Archives de catégorie : Short Stories

MÖCHTE DIE WITWE ANGESPROCHEN WERDEN… de Saša Stanišić

What if I’d decided differently? What if I’d done that, instead of this? What if I had defied expectations? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give life a trial run first, before living it for real?

MÖCHTE DIE WITWE ANGESPROCHEN WERDEN, PLATZIERT SIE AUF DEM GRAB DIE GIESSKANNE MIT DEM AUSGUSS NACH VORNE
(When the Widow Is Happy to Talk, She Places the Watering Can on the Grave With the Spout Facing Forward)
by Saša Stanišić
Luchterhand Literaturverlag, May 2024

We sometimes worry that we’ve been a coward, hesitated too long – and missed out on something that would have made us a better, happier person, with better-looking and more fun pets and partners. This is what Stanišić’s new stories are about: the constant, gnawing feeling that maybe you should have taken the road less travelled, made the less obvious choice, told a lie for once. Like the cleaner, for instance, who, holding a goat’s-hair brush in their hands, finally decides to take the matter of life into their own hands too. Or like the author who travels to Heligoland for the first time, only to discover that he’s actually been there before. Or like the father who’s prepared to cheat, if that’s what it takes to finally beat his eight-year-old son at Memory…

Saša Stanišić, born in Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978, has lived in Germany since 1992. His novels and stories have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous awards, including the 2019 German Book Prize (for « Where You Come From ») and the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize (for « Before the Feast »), as well as the Eichendorff Book Prize, Schiller Prize and Hans Fallada Prize. He lives in Hamburg.

GLORY DAYS de Simon Rich

Laugh till you cry in this new collection of stories from the “Serena Williams of humor writing” (New York Times Book Review) about millennials finally growing up and getting older.

GLORY DAYS
by Simon Rich
Voracious Books/Little, Brown, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

Photo: © Adrian Kinloch

From Mario waking up with back pain and going to get his first physical, to an anthropomorphized city addressing gentrification, to the victim of a Nigerian Prince scheme who actually moves to Nigeria to serve as a loyal subject, to a co-op meeting gone awry, these stories from the former youngest-ever SNL head writer and staff writer for Pixar writer.

Simon Rich is an American humorist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has published two novels and six collections of humor pieces, several of which appeared in The New Yorker. His novels and short stories have been translated into over a dozen languages.

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS de Leyna Krow

A darkly fabulist story collection about women’s choices, complicity, and power and the lack thereof (with screen rights to the title story « Sinkhole » sold to Jordan Peele and Universal).

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS
by Leyna Krow
Viking, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Credit: Young Kwak photo

From a genie, a devil, time travelers, a thief in peril, an oversized baby, an exploding woman, a woman with an impossible sinkhole in her yard, a woman who gives birth to a wild child, and more, this collection explores women in power – or in a deficit of power — to confront questions of complicity and intent, hysteria, paranoia, and what makes us whole in a world with relative values. With unsettling insight and echoes of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Laura van den Berg, SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS traces peripheral, upside down spaces in which sometimes there is a choice to be made, rules to be broken, risks to be tried, even crimes to be had, for the sake of a woman’s unconditional freedom.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’M FINE, BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE SINKING (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel

COMPANY de Shannon Sanders

A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family.

COMPANY: Stories
by Shannon Sanders
Graywolf Press, October 2023
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, COMPANY tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece in COMPANY includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In « The Good, Good Men, » two brothers reunite to oust a « deadbeat » boyfriend from their mother’s house. In « The Everest Society, » the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In « Birds of Paradise, » their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.

Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers

BUTTER de Gayl Jones

A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares.

BUTTER:
Novellas, Stories, and Fragments
by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press, April 2023

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.
Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico, and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas; about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film, and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan. Her landmark books include Corregidora, Eva’s Man, The Healing (a National Book Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Palmares (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction), and most recently, The Birdcatcher (National Book Award finalist).