Book Reviews: In the mood for something shorter?

I love a good short fic. Short stories, novellas, small but well-formed novels - if they are good of their type, they are absolutely my jam. I just finished a collection of the O. Henry short story prize winners from 2024, which prompted me to think I should post a review of some of the short story collections I have read over the past few months. So here goes!

The O. Henry Prize Winner 2024 edited by Amor Towles

This collection of the short stories that won the O. Henry short fiction prize in 2024 is, as is not uncommon for anthology collections, a mixed bag in terms of quality.

There are some outstanding stories in the book, which will stay with me for a long time - I would particularly cite Brad Felver's Orphans, Amber Caron's Didi, Kate DiCamillo's The Castle of Rose Tellin, Juliana Leite's My Good Friend, and E.K. Ota's The Paper Artist. Some of these stories moved me intensely, and Orphans, which is my favourite story in the book, made me sob, which is a high compliment for a short piece to achieve. If this, from Orphans, doesn't move you, I'm not sure what to say:

"What he'd said - it felt true as gravity, and just as inexplicable. He was an old man, but he was also a little boy, asking why things died, which might be the only question worth asking".

There are also a few stories which took a big swing but ultimately missed, but I admire the attempt - in this category I'd put Allegra Hyde's Mobilization, Morris Collins' The Home Visit, Caroline Kim's Hiding Spot, and Francisco Gonzalez's Serranos. I always respect writers who try to do a big significant thing, even if they don't quite nail it. That said, the ending of The Home Visit, talking literally about a cat with dementia but also, of course, about much more, absolutely slaps:

"I said his name again. He quieted and listened. All he had to do was turn around. Simple enough, but no one can do it."

Then there were the stories that just really didn't work for me, either because the tone was off or the story seemed pointless - particularly thinking of Madeline ffitch's Seeing Through Maps (weird, but not in a good way), Katherine D Stutzman's Junior (too vanilla for me), Jai Chakrabarti's The Import (the ending was baffling and I didn't grok the theme), and Robin Romm's Marital Problems (I did not understand what, if anything, I was meant to take from this one). I assume the judges saw things there that I didn't, which more than ok, all readers differ!

Overall, though, as a collection, it's well worth a read if you're a short story fan. I enjoyed it and will certainly revisit the best stories within it. 7/10 for me.

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is a collection of stories by American writer of Indian descent, Jhumpa Lahiri, written in Italian during her long residence in Rome, and then translated to English. I loved her collection The Interpreter of Maladies (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize), so I thought I might like this too, and I did.

The stories all deal with Rome as a city, but also with what the experience of being an outsider in Rome is like. They variously cover the stories of guest workers, tourists, travellers, refugees, immigrants, the children of immigrants, and people with one foot in Rome and one elsewhere (emigrees who have returned an so on). Through the stories, a strong sense of place is matched with a powerful sadness and sense of menace and imperfection - of worms eating at the rind (to paraphrase Langston Hughes). The language is only occasionally stilted in ways that point to the translation issue, which is a bonus; mostly, these stories flow very naturally.

I think this is a collection where the strength of it is only visible if you read them all. While certain stories did resonate more/ hit harder for me, I think none of them would be as powerful if just read in isolation. I found Well-Lit House the most tragic and also maddening, and the long several-part middle story, The Steps, the most engrossing.

Overall, a very good book, and one I would recommend. 7.5/10.

Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan

I am a reader who loves a bit of magic realism, and I think it's too rarely attempted and even more rarely carried off in contemporary fiction (outside, perhaps, of Latin American fiction). 

One of the things I most enjoyed about this short story collection by Australian (Perth) writer Elizabeth Tan is the very strong commitment she shows to blurring the lines between fantasy / speculation and reality, always embedded in clearly real-world environments (some current, some next-5-minutes futuristic). I think it works incredibly well in most cases, with only a few stories that I would consider not as successful.

The stories are a mixed bag thematically, as are the protagonists, and of sometimes startlingly variant length - there are stories that barely run a page, and others that run for 12-15 pages (although none are longer than that).

As with any collection, there are stand-outs. For me, the most compelling five stories from the twenty are the titular Smart Ovens for Lonely People; the story A Girl is Sitting on a Unicorn in the Middle of a Shopping Centre; the story Excision in F-Sharp Minor; the story You Put the U in Utopia (or, The Last Neko Atsume Player in the World); and the story Pang & Co Genuine Scribe Era Stationery Pty Ltd. I think what links all of these, and what makes them my favourites, is a delicate and poignant evocation of loneliness (and grief) in the midst of motion - a busy world moving around you but not through you or within you. I found Pang & Co so sad that I cried, which is, for me, a high compliment for a story that short (the emotional punch is delivered with an economy of words that shows a genuine brilliance of talent and understanding).

There were also stories that didn't hit for me (which is why this isn't a perfect score book!) In particular, I didn't much like Shirt Dresses (I thought it was trying to be something it didn't quite achieve; I found The Meal Channel depressing and a bit disgusting without any redeeming lift or sting; and I wasn't very taken with the cat-perspective Yes! Yes! Yes You Are! Yes You Are!, which somewhat surprised me as I usually do like animal-voice stories if they're done well.

That said, the clear majority of these are good stories, at least half are excellent, and my top five are, I would say, outstanding. A wonderful collection - so good that, having borrowed and read it from the library, I now intend to buy a copy of my own so I can dip back in. 8/10.

Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu

This short story collection by Charles Yu is ostensibly about technology and its impacts on human life, but really, it is about two things only -identity / selfhood and loneliness. While every story has a hook involving tech or engineered experiences of some kind, that is simply the device that lets Yu ask, again and again: What am "I"? What does it mean to be "I"? What, if anything, is the indivisible core that comprises my identity?

The book is divided into three sections - Sorry (Standard Loneliness Package, First Person Shooter and Troubleshooting); Please (Hero Absorbs Major Damage, Human for Beginners, Inventory, Open and Note to Self); and Thank You (Yeoman, Designer Emotion 67, The Book of Categories, and Adult Contemporary). It then finishes with a stand-alone story, the titular Sorry Please Thank You, which seems to aim to wrap the collection up but in my view is not successful in that goal.

More than most single-author collections, I felt that there was a pronounced variability in quality and achievement across the stories. There were two stand-out stories that I thought were stunners - the desperately sad opener Standard Loneliness Package, and the highly intriguing Open - and there were some others that were quite interesting too, but there were also some that were repetitive, boring or so confused that I wasn't sure what Yu was trying to do. I got quite tired of the archness of the tone that featured in the less successful tech- or genre-pastiche stories, such as First Person Shooter (zombie videogame story), Hero Absorbs Major Damage (a "what if videogame characters could have feelings" story, of which I have read many) and especially Yeoman (a genuinely bad retake of John Scalzi's novel Redshirts).

Overall, I can see what Yu was trying to do with this collection, and when it succeeded, it did so triumphantly (Standard Loneliness Package is in my top 3 short stories I read in 2024), but it was a swing and a miss for me as an overall book. Nonetheless, it deserves recognition for the stand-out stories, and for the boldness of the concept. 6.5/10.

Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

This collection of short stories is moving, very sad, and in some cases, profound. 

I always look for the connecting thread in single-author collections; I want to know what is the theme or drive that underlies the project. For Li's collection, I think it can be characterised as the specific kind of loss / trauma that results from the untimely death or permanent estrangement of people you love. In almost every story, a child or a young partner dies (in multiple instances, by suicide) or a spouse or best friend leaves, leaving damage rippling in its wake for the protagonist.

Li's writing is contemplative, almost dreamy, at times, and features cultural dislocation as well (most, although not all, of her protagonists are Chinese-born or Chinese-descended people living in America or travelling in Europe). 

The stories are thematically so much of a piece that you really need to read them all to measure the full weight, but if I had to pick stand-outs, I'd select the stark but powerful Alone, the gut-punching When We Were Happy We Had Other Names (which reads as achingly autobiographical, given Li's own life story) and the depressing menace of A Flawless Silence, which was written around the first election of Donald Trump in 2016 but seems even more sharply relevant now.

I can see why this collection was nominated for the Pulitzer in fiction, and it would have been a worthy winner quite honestly. I will be sitting with these stories for some time to come. 8.5/10.