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.

On "Fleshy Things," by Stefanie Freele (310 words) ****

I don't know what it is about reptiles, but they often come up when we get into matters of longing of the sexual variety. Maybe it's the idea that reptiles are this throwback to a supposedly early evolved species, a creature whose bones go back to a time well before any of us mammals. And yet, here we are, full-fledged mammalian creatures, and the same impulse to reproduce is strong within us, so strong that it can pull us toward things that aren't good for us. Here, we're talking a snake handler and a gal, and one of them is going to handle the other. Read the story here at Fried Chicken and Coffee.

On "Chickamauga" by Ambrose Bierce (2530 words) ***

This short piece of Bierce's resounds mainly for its masterful description. It's a horrifying world that Bierce puts together. It's a story about a child playing in the woods who comes across a body of retreating, almost dead soldiers. The descriptions are what make this piece so utterly gruesome--and the child's incomprehension--but hang around for the ending, which brings helplessness to a whole new level. Read the story here.

On "Baby" by Larry Fondation (239 words) ***

Let's watch a relationship sputter out of control. Or rather, let's watch it peter out. There's this couple. Bad things happen. They get in touch now and then. Maybe it'll work out. Wait and see. Or just read it, quickly, here at Dark Sky Magazine.

On "The Other Me" by Kim Bond (555 words) ****

Doppelgangers are a common feature of Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges, but not as much in the works of most other people. There's probably some good reasons for that, as in they probably often don't make for good stories (if you've read a lot of Poe's lesser work, you probably recognize this). Bond works off this old motif to write a piece about self-recognition, younger versus older, in traffic. It's simple, but it's rather effective, and it's a whole lot of fun. Read it here at Foliate Oak.

On "The Right Eye of the Commander" by Bret Harte (2968 words) ***

This old story by Bret Harte has a certain magic-realist feel to it. Perhaps it's the Spanish names. Perhaps it's the trinket seller who is also a magician of sorts. The commander, having lost his right eye, lives on in a California fort during Spanish times. The visit of a stranger proves useful in that the commander is left with a new eye, one that, while he can't see with, seems to be able to see into others. Read the story here.

On "Lust" by Susan Minot *****

I've now read this book at least three times in the past twenty years and assorted stories from it many times more. Minot's writing is spare, reminiscent of the What We Talk about When Talk about Love Carver and that ilk from the 1980s. Such spare writing is easy to read, but it is not necessarily easy to write if the work is to have much power. At times, Minot strains too hard at her endings, but when her stories work, they have real force.

The most memorable story continues to be the title story. It is unlike any other in the collection, and only a few tales I've come across use a similar form. The reason is probably that such a form is not easy to pull off. It's essentially a list, a set of discreet paragraphs, about different boyfriends that builds to a crescendo without any kind of overt plot. We get the sense of someone desperate for love or desperate for something, someone struggling to find her way past lust and sex toward something more substantive. It's a story that works well for the collections opener, since all the short, spare tales that follow essentially work off the same theme.

My favorites in the collection, beyond "Lust," include "Blow." This is a tale about a man who has just been broken up with and who is high on drugs, trying to deal--or it's a story about someone else, a woman friend, high on the drug of love and not realizing how much that too can distort everything you do and feel. Another one of the best is "The Break-Up," which revolves around a visit from another man who has just lost his girlfriend. In this case, he decides there, visiting a couple, that he will pursue the girlfriend again--but we get a sense that the couple he visits is also on the downslide. "The Feather in the Toque" revolves around a woman dating a man who has had lots of other women and how that makes her feel, to know she's just one of his temporary stays. The motif comes up in several other tales in the collection as well, as in "A Thrilling Life."

The very spareness of these tales, mixed with the similarity in theme across them, does cause them to begin to blur together. It is one of the unfortunate things about the collection, for a get a sense that, alone, many of these stories would shine much more brightly.

On "Respectful Beatings for Very Good Help" by G. K. Wuori (5220 words) ***

Much is in the details. In G. K. Wuori's short story, two women, newly arrived to the United States, struggle to make sense of the world around them--this American world, this American work world. Expectations regarding what is acceptable and what is not clash. But growing trouble eventually becomes too large even for those used to different standards of behavior. Action must be taken. Enter an insane old man, whose command of riches allows for such problems to be solved.

But I said that much is in the details. Part of the charm of this piece comes from its mastery of the English language--or lack thereof. Our narrator has mastered the language but not yet many of its nuances and turns of phrase, and as a result, the occasional odd phrasing hits just the right note. Read the story here at the Workplace Anthology or here at the Barcelona Review.

On "Orientation" by Daniel Orozco *****

This is one of the best new books of short stories I've read in a long while. I say "best" even though I've read some really good book collections lately. The difference here, however, was that Orozco pretty much doesn't miss with any single one of the stories. Certainly, as with all collections, some stories are better than others, but there was only one story in here where I felt like, Yes, that was okay. The rest, on some level each time, wowed.

The longest story--"Somoza's Dream"--is the one I was the least interested in. It reads like a Garcia Marquez historical piece (think The General in His Labyrinth). Certainly, it's an accomplished story, but it didn't stand out to me in the way that Orozco's other tales do.

My favorite was "I Run Every Day," the tale of a middle-aged virgin who is befriended by a slightly overweight coworker. What happens as a result is shocking and bleak, and yet somehow I found myself feeling for a person with whom generally one would feel no pity. This is also one of the straightest--that is, most traditional--stories in the collection and one of the few in first person.

Many of Orozco's stories work around gimmicks or experiments, but he pulls each one of them off. The title story--the way in which I became familiar with the collection--was read on NPR; it's a story of advice, an introduction to an office environment, every bit as cold as some office environments can be and yet every bit as bureaucratic and personal-privacy sinister as they often can be as well.

"Hunger Tales" is just that--four snapshots related to food--that somehow end up feeling like a complete story, even though none of the four stories have anything in common with one another other than the theme of food. The tale reminded me a bit of the triptychs Madison Smartt Bell pulls off in his collection Zero dB. I found these tales more interesting than Bell's triptychs, however.

"Officers Weep" tells a tale of a duo of police officers' day in the form of a police report. As it unfolds, the information becomes more and more personal. This isn't, for the most part, a Hollywood duo's day--this is mundane police work, breaking up loud parties and rescuing cats (though as the story goes on a subplot does emerge that promises potential serious trouble).

"Only Connect" tells the story of a drug shooting from three different points of view. "Temporary Stories" revolves around one temp's various temporary jobs, forging another kind of triptych story. Orozco finishes the collection with "Shakers," which isn't a story in a conventional sense--it's more of a description of California and of a quake in California, but what a description! The writing reminded me of how Kate Braverman can be sometimes in her work, going off on some subject, not necessarily plotting anything out for us but leaving us so breath-taken by the words and phrases and sentences being used that the language itself becomes a kind of storyline with climax.

On "Liability" by S. P. Tenhoff (5597 words) ****

Stephen Dixon's Interstate is a novel that takes a heartrending event and obsesses over it--over and over and over. Tenhoff's short story does something similar. It's not repetitive in the way that Dixon's book is, and it doesn't go on nearly as long, and in a way that's better. For while Dixon's Interstate is a fascinating exercise, it is a difficult book to actually finish. Tenhoff's story is not.

"Liability" also does some other things nicely as well. The decisions in weekly chess matches are paired against the decisions made while driving (a single point can send a given match to its inevitable close ten moves down). The main character's worry over his own son is matched against the worry over the boy that his car hits. His drinking becomes a matter of concern--or doesn't.

What Tenhoff manages particularly well here, however, is getting into the mind of a man who has done something accidental but horribly life changing. The writing is listless to start, then it increasingly focuses on issues of liability and of guilt. Who is at fault? Could it very well be the man's fault? Add in small details about insurance bureaucracy and you have the makings of something that seems almost real Read the story here at Swink.

On "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving (7282 words) *****

It's surprising how well this old tale holds up. When I was a kid, I once saw the first half of a movie about old Rip--basically, up until the point where he fell asleep. I was really disappointed to have to miss the last half--being just a kid, my parents had to haul me to the store with them that Sunday.

I don't think I actually read the tale until I was in college, as part of one of my American literature classes, and I hadn't read it since. Irving does some neat things with the faux historicity of it, including notes and affirmations by locals regarding authenticity. And the tale itself is, in part, one about a miserable marriage that Van Winkle works his way out of by disappearing for a couple of decades. Also of note is the way that the very nature of the surroundings in which Van Winkle lives changes over the course of that time, as if to point to the glories of the new country.

I reread the story largely because it was sent to me by Scout Books, which offers a set of short stories in small single volumes. Each one is illustrated, this one by Bwana Spoons. A size no larger than a wallet, the small books would make for nice small and cheap gifts--the kind of thing one might hand out at a function where all are to receive a small souvenir or that one might include as part of a package of larger gifts. The illustrations are cool, though there aren't very many (only about three to five in each volume that I have seen), and the print is tiny, but at less than five dollars apiece, they're seem great for a mass purchase and giveaway. Read the story here, then check out the Scout Books version here.

On "Cheap" by James Armstrong (1122 words) ***

How much are we worth? To our family, we are worth everything, if it comes to a health-care expense. How dare an insurance company tell us no more? We sell our house and our car, spend out our retirement, anything, to keep this person alive. Or . . .

We get scared. We avoid the family all together. Let's nip this in the bud. Let's do things on the cheap.

This story mines that border between friendship and intimacy. Up front, we pay twenty dollars for an evening, put the person on layover. And then, either we never come back or we cash out our bank balance. Read it here at Stirring.

On "The Complete History of New Mexico" by Kevin McIlvoy **

Much of what gets published in journals comes down to there being some sort of gimmick. The gimmick gets people's attention, and if you're not a known, respected writer already, sometimes attention is what you need to get people to actually read what it is you've written. Different is good. Different is interesting. Sometimes different is as strong or stronger than traditional. And sometimes, traditional is enough.

McIlvoy's Complete History reads like a set of gimmicks, one after another after another. The stories contained in this collection include chain letters, wills, monologues, stories based on lyrics, and--the title story--drafts of student essays. It is the drafts of the student paper on the complete history of New Mexico that make for the most-entertaining reading in the collection. They are funny and absurd, though I'm not sure how the various drafts improve on one another such that the student's grade gets higher each time he tries. And there's a poignant backstory trying to work its way out of all the reflection on prostitutes and mules and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and reversible jackets. Somewhere down here, a kid's friend dies. But it's swallowed up in pseudohistory that seems to wander farther afield from any semblance of reality with each draft. Parts of these three stories made me laugh (if one can call them stories--rather than just grade-school reports so bad that they're good).

The rest of the collection didn't speak much to me. Some of the stories include repeating characters. McIlvoy tells a tale of a white trash family destroying their house (or really one member of the family doing so), one of whom shows up in a later story--a rant about piano moving. He tells a tale of a family who owns a giant rhino that it paints and whose mother is dying and doesn't get to see the rhino, and so lives to hear what stories the family will tell about it--some of whom show up in a later story about a wedding.

The most moving tale to me ("Permission") involved three bar employees and a magician who wants to be hired on for entertainment. Late hours, at or after closing time, he performs tricks for the three bar workers. There's something mysterious here, some essence that is hard to explain. The three of them all want the tricks done on them, want to be the subject of the magician's main attention, just as, on some level, the three of them are also involved in some kind of contest for each other's attention. It's a pitiful situation, the narrator tells us, and in some hard-to-define way, the pity comes through to the reader.

On "Tennessee's Partner" by Bret Harte (3622 words) ***

I'm highlighting this 140-year-old story mostly for its beautiful language and its humorous turn of phrase. That the writing has been around so long and still seems fresh is quite an achievement. Tennessee partner is a man who quite literally lives for his friend. When that friend gets into trouble, the partner is there. But what's really cool are Harte's observations about the community and about the jury rigged up to try Tennessee. One gets a sense that Harte doesn't particularly take much liking to the American, or at least American western, legal system: "they were ready to listen to any defense, which they were already satisfied was insufficient." The tale is full of such bracing observations like these. Read more of them here.

On "Rise" by L. Annette Binder (1186 words) ****

Here's one to send chills through you. The story is in the elision, and I am, for one, thankful that elision is there. Who wants to see the grisliness that occurs? This piece is more harrowing for what we don't see, and for the remains that come back to the surface. Read the story here at Swink.