On "Great, Wondrous" by Marie-Helene Bertino (9761 words) ****

In this story from Bertino's collection, students at a Christian college perform a set of superheroic acts. One of them has the ability to make things disappear. The other has the ability to move things via thought. Put the two talents together, and walla, magic will happen. The talents will only get used for good, we promise. But in the end, sorrow will result, the cost of miracles. Read the story here at Five Chapters.

On "The Emperor Of Ice Cream" by Kevin Canty (8700 words) ****

I've been wanting to feature a Kevin Canty story since I started this blog. At one time, a great flash piece of his was featured on the Cutbank Web site, but in a transition to a new site, the old story disappeared, and so too did the chance to feature Canty--until now. I managed to find one that the folks at Five Chapters have posted, and it's a good one.

What makes Canty's work so memorable to me? He has a knack for fancy language when he wants to, but most often he works with rather stripped-down lingo, and this is a story that features mostly the latter. But straightforward narrative can be powerful when the story is good and the characters well drawn, and such is the case here. Lander nearly killed his brother, Tim, in a near-drunken car accident early in the summer and did manage to kill another driver. End of summer comes, and Lander has the chance to reunite with his brother--shrunken but now sort of well--and the rest of his estranged family. Tim is ready to return to their partying ways; not so much Lander (nor are Lander's parents keen on such), except that, you see, there's a girl involved, and that makes all the difference. Perhaps it's not the best idea to pursue this lady, but . . . Read the story here at Five Chapters.

On " Of Love: A Testimony" by John Cheever (7109 words) *****

About the same time that I first read The Stories of John Cheever, I read also his uncollected stories, a collection that came out about that time. Most of the stories were gathered from Cheever's early years, when he was trying to write in the manner of social realists. The stories weren't very good or interesting--passable, sure, but not marked by the kind of humor and pathos that his later work, set amid the suburbs of the Northeast, would achieve. Why this story didn't make it into that collection--or if it did, why I don't remember--I can't make sense of. I also don't know what Cheever left it out of his own selection. It's magnificent.

It's an old motif--the love triangle. Morgan is a young man newly arrived in the city (Boston, I believe), and through his friend Sears he meets a woman named Julia. Julia was once Sears's girlfriend, but now she is Morgan's, except Sears keeps hanging around. Someone's heart is going to get broken--and it might be yours. Read the story here at Five Chapters.

On "If Wishes Were Porsches" by Jay McInerney (5171 words) ***

I first read McInerney on my high school senior trip. I bought Bright Lights, Big City at Crown Books in San Diego. The book had been mentioned by my English teacher in conjunction with the Lost Generation, with Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (an amazing work I just finished rereading this past winter--twenty-some years after my previous reading, twenty-some years to forget just how amazing). So I wanted to read this new Lost Generation. McInerney was the first; I would read Bret Easton Ellis the next fall. Ellis I did not care for, except in the way he captured a certain milieu; McInerney I cared for a lot. I finished Bright Lights, Big City by the weekend after I returned from the trip and immediately started it again. I must have read it three times that summer. It was good. It was very good.

I went on to read Ransom, a book I also loved. And then Story of My Life (brand new, in hardcover), which proved disappointing. On the anniversary of my first reading of Bright Lights, Big City, I read it again and was again enthused. Other reading interfered then, and I didn't touch Bright Lights again for a long time. I did, however, somewhere in here get around Brightness Falls and was again disappointed. I began to think either McInerney had fallen in form, or I had been young and enthusiastic over writing that age was proving to be less than stellar.

About two years ago, I finally got around to rereading McInerney. I started with Bright Lights, Big City, and you know what? It was still great. I found the last half a bit contrived, but it still had heart and great, great writing. Ransom, unfortunately, proved not to live up to my memories of it--I had loved the portrayal of that strange world of Japan, but now it seemed like a very contrived novel. And then I read Model Behavior. The latter proved that McInerney was not a fluke. He was back in form for that novella, back in the world of Bright Lights.

Here is a story written by a master chronicler of the New York scene. Sure, I don't know how it is that McInerney's male protagonist always seems to have a model or future celebrity fall for him--and then leave him once the woman becomes famous. Sure, I wonder sometimes how people in such financial straits manage to lead such rich social lives (especially among the seemingly well-to-do). Maybe it's all my own lack of social skills that causes me to doubt these things. But for sheer force of New York City, for its moments of craziness one is unlikely to find elsewhere (the old man's story in the bath house here made me laugh out loud), for the energy of language and turns of phrase, McInerney is a wonderful and enjoyable writer to soak in. Read the story here at Five Chapters.

On "What Happens When The Mipods Leave Their Milieu" by Elizabeth Crane (4644 words) ***

I've been a fan of Elizabeth Crane's fiction since soon after her first book came out. Her first two books carried a very distinctive style consisting in long sentences in which she raved or complained or maybe just listed things but really just processed her--or rather her narrator's--thoughts so that you had the feeling you were listening in not just to thoughts but to some person's mildly insane musings, perhaps told to you over coffee, or read on the Web somewhere, like this, only not this particular site specifically because I'm not insane--I promise--even if someone says otherwise, someone who obviously doesn't know me. . . . Anyway, this story doesn't do that. It's a departure, in that sense, from what I'm used to from her. But it's also a pleasure. Crane has rarely been as funny. And what makes the humor even better here is that her observations seem, in some ways, quite trenchant. Meet the Mipods, a couple whose simplicity is taken for--surely--something much more than that. Read the story here at Five Chapters.