Tag Archives: Anthology
The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories (Volume 1) by hitRECord and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Short shorts (of the literary variety, ahem!) are not particularly new. Hemingway (no, I’m not a fan) probably gave the genre its biggest boost with his exemplary six-word version: ”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Given our overloaded 21st-century mental circuits, short shorts seem to be just about right for our shrinking attention spans. The first of a planned three-volume series, Tiny is perfectly sized to slip into any pocket and pull out anytime, anywhere. Open to any page (no bookmarks required) for a quick literary snippet – visually enhanced, no less – to get a full storytime experience in just a few seconds. “‘The universe is not made of atoms; it’s made of tiny stories,’” the title page invites.
“The doctor’s wife ate two apples a day, just to be safe. But her husband kept coming home.”
“One day before breakfast, an orange rolled off the counter and escaped its fate, bounding happily through the kitchen door. Filled with hope, the egg followed.”
“One wanted to share a life together. The other wanted to share two.”
Yes, you could read this tiny book straight through in about five minutes … but why? Go head, take some savoring time in between that commute, this meeting, that pick-up, that deadline … The collection is ready-culled for you, featuring 67 collaborators, chosen from 8,569 contributions (!) submitted to hitRECord, an “open-collaborative production company” founded by actor/artist Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Sure, some will make you shrug and turn the page, others will make you giggle, guffaw, or smirk, and still others might make you stop and linger over a few deep breaths.
Not that you asked, but here’s my (obvious) favorite: “His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.”
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Words from a Granary: An Anthology of Short Stories by Ugandan Women Writers edited by Violet Barungi
Considered together, this collection of 15 stories is a welcome statement of women’s literary empowerment. The second anthology published by FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association founded by novelist/short story writer/playwright-turned Ugandan Cabinet member Mary Karoro Okurut and officially launched in 1996, is testimony that “Ugandan women writers refuse to be discouraged by the appalling lack of a reading culture in the country,” insists editor Violet Barungi in the introduction. “They keep wielding their pens, churning out more and more reading material in the hope that one day, our people will realise that reading is the backbone of intellectual empowerment and an integral part of development.”
With respect and admiration for such commendable intentions, Words – examined as individual stories – is an uneven mix ranging from disappointing amateur efforts to memorable glimpses into even stronger writing to come. The majority of the 15 here understandably reflect Uganda’s turbulent history since its independence in 1962; the gruesome, all-too-common violence against women is undeniably prevalent in these pages, as is the constant struggle for survival amidst unfair, unjust conditions.
“Chained” by Monica Arac de Nyeko is perhaps the most terrifying of all, about a student forced to betray her entire convent school and witness their heinous massacre by a rebel gang, then herself commit an unthinkable act in order to buy her freedom. Just as disturbing and tragic is a silenced, almost casual violence against women, as documented in a wedding-day rape in “Esteri’s Secret” by Winnie Gashumba Munyarugerero, incestuous rape in “Out of the Trap” by Ayeta Anne Wangusa, workplace rape in “Hard Truth” by Lillian Tindyebwa, and random multiple rapes during a bus raid in “End of a Journey” by Waltraud Ndagijimana.
Among the anthology’s 15, two stories prove most resonating. The collection’s first, “I Watch You My Sister” by Goretti Kyomuhendo examines a homeless woman from afar as she fights to be noticed in order to stay alive; the repetition of the phrase “I watch you, my sister …” is a strangely lulling refrain against the tragedy playing out from paragraph to paragraph. Closer to the end, “Stepdaughter” by Deborah Etoori is the only happy tale, capturing the developing relationship between two students and their eventual decision to become a true family.
“The anthology is the outcome of a three-year programme of training workshops geared towards equipping creative women writers with writing skills,” explains editor Barungi. In the decade since the collection’s original publication, a number of the authors included here have continued to hone those skills … as I continue my own multi-culti literary education, I’m planning to explore some of those efforts here on BookDragon. Do join me!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2001 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African
Tesoro by Natsume Ono, translated by Joe Yamazaki
More and more, I’ve noticed book cover flaps yielding important tidbits (which makes me a bit concerned about such covers going astray, especially for picture books handled by so many little hands!). But worry aside, how fitting to find this on the front flap about Tesoro: “In Italian, it means: • Treasure, a treasured thing • Something or someone precious.”
Precious treasure is exactly right: Tesoro offers 15 diverse vignettes – gathered and translated for the first time into English – from manga powerhouse Natsume Ono. “These may be clumsy stories, but they’ve become memorable and important to me,” Ono writes in a closing note. “It’s like a treasure to me.” Nice to know we’re in synch!
Ono’s signature simple style with the oversized, most soulful eyes is bookended here with stylized bears (the front cover offers a sneak peek) that show a sharply different genre from her human creations. As adorable as her little bears are (check out her graffiti-ed trashcan when she “had an office job,” hee hee ho ho!), I remain mesmerized by the eyes … and myriad of instantaneous expressions those eyes define: relief in “Inside Out” when a husband learns of his wife’s impending return; everyday love in “Moyashi Couple” between a “bean sprout” elderly husband and wife; gratitude in “Three Stories About Bento 1/3″ over an unexpected lunch delivery, poignant joy in “Three Stories About Bento 3/3″ as a father speaks to his late wife through his son’s full round belly (wept over that one!); heartbreak in “senza titolo #1″ as a father looks on at his too-young dying son; disappointment in “Christmas Morning” in both father and son over a missing present; and tearful adoration in “senza titolo #6″ over “the best man in the world, Dad.”
Ono has earned her international chops for her manga-turned-anime series Gente (and its related single volume Ristorante Paradiso) and House of Five Leaves, but my personal favorites remain her smaller efforts, especially not simple, and now the tesoros in her Tesoro.
For all of Natsume Ono’s titles posted on BookDragon, please click here.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 (United States)
TESORO - ONO NATSUME SHOKI TANPENSHU © Natsume Ono
Original Japanese edition published by Shogakukan Inc. Continue reading
The End of the World by Sushma Joshi
Few Nepali writers have thus far landed on western bookshelves, with only two exceptions who come immediately to mind – elegant Samrat Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Royal Ghosts) and activist Manjushree Thapa (The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight). So to find another Nepali author writing in English is a gratifying discovery indeed.
Born and based in Kathmandu, Sushma Joshi is another hybrid global writer (and filmmaker), with her Indian and American education, as well as numerous fellowships and residencies all over the world. First published in Nepal in 2008, Joshi’s debut short story collection (which includes an acknowledging – small world – nod to Thapa), was one of 57 titles long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Reprinted late last year, World is immediately available via Kindle (for just $2.99 currently). [NO, I am absolutely not a sudden Kindle-convert, but impatience will make me do strange things!]
What proves most memorable about the collection’s eight stories is an open earnestness in Joshi’s storytelling. Her writing is guileless and energetic, at times refreshing although occasionally a bit clumsy. If her writing seems to lack a polished, sustained subtlety, her directness gives her stories a welcome sense of truthful urgency.
Notables include “Cheese,” in which a servant boy must wait decades to finally taste the precious foreign treat called “chij,” “Law and Order” in which a wannabe officer settles for the local police force but can’t live according to the law, “The End of the World” about the ironic sense of freedom people briefly experience thinking that tomorrow will never come, and “The Blockade” about a man who has spent a year away in foreign menial labor in order to support his family and returns home to disaster.
In each of Joshi’s stories, everyday people are merely trying to survive challenges far beyond their own making, whether strict social stratification, unending war, widespread corruption, political upheavals, or all-consuming natural disasters. Nepal’s last tumultuous decades have left the citizens with little room for anything more than the struggle to just get through the day. Most tragic of all is a sense of resigned acceptance that leaves little hope for a future desperately in need of change.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Nepali
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Having been so enthralled by MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Yiyun Li‘s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, then her novel, The Vagrants, I admit I held off on this, her latest collection, for over a year. I seem to have difficulty immediately reading the newest book of certain much-admired authors knowing that future titles will mean a long, long wait. But then I’ve been on a short story roll this past week … so how could I resist a genius any longer?
The best of this collection of nine bookend the book. The first,”Kindness,” more novella than short story, is a wrenching look into the sparse life of 41-year-old Moyan, who lives alone without a single attachment left in the world. The funeral announcement of her former unit commander – a woman just a few years her senior who Moyan has not seen in over two decades – triggers distant memories of her disconnected past: her mismatched parents, the older woman who introduced her to the world of English novels, the married flutist, the young girls in her work unit, and even the now-dead Lieutenant Wei who once asked, “‘Why are you unhappy … Tell me, how can we make you happy?’” Decades later, such questions remain unanswered.
In the eponymous final story, appearances are at jarring odds with reality. The “gold boy” and “emerald girl” who populate a long-ago wedding picture with “their matching good looks,” represent anything but a happy union. Forty-plus years later, three isolated souls find their lives intertwined: the ‘emerald girl’-wife who wished for her own widowhood, her single son who cannot live his life openly, and the chosen daughter-in-law who keeps herself apart even from her widower father who raised her. Together, the leftover trio “would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.”
In a world crowded with so many billions, loneliness is the one somber detail exquisitely, painstakingly woven throughout Li’s stories. Everyday lives continue, connections fray and disappear, individuals are ignored and become lost … little by little, distance and isolation become the absolute norm.
From the old man who never married, to the couple who lost one daughter and devise an elaborate plan to have another, to an older woman who shelters suffering younger women and girls, to a group of six older women who ferret out cheating husbands, Li’s stories haunt and elucidate, giving permanent space to the overlooked, the forgotten who in their own longing ways try again and again to connect.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Chinese, Chinese American
The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin
No one has such an unpredictable, quirky, downright wacky imagination as Haruki Murakami. And even though your brain knows he’s created an impossible universe, everything on the page seems so convincing, you’ll go along for the ride – any ride with Murakami at the helm.
Even almost 20 years since its initial publication in English translation, Elephant surprises, teases, shocks, and, of course, entertains as if it’s brand new (re-reading Murakami is always highly recommended).
Of the collection’s 17 stories, my personal favorite has to be “The Second Bakery Attack,” which also happens to be the second story (of course). Suffering “unbearable hunger” in the middle of night, a man tells his wife of a youthful “bakery attack” he planned with his friends to stave off their incredible hunger back then; the bungled event turned into an impromptu concert, but the friends did get fed. Inspired, the wife decides the time is right for attack #2, but when they can’t find another bakery in the wee hours, they settle for a sleepy McDonald’s instead.
Among these diverse stories, some seem linked, tracking fragments from the life of a certain male “I” and his experiences – both mundanely domestic and fabulously surreal. One engaging recurrence of note is the name “Noboru Watanabe,” which appears in the first story, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” as the name of a missing cat, then again in “Family Affair” as the disdained computer engineer fiancé-to-be of the man’s younger sister (who reminds the man of a hated former schoolmate who “had a memory like an elephant”), and – wait for it! – yet again in the title (and final) story as a 63-year-old elephant keeper who vanishes with his pachydermous charge …
A lovelorn little green man, a manipulative dancing dwarf, “reduced” TV People that no one else can see … in Murakami’s uninhibited, volatile, capricious world, anything can happen. And does. Check your rationality. And just come along for the wild ride …
Tidbit: The title story, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” reappears a few years later as the first chapter of Murakami’s abridged-in-translation-just-for-word-count (!) novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; the cat’s name morphs into Noboru Wataya and, yes, it’s still named after a character of the human variety …
Readers: Adult
Published: 1993 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, .Translation, Japanese
You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
All is definitely not fair in love and war … and off the battlefields, the most sacred institutions – especially marriage and family – take the hardest hits.
Siobhan Fallon‘s debut collection bears expert witness to the dangers of deployment for those left behind: according to her biography, she lived at Fort Hood in Texas while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty. Miraculously, her family survived – her bio says she’s now living near the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan with her family.
Not nearly as lucky (resilient? blessed?) are most of Fallon’s fictional characters in her eight starkly indelible stories here. They are, however, hauntingly real, deeply suffering, desperately hopeful, frighteningly resigned. In the opening, eponymous story, a woman hears – even eavesdrops – on the disintegration of the family that lives next door, the isolated wife within who is a source of foreign fascination for the rest of the lonely, waiting wives.
Other standouts are many. In”Remission,” a cancer-stricken woman is faced with the multi-layered challenges of her illness, her distraught and defiant teenage daughter, and a community that shuns her for having the luxury (liability) of having her husband on this of the world. In “Leave,” a soldier is so desperate to know if his wife has been faithful that he sneaks home unannounced and sets up his a secret reconnaissance mission in his own basement. In the penultimate story, ”You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming” – a real-life sign that warns returning soldiers of the dangers of drunk driving – reunited couples must learn to co-exist in the same space, to somehow reclaim their lives together amidst all the nightmares, betrayals, rage, loneliness, and endless guilt.
These men and women – so distanced even when they are standing in the same room –tread a fine line between blinding denial and crushing reality. How they navigate their leftover lives, survive their immutable choices are searingly captured by newcomer Fallon. The short story proves to be the perfect medium for her, reflecting the devastating fragmentation of active military life. Indeed, war is hell, but survival too often also comes at an impossibly brutal cost.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Nonethnic-specific
Asian American Plays for a New Generation edited by Josephine Lee, Don Eitel, and R.A. Shiomi
This is not your parents’ (or your grandparents’) Asian American theater. That I can even say that is proof of massive progress. What a difference a few decades makes … you won’t find any Japanese American internees or migrant farm laborers here, no Gold Mountain gold rushers or transcontinental railroad workers (although Charlie Crocker does get a sly mention).
Truly, these are indeed “plays for a new generation” – we’re talking 9/11 in Zaraawar Mistry’s Indian Cowboy, transracial adoption in Kurt Miyashiro, Rick Shiomi, and Sundraya Kase’s Walleye Kid: The Musical, Hong Kong handover in Aurorae Khoo’s Happy Valley, an APA Oscar nomination in Sun Mee Chomet’s Asiamnesia, the voiceless-no-more Hmong in May Lee-Yang’s Sia(b), a new kind of inter-Asian colonialism in Clarence Coo’s Bahala Na (Let It Go), and the over-the-top reclamation of just about every stereotype in Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman.
But before you let out that “WOW!” here’s another unprecedented fact about these plays to marvel over, as co-editor Rick Shiomi, the co-founder and artistic director of Minneapolis/St.Paul-based Mu Performing Arts, writes in his “Afterword”: “Mu Performing Arts participated in the development and produced the world premieres of all but one of the plays in this anthology. The question that comes to mind is ‘How on earth did this happen?’”
How, indeed! Really, we’re not talking either coast where most APA theater participants and experts tend to congregate – or at least we think they do. Even Shiomi confesses to his own initial concerns about the (very) few APA artists trying to “survive without an Asian American community” while “buried deep in the hinterland of the Midwest.” And yet, somehow, Shiomi’s Mu Performing Arts, founded in 1992, has grown into the second largest pan-Asian performing arts organization across the country. This marvelous book is irrefutable testimony to its not-so-quiet powerhouse status. The drama continues … hopefully for decades to come.
Tidbit: Come meet Rick Shiomi today at the Library of Congress! Click here for details.
For those of you who missed the event, his fellow panelist Lia Chang shares some of her photographic memories. Click here to view!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Drown by Junot Diaz
Talk about a surprisingly fortuitous bonus: If you get the audible version of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, included in the deal is Junot Diaz‘s debut title, Drown, a collection of 10 mostly-related short stories. That both Diaz titles are read with such fluency by Jonathan Davis melds both together, as if each book is a complementary extension of the other.
If you haven’t discovered either book yet, the audible versions are highly recommended together. The main reason is Yunior, Oscar‘s narrator, who in spite of his near omniscient vantage point in the novel, reveals little about himself beyond his love for Oscar’s sister Lola which is never enough to curb his extracurricular exploits. Instead, Drown is where Yunior’s life gets revealed in snippets: his origins in the Dominican Republic, growing up with a mostly absent father who left for the United States, his adventures (sometimes brutal) with his older brother Rafa (“Ysrael”), the struggles his mother faces trying to raise her two sons abandoned and alone (“Aguantando”).
Meanwhile, in New York, Yunior’s father works numerous dead-end jobs, trying to figure out how to reunite his family, and falls into another marriage, another life (“Negocios”). The family is eventually reunited, adding a little sister for Rafa and Yunior. Yunior is prone to car sickness earning his father’s violent wrath (“Fiesta 1980″), worries about his sexuality (“Drown”), yet knows all the certain love moves for girls of different ethnicities (“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie”). As an adult, he’s mourning the loss of his girlfriend for whom he used to steal spending money at his pool table delivery job (“Edison, NJ), although he thinks he might get over his latest breakup by befriending the model in the apartment below whose lover has recently broken her heart (“Boyfriend”).
Diaz’s stories here, about Yunior or not, are all raw, visceral, and each aching with need. The rejected suffering endured in the Dominican Republic does not necessarily abate with an American address. Material and physical comforts (food, transportation, a home) are not enough for the good life, especially with fractured families that can’t seem to find a way back together, regardless of closing distance. Yunior and Oscar: two overlapping books, two diametric lives, one parallel quest for lasting true love.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1996 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Carribbean American
An Empty Room: Stories by Mu Xin, translated by Toming Jun Liu
With 20-plus books published in Taiwan and China, writer/painter Mu finally makes his English debut with a collection of 13 stories he chose from three previous titles. The result is, in a word, uneven.
Standouts outshine the less than memorable, perhaps making the latter seem that much more lackluster in comparison. “The Moment When Childhood Vanished” is a koan-like reminder of bewildering loss, “Xia Mingzhu: A Bright Pearl” challenges family bonds, “Eighteen Passengers on a Bus” shockingly pushes the boundaries of patience, and “Halo” captures the holy in humanity. The highlight is “Fong Fong No. 4,” which, in a few controlled pages, translates half a century of China’s tumultuous, wrenching past through the metamorphosis (in four phases) of a young girl’s life into middle-aged womanhood.
Verdict: Although recent notable collections such as Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders might prove more consistent, readers who appreciate spare, elliptical stories that last long after the final page will find considerable satisfaction here.
Review: “Short Stories,” Library Journal, June 1, 2011
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, .Translation, Chinese
Facebook
Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
