story: “Commerce and Residue”
author: Tim Fitts
year: 2017 (in Go Home and Cry for Yourselves)
where: mio ufficio
note: a great story for our age of cultural appropriation politics
a line: “Marcus slightly envied the fact that Pham had an automatic angle borne into her. She was part of the diaspora. Her father had spent time in re-education camps.”
story: “Saint Andrew’s Hotel”
author: Sara Majka
year: 2016
where: Greece
note: from Cities I’ve Never Lived In
a line: “Peter stayed in the hospital until he was twenty-one; nobody could find his parents, and the hospital had put him to use in the kitchen.”
story: “The Adventure of a Soldier”
author: Italo Calvino
year: 1984 (English translation)
where: Philadelphia train
note: Such great description of how time stretches in the moments of nearness to someone we desire.
a line: “This meeting of calves was precious, but it came at a price, a loss: in fact, the body’s weight was shifted and the reciprocal support of the hips no longer occurred with the same docile abandon.”
story: “The Lost Order”
author: Rivka Galchen
year: 2014
where: casa dolce casa
note: I can’t recall the stimulus for purchasing Galchen’s book, American Innovations, and this makes me sad. I hate forgetting. This story has a ring like Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”…a ringing call. The main character also feels like a more morose and confused Lorrie Moore character.
a line: “I have not always–had not even long–been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less a valid primary goal.”
story: “White Rain”
author: Helen McClory
year: 2018
where: outside still, Abu Dhabi
note: another gem from w i g l e a f
a line: “In text she was that way; overeager, pressing. I had withdrawn. She pushed back, then lashed out. Then a spattering of texts and incidental photographs that were obviously sent out in a kind of bruised friendship.”
story: “Now That the Circus Has Shut Down, the Human Cannonball Looks for Work”
author: Meghan Phillips
year: 2018
where: 我的办公室 (again)
note: This short short story has the punch at the end like contemporary English poetry. Maybe it has something to do with its length too; though it would not be mistaken for a prose poem.
a line: “He’s happy to be a reference, but he’s not sure how much weight the words of a clown will carry.”
story: Love Machine
author: Samantha Hunt
year: 2017
where: home physically, but mentally with The Man Who Fell to Earth
note: George Saunders, Ovid, and Dostoevsky would have a party in this story
a line: “’Machines,’ he continues, ‘have one of only two choices. Either they are run by humans or else they run themselves. And the way I see it, either choice is no good for me.’”
