On Short Story Collections and Reading

Some quick thoughts about this new anthology in which I have a story. It just arrived the other day and I haven’t yet read most of the stories though I intend to. I know my story of course and I read Joyce Carol Oates’ story, which is short, surprising, gripping and disturbing. And last night, in bed, I read the Afterward by Junot Diaz, which is brilliant and important. (I have to admit that when the editor told me Junot Diaz was doing something for the collection I said, “I’m in,” because I’m a huge fan, “The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is one of my all-time favorite novels, and the idea of my name anywhere near his was enough. Then I heard the other names, Sherman Alexie, Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Richard North Patterson, Lionel Shriver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bradford Morrow, Alice Walker, Andrew Doyle, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffery Ford, James Morrow, and I was like, “Can I say yes twice?”).

I always like being asked to write a story with a prompt. It gives me a place to begin. This time, the editor Bernard Schweizer, supplied a Kafka quote which got me thinking and I started writing an outrageous story based on a sexcapade. I was halfway through and I thought, uh, no. It wasn’t a story. It was…what? A confession? A moral cleansing? Maybe. But it wasn’t a story. And I wanted to write a story. So I thought about things that cut deep, grief and love and sex, which led me to noir which is always about love gone bad, and I started again.

The thing about story collections is that they’re like restaurant menus. You can choose what you’re in the mood to digest and leave the others for snacking another time.

Diaz’s Afterward is about reading and the fact that few are doing it, something discussed a lot these days. The beginning of his essay recaps the issue and is of course depressing but then Diaz does something miraculous by flipping it around and it becomes one of the most hopeful and illuminating pieces about reading, its pleasures and importance, incorporating snippets of quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson and C.S. Lewis to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, as well as Stephen King and Franz Kafka, all in such a dazzling fusion your mind will be spinning. From there, Diaz sets out four reasons to read, ways and whys like “read hungrily, adventurously, blasphemously, futuristically” all written with such power and beauty I immediately bought four new books! (Should I send Diaz the bill?)

Here are my personal reasons about the importance of reading: It takes you away from real life while setting you into other lives, fictional or not; it’s active, your brain imagining as you follow characters and stories; it stirs your emotions, makes you laugh or cry, happy or sad or angry; it allows you see other points of view, other lives and ways of living different from your own, offering understanding and empathy; and reading, even when it’s exciting and you can’t turn the pages fast enough, is relaxing. Unlike watching a screen, reading makes it possible to fall asleep.

As a wrap-up (for now) some books I’ve read recently: London Falling, Patrick Redden Keefe’s brilliant nonfiction book that reads like the best thriller.

Katie Kitamura’s Audition, short-listed for the Booker Prize, experimental and fun, in two parts, the second part both contradicting and illuminating the first.

Kitamura’s novel brought to mind an old favorite, John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, still and always brilliant.

Another Booker finalist (which I read last year but still think about), The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, a dazzling first novel with a surprising holocaust backstory.

And Booker Prize winner Flesh by David Szalay, a kind of modernist Dickens, ambitious, smart and fun.

Heart the Lover, by Lily King (I’m a fan), almost too sad but romantic and engaging.

RF Kuang’s Yellowface, sharp, funny and deliciously nasty.

Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent which I resisted for a long time thinking it would be corny but I was wrong. It’s terrific!

Currently, I am going to read all the stories in AXE, while reading Joyce Carol Oates new short story collection The Frenzy, and a whole stack of books by people I know waiting patiently next to my bed (the books not the people), John Searles Single Girls, Hank Phillipi Ryan’s Mother Daughter Sister Stranger, among others. Sitting on top, Ann Patchett’s Whistler, which I know will carry me away and I will let Patchett carry me just about anywhere.