Rapture
Susan Minot
i think i got books mixed up. i remember looking at a book in a store recently and thinking it sounded good. i also saw this book and remembered how i read Minot's book of poems several months ago. somehow this became the book i wanted to read, but i can't recall the other book at all. i glanced at the jacket again before starting it and thought is this really the book i wanted to read? after reading a few pages, i was pretty sure that it wasn't.
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The Kiss and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov
damn, i am BURNT OUT on short stories. i can't even get into Chekhov.
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The River of Lost Voices
Mark Brazaitis
written by one of sandi's professors at wvu, these stories are all set in guatemala. it's a little weird reading stories about guatemala from the perspective of a white american, but he seems to bring light to the tense and sometimes tenuous relationships between the indigenous people, those of spanish decent, and less frequently the foreigners.
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Ship Fever
Andrea Barrett
the back of the book claims these are "set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century." i don't want to nitpick or anything, but several are mostly set in the twentieth century and two are set in the eighteenth century.
the stories all hinge on the sciences—from genetics to zoology to public health to several other branches–and that is definitely what makes this collection so outstanding. i love the concept of the littoral zone (in the story of the same name):
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The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever
i only read about a third of this, since 700 pages of short stories seemed like a bit much all at once. even if i have been reading so many short story collections lately. these are set mostly in nyc, various times between the 1930s and 1950s with a range of class focuses. Cheever has exciting insights into his characters. i loved the slightly twilight zone feel to "The Enormous Radio" and the impressingly epic "The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well."
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Close Range
Annie Proulx
sometimes i don't know if it's that the stories get better as they come or if it just takes a few to get into the general feel. having been in wyoming last year, it's nice to have a sense of how attuned the descriptions of scenery and atmosphere are in this collection. the longer stories are easy favorites: "Pair of Spurs" falls open in well-measured time; "Brokeback Mountain" is just heartbreaking, two tough cowboys in love and trying to make sense of it.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
i'm surprised i never read this when i was younger, and reading it now, i wish i had read it then. it's a coming-of-age story set in williamsburg (long before it was hip and fucked up) at the turn of the century. there are so many wonderful things about this book, even just the little details that are little asides from the story i assume are lifted from real life experiences.
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Circling the Drain
Amanda Davis
it's kind of morbid that i sought this book out after reading Davis's obituary in march. she also published a novel entitled Wonder When You'll Miss Me.
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Across the Bridge
Mavis Gallant
the april 2003 issue of Harper's had a review of the two new collections of Gallant's stories—being published by The New York Review of Books (one of which has just been released)—and called her an "unknown master." at first i felt like reading the review had pushed my expectations too high; while the first three stories were inter
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Sister of My Heart
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
last summer, during my total short story fixation, i read The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, also by Divakaruni—it's probably one of my favorite collections, so i was curious to read something else by her.
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