Larry Dark

As the title suggests (in an awkward, weirdly backwards sort of way), this is a collection of the winners and runners-up in the 1997 O. Henry Award for short stories. Unsurprisingly, given that fact, they're all well-written, thoughtful, carefully crafted things. But... Well, they are very much part of what I think has to be called "the literary genre," and reading them does remind me that I often have some issues with this particular kind of writing. There were moments, as I read through show more these, when I couldn't help thinking that the author had prioritized cleverness of structure or originality and vividness of language over actually having things to say, and several more instances when I finished a story and found myself thinking, as I often do when people ramble on at me in person, "And you're telling me all this... why?" I can't remotely call any of them bad, but I can call a number of them vaguely unsatisfying. Then again, just when I'd get to the point of thinking, "Well, I guess these are somewhat interesting individually, but there may just be a limit to how much of this I really want to read," I'd come across a story like Alice Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman," which is "literary "without sacrificing actual story and does some wonderfully effective things with some very simple language, and I'd feel very glad about having picked this volume up, after all. show less

I am a compulsive reader of short stories, thus I compulsively read collections of short stories, no matter the year. My favorites in this volume were "Servants of The Map" by Andrea Barrett, an astonishing writer, and "The Smoker" by David Schickler, whose short stories I have read and liked. The winning story, "The Deep," by Mary Swan was extremely well written, though I found it rather morose and calculated in that self-conscious MFA-style way that can be troubling sometimes. Very well show more done, however. show less

Best ones: DFW's The Depressed Person; Alice Munro's Save the Reaper (which will remind you of that Flannery O'Connor story in which a traveling family is meets a very bad man); T.C. Boyle's The Underground Gardens, inspired by a real immigrant's story; Pam Houston's Cataract (she had more heft that I had assumed; yes, what is that re the way men can't own up to fear, even near death fear?); Annie Proulx's, The Mud Below, concerning a reckless rodeo bull rider; Pinckney Benedict's Miracle show more Boy, concerning the bullying of a disabled boy; Michael Chabon's Son of Wolfman, wherein a man lives through his wife's pregnancy, the outcome of a rape (he's so good at physical description, and emotional nuances*); Sign by Charlotte Forbes, in which the handyman gets very scary; Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies reminds me that I must get the full novel; George Saunders' white trashy Sea Oak.

Julia Whitty's A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga--I had read before in Harper's but it's still nice. Michael Cunningham's Mister Brother--well, I didn't read that in DoubleTake.

* "A dark circle of hair had appeared between her legs, surrounded by the fiery pink ring of her straining labia.."

*"She gave off a pleasant smell of sugary coffee. Over one shoulder she carried a big leather sack covered in a worn patchwork of scraps of old kilims. He noticed, wedged in among the tubes of jojoba oil and medical instruments, a rolled copy of The Daily Racing Form."

"The front porch had been overwhelmed years before by a salmon-pink bougainvillea, and a disheveled palm tree murmured in the back yard, battering the roof at night with inedible nuts ... In the afternoon there was a smoky tinge of eastern, autumnal regret in the air that they only later learned was yearly blown down from raging wildfires in the hills.'

"They would drink Tecate from the can and arrive home just as the palmist's string of electric jalapenos were coming on in her window, over the neon hand, its fingers outspread in welcome or admonition."

"For the first time, she caught or allowed herself to notice that jagged, broken note in his voice, the undercurrent of anger that had always been there but from which her layers of self-absorption, of sheer happy bulk, had so far insulated her." show less

A good collection that introduced me to some authors I haven’t read before and others who I know well.