​The Best American Short Stories 1994 is an anthology of short stories published the year prior and selected by Tobias Wolff. There are some real bangers in this collection, such as ‘Proper Library’ by Carolyn Ferrell, ‘In the Gloaming’ by Alice Elliot Dark, ‘Pipa’s Story’ by Lan Samantha Chang, and ‘Landscape and Dream’ by Nancy Krusoe. Specifically, ‘In the Gloaming’ is about a handicapped son and his mother caring for him as he slowly deteriorates from an unmentioned disease. Though the deterioration, as opposed to other declines caused by disease, is portrayed in a dignified light, one which treats the character, Laird, as curious, wanting to know about his mother’s life before he perishes. Another story I wanted to highlight was ‘Proper Library’ which follows a boy from a rough part of New York, caring for friend’s babies, and pining for another boy. It is a sad rendition of what type of masculinity thrives and what dies when the going gets rough. Though, I am on the fence with its voice, a distinct part of the story, in part because if it crosses a line, it becomes a stereotype of Black New York youth. There was also one story that had such a strange, confusing, and frankly very controversial scene in ‘Things Left Undone’ by Christopher Tilghman that I would feel very uncomfortable describing it. I don’t know if me feeling unsettled is what the story is trying to portray, but it verges on being edgy for the sake of being edgy. Though, for all the anthology’s faults, it’s a decent read.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night by Truman Capote is a collection of short stories and one novella, The Grass Harp, that focuses on families and children in the south and sometimes New York City. The Grass Harp follows a teenager as he is brought to his aunts’, Dolly and Verena’s, place with his father passing away quite soon after the boy, Collin, is dropped off. Verena is the industrious aunt who has businesses everywhere in the small southern town, and as such she’s quite demanding and strict with Collin and Dolly. As for Dolly, it becomes clear through her interests (e.g. painting a room fully pink, boiling medicine in a tub, etc.) and demeanor, she is disabled. However, Collin, Dolly, and their help, Catherine Cook, make a fine group that helps cook and sell the medicine. One day, Verena returns home with a businessman who wants to get the recipe for Dolly’s cure and make labels for the bottles. She doesn’t like this, and to get away from the businessman, Dolly, Collin, and Catherine all runaway to a treehouse in a field. The first day, they nearly get shot out of their hiding spot because of a boy, Riley, who was looking to hunt squirrels. He leaves them and then a troop of the Sheriff, Judge, and a few other people come to collect them from the treehouse after hearing word from Riley where they were. The Judge joins the group, while the rest are shoed off. When the sheriff and his buddies return, they come with a vengeance trying get the group to return to Verena—though while everyone escapes, they catch Catherine, the only Black person in their group. During their time in the treehouse, they meet a woman who has fifteen children looking for food and to tell Dolly that she hadn’t bad-mouthed her. All while this is going on, back with Verena, the businessman ran off with twelve-thousand dollars of her cash. While in the tree, the Judge and Dolly get married right before the sheriff returns a final time. Though when one of his buddies is nearly choked, he shoots his rifle and the bullet hits Riley in the leg. This just about ends their adventure with Verena taking them back in, but things between the sisters had changed.
 
The other stories in the collection follows: a woman who gets paid for telling a mysterious man about her dreams, a little girl that tries for a talent show while everyone is mesmerized by her but she’s swindled out of her stardom, a boy who tries extra hard in counting the money in a jar put up for guessing, a mysterious girl that shows up at a woman’s house and won’t leave, and a niece returning from attending her uncle’s funeral sitting next to a deaf man and drunk wife. All the stories had an insane amount of charm and craft, but I particularly liked, ‘My Side of the Matter’, which is a man’s recounting of how he nearly got stabbed by one of his wife’s friends. The voice, snappiness, and humor were really striking (albeit misogynistic).
 
As with all of Capote’s other works that I’ve read, this collection entranced me. The language, which is one of its most striking elements rolls you along with this confident and propulsive pace. Capote, it seems, had an internal rhythm of language that makes descriptions of the landscape or of people magical. The dialogue and quips were so memorable as well, particularly in ‘My Side of the Matter’. It is also surprising that ‘The Grass Harp’ was made into a musical that, while unfortunate that it flopped, still has its soundtrack online. There so much to say about Capote’s brilliance, but I’ll just leave it at this: read this book!
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​AGNI Issue 101 is a collection of essays, fiction, poetry, and art mainly centered around conflict and the pain of war. There are pieces on Gaza and most notably the art feature of the issue is art done by a Palestinian artist. And the pieces I particularly liked were ‘Pandora Addresses the Court’ by Vanessa Stauffer, ‘Catching My Breath, I Nearly Forget the View’ by Jim Whiteside, ‘What I Can’t Say’ by Brandi Bird, and ‘Curly’ by Ahmed Douma. Though the piece that has stuck with me the most is ‘Florence, now a bird’ by Silja Liv Kelleris which is about a girl who begins growing wings. The government then takes her as a young girl and cages her up in the center of the town as a tourist attraction. After many years, they sew up her mouth and put a beak on her mouth. After a while, the government takes her out of the cage and makes her “fly” from the top of a building, which is really her plummeting to her death. Overall, a decent issue.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo is a collection of stories featuring women in Nigeria who are driven to extremes by the people around them. The whole collection was astounding, and almost every single story was amazing. The first story, ‘Nwunye Belgium’, is about a woman whose mother is in search of a husband for her and when she isn’t able to find a good suitor, her friend suggests her son, a doctor working in Belgium, to marry. And even though she is seeing another man, her mother convinces her to stop seeing him because he isn’t wealthy. Because this is a small town, it becomes talk that she will be marrying a very wealthy doctor and will be taken out of Nigeria into Belgium. However, as time unravels, the status of the friend’s son is shown to be a lie. That while at one point her son did pursue work in Belgium, she actually doesn’t have contact with her son anymore. That the friend made up her son being a bachelor so that she could have a higher status in the town. And now, the woman is marred and ridiculed because she’d stopped seeing her actual love in return for a fake suitor. Another story, ‘Animals’, is about a boy Nedu and his family that bought a chicken to slaughter for dinner. But the mother is unable to kill it, even though she’s done all the work in the family. Nedu becomes so attached to the chicken that they give it a name via a ceremony that the father is encouraging while the mother looks down on it. In fact, she realizes that without her, the family would be dysfunctional and is frustrated that the one thing that a ‘man’ is supposed to do (i.e. kill the chicken) is made to be her job. The father, after a while prepares himself to kill the chicken, and when Nedu pleads them not to, they see that the chicken has been cut from its leash and runs away from them. The sister films the whole thing as the family runs around the town to get the chicken. Finally, when the family catches the chicken, the father kills it and Nedu becomes so distraught that he won’t eat dinner. Eventually he does, but he eats around the cooked chicken parts. A third story to highlight is ‘Eden’ in which a brother and sister rummage through their father’s collection of tapes and find his pornography. They watch together both mesmerized and terrified of the consequences. So much so that one day when the power goes out and they can’t pull the tape from the VCR, they are on edge until their father finds out what they’d been watching. From this, he freaks out and beats the son who admits to watching it, and covers for the sister. After some time, the brother gets into more trouble, and to show that she can be just as strong as him, she admits to her father that she also watched the tape. Her father beats her as well.
 
I’ve dogeared basically every story in Okonkwo’s collection because they’re truly so astounding in the depth and propulsion that they’re all hits. These feel like quintessential stories of religion, mental illness, family pain and drama. And each story opens up a world that felt so specific and full of emotion that I can only be left in awe. An unrivaled read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Felt in the Jaw by Kristen Arnett is a collection of stories about queer women living in Florida. Many of the stories follow lives that are rough around the edges, such as ‘Aberrations in Flight’ where a married couple, after buying a fixer-upper of a house, fight over the color of the studio all while birds fly into their windows. Or, in ‘Blessing of the Animals’, where a queer couple goes to a church on the day they bless animals to ask for their wedding to be done at that church. Though, one of the partners is unenthused about the idea while the other has an accident with their period. I particularly liked ‘The Locusts’ which follows a girl as she leads her cousins in drinking beer and then eventually forces the youngest to swallow acorns. This leads to the child’s choking and then death which makes the girl run away. All of the characters in these stories don’t and shouldn’t be let off easy—like any person, they are flawed, though that doesn’t make them unlikable. For example, in the last story ‘See also: a history of glassmaking’, the woman once was married and had a child, though was so distant from her son, she doesn’t really know who he is. Even still, she volunteers to take a coworker home partway through a night out. A worthwhile read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Slow Stories by Bette A. is a collection of stories that follow characters into the strange and surreal. They’re framed like fairy tales with a nod to morality, though it never arrives. The stories are about people who get stuck in a continuously growing house, or a king who asks for everything or else he beheads people, a village that builds a microscope that is so long that they direct it on themselves. The strangeness of these stories keeps them an arm’s width away, sometimes by not naming characters, other times sprinting through time. The stories that I most enjoyed were ‘The Other Village’, ‘Guided’, ‘The King and His Things’, and ‘The Inverted Gallery’. While entertaining, the stories felt fairly surface-level in their meanings (in part because they’re so short that ‘Guided’ was really the only story that delved strongly into emotion).
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​Transcription by Ben Lerner is a novel centered around an enigmatic character, Thomas, as he is about to be interviewed, his death, and his involvement in his son and granddaughter’s life. The story starts off with one of his previous students gearing up to interview him, prepping in his hotel, dropping his phone in the sink, and losing the only recording device he will have for the interview with Thomas later. Though, for the interviewer, they’re able to partially reflect on their time in college and after with the moments surrounding Thomas, and then the circumstances in which he met his wife and had his own daughter. At Thomas’s place, because he’s in his 90’s, his mental facilities have slightly eroded, which make him start to think that his student may or not be his son. Even still, the interviewer isn’t able to use his phone so instead reconstructs the interview that is soon published. The second part of the novel follows immediately after the interviewer’s reveal of the published piece, in part being a fabricated conversation with Thomas, during Thomas’s memorial service. The interviewer doesn’t believe that he was in the wrong, though most of his collogues think different of him after. The final part is an extended interview with Thomas’s son, in part about Thomas being emotionally distant as a father, while also delving into his own struggles as a parent trying to get his daughter to eat.
 
Even though the novel is quite short, Lerner is able to pack a lot of emotional weight to the interviewer thinking about his own daughter or Thomas’s son feeling frustrated at his father. It is constructed somewhat unconventionally, and even while the majority of the novel is dialogue, it still feels like it speeds along. I think in part because it’s structured around Thomas’s death and that the interviews are describing events that happened.
 
The novel is very specifically a Covid story with the granddaughter doing school online, Thomas getting Covid and his call over FaceTime, and opening with the interviewer on the train with a mask. While I think that Covid is essential in the narrative, the novel already reads of its time even if it was published last month. I think what I mean is that because Covid—at least for the middle class—was a universally cushioned isolation its descriptions and discussions of Covid don’t feel fresh or unique. Of course, because it was a collective experience then these details don’t make anything particularly sticky. What is missing, which may be intentional, is the class of people who couldn’t get their groceries delivered to them—that in fact they were the ones delivering the groceries. I think this isn’t a particularity to Lerner’s novel, but this is more of my own skepticism of Covid narratives in general: they are middle or upper middle-class experiences that are softened by lower class struggle (and specifically that lower class struggle is barely mentioned). So, while Transcription is positioned in Covid time, and its narrative centers around Covid, its impact of Covid is aesthetic only. What I mean is that the only true impact that Covid could’ve had was Thomas’s intubation. Though, while Thomas is intubated, he doesn’t die. And for the purposes of the narrative, his intubation is required for his son to open up about his feelings. But in the narrative, it could’ve been any near-death event for Thomas’s son to talk openly.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford is a collection of interlinked short stories that follow the lives of a Native American family first in Oklahoma and then in Texas as they deal with skeletons in their closets. In some instances, they flee from wildfires, hunker down in cellars during tornadoes, or battle their own family history. One of the characters, Justine, gets pregnant while she is in high school with a man twice her age. And when her family finds out that she’s going to be a mother, Justine runs away at first and then returns to her family at church. This child is Reney who, somewhat aware of her mother’s early parenthood, lives recklessly, smoking in abandoned houses, running away with a boy, scoping out her father at the gas station. In the collection, I really enjoyed the first story, ‘Book of Generations’, which follows Justine’s pregnancy. Another story I was quite fond of was ‘Then Signs My Soul’ which is about a guy, Moses, who recently lost his mother. In the first week of his grieving, a pair of married women move in next door and help him care for his garden while he helps repair their house. The third story that I thought was really good was ‘Bonita’ which follows Justine and her partner as she weighs leaving him while a fire whips through Bonita. These stories feature generations of strong women, sometimes in the wrong, but always resilient.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Only Son by Kevin Moffett is a novel about a boy and then a man reckoning with his father’s death, raising a son without a template, and the tenuous relationship he has with his aging mother. The first part follows the speaker in the days and years after his father’s death when he is nine. He attends karate lessons by a sensei who teaches kids with dead fathers, he sells things door to door from a magazine catalogue, he takes a trip to his aunt and grandmothers in Kentucky (going from Florida) to visit his father’s old room. The novel then pushes forward as the speaker is a father himself, watching his son grow up, observing and loving him in ways he thinks is right. At the moment, he’s a writing professor at a college in LA where he feels all his students are detached from his teachings. He takes his son, by that time a pre-teen, to skateparks and tries to become the role model he never had. Then, after receiving a gray notebook with his own father’s documentation of a journey from LA to San Francisco, he decides to follow in his father’s footsteps. His wife convinces his son to join him on the journey, acting as a final trip between the two before his son goes off to college. It’s during the trip the father begins to see how his son has pulled away from him. The father’s mother calls at times to talk about her new love affair, or the cactus she walked into at night, though the whole time, the father is somewhat cold to her while his son is the opposite. It’s not until they’re in San Francisco and it’s the last night when his son decides to go to a very fancy sushi restaurant. While there, he calls his grandmother to rate and rag on the food. It’s a moment where the father notes, “…it occurs to me that my experience of this meal is secondary to his, a feeling some parents must have all the time, and one I’ve had before but never this acutely.” It sums up how during the raising of his son, his focus hadn’t always been on his son.
 
Moffett has crafted a story that feels so propulsive in its language, it’s almost closer to a very long prose poem. It approaches its subject matter sometimes lightheartedly, sometimes serious, but always providing gut-punching lines. The novel crystalizes into a father’s realization of the way he loves and treats his son, and how that’s been put on the backseat when the grief of his own father towers above him. A truly powerful read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner is a novel that follows the Compson family in 1910 and 1928 as problems begin to wreck them from the inside out in the fictional Yoknapatawpha county. The novel opens with the youngest son, Benjy, who is mentally handicapped and is taken care of by one of the Black servants and kids, Luster. In the narrative, we’re inside Benjy’s head as he goes looking for quarters, follows his siblings and servants around. Though the narrative itself is disjointed, jumping from one moment to the next quickly, has partial thoughts in italics, and creates this atmosphere of a family in turmoil. The narrative then shifts back to 1910 and follows Quentin, a man and Benjy’s uncle, on one of his last days before he commits suicide. He goes to get a watch he purposely broke repaired, tries to help a girl who is lost out, but then gets detained for doing so, and has sex with his sister Caddy (who he killed himself over after she gets married to someone else). Afterward, the narrative shifts back to 1928 and follows Jason, the eldest brother and the head of the household (since their father had died). He runs a business betting on cotton stocks, while manning a supply store, though he is nefarious in his other dealings. Not only does he think the traders are conspiring against him, but he is also keeping his sister’s daughter, also named Quentin, from seeing her mom. And throughout this time, he forced Caddy, Quentin’s mother, to pay for Quentin’s life. Though Jason has been storing all that money in a drawer for himself. It’s hinted that he knows that Quentin, the daughter, is a product of Caddy and Quentin, the uncle, and uses that to keep Caddy away. And in fact, one day she tries to see her daughter and Jason cheats her by keeping her daughter in the car as they drive next to her. Finally, the last part of the novel pulls away and is told in 3rd person, mainly narrating Dilsey, the Black servant, as she takes care of the house, the mother, her son Luster, and Benjy. In the morning she gets water ready and then takes Benjy and Luster to church where they listen to a preacher from St. Louis. Later on, the narrative follows Jason as he realizes that Quentin hasn’t shown up to breakfast. So he barges into his locked room where he keeps his money, and realizes it’s all gone. Turns out Quentin stole the cash (most of it truly belonging to her) and ran away with a man from a traveling show. Jason becomes furious and tries to track them down, but ends up getting knocked over and gets a splitting headache, so ends his search. The novel ends with Luster trying to calm Benjy by taking him to the cemetery where Quentin is buried, but Jason finds them out. There’s an additional appendix to the novel which, in part, is a listing of the Compson family from 1699-1945, but really applies an additional narrative to the family. First, it tracks a librarian who sees Caddy’s photo in a magazine and takes it to Jason first, thinking he’d want to talk to her, but knows that he was the one who sent her away. And then to Dilsey who is too old to see the photo. It also provides a broader picture of how the robbery changed the family, or rather, how Jason’s blackmailing bit him back.
 
Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury is astounding in its voice, narrative, and boldness. The first two sections on their own provide impressions of a family. One through the eyes of (what the narrative calls) an “invalid”, while the second follows the uncle who will commit suicide. It’s only when Jason’s narrative comes in where clarity begins to arrive. Though this clarity is sharply nihilistic. He thinks conspiracies are abound by the Jews out east trying to take advantage of his cotton stocks. He basically keeps his niece, Quentin, under lock and key and forces her mother, Caddy, to pay him if she wants to see her. He is deeply racist, though also terrified of Dilsey. All of it prepares the reader for the most narrative heavy section in the last part. In fact, it’s possible that the first 3 sections are there to really paint these characters in detail, while the last section then throws these characters into chaos. It is in how the POV shifts that creates an air of weight that hinges on us being inside the character’s heads first.
 
Though, regardless of being “of its time”, the narrative’s weak points exist in its racism—not of the characters themselves because if you’re inside a character’s heads, racism surely can exist. But it’s in the last section where it describes the preacher from St. Louis who had, “a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey.” It is in this narrative, the 3rd person POV, where the reader is pulled back from what they suppose as “subjective” to “objective”. But this description does indicate a bias of Faulker’s that shouldn’t go unstated. Of course, the other sections may be more overtly racist with their use of the N-word, but those are confined to 1st person, effectively subjective interpretations of reality. It “gives the game away” when what’s supposed to be objective describes a Black man with racial stereotypes. However, that being said, The Sound and The Fury is an intensely innovative novel and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.
 
Final Rating: 5/5