Ted Chaing - "Stories of your life and others"

first story, "Tower of Babylon", where people are able to get to heaven, after weeks of climbing (the tower was built during generations), and start digging, they think of the biblical floods, install doors to deal with it, but the protagonist still gets swept up... and ends up on Earth.

And realises it's an endless scroll, like a cylinder pressed in clay...

Karen Russell - "Vampires in the lemon grove and other stories"

 

Fila makes the lemonade and monitors the hot dog machine, watching the meat rotate on wire spigots. I'm fascinated by this machine. The Italian name for it translates as "carousel of beef." Who would have guessed as such a device two hundred years ago? Back then we were all preoccupied with visions of apocalypse; Santa Francesca, the foundress of this very grove, gouged out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame, I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in that circle of night.

Wind blows the leaves apart. Lemons wink like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening, and I can see the other, truer night behind them.

Martin Marprelate - "Notes from Noho / a god at work in Noho"

Interesting short story in Dodgem Logic.  Some tone to the writing that is nice.

(author's name is likely a pseudonym as it was used as such in the 16th century with seven tracts written against the episcopacy of the Anglican church)

Claire-Louise Bennet - "Pond"

short stories, very dry and deadpan.

Julia Armfield - "Salt Slow"

Amazing magic realism / fantasy stories.
Beautiful way of phrasing things, juxtaposing feelings and impressions. (I've been using the wrong page numbers, of another book, for the first quotes and did not notice anything amiss.

To her eyes, there is nothing obviously wrong with any of them; they all wear logo T-shirts, like to pose next to barbecues, all seem partially blinded by the sun. Her friends, however, tap their screens to zoom in on throats and the corners of eyelids, reminding her that to love a man is to watch him buckle.

Later on, she goes back to the kitchen to wash up. Looking out into the shared garden, she sees Mrs Lumis making a shuffling tour of the lawn in the first of the snow. A strange sight, spectral. Like death walking in the morning, looking for its lost cat.

Knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude. Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to amuse and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people Loneliness like a taste on the skin.

Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.

Lauren Groff - "The Wind"

Amazing and chilling story of marital abuse told from the view of the daughter, or rather from her daughter as she told it to her, every night, the same details, omitting the same truth.

M. John Harrison - "You Should Come With Me Now"

Some interesting and really strange stories (about the man trying to escape from a prison), some of them less interesting. 

Daniel Mason - "A registry of my passage upon earth"

 Collectin of short(er) stories. Few of them actually grabbed me. 

That, he said, was why he no longer trusted his counselors, who ahd the intelligence of a fiteen-year-old bride, with none of the advantages.

(from "The Miraculous Discovery of Passmetichus I")

Octavia E. Butler - "Bloodchild"

short eponymous story and others, including a few essays.

Good writing.  The short story about how people cannot talk anymore was interesting. Her afterword after each story made it particularly interesting.

"Contemporary British Short Story" (edited by Philip Hensher)

Mr Philip Hensher has strong opinions when it comes to short stories. I liked some, but have not properly kept track of which ones. Except that I remember Lucy Wood's "Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict" as beautifully haunting and melancholic, about an elderly couple living close to the beach where more and more waste keeps turning up.

Amy Hempel - "Sing to it"

Same style as previous books; short stories.

Again, really well written. But also; things become familiar now. Too familiar. "They know us as..." about the dogs in the rescue center. Have read too often about this now.

James Joyce - "Dubliners"

A number of short stories describing middle class life in Dublin. I doubt I will ever be a James Joyce fan, but he creates sometimes amazing imagery. The problem for me is that the arc of his stories never catch me. I never care about the characters or their lives. I love the detail and description, but there is no emotional connection for me.


"The Sisters"
Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him, and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuffbox, for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of snuff dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their gree faded look, for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.


"Araby"
An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown impertubable faces.

Haruki Murakami - "The Elephant Vanishes"

Though I'm Murakami'd out, I thought I'd give this a try. There's the usual boring stories, but a few stand out.

"On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning" is amazing. A short story version of "Voices of a distant star"

(halfway)
    Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. There were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.
    One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.
    "This is amazing," he said. "I've been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you're the 100% perfect girl for me."
    "And you," she said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I'd pictured you in every detail. It's like a dream."
    They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.
    As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one's dream to come true so easily?
    And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, "Let's test ourselves-just once. If we really are each other's 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we'll marry then and there. What do you think?"
    "Yes," she said, "that is exactly what we should do."
    And so they parted, he to the east, she to the west.




"little green monster" - love the repetition and the short focused stab of its story.

    I want to lead a general existence and yet be a distinctive, separate entity.

    Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I'd sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was - very simply - amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them.

    If sleep is nothing more thann a periodic repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don't want it anymore. I don't need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I'm keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don't want to be "repaired." I will not sleep.

    [...] so rich with the genuine sense of daily living.

    

Samantha Schweblin - "Mouthful of Birds"

Was really looking forward to reading this collection of short stories, but most could not capture me as much. They looked the strangeness and eerieness I hoped for, though there were a few nice ones, particularly about the women waiting next to the highway.

Ottessa Moshfegh - "Homesick for another world"

Sad and beautiful short stories. Amazing character descriptions.



Oh, my mother. A week later she drove me to the bus stop. It was barely five in the morning and she still wore her burgundy satin negligee and curlers in her hair, a denim jacket thrown over her sunburned shoulders. She drove slowly on the empty roads, coasted through the blinking red lights and though they didn't exist, stayed silent as the moon. Finally she pulled over and lit a cigarette. I watched a tear coast down her cheek. She didn't look at me. I opened the car door. "Call me" is all she said. I said I would. I watched as she pulled a U-turn and drove away.

Lorrie Moore - "Birds of America"

Only just started, but already amazing sentences.

The story "Community life".



    She looked at him darkly. "What the hell were you thinking of, recommending that stock?" she asked. "How could you be such an irresponsible idiot?" She saw it now, how their life would be together. She would yell; then he would yell. He would have an affair; then she would have an affair. And then they would be gone and gone, and they would live in that gone.



    They stopped briefly at an English manor house, to see the natural world cut up into moldings and rugs, wool and wood captive and squared, the earth stolen and embalmed and shellacked.



    No one had toasted Abby and Bob at their little wedding, and that's what had been wrong, she believed now. No toast. There had been only thirty guests and they had simply eaten the ham canapes and gone home. How could a marriage go right? It wasn't that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.



    "Gee, I thought you guys would never break up!" he says in a genuinely flabbergasted tone.
    "Really?" I find this reassuring somehow, that my relationship at least looked good from the outside, at least to someone.
    "Well, not really," admits Cal. "Actually, I thought you guys would break up long ago."
    "Oh," I say.
    "So you could marry her?" says the amazing Eugene to this father, and we all laugh loudly, pour more wine into glasses, and hide our faces in them.



    She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust, and when she did go out, to work at least, his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at. She turned to inspect the face of every pageboy haircut she saw from behind and passed in her car. She looked at them furtively or squarely - it didn't matter. She appraised their eyes and mouths and wondered about their bodies. She had become hi: she longed for those women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up.
    A rapist.
    She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.
    But for a while, it was the only way she could be.
    She began to wear his clothes - a shirt, a pair of socks - to keep him next to her, to try to understand why had done what he'd done. And in this new empathy, in this pants role, like an opera, she thought she understood what it was to make love to a woman, to open the hidden underside of her, like secret food, to thrust yourself up in her, her arch and thrash, like a puppet, to watch her later when she got up and walked around without you, oblivious to the injury you'd surely done her. How could you not love her, gratefully, marveling? She was so mysterious, so recovered, an unshared thought enlivening her eyes; you wanted to follow her forever.
    A man in love. That was a man in love. So different from a woman.




    She went home, poured herself a drink, stood by the mantel. She picked up the pink-posied tin and shook it, afraid she might hear the muffled banging of bones, but she heard nothing. "Are you sure it's even him?" Jack asked. "With animals, they probably do mass incinerations. One scoop for cats, two for dogs."

Julian Barnes - "Pulse"

Amazing short stories. Some of the chapters are dinner party discussions and are simply amazing.



    TA few minutes later, the Twin Otter took off straight out across Orosay and the open sea. There was no farewell view of the island before that world below was shut out. In the enveloping cloud, he thought about marriage lines and buttons; about razor clams and island sex; about missing bullocks and fulmars being turned into oil; and then, finally, the tears came. Calum had known he would not be coming back. But the tears were not for that, or for himself, or even for her, for their memories. They were tears for his own stupidigty. His presumption too.
    He had thought he could recapture, and begin to say farewell. He had thought that grief might be assuaged, or if not assuaged, at least speeded up, hurried on its way a little, by going back to a place where they had been happy. But he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him. And in the months and years ahead, he expected grief to teach him many other things as well. This was just the first of them.



The city of Carcassonne looks solid and enduring, but what we admire is mostly nineteenth-cenutry reconstruction. Forget the hazard of 'whetehr it will last', and whether longevity is in any case a virtue, a reward, an accommodation or another piece of luck.

Ken Liu - "The paper menagerie and other stories"

Not all of them are great, but some breathtaking stories, such as the "The paper menagerie" itself of course, as well as "State Change" of a girl with an icecube as her soul.


"Everything passes, Hiroto," Dad said. "That feeling in your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transcience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephmeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon."

Lauren Groff - "Under the wave"

Short story in the New Yorker about a woman who has lost her family but finds her lost son in a lost child. Short, distant, and quite nice.

Steampunk Anthology

Elisabeth Knox - "Gethsemane"
Cool story! Amazing little backdrops, an interesting premise.


MT Anderson - "Oracle Engine"
Fantastic