Poe / Hop-Frog

Illustration by poe Arthur Rackham

HOP-FROG

By Edgar Allan Poe

I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind, and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it happened that his seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as jokers. They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent, oily men, as well as inimitable jokers. Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine; but certain it is that a lean joker is a rara avis in terris.

U.F.O. in Kushiro by Haruki Murakami

(Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.)

Haruki Murakami / Un ovni aterriza en Kushiro

Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways. She never said a word. Sunk deep in the cushions of the sofa, her mouth clamped shut, she wouldn’t answer when Komura spoke to her. She wouldn’t shake her head or nod. Komura could not be sure that the sound of his voice was even getting through to her.

Haruki Murakami / Samsa in Love

Samsa in Love by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami / Samsa enamorado

He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.

He lay flat on his back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. It took time for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The ceiling seemed to be a common, everyday ceiling of the sort one might find anywhere. Once, it had been painted white, or possibly a pale cream. Years of dust and dirt, however, had given it the color of spoiled milk. It had no ornament, no defining characteristic. No argument, no message. It fulfilled its structural role but aspired to nothing further.

The Murakami Effect / On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature

 

Haruki Murakami

The Murakami Effect

On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature

The following essay originally appeared in Vol. 37, No. 4 of NER.

Stephen Snyder
January 4, 2017

Translation is a kind of traffic, in nearly every sense of the word. There’s the most obvious sense, in that translations cross borders of time, place, and culture, moving from one language into another.

But traffic’s other meaning—that is, the buying and selling of goods—also applies. Translators themselves can be said to traffic in words, sounds, images, and more; whether what is trafficked is tangible or intangible, it’s implied that what is bought, sold, and bartered is in any case commodified. When we think about traffic we also inevitably think about congestion, about impediments to smooth circulation—of vehicles, of course, but also, by extension, of ideas and things. While translations do cross borders, broadening our cultural knowledge as they present one language in the terms of another, they can also become an impediment to free communication. As a translator of contemporary Japanese fiction, I’ve seen both the flow and the congestion, and have witnessed at close range the unintended consequences—and our lack of control as translators—when it comes to the way our texts move or fail to move across borders.

Five Japanese Authors Share Their Favorite Murakami Short Stories

 

Haruki Murakami

Five Japanese Authors Share Their Favorite Murakami Short Stories

Yoko Ogawa, Masatsugu Ono, and Others Discuss

David Karashima
July 20, 2020

This past weekend in Japan, Haruki Murakami released his new story collection Ichininshō Tansū (The First Person Singular). The collection comprises eight stories, seven of which were first published in the literary magazine Bungakukai between summer 2018 and winter 2020. Many of these first-person stories are narrated by what feels like an older version of the “boku” first-person narrators of Murakami’s early stories and novels. Some of the narrators have clearly been crafted to resemble Haruki Murakami himself (a technique he famously deployed early in his career when he wrote the stories included in his 1985 collection Kaiten Mokuba no Deddo Hiito). Several stories in this new collection have already been made available in English translation in the New Yorker and Granta, and Philip Gabriel’s translation of the entire book is scheduled to be published in April 2021.

 

Ali Smith

Ali Smith: By the Book

Feb. 7, 2017

The author, most recently, of “Autumn” ranks “Invitation to a Beheading” among the great books: “Nabokov treats us to, then liberates us from, the bad farce of totalitarianism. What a blast.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

Posters / Parásite

PARASITE

POSTERS

Books that made me / Anuk Arudpragasam: ‘There’s a lot of laughter in my life, but not when I read’

   

Anuk Arudpragasam … ‘There are texts and passages I wish I was capable of writing.’ 
Photograph: Ruvin De Silva

Books

that 

made me  

Anuk Arudpragasam: ‘There’s a lot of laughter in my life, but not when I read’

The novelist, whose A Passage North has been longlisted for the Booker prize, on being inspired by Descartes and the influence of Robert Musil

Friday 13 August 2021

The book I am currently reading

I just finished reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, and am about to read some Elizabeth Bishop. In Tamil I’m reading Vaadivaasal, an elegant late 1940s novella by CS Chellappa about jallikattu, the centuries-old game of bull-taming that still takes place in parts of Tamil Nadu today.

 

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor review – a chilling meditation on loss and time

The rural village, the missing girl, the search for a body … then life goes on, as an archetypal story is rekindled with explosive results

Tessa Hadley
Saturday 14 April 2017

W

hy is it always a girl who’s missing? What is it in that archetype that tugs at us in some deep place – readers and viewers, male and female alike – when yet again the quest begins with news of someone’s daughter who hasn’t come home, or a glimpse of a girl in some place that’s much too lonely, glancing back nervously over her shoulder? We can’t imagine being hooked so easily if the paperback thriller or crime drama began with a missing boy, and the idea of his disappearance wouldn’t transform with the same inevitability into the idea of the boy’s death, the image of it.

'Reservoir 13,' by Jon McGregor / Review

 

REVIEW: 'Reservoir 13,' by Jon McGregor

FICTION: A mesmerizing novel about a rural English community and the disappearance of a teenage girl. 

By MALCOLM FORBES 

Special to the Star Tribune
NOVEMBER 3, 2017 — 10:45AM

The famous Arlington Row in Bibury, The Cotswolds, dusted with January snow

Jon McGregor’s first novel, the Man Booker Prize longlisted “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things,” was a shrewdly composed, beautifully orchestrated urban hymn. “The city, it sings,” ran its opening refrain, and from there McGregor zoomed into a British street and amplified its residents’ individual voices.

The Visionary Power of the Novelist Jon McGregor

 

Jon McGregor

The Visionary Power of the Novelist Jon McGregor

He mixes the mundane and the ecstatic, and refuses to settle into conventional form.

James Wood
November 20, 2017

One of my favorite short stories is Luigi Pirandello’s beautiful, brief “A Breath of Air.” An old man, paralyzed by a stroke, sits in his bedroom, while the life of the household stirs around him. The old man seethes with anger and resentment, and on this particular day he is unusually perturbed. Everyone seems to be acting strangely. His little granddaughter enters the room, and is annoying and unruly—she runs toward his balcony, whose glass doors she wants to open. His daughter-in-law, who comes in to remove the child, seems not quite herself. Even the old man’s son seems different: he uses a tone of voice that the patriarch has never heard before. What has happened? Are they all in league against him? When he asks the servant why she is sighing, she laughs, and he angrily dismisses her. Later, he confronts his son, who assures him that nothing is going on, nothing has changed. But in the early evening, as a perfumed breeze gently pushes open the balcony door, he understands: spring has come. “The others could not see it. They could not even feel it in themselves because they were still part of life. But he who was almost dead, he had seen and felt it there among them. . . . That was why they had all behaved differently, without even knowing it.”

 

Jon McGregor

This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor – review

An audacious collection of short stories in which events come out of left field

Maggie O'Farrell
Fri 3 Feb 2012 22.55 GMT

I

was at a literary festival recently when an audience member asked the panel if they thought the short story would make a comeback in this country. I was surprised at the time because, as far as I'm aware, the short story has never gone away. The genre in Britain may not perhaps share the robust health it enjoys in North America, especially after the BBC revealed plans to reduce its short story programming. But all is far from lost. We have Helen Simpson, Dan Rhodes, Ali Smith: skilled short-story writers, all. We can now add Jon McGregor's name to this roll-call, with his generously titled collection, This Isn't The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.

Jon McGregor / This isn't the sort of thing that happens to someone like you / Review

 

THIS ISN'T THE SORT OF THING THAT HAPPENS TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU

STORIES

BY JON MCGREGOR ‧ 

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 27, 2012

Absorbing, quirky stories by Booker-nominated McGregor.

The best stories here are very good indeed. McGregor approaches his narratives elliptically and doesn’t shy away from experimentation. “In Winter the Sky,” for example, focuses on the fortunes of George, a young man who has been visiting his girlfriend. Driving home in a preoccupied state, he accidentally runs over a man, killing him instantly. Because he knows this would have a less-than-salutary effect on his future, George calmly buries the man and gets on with his relationship with the girl, eventually marrying her and taking care of his debilitated father. Years later the body is discovered, but there are no moral ramifications for George, only a little inconvenience. While McGregor conveys this narrative on the left-hand pages of the story, on the right-hand pages he gives us fragments of poetry written by George’s girlfriend/wife, poetry that gives us an alternative view of the events recounted. Another brilliant story, “Which Reminded Her, Later,” introduces us to Michael, a vicar, and Catherine, his wife. In deft strokes McGregor gives us glimpses of their earlier relationship, but by the time this story begins, they’re a long-suffering married couple. In his role as vicar (and Good Samaritan), Michael has invited a mysterious American woman into their house, a woman who spends much of her time dealing with a mysterious ailment. Catherine has little tolerance for this act of charity, and she and her husband become equally intransigent about how to deal with the situation. McGregor gives us 30 stories here, ranging from a single sentence to dense (and intense) re-creations of relationships.

Impressive and unconventional fiction.

KIRKUS

The 10 best short story collections

Elizabeth Day chooses the sharpest and smartest of small but perfectly formed works of fiction

Top 10 contemporary short stories

Elizabeth Day
Fri 17 Oct 2014 12.00 BST 

Photograph: Neil Bennett

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You 

Jon McGregor (2012)

The best short stories should haunt you for days and weeks. The stories in McGregor’s collection have stayed with me for months on end. They are linked by a unity of place – the fenlands of Norfolk and Cambridge – and by precise, elegant prose that elevates everyday occurrences into small, perfectly rendered pieces of art. As Maggie O’Farrell put it in her Guardian review: “The stories wrap themselves around the wholly disconcerting premise that catastrophes can rear up in anyone’s life without warning.”

Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver (1976)

Possibly the most economical short story writer in this list, Carver, with his precise, punchy prose, conveys in a few words what many novelists take several pages to elucidate. In stories such as “Fat” and “Are You a Doctor?” he writes with flat understatement about suburban disenchantment in mid-century America. The collection – shortlisted for the National Book prize – was written during what Carver called his “first life”, when he almost died of alcoholism. His “second life” started in 1977, when he gave up drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Photograph: Tim Knox

Tenth of December

George Saunders (2013)

Winner of last year’s inaugural Folio prize for fiction, Saunders is, according to Entertainment Weekly, “the master of joy bombs: little explosions of grin-stimulating genius that he buries throughout his deeply thoughtful, endlessly entertaining flights of imagination”. Stories such as “Victory Lap” demonstrate his deftness of touch in mixing humour and humanity, as well as showcasing his technical brilliance, incorporating several different points of view in a contained space. And “Sticks”, little over a page in length, is one of the most moving stories I’ve ever read

The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)

Adichie had written two novels set in her native Nigeria before this collection. It shifts her gaze to the US in 12 stories that explore the experiences of husbands and wives, parents and children, immigrants and permanent residents. The title story delves into the loneliness suffered by a Nigerian girl who moves to an America far removed from her imaginings. A wise and emotive writer, in this collection Adichie touches on her familiar themes of exile, cultural miscommunications and the human desire to reconcile internal and external worlds.

Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex

Runaway

Alice Munro (2004)

The Canadian writer won the Nobel prize for literature in 2013 for her extraordinary work as “master of the contemporary short story”. She also won the 2009 Man Booker International prize for her lifetime body of work and has been called a modern-day Chekhov. Runaway is among her best collections and displays all of Munro’s mastery: the effortless shifts in time, sometimes across decades; the ability to convey an entire life in a few pages; the exploration of complex truths in uncomplicated language.

Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The Garden Party and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield (1922)

This collection was first published in 1922, a year before Mansfield’s death at the age of 34 from tuberculosis. A pioneering modernist writer, Mansfield was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand before moving to Britain, where she became friends with DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The title story, one of her best-known works, is written in the modernist style, with the deceptively simple setting of a family preparing for a garden party. Against this backdrop Mansfield brilliantly interweaves meditations on class, life and death, illusion and reality.

Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex Features

Pulse

Julian Barnes (2011)

Barnes is best known as a novelist and won the Man Booker prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. As a result, his short stories are rather overlooked and shouldn’t be. Pulse is Barnes’s 17th book and is a masterclass in the shorter form. He is brilliant at evoking social nuance and has an unfailing eye for the tiniest detail that will shine light on the whole. Two particularly wonderful examples from this collection are “Complicity”, about the delicate beginnings of a love affair, and “East Wind”, about a relationship between an estate agent and a foreign waitress.

Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Observer

The Collected Stories

Lorrie Moore (2008)

This deliciously fat collection gives the reader the chance to dip in and out of one of the best observers of human behaviour. Moore is notable for her arch tone and her sharp humour. But what makes her special is the way she can shift so smoothly to gut-wrenching poignancy. She writes about terminal illness, family dynamics and infidelity with equal fluency. A particular favourite from this volume is “How to Be an Other Woman” from her first published collection, Self-Help (1985), which was composed almost entirely of stories from her master’s thesis.

Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

This debut collection of nine stories won the Pulitzer prize shortly after it was published in 1999 and was named the New Yorker’s debut of the year. The stories, written with what Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described as “uncommon elegance and poise”, deal with the diversity of Indian-American immigrant experience and the curious alchemy of love and relationships. My particular favourite in this collection is “A Temporary Matter”, a beautiful mediation on grief, love and loss as a couple try to come to terms with the stillbirth of their child.

That Glimpse of Truth

David Miller (ed) (out 23 October 2014)

Some of the best short stories contain unexpected moments of felicity on which the plot pivots. And so it was that, just as I was compiling this list, I received a giant package containing this doorstep of a book. It might be the most comprehensive collection of short stories… ever, featuring an all-star cast including Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl and more, selected by David Miller, a literary agent and author.

THE GUARDIAN

Two Interviews with Raymond Carver

Two Interviews with Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver's death at fifty in 1988 cut short the career of the most influential American short story writer since Ernest Hemingway. But it did not put an end to Carver's writing--or his influence.

In the years since Carver's death a steady stream of posthumous works has appeared, thanks in large part to the efforts of his widow, the writer Tess Gallagher. These range from Carver's last-written book of poems, A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), to some of his earliest literary efforts: No Heroics Please: Uncollected Writings (1991) and Carnations: A Play in One Act (1992). The biographical volumes Carver Country (1990), . . .When We Talk About Raymond Carver (1991), and Remembering Ray (1993) have kept his memory alive, as have the television documentaries Dreams Are What You Wake Up From (1989) and To Write and Keep Kind (1992). And of course there's Short Cuts (1993), Robert Altman's irreverent Hollywood take on Carver's world.

Raymond Carver / What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Review

 

Raymond Carver

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver, who Stephen King called “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century,” is generally regarded as having revolutionized the form. However, there are those who argue that the Carver style – what King says many critics “miscategorize as ‘minimalism’ or ‘dirty realism’ ” – is actually a product of his editor, Gordon Lish. The two had worked together successfully on Carver’s debut, the 1976 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, but the relationship became strained when it came to the follow-up, a book Carver called Beginners, but which eventually appeared, in 1981, under Lish’s preferred title, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It remains the book most general readers associate with “the Carver style.”

Interview / Tobias Wolff

1

Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff 

John H. E. Paine
May 2003

Tobias Wolff has steadily earned distinction over the last two decades and more as the author of carefully crafted and highly nuanced short fiction whose lineage, as he indicates here, can be traced back through the work of Raymond Carver, Katherine Anne Porter, and Ernest Hemingway to the fiction of Anton Chekhov (His introduction to a collection of Chekhov stories [A Doctor's Visit, 1988] contains some of the most perceptive commentary available on Chekhov as a writer of short stories). He is also an insightful reader of the other “kind” of story (those of Tolstoy and Flannery O'Connor, for example) and an alert observer of contemporary fiction.

 

John Cheever

Earth, Water, and Fire: Elemental Representations of Feminist Force In Stories by John Cheever, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Tobias Wolff

Richard C. Kane

Abstract

John Cheever, T. Coraghessan Boyle et Tobias Wolff sont bien connus pour leurs oeuvres qui se cristallisent autour de protagonistes masculins, comme l'illustrent "The Swimmer" et "The Country Husband" de Cheever, ainsi que "Greasy Lake" de Boyle ou encore "Hunters in the Snow" et This Boy's Life de Wolff. C'est certainement en réaction à la prévalence du thème masculin que ces auteurs ont été déboutés par nombre de critiques féministes après avoir été soumis à leur examen.

Mrs. Crasthorpe by William Trevor

Mrs. Crasthorpe

by William Trevor

On the short walk from the churchyard to her car, Mrs. Crasthorpe was aware of a profound humiliation. A lone mourner at her husband’s funeral, she had sensed it first in the modest country church he had insisted upon for what he had called his obsequies. A woman cleric unknown to Mrs. Crasthorpe had conducted a bleak service, had said the necessary words in an accent that appalled Mrs. Crasthorpe, and then had scuttled off without so much as a glance in Mrs. Crasthorpe’s direction. Two men were waiting, leaning on their shovels in the nearby graveyard, and within minutes had returned the clay to where they had dug it from, making a little mound, the coffin gone forever and with it Arthur, all of it a mockery. She was wrong, Mrs. Crasthorpe knew, to blame Arthur for the arrangements he’d put in hand before he went, but she’d become used to blaming him in his lifetime and couldn’t help doing so still.