3 from The New Yorker and Ploughshares, 2 from Story and Atlantic Monthly. There are the usual extensive author notes, including the information that "Melungeons" was revised 18 times and rejected by 11 magazines. Wolff didn't know who the authors were when he was picking stories. He chose about twice as many male authors as female. The year before when Louise Erdrich read blind, she chose twice as many females as males.
I didn't see much in the first few stories (by Alexie, Anshaw, Butler) - politically correct, but little more. "Pipa's Story" was ok. "In the Gloaming" (Alice Elliott Dark) is more what I was hoping for. Janet, mother of a dying 33 y.o., Laird (wheelchair-bound, thin), begins to reconnect with her son each twilight, when the day's chores are over and his father, Martin, is out of the way. She'd pretended to their kids and herself that Martin was a caring, albeit busy father. Later, during therapy, she'd admitted that "He was an ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed man who probably should never have got married". Towards the end she's sitting beside her son. "the fire was in danger of dying out entirely, and when she got up to stir the embers she glanced at him in spite of herself and saw that his fingers were making knitting motions over his chest, the way people did as they were dying. She knew that if she went to get the nurse, Laird would be gone by the time she returned, so she went and stood behind him, leaning over to press her face against his, sliding her hands down his busy arms, helping him along with his fretful stitches until he finished this last piece of work". Dybek's piece was stylish.
The first-person narrator of "The Prophet from Jupiter" by Tony Earley looks after a dam that supplies power. The piece switches between several story-lines, with anecdotes about the locals and the town that had to be flooded when the dam was built. His wife's left him, and is having a child. I like the story. In the notes the author writes that he had some scraps, then he got a story idea. Then "For a month I made up things and threw them into the story, and the story ... accepted them all."
John Rolfe Gardiner's "The voyage out" is epistolary, set in WW2. He used the idea that "plot may be advanced by narrators who appear to be busy with other matters". David Gates' "The Mail Lady" has as its first-person narrator someone whose language, but not thought, as been affected by a stroke. When he says "Get in out" he means "You'll never be able to". He thinks he cured his daughter of lesbianism by slapping her. Before the stroke he turned religious. His wife reacted by drinking. It ends well - they can't get out of their drive when they set off for the airport to see their pregnant daughter. Luckily the post lady in her van is passing and can tow them out. He thinks she's a lesbian. The author writes in the notes about "the story's diciest device: the aphasic Lewis Coley's fussily articulate inner voice".
John Keeble's "The Chasm" describes a family trying to build their own house amongst farms as the weather turns cold. The narrative combines distant things (war, a sister's young death, the future) with the details of DIY, staying warm, parents, the death of a neighbour, the wife's music practising. For Joe, the husband, it briefly becomes too much to cope with. His wife gets him through.
Nancy Krusoe's "Landscape and Dream" is the shortest (5 pages) and most poetic piece so far. It begins well, but I'm less impressed by the ending whenthe narrator watched her mother - "Like her I became a cow and I became a mother. I became the barn and the hill behind the barn, the lake and the water cows drink from the lake, the salt and saliva in their mouths. I became, for a while, entirely these things - nothing more. And this is not enough."
In Jim Shepard's "Batting against Castro", two rather useless US baseball pros decide to play in Cuba. Castro and Batista are at some games. Castro bowls against them. What should they do?
In Christopher Tilghman's "Things Left Undone" a farming couple lose a long awaited child through cystic fibrosis. The woman, in despair, leaves for another man, then returns. She talks to her husband's father, who still lives on the farm, and learns a few things that might assist reconciliation.
Jonathan Wilson's notes for "From Shanghia" in small font occupy nearly 2 pages. Set in England, the Holocaust is part of the background plot. In the foreground there's a boy with an infatuation for the girl living opposite, a father who attended life drawing classes, and an "uncle" with an obsession for books.
South-east Asia features in a few stories. Non-WASPs are aware of their (tribal) roots. Authors talk of finding the right voice (e.g. Barry Hannah writes "you will have only junk if you don't find the voice ... I have never had any interest in form, structure, or technique"). John Wideman is quoted as saying "All you need is enough plot to hang a character on". John Keeble writes that a dead neighbour "became the bones over which the flesh of all the remaining characters could be stretched"
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