This is How You Lose Her
Junot Díaz
Partway into this collection, Teri tweeted a link to this comment thread on a Hairpin advice post, prompting a brief discussion of Díaz and how autobiographical his work might be. Since I haven’t read much about him as a person before, I wasn’t aware that his character Yunior, who is the centerpiece of this collection of stories, is really quite similar to him, making much of his fiction pretty true-to-life.
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Tenth of December
George Saunders
I always feel I should like George Saunders more than I do; when The New York Times emphatically declared this “the best book you’ll read this year,” I thought perhaps these would be the stories that would teach me to love him. The flaw in this thinking being that I read several of them when they ran in The New Yorker.
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis
I read the first two books in this collection not quite two years ago. Now maybe wasn’t the best time to revisit this, as I felt pretty distracted until the end when I was able to find some focus again. But then reading one of Davis’s books is more of an effort than you would expect, partially because her stories vary from the incredibly short to involved. The incredibly short ones seem like they would be the easiest, but sometimes the linguistic riffing takes some time to untangle.
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Other People We Married
Emma Straub
Summer, with all its distractions, is generally an opportune time for reading short fiction that you can digest in small segments. This collection seems like a particularly good fit, as many of the stories have themes of travel. At some point I thought to myself that it was strange that two of them had a character with the same name; only after finishing and reading a few reviews did it come clear that this wasn’t a coincidence — I’d actually missed that the character recurred in three stories. Summer and its distractions?
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis
I picked up All the King's Horses as a break from this and found that a longer narrative really hit the spot. Afterward I decided to finish up the stories in the section I was reading here and come back to the rest of the collection later, only to discover somewhat disappointingly that there were just a handful until that next break. But I'm sticking to the plan.
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Pretty Monsters
Kelly Link
It's almost exactly four years since I read most of Link's Stranger Things Happen, and I experienced similar hit-and-miss responses to these stories. Sometimes the concept of the story is more entertaining than the execution, and the writing is often too simplistic and almost juvenile, though I discovered after finishing the last story that this a YA book. I guess that's why all the stories are focused on younger people!
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Bats or Swallows
Teri Vlassopoulos
I've known Teri for years via the zine world, and it's exciting to see her first book published. These stories are largely melancholy, lined with the poignancy of deaths and disappointments. They feel open-ended, most likely because the characters without fail need to reach a point of internal conclusion rather than exacting any kind of influence on the world around them.
See also: "Baby Teeth" on Joyland
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Tales from Outer Suburbia
Shaun Tan
The gorgeous art in this collection of stories would make this worth checking out on its own, but the stories are at times vaguely unsettling, examining the fantastically surreal edges of an otherwise banal world, while also remaining playful. In the end, it's something kids would find entertaining, while adults may more appreciate the darker elements.
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Carried Away
Alice Munro
After the semi-disappointment in Dance of the Happy Shades, I picked up this collection and worked my way through it over autumn in between other books. I'd probably read half of these seventeen favorites in their original collections, so reading this was a combination of finding and revisiting. I can now be sure that her earlier stories just don't grab me as completely.
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