McCracken delivers 12 short stories all revolving around the theme of relationships, whether it be romantic, family, or even acquaintances. The reader learns of each character’s point in time and how they cope with life’s battles, wrestling with grief, love, loss, and much more. Each relationship she writes about is unique in it's own way, providing an intriguing plot with realistic circumstances articulated throughout. The setting varies between Europe and America, some places well known to us New Yorkers.
The author opens her short story collection with a light hearted comedy about two people, Jack and Sadie, beginning their relationship and heading to a wedding in Ireland. The American woman in the relationship adjusts to the customs of European banter as she wraps her head around her new mate. This cheerful story provides a good start to the collection, but as the reader continues on, the stories become darker and some even strange. A few bleak narratives include a father and son traveling to Scotland to mourn the loss of their wife/mother as well as a betrayal story of a young woman who checks into a hotel to drink her sorrows away. McCracken also writes a few offbeat plots about a ventriloquist, a mentally ill mother who wants to eat her children, and an actress who played a villainous character on a children’s show, suffering from all the hate she received from the public.
There are some endearing storylines that make the collection more heartwarming and fun to read, one being about a gay couple who takes their little boy on an adventure to a water park. In this story, the writer adds humor with, “He had the panicky, recurring feeling that he’d forgotten to remove his watch, but it was only the shackles of the waterpark around his wrists.” Another fictional account that leaves the reader feeling emotional portrays a young woman’s boyfriend who comes to the aid of her ailing mother and asks him to be her caretaker as her daughter is not fit to care for anyone in her mental state.
I would recommend this short story collection to someone who enjoys characters deeply reflecting on their life circumstances. Since it contained a few bizarre plots along with some depressing moments, this book is not for readers who love whimsical literature. One fictional piece in this 12 story series is named after the title and its content includes a boy and his mom who visit the Souvenir Museum filled with exhibits while adventuring in Denmark with Vikings. The writer ends her compilation of stories with the same two characters she started with, Jack and Sadie. Overall, McCracken’s descriptive language is excellent writing, “Her little house bound up in aluminum cladding the pale green of an after-dinner mint,” and her arrangement of stories is coherent.
McCracken is the writer of other literary novels, a memoir, and another short story collection titled, Thunderstruck and Other Stories. She has received grants and fellowships, and is a teacher at the University of Texas.
Haruki Murakami’s collection of short stories called First Person Singular contains eight stories, all narrated by middle age men. Only one story provides the name of the narrator - Haruki Murakami. This blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, however the collection is not autobiographical.
Each story is written in Murakami’s typical plain, clear language and embraces alternate, slightly unbelievable realities. In Cream, the narrator tells of a time he is invited to a recital on the top of a mountain but discovers upon his arrival that the recital hall’s gate is closed and locked. He appears to have a panic attack and sits on a bench to wait out the symptoms. An old man challenges him to visualize a “circle that has many centers and no circumference.” (p. 19)
On a Stone Pillow and With the Beatles both discuss young love, albeit from different angles. The narrator of On a Stone Pillow has a one-night stand with a woman who explains that she is in love with someone but cannot be with him. They have one night together, in which she cries the name of the man she loves in the midst of passion, and then disappears. The narrator of With the Beatles uses a brief moment in time, a memory of a girl walking past him in a high school hallway many years before, as a hook to begin his tale of a past girlfriend. Interestingly, the story eventually becomes more about the narrator’s odd interaction with the girlfriend’s older brother than his actual love affair with the girl. In this instance both the girl carrying With The Beatles and the girlfriend are clearly secondary characters.
Murakami uses music as a thread in Carnaval. The narrator meets a woman who he describes as ugly, but captivating. He formulates a friendship with her based around a mutual love of the piece Carnaval by Schumann. The story raises questions about the difference between interior and exterior beauty, and the masks we all wear, which can hide the face of a devil or the face of an angel. Eventually the story takes a surprising turn, with the woman having disappeared because she was arrested for a running a bogus investment company with her husband.
Magical realism, often used by Murakami, allows us to believe that the monkey in Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey is not only able to talk, but is well educated and is pleasant company for the narrator. They drink beer, eat snacks, and chat late into the night at an inn in a hot springs town. The monkey makes confessions to the narrator which are unbelievable, until many years later when an interaction with a random woman seems to substantiate the monkey’s tale.
These short stories are all, as indicated by the title, told in the first person. The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection is the only one that names the narrator, Haruki Murakami. Is this story non-fiction? Does it have an autobiographical influence? Or, for that matter, do the other stories have a bit of Murakami’s personal experiences written in? While the collection is fiction we can’t help but wonder how much of Murakami’s personal experience influenced these stories.
Murakami is known for his distinctive style. He writes in a straightforward manner, and describes the setting in a way that allows the reader to truly feel immersed in the scene. In these stories, the narrator is always a middle aged to older man. Also typical of Murakami is a treatment of women that often presents them as solely objects of the male characters affection or judgement. In Carnaval he opens the story with: “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest.” (p. 165) The following several pages wax on about the ugliness of some women, and how being beautiful does not seem to make women happy. Female readers may find this persistent objectification offensive.
This collection provides a framework for the author to ask philosophical questions. What is reality? How does physical beauty affect our interactions and perceptions of others? Is it possible for things to be both true and not true at the same time?
This book will appeal to readers who are already fans of Murakami, who enjoy being left with questions to ponder, and who appreciate magical realism.
Read-alikes:
A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel an Stories by Leonard Cohen
The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manual Gonzales
The Lost Writings by Franz Kafka
Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki
Ellen Covino, Sayville Public Library
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott
A collection of dark fairytales and folklore about love, yearning and monstrosity, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories reads like hazy, stream of consciousness, little nightmares. The writing is lyrical, descriptive, and character driven with a creepy, whimsical atmosphere. The stories, while vastly different and abstract, center on the desire to be known and loved and the fear of being so deeply known for the bad/monstrous parts within. Each story has a different writing style and a good portion of the book is a bestiary of “monsters” which speeds up the pace. It reads with a sort of detached voice as if being told by these fantastical creatures or a sentient world that they are set in.
The collection explores universal themes of heartbreak, class anxiety, grief, societal cruelty, and the patriarchy, making the supernatural personal and familiar. Some of the stories are more tender than others and each calls forth an emotional response of some sort. One of the stories, The Thread Boy, has a main character who gives away pieces of himself to each person/place he meets until he’s just a bunch of threads pulled in different directions and the imagery is beautiful but sad, as it is for most of the stories. It’s grim, eerie, and unsettling, with settings that could not exist in our world but pull from it making them almost uncomfortable to read. The author doesn’t indicate the year for most of the stories but descriptors like having an *NSYNC sticker, CD jewel case, or Lisa Frank binder suggest a certain time period.
I’d recommend this collection of short stories to readers who like strange fiction, horror, and storytelling that is beautifully written but reads like a fever dream. Also for those who are looking to read deeper into each tale rather than be given a clear start/finish and purpose.
Read-alikes:
Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik
Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
Ana Walsh, The Smithtown Library - Kings Park Building
Table for Two: Fictions by Amor Towles
Six stories based in New York City, which consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters, and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood, told from seven different viewpoints, which stars the indomitable Evelyn Ross who was first introduced in Towles’ novel The Rules of Civility. (The Line -- The Ballad of Timothy Touchett -- Hasta Luego -- I will Survive -- The Bootlegger -- The DiDomenico Fragment -- Eve in Hollywood).
All six stories in this collection are engaging, clever, atmospheric, and not related. They are set primarily in Manhattan except for Eve in Hollywood, which enticingly updates readers on the life of Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility (there is no need to have read Rules of Civility in order to understand this story). In most stories a character accidentally finds a way to improve their circumstances using methods that are not necessarily on the up and up, taking advantage of those more at risk. A Russian man makes money by standing on never-ending lines for others, an aspiring writer realizes he is a good forger, a devious retired art dealer uses his knowledge to his advantage, and an elderly man secretly records Carnegie Hall concerts for his homebound wife. In Eve in Hollywood, a potential 1930’s starlet gets caught up in a noir like ordeal with Olivia de Havilland.
Amor Towles was born in 1964 and grew up in Boston. He attended Yale and then received an MA in English from Stanford. He has received excellent reviews for his novels Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), and The Lincoln Highway (2021). He worked as an investment banker and now writes full time in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and two children.
Read-alikes:
Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Jo-Ann Carhart, East Islip Public Library
The Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen
Dragons, and Djinn, and Fae…oh my!
This is the third volume in Jane Yolen’s collection of short stories in the Circus series. General theme is romance/love, but with a fantasy twist. That’s right - this is a Romantasy short story collection! Tell all of your “Fourth Wing” friends! Each of the ten tales is a stand-alone that takes place in a different realm and time period.
The point of view also differs from story to story. Some are told from the first person POV (ex. “Dark Seed, Dark Stone” a tale about a daughter dealing with the death of her warrior father) while others are expressed in a third person narrative (ex. “Sans Soleil”, a tragic love story about a prince that was told to forever avoid the sun because it would kill him and his new bride’s complete disbelief in the rule).
Out of the ten stories, three are retellings of classic tales that the majority of readers will be familiar with - “Dusty Loves” is a take on “Romeo & Juliet”, “Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn” is a nod to “Aladdin”, and “The Sword in the Stone” is, unsurprisingly, about a young King Arthur.
The stories are evenly paced, perfect to hold the audience’s interest for the duration of a short story.
I would recommend this novel to patrons who enjoy Romantasy. A regular short story reader may be put off by the fantasy elements, but it’s worth a shot to tell them about this collection to gauge their interest.
Read-alikes:
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Annual Short Story Series
The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen
The Midnight Circus by Jane Yolen
Jessicca Weber, The Smithtown Library - Kings Park Building