On "A Tough Tussle" by Ambrose Bierce (3117 words) ***

Bierce likes to tell ghost stories, and this one from his Soldiers and Civilians collection is one of the better ones. A soldier gets holed up with a dead man for the night. Carnage ensues. But how are we to read what happened? Read the story here and decide for yourself. Cue creepy music.

On "Trouble with Girls" by Marshall Boswell *****

I suppose one could call this book lad lit. It was well received among the indie bookstore crowd. It's a collection of linked stories, in chronological order--some publishers might have even tried to call it a novel, which I think would disappoint those looking for a sustained narrative. The book is also one of my favorite reads of the past decade.

The story that first brought Boswell to my attention was published in the Yalobusha Review some eight years before the book saw light. By then Boswell had already won a context with Playboy magazine, and I couldn't help but wonder why he was submitting to the little magazine I was serving as an editor of at the time. We accepted the story in a heartbeat. That story, "Bloody Knuckles," however, seems quite unlike most of the stories in this collection. It has a kind of lyricism that Boswell's other stories only hint at. And it, along with the first story, "Ready Position," makes up the set of only two pieces that have nothing to do with "girls," the title of the collection. I suppose this makes sense--they are stories about boys.

By story three, the main character, Parker, is in high school and has discovered girls--and girls become the subject of the last eight stories. Parker is clueless and innocent and hopelessly optimistic, and it's a treat to watch him marshall his way from relationship to relationship, whether it's with a gal at a Christian camp, a too-hip-for-him punkster, or a gal who is about to be committed (literally).

The two best stories--or I should say, the two most memorable--from my first read of this book several years ago now are the two that appeared in Playboy. "Stir Crazy" is the tale of a couple of strippers who live next door, and Parker's eventual dating and dropping of one of them, with attendant bad results. "Venus/Mars" regards Parker's beautiful wingman (or rather, wingwoman) for a week and the help she lends him scoring with others--but with eventual revelations that threaten to destroy all that Parker has gained.

I also, on this read, particularly liked a story called "Between Things," which was first published in the Missouri Review. Here, Boswell, in places, returns to the kind of lyric voice he holds in "Bloody Knuckles," but in addition there's a kind of maturity of storyline and plot, complete with perhaps the best epiphany in the book, as Parker discovers something about both himself and the woman he's been sort of dating, sort of not.

On "Sundays" by Tawnysha Greene (211 words) ****

What a wonderful little short piece this is. My mom always used curlers, so it was a different sort of experience when I went to visit aunt and cousins, who were devotees of the curling iron and the hairspray. Greene captures such morning rituals perfectly here. But she does something even more interesting with the closing of the eyes. This story does what a good flash often does, bringing disparate things together. Read it here at Wigleaf.

On "Levels of the Game" by Townsend Walker (1562 words) ***

So you want to read about something on the edge, something that pushes the limits. Think, for example, about Cronenberg's film Crash, all those people seeking traffic accidents for arousal. Okay, let's add some kids. Let's make it kids seeking traffic accidents for new highs. And let's add a kind of MADD do-gooder social reason. That's essentially the piece Walker puts together here, and if what is noted above sounds fascinating, then the story itself is bound to be even more so. Read it here (originally appeared in Dispatch Litareview).

On "What You've Done For Me" by John S. Walker (4185 words) ***

This story is about things that are slowly running out of control. Each of the major characters can see events coming toward them, trouble that will be part of their lives. And yet, there's a certain helplessness in the face of that trouble. Struggle as they might against fate, they're doomed to fulfill it. Strange how one can get all of this out of a single bar conversation, a man's brother and that man's wife, two marriages running out of steam, two men that want back out in the world, only one that will make it. Read the story here at Carve magazine.

On "Road Hunting" by Lindsay Purves (3344 words) ****

A story works according to elements. In each piece, the elements are generally unique. An author choose a few items--a gun, a bottle, loneliness, and a beach--and then works them around each other, over and over, until the final flourish.

In "Road Hunting," Purves does just that. We have two characters, Daniel and Juliana--young and hopeful. We have a shared activity--the hunt for roadkill. And then we watch as those two characters dance around each other, hunting one another. Daniel is a guy with a reputation for being a bit of a manipulator, but he has plans, plans that will take him away from the town where he grew up and off to better places. Juliana isn't much different. She's a bit snooty, apparently, because she too has plans--to use her stronger education and better financial situation to go elsewhere. They hang together for the summer because they're friends, because they just need to be there for one another. They aren't in love. Or are they? Or are they even friends? Read the story here at Anderbo.

On "Hit-and-Run" by Douglas Light (5156 words) *****

As I noted in my write-up of Light's first collection, some of his most powerful stories build on small details, using them for multiple effect. In this story, for example, accidents become a motif that forge both the main event of the story and the aura in which the story resides. A man is hit by a car on a walk home after museum show opening. But such is not the first scar he will bear. His face is scarred by something else entirely, something that draws a woman toward him, but the story behind the scar is multivaried, the truth something we will never know. Just as we can't know the real essence of a person involved in an accident whose name shows up in a newspaper, no matter how many people are interviewed, we can't know what really resides behind the features of a person's face. The stories go on forever. You can read the story here at Night Train.

On "Girls in Trouble" by Douglas Light *****

I'm not a fan of Grace Paley, but I am a fan of this, a Grace Paley Prize winner. I've become familiar a bit with Light's work through stories of his that have been published online, most particularly those that found a home at Failbetter. Both of those stories are featured here in this book, and especially in the case of the second, "Breaking Up," I was reminded by just how phenomenal Light's writing can be. It's essentially a recounting of various breakups amid yet another attempt to find a girlfriend--hilarious, clever, fun.

That's not to say that all of Light's stories are light. Many of them are far from such. "Orphans" ventures into the dark territory of a girl sexually abused by an uncle who may or may not have actually been related to her and who now is storming back into her life in the form of an inheritance she has been handed.

"Zebra" is one of my favorite of the darker stories in Light's first story collection. The tale recounts the life of a girl adopted by a family of another race. The word "Zebra" itself takes on so many meanings here that Light's story is one that would lend itself fairly easily to teaching. There's, of course, the idea of black and white mixed (and yet contrasted) on one creature as it is mixed in this one family. The reason, as Light notes, for this feature on a "Zebra," is that when the animals are together, it is not easy for them to be preyed upon; predators can't pick out any single one from the pack because of the coloration. But when one is alone, the pickings are, of course, easy to the extreme. And in this family, struggling to stay together, one gets the sense that their survival as individuals depends on their finding some way to continue to exist as a group. Or one could read it as the opposite, that the girl here, pulled from the community in which she has been raised, is now on the verge of some kind of greater danger among kin who are not her kin.

Some of Light's most powerful stories build on small details, using them for multiple effect. In "Orient," for example, Light recounts the tale of a woman who dates a man who has a fascination with an ancient map that places the Orient in the center of the world. It is, as the man states, the reason that part of the world has its name--the center orients us to all the other things in the world. The point hits hard as the story moves forward, with the girl, who is already lost, working harder and harder to find where she belongs. "Separate" is about another lost person, this one a man whose divorce has set him adrift in New York City and who realizes that he never knew love.

"Three Days. A Month. More." is a tale that made quite a few fans when it first appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review. It's a story much like the others in that it involves women adrift, this time a thirteen- and eleven-year-old whose mother has disappeared and who now live alone in an apartment with a boyfriend of sorts who the two curious girls compete for.

"Animals" is a fragmentary piece that works extremely well in the composite. It's essentially a set of sensational stories involving violence. Each piece on its own is interesting, but what's fantastic is how Light manages eventually to weave them all together.

Light's stories go down easy. On the whole, I found the longer ones more to my taste, but that's not to say that the longer ones are long. None of the stories go more than twenty pages, and most stick to around ten. The stories are fun to read, and as a writer, I found them fun to watch see being put together one word and sentence at a time. Light makes it look easy.

On "1966" by Janice Shapiro (3941 words) ****

What I love about Shapiro's story is the elaborate description it gives of a time and place. This is Los Angeles in 1966. These are kids, with a summer to obsess over baseball or murder. And this is a summer for a grumpy teenager, who is about to take a step in the open--told from the point of view of children. It's a story about longing and about slowly have one's perspective change. Dad is no longer a hunk; he's simply not bad looking. The babysitter doesn't like you. And on and on. Read the whole bevy of discoveries here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "Two Serious Ladies" by Jane Bowles *****

I first read this novel about eight years ago, in conjunction with a list of reading I was doing on the Arab world and Paul Bowles. I figured, Why not read Paul's wife. And so this novel and her short stories got tacked on to the end of that list. The novel has nothing to do with the Arab world, of course, but it was a great discovery for me (sadly the short stories didn't seem anywhere near the same level). Paul's method apparently involved writing quickly then rewriting one draft more. Jane, by contrast, apparently labored over each sentence, sometimes managing only one in a day. And that method shows in this work of hers, for each sentence is a gem.

*Two Serious Ladies* is, actually, hilarious. The story--but it's not really a novel set around a plot--ostensibly involves two parallel narratives about two women. One woman is Miss Christina Goering; the other is Mrs. Copperfield. The two meet up in two places in the novel, once near the beginning (at a party) and at the end (at a restaurant). In between, Mrs. Copperfield goes to Panama with her husband and finds a new sense of herself--or loses herself in yet another person. For if at the start of the book she is Mr. Copperfield's wife, at the end she is a woman obsessed with a Panamanian prostitute named Pacifica. Mrs. Goering, by contrast, moves from a house she has inherited into a new home on an island and then deserts the people who have come to live with her to spend her days back on the mainland pursuing various men--and some kind of religious experience.

There are parallels between the two women. Both are consumed by obsessions with others. Mrs. Copperfield has her Pacifica; Miss Goering has her Miss Gamelon (and then her Andy and her Ben, not to mention Mr. Arnold's father, or even Mr. Arnold himself). Both move to new places and then return, of a sorts, to the world from which they have come--but in a transformed state. Both are searchers who never stop searching, who think that they are getting closer to what it is they are looking for but who seem incapable, in the end, of finding it.

But the essence of this book--what makes it so memorable--is not in this vague idea of a plot. The narrative wouldn't be substantial enough to hold most people's interest. What is fascinating here is the language itself--those sentences. There are zingers everywhere, some of them laugh out loud funny. One of my favorites is a statement one character makes to another at a party in describing one of her friends: "She's not like you at all. She's very intelligent." Or there's this description, early on, of Miss Goering, as a child: "Even then she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being."

And the book does have some ties in to themes that her husband Paul would so often return to in his own fiction, for in Jane's work, Panama stands in for that Arab world that Paul so often wrote about. And as in Paul's world, where American ignorance of foreign social customs results in grave danger, in Jane's world the same sort of ignorance creates danger as well; however, in Paul's work, the result is usually tragic, whereas in Jane's the result is comic--to an extent. For underneath all the comedy, there rests in this book a kind of vague hopelessness, not so much that we as humans will never understand each other because of differences in upbringing but that we'll never understand each other because of our own strict adherence to our own worlds, our own minds, our own imaginations.

On "There Are Things I Need You to Know" by Roxanne Gay (673 words) ***

Want to listen to someone talk about what they like most about a boyfriend? Want to listen to what that person doesn't like, what scares that person, how that boyfriend makes that person feel? Gay's short piece revolves around this intimate details, and what makes it so arresting is the very fact that they do seem so intimate and real. Read the story here at Foundling Review.

On "Nowhere" by Walter Cummins (4349 words) ***

In "Nowhere," a woman bound to a man she has little interest in does the unthinkable. She leaves him, on a kind of dare, and takes up with a random guy on a train. The man, some old guy, proves a fascinating character, and the woman's own wonder becomes our own. The story is about wandering, about wanderers, about those who choose to do so because they can and those who have no choice and must do so. Locked up in the isolation that is our bodies, we scan for homes we can rest in, even if only temporal. Read about this particular voyage here at Serving House Journal.

On "Angie Gets a Job" by Linda Boroff (3175 words) ****

A friend of mine--six years old--thinks she has the world figured out. Anytime things don't go her way, she cries. Such a tactic works for a child, in part because the adults just don't want to deal with listening to bawling for hours on end. It's tempting to give in.

In a way, Boroff's story is about such a person who has grown up. Angie bawls her way through life, and it gets her what she wants. Sort of. Actually, it gets her a job, but it's not a good job; in fact, it's a rather unsavory one. How is one ever to get ahead in this life? Better start bawling again. Read the story here at Workplace Anthology.

On "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" by Raymond Carver *****

I haven't read this collection in years, but it still speaks to me. I think my favorite collection is still What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, but this one still stands out nicely. I remember loving the title story for one. On this read-through, it was still fairly powerful, the way that Carver adds up all the simple details until we get to that final moment in which there is a kind of recovery. But I wasn't as well moved by the opening of the story, which didn't seem to justify the particular conversation that creates all of the story's angst. In fact, many of the stories toward the end of the collection didn't speak to me as much.

But at the start of the collection, Carver is on fire, and it's several of these that are classics. In "Neighbors," a couple assigned to check next door while the neighbors are away begin to lead a kind of fantasy life in the other's home, suggesting some great lack in their own lives. In "They're Not Your Husband," a man works to make something of his wife (that is, make her look good to other men), in a way that is both creepy and somehow touching. In "What's in Alaska?" friends share weed and talk about imminent plans to move away from one another--like many of Carver's stories, nothing much seems to be happening, but we remain glued to the story somehow because he conveys a power in the most mundane of moments. In "Night School" a man living with his parents tries to pick up a couple of women but finds his child-like living arrangement to be too difficult to get past.

"Put Yourself in My Shoes" recounts another party, this one, one in which a couple confronts another about damage to a rental home. In "Jerry and Molly and Sam," Al decides to get rid of the family dog but finds it more difficult than he'd have ever expected, just like so many things in life. In "What Is It?" a couple desperate for cash settles on selling a car--and perhaps a wife in the process.

It's the sheer fact that there are so many great stories here that I have a hard time remembering all of them. Some, over the years have stuck with me, not as much because I once read them here but because I read them, separately, in some other anthology, when compared with other stories, they stood out like diamonds.

On "Killed at Resaca" by Ambrose Bierce (2380 words) ***

If a bit heavy handed, Bierce's story is nonetheless effective at putting a bullet to the idea of the glories of war, honor, and courage. He does it by placing within a soldier all the great virtues of a warrior, and then exposes how the man came about gathering those virtues, amid all that such virtues achieve for him. Don't expect any great speeches about what a valorous man he was. Read the story here.

On "The Butcher Boy" by Patrick McCabe *****

This is one of the first books I completed after I finished my undergraduate degree. It's been over fifteen years since then. I was blown away by the book in my twenties. On occasion, I've returned to these magnificent books of younger years and still found them excellent; on other occasions, I've found the work no longer seemed to speak to me as much. McCabe's novel falls into the first category.

Ostensibly the story of a psychotic killer told in a Joycean monologue, this work struck me as more tragic (and pitiful) on this read than humorous (a feeling that I remember having on the first read, in addition to the tragic feeling). McCabe presents us with a boy who can't grow up and whose horrid family life at home leads him to envy another family and to live out his jealousy by terrorizing them.

On "The Woman We Imagine" Andrew R. Touhy (964 words) ***

I'm reminded of a Cortazar story with this one, in which a man who goes with his family to look at a painting each day over the course of the piece ends up looking at his own family in the painting--in other words, slowly merges with the painting at which he stares. Touhy's description has something of that magical realism feel. In this piece, a woman seems very much to look like a bird, and our narrators, we come to see, aren't far off. Imagination meets the real world here at the Collagist.

On "The Man with the Nose in His Living Room" by Zin Kenter (643 words) ****

Kenter's work has a strange, dreamlike quality. In one of her other stories, wings drawn on a page take to life and fly away, for example. In this story, three destitute people hear that a bakery they enjoyed as children has closed, and so they head off to steal the bakery's emblem, a giant nose. Kenter brings in much material that seems unrelated to the subject at hand, and at first I felt like, um, what's all this other stuff doing in here. But I think that by the end she pulls it off. Why? Because this story isn't just about the nose but about the old adage about how smell is our most powerful sense when it comes to eliciting memories. And indeed, the end of this story is a doozy, bringing us back a memory that showcases just how sad these people's lives are, sad in a way that is absurd at the same time. Read the story here at Frigg.

On "Seasonable" by Forrest Roth (714 words) ***

We get old, but our brains don't. My mom once said she still felt twenty-two, except the body. Here an old man falls for a younger woman, a much younger woman. He sings anew. Really, he's just another teen boy, wrinkled. Are we men really so sad? Read the story here at Writers' Bloc.

On "No Mess Allowed" by Maria Kusnetsova (7750 words) ***

I knew where this story was going to go about 10 percent of the way in, but that seemed okay. What drew me to the story was the narrator. Kusnetsova does something that isn't easy here. She tells the story from the point of view of a middle schooler, but also from the point of view of someone much older looking back on that time in life. The second point of view, however, is mostly in the background, so we mostly feel as if we are in this twelve/thirteen-year-old's head.

The story is about friendships, the way that they fall away from us as we age. I'm reminded of something an acquaintance of mine once said, how friends were only made to last a few years. I've been blessed with a few that have lasted decades, but on the whole, that observation is correct. As we age, our interests change and our priorities as well. Beyond that, circumstances change. Friends from work, for example, aren't so much friends anymore once work isn't held in common, except in a few rare cases. We move on. And yet, we also grieve, and that's what this story is about. Read it here at Summerset Review.