Marc Schultz

Show Me What You Got, Shorty
May 17, 2007

This past Sunday Bob Thompson had an interesting story in The Washington Post about the Rodney Dangerfield of letters: the short story. It just don't get no respect. Thompson cites the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, in which four out of the five nominees were short story collections. Guess which won?

Like a lot of people (but not nearly enough) I've got a special ventricle in my heart for short stories. Here's the collections I've been clogging it up with recently:

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg, FSG 2007
One of the aforementioned PEN/Faulkner nominees that didn't win, this is another brilliant collection from a master of the form. She tackles all the big questions (mental illness, domestic violence, 9/11) and makes it look effortless.

Brief Encounters with Che Guevera by Ben Fountain, Harper Perennial 2007
Fountain's debut collection is very good, very funny, very of the moment, and carried a good bit of buzz before Israeli import The Nimrod Flipout (undeservedly, imo) out-buzzed it. Filled with idealistic young Americans trying to do good abroad and coming up, largely, with bupkis, it makes a perfect graduation gift for the idealistic young American in your life.

Some Fun by Antonya Nelson, Scribner 2006
Criminally overlooked collection (I blame the cover design) from this consistantly brilliant New Mexico writer. In the tradition of Lorrie Miller at her most bleak, Antonya Nelson turns in some of the most troubling, funny and closely observed stories I've read since Birds of America.

We're All in this Together by Owen King, Bloomsbury, 2006
If you're nostalgic for Stephen King's mid-period horror novels, by all means go read Heart-Shaped Box. If you're more interested in what Stephen's lit-fic legacy might look like, check out this debut from his other son, Owen. It would be impressive for its confidence and range alone (drunken mountain-side dentistry abuts baseball pregnancy freakshow), but all five stories are damn good yarns to boot (to be precise, one is a novella).

New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2006 edited by Allan Gurganus (Kathy Pories series editor), Algonquin, 2006
A perennial favorite, this year's edition features two of my favorite writers, Tony Earley and Kevin Wilson. Their stories are worth the price of admission alone -- especially for Wilson, as he doesn't have a book of his own yet (I'm positive that will change soon). Other crowd-pleasers include Nanci Kincaid, William Harrison, Chris Bachelder and Ben Fountain (see above).

Of course, as everyone says, it's an honor just to be nominated -- you could definitely do worse than losing a PEN/Faulkner to Philip Roth. I guess it's like Dangerfield (rest his soul) said: "If it wasn't for pick-pockets, I'd have no sex life at all."

Posted by Marc Schultz on May 17, 2007 | Comments (0)