of a character waking up, displays a mastery of language and actually reminded me a bit of Brideshead Revisited--lop off the slow beginning, and the tale had potential. "An Essay" is a great display/description of a character with something of a twist at the end. Such stories got me thinking about when/how writers bloom, and I think there's something to be said for the maturing that begins to take shape in the early twenties; arguably, it's possible one doesn't advance much beyond the skills one builds by age twenty-five, assuming some good instruction.

That said, the stories in the section of Waugh's college years, while displaying a better mastery of language than the early juvenalia, often (too often) display an overwhelming interest in killing and murder: something rather common, I found, among writers who are young adults when I taught college English. In "Portrait of a Young Man with Career" the protagonist fantasizes about killing a man who has come to visit with him. "Edward of Unique Achievement" is a rundown of how a college man kills his tutor and gets away with it. "Conspiracy to Murder" is a Poe-like story about a man who goes insane thinking his neighbor wants to kill him. "Unacademic Exercise" is about some sort of ritualistic cannibalism cult. And while the last story, about cricket, gets away from these macabre themes, it still isn't at the level of Waugh's adult material.

On "So Long" by Lucia Berlin ***

In this, Berlin's second to last collection while she was alive, she tells tales from all over. Most of the best ones ended up in A Manual for Cleaning Women. But I decided I'd read the rest of the works that appear here so as to get a sense of her other ouevre.

"Luna Nueva" involves a pool in Mexico, where people go to the beach to sunbathe and to feel the water on their skin. There's a kind of miraculous feel to this water, reviving people.

"Sombra" is one of Berlin's better stories and one of the best in this collection (certainly the best of those not collected elsewhere). It brings together descriptions of a bull fight with a fraught moment involving the spectators. What's so profound here is the way that that fraught moment is presented so nonchalant. As Berlin makes clear, people are more interested in the fight than in what's going on in the stands. It's like the people are bulls themselves--little concern for the deaths that are occurring.

"Our Lighthouse" is a description of a little lighthouse and the people who once lived there, while "Daughters" focuses on the people at a dialysis clinic. "Daughters" focuses on a day in a doctor's office among eastern European immigrant families.

"Our Brother's Keeper" is about a woman who was killed by her boyfriend. Or more, it's about her friend, who comes to clean up her house and who, day to day, pretends to be a sleuth, finding others who might have done it.

"Fire" returns to Berlin's recurring characters of sisters Sally and Carlotta. In this story Carlotta goes to the airport to meet Sally, but there's a fire at the airport. The description is droll, as chracteristic of Berlin's writing, which makes the tale work all the more.

"Dust to Dust" focuses on a young race car driver and the families that loved him. Really, it focuses on two young boys who seem both attached and detached from the driver after he crashes and dies. Vaguely, they are aware of a change: his absence. But funerals and the like are also exciting in a way. The story recaptures a kind of child-like innocence.

On "The Unfinished World" by Amber Sparks ***

Long an admirer of some of Sparks's online stories, which are often kooky but more importantly are generally full of energy and verve. She writes in an unpredictable way that makes reading fun. So it was with great anticipation that I took up her second book of stories.

That weirdness is present from the start in "The Janitor in Space," which I'll save discussion for in the next post.

"The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies" is about two sisters whose desired lifestyle is curtailed by their parents, whom they think of doing a Lizzie on. But it's really about how siblings grown apart from one another as they age--and together.

"The Cemetery of Lost Faces" is a more traditional story insofar as it's more filled out, but narratively it isn't--chopping up space time to tell us about death and murder: of animals and relatives. Taxidermy plays a large role.

"The Logic of a Loaded Heart" performs a difficult trick. It's a story in the form of word problems, about a kid with problems, a man with problems. The next story plays a trick to: "Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting" is a science fiction piece. A woman travels back in time to destroy a painting she hates, but to no avail. Each time she returns to the future, the painting is still there--sometimes in a slightly different from, but still present. I like how the old kill a butterfly idea gets turned on its head here.

"Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World" didn't really grab me, nor did the next two stories. The first, I'll save for another time, but the second, "Birds with Teeth," is about anthropologists and is available online here at the Collagist.

In many ways, Sparks's stories at times seem like exercises--challenges she has managed to meet. Such is the case with "For These Humans Who Cannot Fly," which is about a widower who build little death houses for people. The story, however, begins with a quote from Jan Bondeson about some rather mysterious German structures. It's as if Sparks is answering the mystery here.

"Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter" introduces a set of stories that seem based around fairy tales and fantasy. This particular one focuses on a werewolf hunt, told like any other tale of girls going hunting with dad's. However, the fact that these are other sort of humans makes it rather grizzly. "We Were Holy Once" is a piece of lyricism that didn't speak much to me, but it spoke to the editors of Granta here.

"La Belle de Nuit, La Belle de Jour" reads like a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen tale. This one's about a family whose father marries a witch. The witch fills the daughter's mouth with stinging insects so that it is hard for her to speak. The sons are turned into birds. The daughter sews sweaters with magical powers to break the spell.

"The Fires of Western Heaven" is a lyrical piece about the World War I era, a setting that will be repeated in the novella that ends the collection. "The Process of Human Decay" performs an interesting trick by focusing the narration from the point of view of a cadaver, a dead person, as it dies, bloats, is buried, and learns of various things that are not done after death as it would wish.

The title story, a novella, follows two major storylines, one of Set and one of Inge, until of course they meet and fall in love. Both have lost parents of a sort. Inge grows up in a dilapidated estate with a man named Albert. Set, upon whom the narrative seems to focus more and which proves to be the more interesting side of the story, grows up among a set of siblings--one an explorer, one a collector of bobbles, one a slayer of conventions. Amid this family, Set begins to suspect that he is in some way not really alive, not really flesh and blood, in the same was as others. Obviously, he ends up in Hollywood, a filmmaker and playboy. Inge becomes an adventurer, a world-traveling photographer. Sparks first came to my attention as a writer of the quirky, but in this collection, it's her longer pieces such as this one that appeal most, where the stories might not be as quirky but where they maintain a lyricism that is flushed out and beautiful.

The closing story is part of that lyricism, about "The Sleepers," whose dreams never come to be. It can be read here at Necessary Fiction. Sparks remains a writer I will keep an eye on. I expect a novel down the road.

On "I Want to Show You More" by Jamie Quatro ***

Sex, death, and religion in the North Georgia mountains, along the border with Tennessee are the focus of this collection.

The lead story is a short one about a woman having a phone affair with a stranger, which becomes the setting for many other stories throughout the book.

The next story, "Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives," expands on this theme. Here, the lover takes on the form of some kind of body, a wax figure, that decomposes in the couples bed and then elsewhere in the house, constantly reminding the couple of what was. There is no escaping the affair, even as it fades into oblivion.

That kind of odd metaphorical realism extends into the next story, "Ladies and Gentleman of the Pavement," wherein a woman runs a marathon with a statue tied to her back. In fact, that's the vogue: everyone carries a statue while running--a burden, a work of art. One is not allowed to run without it. At the end the connection between art and running becomes more apparent. One must finish the race, as hard as it is, but there seems no way to do so without compromising.

Beginning with the next story, "Here," the collection takes a more traditional turn. "What Friends Talk About" is yet another story involving a woman's affair with a phone caller. In this one, she takes her children to the park to play so that she can have phone sex with her audio lover.

"1.7 to Tennessee" revolves around an eighty-nine-year-old woman who opts to walk a letter protesting a war to the post office. The story reminded me in some ways of Eudora Welty's tale (the name of it escapes me at the moment) of an older walker along the side of the road. Along the way, the woman meets various people and thinks about her past.

"Imperfections" is a very short piece that again returns to Quatro's frequent focus: a mostly nonphysical affair. Here, a woman meets up with a man in person, along with his wife, but works the situation around so that she and the man are, at last, alone. Does the hope measure up to reality? Does it matter?

And "You Look Like Jesus" is yet another piece with a focus on an affair that is exclusively via technology--this one online, over the Internet. A woman recounts the photographs she sent and received from her paramour, the pictures she won't show her husband, the pictures she eventually deleted, one supposes, probably in an effort to save the marriage.

Quatro is at her best with stories involving straight-up religion (without the kink). "Better to Lose an Eye" takes a rather standard look at hypocrisy among Christians, but what is not standard is the point of view. Lindsey's mother's boyfriend shot her mom, leaving her a quadriplegic with a tracheotomy. Now Lindsey has been invited to a pool party, and she's too embarrassed to go with her mom in tow, especially knowing all the questions she's going to be asked. But grandma insists. It's hard not to feel for a girl in this situation--or for a mom.

“Georgia the Whole Time” continues with the theme of disease that works through many of the stories in Quatro's collection. In this case, a couple has to find a way to break it to their kids that mom's cancer has returned and that she's likely to die.

“Sinkhole” won an O'Henry Prize, but the story didn't much speak to me. It returns to some of the oddball pieces that kick off Quatro's collection. Here, a boy who is a magnificent runner has a “sinkhole” in his chest that allows him to hear God and that he feels must be healed, a healing he finds via relations with a girl.

“Sinkhole” introduces a set of stories that explicitly deal with religion that end the collection. Here, the motifs of sexual deviance, religion, and running come together. And it is here that the oddities of those early stories begin to make sense, for the suggestion seems to be that religion involves a kind of oddness of thought, an oddness that pulls us toward transcendence, the way that sex or death supposedly do (as George Battaile would have argued). “Demolition” is about just that. It starts as a story about the loss of faith--or the finding of “true” faith. A deaf man joins a church and then leaves it. Meanwhile, the church's stained glass begins to fall apart, but seemingly for no reason. The church congregation decides to do the most “logical” thing--get rid of the building and go into nature, the deaf man as their guide.

In “Relatives of God” a woman thinks back on her phone sex affair with a certain acceptance, an end, I suppose, to a collection that focuses so often on the mix of feelings attached to such an affair.

On "Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories" by Tom Noyes ***

Tom Noyes's collection of tales merges religious concerns with violence, oddity, and the regular day. As such, it doesn't seem to have that much drawing the pieces together, other than a few characters that seem to repeat. The strongest stories involve violence of a sort, mostly because we are treated to watching something unexpected slowly develop until we completely understand how such a thing could happen--in fact, had to.

"Here, There, Yonder" is told from multiple perspectives that all fit in the same setting. One is a boy flying for the first time. Another is his grandmother, returning to visit her two sisters, who years before she stopped talking to. And yet another is a flight attendant who is in a somewhat unhappy relationship with another flight attendant. I'm not sure what we're to glean from the differing perspectives except perhaps that the adults seem to have a number of broken relationships that the innocent young boy has not yet discovered is part of life.

"Everything but Bone" is a slice-of-life piece about a divorced man and woman who reunite to attend the man's father's funeral and about their son, who brings along his new girlfriend, a kind of carbon copy. There is a focus, in part of the story, on hair, on how it outlasts "everything but bone" once we're dead. This hair plays a role in each man's life in the story, defining them but also hiding them. Memory is hard to piece to together.

"Love Canal," one of the stronger stories from the collection, involves a pastor's family. The pastor is replacing a former pastor who ran off with one of the wives of his congregation (one might assume the wife from the opening story, "The Straightened Arrow"). But what seems an easy task--simply not messing around on your wife when you are pastor--becomes much more than the pastor bargained for.

"The Daredevil's Wife" is a short piece about Niagara Falls barrel riders.

"Greeting Phantom" focuses on a newly but less-than-happily married couple with a newborn son. The husband creates an imaginary to entertain his son with; the wife does what she can to push the ghost away. But still, the couple is together, while upstairs, what appears to be a less well-off couple that has split up is actually a couple who are dealing with health issues. This is the first in a set of stories in which violence is heavily implied or present. And maybe it's that passion that makes these latter stories feel as if they matter more.

"Wrong Hands," the strongest story in the collection, is about an out-of-shape man who takes up dieting and exercise at a gym--or seems to be about that. But as the story progresses, and the man becomes more and more heavily involved in weight training, a kind of violence begins to pervade the story, as the man is caught up in a way of life in which machismo plays a larger and larger role. Soon, just as his eating was once out of control, his anger becomes out of control.

"Rot and Squalor" focuses on a high school basketball coach whose disappointment in his team and desire to motivate it turns darkly violent.

The title story is cleverly told tale of a man who believes he is the spawn of a dead twin. The story comes to us via recordings to his psychologist.

On "Stories in the Worst Way" by Gary Lutz ***

All these pieces are short, and all have been, it feels like, edited down from something much larger. Lutz is one of those practitioners of the sentence, which means that every line counts--and virtually every line is something totally original. People don't just sit. They uncrack their bones into a repository. That sort of description, while beautiful (and actually, that's not a quote--it's just something akin to what Lutz would do), makes for difficult reading if one wants to go quickly. But it's worth slowing down and savoring the work.

Not that the stories themselves, beyond the language, always hold up something that original. Quite often, they're more or less slice of life pieces without much of a climax or epiphany. In "Sororally," a man goes out with a coworker, but a relationship doesn't work out. In "Waking Hours," a man stumbles through life at a job, spending time with the kid from his former marriage, and looking for gay lovers. In "Street Map of the Continent," a man deals with the fallout of a wife who leaves him (or dies). The latter story ends on a strange, seemingly unrelated tangent, as do many of Lutz's other pieces. In that sense, they remind me a bit of Lydia Davis's work, which has a fan base and its critical followers but of which I have not been one.

In "Slops," a man considers some events affected by his constant bouts with colitis. "Devotions" recounts marriages; "When You Got Back" involves a man in a relationship with a high school senior who goes out for a walk and meets another man with laundry that has been done but that doesn't look it (perhaps some kind of comment on the man's own behavior?).

"Esprit de L'Elevator" breaks what is already a short story up into even smaller pieces. The man at its heart meets four people in his apartment building each day. He begins writing a book for them--and then excerpts of said book are quoted. It's as if Lutz is just having fun with the little snippets here, whatever neat thing might strike his fancy.

In "Education," which seems vaguely set in some eighteenth-century world but also in our own, a man goes to "educate" a young miss for her mom and grandma. The story revolves around geography (learning town names) and, as one would sort of expect, sex and innocence.

"Certain Riddances" involves a man's life at an office and is full of fun and interesting asides--how names weigh us down with expectation. But like so many of the tales, it peters out with information that has seemingly little to do with anything that has gone before it, focusing on the man's life at home. The story could be about the way in which our relationships are in many ways anonymous, how we don't know people even when we do, and how what we do know impinges on our ability to connect. So taken in by words and occasional grand ideas is the writer, throughout this piece and others, that one rarely feels much for the characters or situations.

"Pavilion" is about marketing or public speaking or family relationships or all of them. A man speaks about forging families to others, forges one of his own sort of--and others. The last line here is memorable enough that it demands reading of the story itself to get to.

In "Recessional" a man lives with a divorced woman and her daughters. It's one of the longer stories in the collection, and as such, Lutz spreads out a bit, and that is in itself curious to see. A large amount of space is given over to the man emptying his pocket out on a dresser while his wife talks. I've never read so brilliant of a description for something so mundane.

"The Preventer of Sorrows" focuses on rooms--a woman's various rentals. Rooms with roommates and rooms alone, rooms with partners and husbands. Rooms in rowhouses and attic rooms. This manner of telling a story, not unlike Susan Minot's "Lust" is often compelling, but Lutz brings with it his own skewed vision such that the piece is something very different from anything Minot wrote. The piece ends with a profound line about how a place can overnight become something else. It makes you think about how we assign meaning to the places we go.

"Onesome" is about the struggle of staying in such relationships and how we in some ways subordinate our own lives in order to continue on with these others who have become part of us.

"Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been" covers much the same ground as many of the other stories, especially the early ones--a failing marriage, a set of jobs. Here, the focus becomes indexing, and the story itself features an index, and the narrator throws more and more of his life into categories (and into the jobs that he has).

The collection is full of so many stories, so many short ones, that it would be ponderous to recount all of them. Instead, one notices common themes and settings--offices, relationships, teaching, a kid. The pieces often feel as if part of a dream, given that the situations seem random and often the happenings go off on seemingly nonsensical tangents, even as they remain generally oh-so-commonplace. But Lutz's real strength in the sentence itself--so many beautiful lines. They get stacked up so much that his stories are probably better savored one at a time than read in a collection like this, where they tend to overwhelm and where the thread of the narratives gets lost.

On "Calamity and Other Stories" by Daphne Kalotay ***

A collection of twelve mostly loosely interrelated tales involving characters headed ultimately to a wedding, Kalotay does a good job of presenting middle-class life and concerns. These are well-written pieces that I am not surprised to see in print. They tell contemporary stories well, but they don't revolutionize the form or do anything else that might make them differ from other polished work.

"Serenade" recounts a girl's experiences with her piano teacher, who her next-door neighbor best friend also has for tutoring. The teacher is an artist of sorts, an effete musician, who appreciates all things beautiful, most especially women, in a somewhat lecherous way. But there's more going on than initially meets the eye, and not all of it involves the teacher, who essentially plays the part of a voyeur.

"A Brand New You" concerns a woman who meets her ex-husband (from eight years before) and ends up bedding him, even as she is trying to change her life, to become someone better than she used to be. What she finds, however, is a man who himself is on the decline, his good looks--his main attraction when a younger man--fading. There's certain poignancy in this story, the way this woman recognizes in the man weaknesses and sorrows that she hadn't seen before, ones that mirror some of her own.

Many of Kalotay's stories end on something of a subtle twist. That's the case with "All Life's Grandeur," which focuses on a teen forced to spend the summer with his father and his father's new love--and with an eleven-year-old girl whose devotion and friendship the teen dismisses and dislikes. There's a lot of sorrow in this story, wisely delivered.

That quiet despair is also part of "Prom Season," in which boys are told they must bring dates to the prom, and one, Mack, learns that there are things more important than getting the girl you want, things that can cause you to lose all you set out to accomplish.

The next several stories didn't hold my interest as much, as if having hit her stride, Kalotay was simply skating along traditional themes. The last and weakest of these, “Anniversary," focuses on women getting together for drinks to talk about a son's impending wedding to the "wrong girl." This was the first time I got the sense that the characters in these stories might be linked, as the name of a dropped girlfriend corresponded to the name of the woman in the previous story, and the name of the son corresponded to the boy in "Prom Season." The two women talk of love, and one of them thinks a lot about a dead husband. Thematically the story fit in well with the tales in this section of the collection, but I didn't feel like this piece really went anywhere. The main topic of the son Mack is almost completely dropped by the story's end as the piece changes focus to the dead husband.

"Snapshots" involves a wife's complaints about a house that her husband likes for its views and location. At times, there are wonderful moments in the marriage, like snapshots, but we get the sense that the marriage is ultimately doomed. A next-door neighbor holds much curiosity for the couple--the husband tries to figure out where the neighbor works, the wife goes with the neighbor into his house (the husband suspects there might be an affair occurring). The neighbor builds a tunnel into a closet in the couple's house, where he hides from time to time from the law. I thought this story, as odd as it was, seemed a good, realistic summary of a couple's relationship.

"Difficult Thoughts" does an intriguing thing insofar as Kalotay does not follow the usual script for a work that involves a majorly otherworldly detail. Most of the time, the story would focus on the odd turn of event that occurs in the tale; instead, Kalotay uses the event to bring the story to a close, leaving us uncertain to an extent as to its reality. The tale itself is about a woman student (Rhea, of "Allston Electric," among others) in Italy who falls for a pair of brothers who turn out to be playboys of a sort. Are they to be believed?

"Rehearsal Dinner" ruminates on love and breaking up and on how essential it is to have a significant other. It does so through a focus on Geoff, who a year earlier dropped a girl and who has been avoiding relationships since and how he comes to see a couple who pick him up on his visit into town and how natural they seem to fit together.

The title story, “Calamity,” is one of the better ones in the collection and sets up well the last, "Wedding at Rockport," which brings the characters from the various stories together, which proves an interesting way to construct the book. Knowing the background of the various peoples at the wedding makes for a different reading than one would make without the eleven stories preceding. A drunk maid of honor, for instance, is much more sympathetic when one knows the experience through which she's just passed. And that is really what is the most redeeming part of this collection, which does what great story cycles do--it builds little by little something much greater than the sum of its parts. It gives us a sense of a community of characters.

On "Train Shots" by Vanessa Blakeslee ***

Having only an electronic version of this one--a copy of the galleys given to me by the author for review--I've take a long while to read it through. I read on buses, on breaks, on street corners, in restaurants, on park benches, on sofas, in bed, anywhere I can manage. I don't read so much on computers--and certainly not much since taking on a family and moving to a new office that is not conducive to lunch-time reading at a computer screen. So I was not able to rip through Blakeslee's book with the kind of speed that a collection such as this would normally lend itself to: easy, fun reading.

Blakeslee's tales are of an expected variety--that is, there isn't a lot of experimentation here, and they didn't really leave me with much to ponder at the end of each one. But they accomplish what they do well.

After a fun lead-in short short about work relations, Blakeslee's collection settles in traditional faire. Most of the stories revolve around loss in some way--people searching for something, be it more to a relationship that is going bad or already has, a place to call home, or simply peace.

The strongest story in the collection, for me, is "Barbecue Rabbit," a tale about a mother and her mentally disturbed son. Reading about how this mother tries to cope is heartbrearking and horrifying.

"Uninvited Guests" focuses on a poor woman whose is forced to live under the surveillance of a religious landlord and to lie in order to continue a lifestyle to her liking. "Hospice of the Au Pair" focuses on a man whose wife dies and who has to deal also with the concurrent guilt of having a baby by another woman. "The Sponge Diver" focuses on the loss of a birth-control device amid the closing of a relationship. "Don't Forget the Beignets" is about a woman in over her head as her husband is carted away to prison for supposed financial misdeeds. And the title story at the end of the collection tells of a man dealing with the deaths he comes across (literally runs over) as a train engineer.

On "Painted Cities" by Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski ***

This collection focuses on a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. As its strongest, I got a real sense of the neighborhood and the people who lived there, but many of the pieces seem more like vignettes than stories and don't cohere that well. Throughout, we get a feel for a kind of fourth-world place where there are dreams but where there is also a kind of hopelessness that will never let those dreams come into being, save in the form of rare moments of beauty and art, crafted from dreams' destruction.

The first story focuses on daydreams--the way that a kid can dream of places and times in his past with a kind of idealism. Next, we turn to a story about panning for gold in the gutter, which becomes a kind of metaphor for looking for the treasure in life in a lower-class neighborhood, where nights consist of the sounds of fighting and sex and where people come together only when a building goes up in flame--over jealous love--with an entire family inside (not the kids too! they say).

I'm not sure what to make of the title story. Broken into four pieces, each piece focuses on a loss of some sort. The first section is about a graffitti mural. In that mural, a girl's tears turn out to be, when closely examined, reflections of the entire city down to the minutest details. The second section deals with gang shootings of a sort; the third focuses on the loss of a friend to the "underground," as he decides to go visit and live in the old city subway tunnels (one get the feeling we're talking about the underground as a meaphor for death); and the final section focuses on a puppeteer who calls forth dead Ritchie Valens for a mostly nonexistent audience.

One of the more successful stories in the book is "Freedom." It's the tale of two kids who make a rooftop their home--even going so far as to build a house of sorts on the roof. From that perch, they launch rocks at passersby for fun, until one day the rock throwing results in tragedy and their time of freedom comes to an end.

"Childhood" is about kids peeping toms and what results when they are finally caught at it. The story is mixed in with Catholic superstition (the disappearance of the Virgin creates a community stir) and guilt.

Another story split into parts is "Snakes." The first part focuses on folks who climb the El or who slink around in the underground like cave explorers. The next focuses on walls, and the next on what it is like to live in an Arab city. The piece closes with a short piece about proper etiquette at a wedding dance. How these pieces fit together, I was never able to quite figure.

Maximilian focues on three memories about Max (the narrator's cousin), two of them revolving around his fist--that is, fights that Max got into. The last story holds the most power, involving a funeral procession that is interrupted by a driver unwilling to wait. Max takes off after the driver and beats him up once he catches him. Was it worth the trouble?

"God's Country" is one of the better stories in the collection. It revolves around a kid named Chuey, who, as it turns out, has the gift of resurrection: he can raise dead things to life. There is some question as to the reality of this early on, but at the story proceeds, you come to believe in his power. But like a story of fantastic realism, the power is treated almost banally. The kids who gather round him get rather bored of watching Chuey raise dead animals, and even Chuey himself gets tired of using the power. Even miracles, as it turns out, are just a way to kill time during long and boring days as a kid. And coloring the whole story is a tragic event that makes the whole thing seem rather banal--raise the dead, but the neighborhood will kill no matter.

"Sides Streets" is another short piece that doesn't seem to quite add up. It's about different reactions to the death of a gangbanger named Casper: kids reenact his death; his mother disappears; the story moves into myth with no clear single reality.

"Blood" is an advice column--an older man dispensing advice to another kid in the neighborhood about how to be a man. How to act at a bar, and so on. It's an intriguing piece probably most because the form is so rarely used.

"Blue Magic" is the third story split into seemingly unrelated parts. The opening piece is the most intriguing here, explaining how a kid walks along the "edge" of the earth--namely his neighborhood, an area that he never leaves. I remember reading about how some people who grow in the inner city never leave a fairly small radius; it's as if their whole world is the neighborhood, and this story fits in with that kind of world vision.

"Growing Pains" is a complete story that works well, and "Sacrifice" is another strong piece, in part because it is so harrowing. It involves a man and his wife and the man whom the husband killed, the wife's ex-boyfriend. Ironies are packed in this piece--and double identities. The husband is from one side of the neighborhood; the wife and her ex are from the other side of the neighborhood. The child they have is named after the ex-boyfriend; this child is in fact the ex's offspring. The ex stalks the family, gets help from the family. The husband threatens--repeatedly--to do something. He is just trying to protect his family; or was the ex just trying to protect his?

"Supernatural" makes of pollution in a neighborhood canal what most make of something like the appearance of the Virgin Mary. In these last stories, Galavis-Budziszewski moves into a kind of satire. This is the miracle that neighborhoods like this get--a green glow from waste that might just heal someone but that is certainly interesting to look at.

Just like looking at fires is the fun activity in "Ice Castles." Full of old buildings, each night features one of them going up in flames. Father and son head out to watch the firefighters, who are generally less than effective. What glory fills the night sky--and sometimes the morning's ground.

On "Sixty Stories" by Donald Barthelme ***

Once, a long time ago, I was tasked to write up a bio and summary of criticism on Frederick and Steven Barthelme. I wrote up one on Donald, having been initially given the wrong name. A couple of years after that, I read Donald Barthelme's Snow White. It was absurd and fun and funny. I read it in the Fort Worth Central Library, in one sitting, as I had no means to check out books from that library, living literally a few hundred yards out of town. It's been nearly twenty years. Now I'm finally back to Barthelme. Why? He kept coming up in discussions about experimental fiction. And he showed up as the author of a story taught alongside a story by another author I know. I figured it was time to try Barthelme's short pieces.

Overall, I found the collection fun and intriguing, by as I find with that genius Faulkner's novels, it didn't feel like much of anything added up. These are stories that often just drop off, without any kind of epiphany. Barthelme, I'm sure, was eschewing that element of the form, an element that in its ubiquity almost seems trite. And yet, I find a story without some kind of gravitas ending to be, well, an anecdote. It doesn't tend to stick with me, no matter how clever or absurd the premise and execution.

My favorite stories of this collection generally managed to do something that thing that was clever or absurd, and they were often funny in a smile sort of way. Others were hard to stick to. Among the one that were hardest to stick with, for me, were those that consisted wholly of dialogues. Not only was it difficult sometimes to follow the conversations (often with non sequiturs) but the conversations often didn't seem to go much of anywhere. Now, if I managed to become engaged in the topic of the conversation, and sometimes I did, the dialogue could be quite funny in the smile sort of way. A masterpiece of this form was "The Farewell," which consisted of two people talking about getting into an exclusive institution--only it's not so exclusive as it once was. We see a good deal of awkward and mean competition between two "friends."

My favorite piece in the collection by far was one drawn from what I believe to be one of Barthelme's novels. It was called "A Manual for Sons." It is essentially a summation of fatherhood--what "father" means. I don't know exactly what it is that Barthelme does here that makes the piece so intriguing. It's simply an definition essay on fathers, but the way that he goes about setting out that definition, with its specificity and, many times, ridiculous appeals to history or anecdote fascinates like poetry.

Characteristic of the collection is the very first story, "Margins," which is about two men discussing character and handwriting analysis. If handwriting shows who we are, why bother reforming ourselves--instead, reform our handwriting. The story is an exploration on inner versus outer, surface versus depth--the margins. How can or does one reflect the other? And yet, Barthelme seems to provide no real answer--there's just a lot of talk. And one is left nodding the head, saying, Interesting. Maybe even beautiful. But so what?

On "Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth ***

Years ago I read The Last Voyage of Somebody Sailor, which I enjoyed enough that I kept a copy of it in my personal library (despite whatever mediocre reviews it may have gotten). But it has taken me nearly two decades now to get to Barth's classic collection of stories. Unfortunately, the collection proved as a whole to be underwhelming.

Here's what I liked about Somebody Sailor, as I recall: Barth's musings on middle-class life. There was, of course, a whole other plot involving Sinbad that becomes mixed in with the work, and while somewhat interesting, it was less compelling to me than the realist fiction of everyday life.

Something similar happened with this book for me. I was drawn most to the stories about Ambrose and his family. One explained how Ambrose got his name. One involved Ambrose being locked out of his brother Peter and Peter's friends' "club," in which the older kids discover a few things about sex. And the last involved Ambrose going to an amusement park. Each had some metafictional musings, as does the collection as a whole, but they remained subjugated to the purposes of the story as a whole. Such is not as much the case with the other stories, and as a result, my interest often waned before getting far into them.

Here's a rundown of some of the devices included: there's a story ("Night-Sea Journey") of a life that is essentially the tale of a sperm crossing crossing to its egg (or so I read from a secondary source--the tale could be easily read as one of a person swimming for life). There's a story telling the story of itself ("Autobiography"), which proves hardly as interesting as the conceit sounds. Other stories recount, in varying form, Greek legends--one discovering how to write as story, one exploring stories within stories (the techniques of "Menelaiad" is fascinating, as we get to a point where there are seven quotes within quotes, but the story itself hardly kept my attention).

The one exception to these other stories that really intrigued me was "Life-Story," which told of a writer trying to write the story that we readers are currently reading. All the conflict and crisis occurs right in there, as we witness the write dissatisfied with his work trying desperately to bring a decent story into being.

On "Pricksongs and Descants" by Robert Coover ***

I am surprised that I did not read this much earlier than I have. I discovered Coover near the beginning of college, and I was a big fan of "The Babysitter," but I barely gave the collection from which it is drawn a look. Instead, about ten years later, I read his novel John's Wife. The reason for this was threefold. One was that a coworker of mine explained to me the premise of his novel about baseball, which got me intrigued. Second, I had no access to a library at that time, so to meet my usual reading load, I was dependent on what I could find cheap in remainder bins or used. And John's Wife happened to be one of them. And then there was this: John's Wife began in a very interesting manner.

Unfortunately that novel got lost in its strangeness, becoming so inordinately weird that I lost interest about two-thirds of the way through (though I did finish it). I didn't return to Coover again.

Until now. And I wish I could say that I was mistaken in failing to read Coover for all these years. I can see how his work might have appealed slightly more in my early twenties, but I could also see myself not being that much more moved. That isn't to say I was not interested in his techniques--and in fact I still find those fascinating. Long before I had a computer or before the Internet was a widely used public utility, Coover was talking about the use of hypertext in fiction. I thought the ideas intriguing, but I didn't quite know how they would work or what they meant, not having the technology to refer to. The article, for those interested, is available here at the New York Times.

However, this Coover book is, as it is probably meant to be, deliberately alienating in many places, and I was left as if I were watching a showman, but in doing so, the showman fails to be a showman because I continue to see him as such throughout.

The stories in this collection are very much self-conscious. They are, many of them, a rerendering of fairy tales. They consider the process of storytelling itself, how we come to create narratives and what that means. They are also very male-centric stories, focusing often on sex and the female form. But the book is called Pricksongs, so what should be expected? Perhaps, Coover is intimating the sexual desire and story go hand in hand. Given how much best-selling fiction is romance or erotica, that's probably true.

The book opens with a prologue that makes the tie-in to fairy tales explicit. From there, the collection moves to a story called "The Magic Poker," which might qualify as my second-most favorite of the book (perhaps, "The Elevator" could also take the position). Coover is explicit here in saying the story is a story, telling us that he is the author and that he is about to introduce a character or that he regrets introducing a character because he seems to have little to do with the story, and so on. Vaguely, it involves two sisters who find a magic poker--one attracted to it, one repulsed; one who turns it into a prince and one who does not. The poker stands in for the frog the way you might expect the male anatomy to stand in for the prince here.

"Seven Exemplary Tales" features a prologue of its own and seven very short stories--some of them again, retellings of famous other stories. "The Elevator" discusses a man who plots revenge for constantly being accused of flatulence, when in fact another man is the one responsible. As with "The Babysitter" it ends up including several plotlines of possibility--sex with the woman who runs the elevator, revenge, the elevator dropping everyone to their deaths, being let off on the wrong floor or at a floor from which there is no return, and so on. "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl" recounts the tale of a family who lives in a touristy fishing area and the man who comes to fish with them, told as per usual with Coover, out of order and with seeming conflicts in terms of what actually happens. "A Pedestrian Accident" focuses on a man who is hit by a truck but is told as a kind of farce.

Another theme of this Coover book is performance. "Romance of the Thin Man and Fat Lady" recounts circus performers, for instance. And the final story in the collection involves a magician, acting as a kind of epilogue for the collection, one in which the magician can perform some great feats but in which he will inevitably disappoint, as indeed, the collection as a whole seems to do.