Condalmo

New Etgar Keret story.

Enjoyers of Etgar Keret will be pleased to learn that This American Life will have a new story by him on this weekend's broadcast.  That's my prediction.

Ed Park split into five.

Ed Park, a man of many parts, divides again this week at Five Chapters with "The Oblivion Arms."  He also blogs this week at Powell's, while also editing The Believer, crafting The New York Ghost, and sharing his Personal Days with you.

National Short Story Month 2008.

As Dan notes, it's May.  How did that happen?  I have no idea what, if anything, I'll do for NSSM this year.  Dan wrote that we should expect less from him than last year, which sounds like we'll only get two or three short story posts a day from him, instead of six or seven.  Because that's what you can produce when you've cloned yourself.

Lennon and the terrible music.

Funny story: I was at work tonight, talking for a few minutes on the phone with my wife.  She asked me if I'd listened to Selected Shorts tonight.  No, says I, why?  She told me that she put it on to listen to while settling the littlest child into bed, thinking the description of the show sounded nice, with music provided by "some quartet" - but apparently, the music "made (her) ears bleed," was horrible, awful, no-good "sort of Chinese orchestral jazz noise, or something" - and the radio was louder than she'd anticipated, the baby wasn't going to sleep, she couldn't reach the radio to turn it off, and - the worst - "the music made me actually want to listen to the theme music for Maine Things Considered instead."  Which, let me tell you, is pret-ty godawful.  We had a good laugh. 

I just got home a few minutes ago and figured I'd take a quick (ha!) look at Google Reader, and hey, there's tonight's episode of Selected Shorts, all lined up.  I open it to see if it says anything about the Earbleed Quartet - and the featured story is by Condalmo friend J. Robert Lennon, he of Ward Six and also Books That Have Been Published On Paper And Read!  I'll have to ask her in the morning if she listened to the story.  I gleefully anticipate a string of venomous invective toward the Quartet, followed by a no, after which I reveal my tenuous yet genuine connection to the author, to be met with likely-deserved skepticism/disinterest!

"Promise Breaker."

Chris Adrian's new story in Esquire.  The man leaps tall buildings.  I will not tell you anything about this story, except that You should go read this story, as should Stephen King, and anyone else that says the form is dying.

Gob's Grief just got moved up on the list.  (Also: yes, read this, already!)

(Thanks to Maud for pointing it out.)

Have you seen Yunior's grades?

Okay, now I've had my first Junot Diaz Experience.  (It's only a matter of time before someone cries foul with all this audiobook/story/pod reliance on my part.  To you I somnolently say: 80 hour work week!)  I see the goodness that is Diaz.  This is a great piece, deceptively simple, but he nails it completely, doesn't he?  So matter of fact, so conversational; so revealing.  I'll be pulling Drown from the shelf and adding it to the pile.

The chat after the story noted how some audiences reacted harshly to the story.  There's always a few readers who can't separate the story from the author.  (In some rare cases, this is true of the author himself.)  It seems silly, getting angry at Diaz because he nails all the details of being a teenager so well.  Angry at him for being a good writer?  Should he write about sensitive pony-tail men?  Being Maine White Bread, I obviously can't say I see myself in the story, but he gets the mood of the story so perfectly - it took me back to the later high school days of pool halls and "Rocket Queen" on the jukebox and misguided adventures with Westbrook girls.  First beers, confusion about the opposite sex, the whole bit. 

The audio version has the amusing benefit of a woman reading the women's dialog.  I think it puts the story in a different light - actually having the female's voice in there, whereas reading it you'd more likely get it in Yunior's voice, as he's narrating the story.  I'll have to read it and get back to you.

And wouldn't you know it: I finish listening to the podcast and decide to scan through the FM band, and there you have it: "Sweet Child O' Mine."  I'm pleased to report that my tiny mp3 player does, in fact, go to eleven.

The girl with the curious singularity.

A Curious Singularity has started a new round of short story discussion; this time around the focus is on Grace Paley's fine "A Conversation with My Father." 

Short Story Month: Your last moments.

The final moments of her life.  Marie-Francoise lay crushed under tons of rubble.
The fish she had been eating was still in her mouth.
Her eyes would not open.
She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her.  She could not feel her body, as though during the fall, her soul had slipped out and lay waiting for the exact moment when it would disappear from the world.
Then her life, like a cloud, split open, and she lay motionless in a rain of moments.
The green telephone in her grandparents' kitchen next to the plant.
She could feel the cool plastic of the handle and the sensation of cupping it under her ear.  She could hear a voice at the other end of the line that she recognized as her own. 

The weight of her mother's shoes as she carried them into the bedroom.

The idea that one day she'd be grown up and would have to wear such things.

Running into a friend.

That time has passed.

...and so on.  This story is from Van Booy's first story collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love, which is uniformly excellent.  This story in particular is more prose-poem than the others; the majority of the sentences and thoughts are clipped.  I like this - it fits well, the idea that a woman's last thoughts draining away from her would be presented in such a staccato manner, and yet he writes it in such a way that you get a complete picture of this woman.  She's clearly made out to be one particular, unique person, but Van Booy provides the details as stencils for us to fill in with our own experience and sensory knowledge.  My grandparents also had the green phone on the counter, in the kitchen, and I remember the feel of the rotary circles pulling my little finger back to the start when I'd dial seven, or eight.  "The smell of classrooms."  Not just one classroom, but many - so she's a teacher?  Or had particularly vivid memories of her time in school?  Either way, you know that smell. 

A different approach - the Tobias Wolff short story "Bullet in the Brain" (from his collection The Night in Question as well as the David Sedaris fanboy anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, as well as numerous other collections) - likely one you have read; if not, a good starting place for Wolff, author of Condalmo favorite Old School, a few short story collections, This Boy's Life.  Is this less or more dirty realism?  Hard to say, as what is realistic for someone dying?  Less and less with each passing moment.

It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember.  He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him - her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in "Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play," and "Let's hide Mr. Mole!"  Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predicability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth.  He did not remember standing just outside his daughter's door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receive unless he changed his ways.  He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will - not "Silent, upon a peak in Darien," or "My God, I heard this day," or "All my pretty ones? Did you say all?  O hell-kite!  All?"  None of these did he remember; not one.

I love both of these stories. 

Short Story Month: "Timothy" - Colin Greenland.

Interfictions has a strange feel, for me.  The best way I can describe my reaction to this book of short stories, thus far, is that I see it like a marching band.  The best high school marching band - award winning, really talented.  If you like that sort of thing, this collection is top notch.  If you don't, this collection leaves you scratching your head, wondering what the big deal is, thinking that all the hoopla must be generated by relatives of people in the band.  I think I fall somewhere in the middle - some of the pieces have felt like the author was trying to hard to redefine tuba playing, if I may continue my poorly structured metaphor.  As in, dude, settle down a little bit - it's just a tuba.  Just play the damn thing well and leave it at that.  Other pieces, on the other hand, are really good, and Colin Greenland's "Timothy" is one of the ones that has stuck with me. 

Before I lose you, here's a short description of interstitial fiction, from the blog:

Our two cents: "Interstitial" was never really meant to be a label as such -- and certainly not a marketing label. Rather, it's a deliberately vague adjective that acknowledges the frustrating in-betweenness of certain works of art that are therefore difficult to explain (and, thus, sell). The Interstitial Arts Foundation -- still a very young group -- seeks to find ways of supporting and nurturing those who create such works.

The introduction also describes these pieces as in-between different genres, ideas - not at a crossroads between the two, but simply in the space between.  Which, again, can be either aha! or hooey, depending on where you stand, or even which of these stories hits the bullseye for you as a reader.

Greenland's story, though - I don't know, it borders on hokum in idea but the execution, it just works really well.  A woman stands on her doorstep in the late evening, calling home their male black cat, Timothy.  Her husband is away at work, and even if he was home, he might as well be at work for all the companionship he gives her.  So, she's calling the cat, and out from the darkness strolls a man in a black outfit - like a burglar - and

Leanne is startled.  There is someone coming in the gate, someone she doesn't know.

She shades her eyes with her hand, trying to see his face.  "Yes?" she says.  "Can I help you?"  Her voice is high with tension.

"You called me," says the man.  His voice is quiet too, self-assured.  "I'm Timothy," he says.

Leanne laughs, flustered.  "Timothy's our cat!" she says.

"That's right," says the man again.  "I'm Timothy."  He lifts his arms out to the side.  "I was a cat, until last night.  This morning I woke up like this."

Where the story goes from here is one part absurd, two parts chilling, and a whole lot of provocative.  Is this really the cat?  If I told you that the answer is possibly both yes and no, and that the question is likely more important than any answer, would that make you more or less likely to read it?  In my case, more, and I enjoyed it.  A lot of this collection is like that, and if my lousy marching band metaphor turned you off, then I've not succeeded; if something off the beaten path of "short fiction" is what you're up for, you would do well to snap up a copy.

Short Story Month: "Highlights" - Michael Martone.

This is the first story from Martone's new career-spanning collection, Double Wide, and one of those pulled from his first collection of stories, Alive and Dead in Indiana, published by Knopf in the Spring of 1984.  It's a great reflection from a former Olympic swimmer, now working as a dentist.  The title refers to that childrens' magazine found in every dentist's waiting room, but also to the best moments of this man's life - all apparently in the past. 

It's never made explicitly clear, though - he sits, waiting for a child to come in.  He works mainly with children.  This dentist is thinking about the amazing skill he had in swimming, long ago; the way he was literally thrown into swimming by his father, forced to practice.  Growing up in Bloomington (Indiana, of course) he would watch the other children playing outside.  Bloomington, he informs us, is where Crest did their focus group testing, and we get a connection between watching the pearly-toothed children outside, smiling and laughing - he cannot join them, he has to go practice swimming - and his later post-swimming career choice.

Excerpt:

Could I ever drown?  Could I ever forget that much?  Is it really like breathing?  I am like the cartoon character who has walked over a cliff and hasn't looked down yet.

I watch all the cartoons on Saturday so I can discuss them with my patients.  To drown would be the only death that would make sense.  The things that makes you, kills you.  The thing that serves you right.  The hunting accident for the hunter.  But I wonder if I could let myself or if the water wouldn't toss me back.  No, it won't be the water that I'll drown in, it will be the swimming.

It's a great story; lots of nice little details about swimming, a few about dentistry.  Such a good story so early in a career.

Short Story Writing Month.

Jeff Bryant, of Syntax of Things, with the better idea:

As promised, now that the shortest month has rolled around, it's time to kick off the first ever Syntax of Things Short Story Writing Month, aka SoTShoStoWriMo (just because everything needs an acronym).   What does this mean?  Well, unlike with the novel writing version of this (NaNoWriMo), I'm not setting daily word count goals and I don't have a fancy site with a word count calculator.  In fact, during this period, there may be days that I don't get a lot of writing done. Eventually, I simply want to have a solid and possibly submittable story finished before we turn the page on the calendar.

En garde!  The game is afoot!  Etc.!  Depending on the lameness and/or success of my efforts (being conducted in, but sadly not sponsored by, Google Docs) I will post a link to the ongoing draft, over there on the right. 

I encourage you and your friends to also take part in this fine idea, as it is much more do-able than a Month of Novel Writing.  And a short story can be pretty short. 

The call goes out.

From Syntax of Things:

Don't forget that tomorrow (Thursday) starts SoTShoStoWriMo.  I'll have to figure out a way to get this kicked off.  If you have any ideas or would like to join, drop me a line.

We at Condalmo enjoy the short story.

Finding the light switch.

From a nice post at The Age (via) on the value of the short story:

The US poet laureate Billy Collins, in one of my favourite poems, describes the frustration of trying to teach poetry to a class who just want to "tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it . . . to find out what it really means". He says what he'd rather do is invite the reader into the poem, as if it were a room, and get them to feel around for the light switch. I love that idea: that whatever illumination your piece of writing might possess depends on being able to make your reader willing to enter a darkened, unfamiliar room. How to convince them it's worthwhile? How to suggest, in such a spare, pared-down form as a short story, that there'll be something in there worth seeing?

The Kid and The Champ.

Maud gets a guest post on a recent reading with Adam Haslett (of You Are Not A Stranger Here) and Tobias Wolff (of many great story collections and Condalmo favorite Old School) in which young Mr. Haslett reads a story, much to the consternation of Mr. Wolff, who is prompted by his young peer into reading a story of his own, one he reports being nervous about reading, much to the delight of the audience.  I love these guys and strongly encourage them both to go another round, this time closer to Maine, in the very near future. 

One Story, priced to go.

I heartily recommend this holiday gift:

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Hard to beat.  I look forward to getting this little guy in the mail, and while not every story has turned me upside down, they've put some pretty great stuff out there.  Check it out.

One small victory for short stories.

Yes, Victoria, they do exist outside of your left over from college Norton Anthology of Literature. 

Your winner:

This year's Guardian first book award, designed to recognise and honour the finest new literary talent, has been won by Yiyun Li for her spare and graceful collection of short stories set in and around China, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Assorted reading.

• Finished Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain pretty quickly, for me - a lot of traffic reading.  What a great book - one write-up described the book as, I think, having a claustrophobic feel to it (this being a good thing) and I'm inclined to agree - there's a sense of things closing in all around you as you read.  I'm generally dubious about the "thriller", or "literary thriller" genre - I suppose my ego doesn't allow for the possibility that a book could actually be "chilling".  This one was - there's one part to it, with an oft-used device, that just got me.  A real chill.  (Of course, quickly defused by my observation and notation of it, but that's my fault no fault of the book.) The third section - loved it, the trying to figure out what was going on, knowing the possibilities and seeing Evenson introduce little things that seem to point toward an answer, but when you look, the answer's been moved. 
• Have been saving Jimmy Corrigan just for bedtime (it does not make for good traffic reading).  Enjoying it a lot - Ware does amazing things with the structure of panels, with what he does and doesn't draw.  It's funny and sad, sometimes at the same time, which I know is a cliche, but that doesn't lessen the truth of it.
• The Sicily Papers arrived in the mail a few days ago.  Interesting, so far, the way it's giving little bits of information about what's going on, mixed in with a whole lot of what may or may not be rambling in the letters Orange is writing to - someone.  I hope it is going somewhere, getting tied together, these little pieces all pointing toward something - and not just a collection of travel letters with no payoff.  I suppose that would be okay as well, but I'm not sure it would be worthy of a book.  Time will tell. 
• Thinking about making my first foray in Sorrentino (G) with The Moon in its Flight.  I've started carrying it around, gave it the Montesquieu bookmark ("I have never found any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve" - amen, brother).  I find lately that if I let too much time pass between finishing a great book and choosing my next read that I become very sullen, depressed, generally sour to be around.  Technically, I've already got my "next read" in The Siciliy Papers, but that's a separate category ("books that fit in my pocket so I can read them during break at work or in the bathroom") from the "official next read", which has to be something weightier.  So Sorrentino is likely up next.
• Is the theme to "The Six Million Dollar Man" not the best theme ever?  Gentlemen.  We can rebuild him. 

Who's the big winner.

Murakami takes it:

Haruki Murakami has won the second Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, his third collection of short stories to be published in English.