elephantine

7/52 — "The Lamp at the Turning" by E. Lily Yu

I don’t know of many short stories told from the perspective of an inanimate object. The most famous one is probably “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury, which is about an automated house. And for the purposes of the story, there could be no more perfect choice. “The Lamp at the Turning” by E. Lily Yu also has an inanimate object as its protagonist: a streetlamp. And, believe it or not, it's a romantic story. Yes. About a streetlamp. No, I’m not kidding. From the streetlamp’s point of view:

When it rained and water pooled in the gutter it could sometimes see itself, swan-necked and orange and not, it thought, unlovely.

I wouldn’t want to read an entire novel told from the point of view of an object, but in short form, it’s fun. I’d like to see more of this, actually. Or maybe a lot more of it exists, and I’m just not in the loop? If you know of any similar stories, let me know.

Other stories I read this week:

“Wait Till You See Me Dance” by Deb Olin Unferth
“Animals” by Mandeliene Smith
“Other People’s Bodies” by Becky Mandelbaum
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver
“How Did You Feel About It?” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Something Better Than This” by Mary Gaitskill

6/52 — "Boys" by Rick Moody

A couple years ago I took an online writing class that assigned the story "Boys" by Rick Moody as part of the weekly reading. And then our teacher asked us to write a short piece in a similar style. If I remember correctly, I think I wrote the same type of story, but about girls — it only seemed natural, you know? It was a fun assignment, but more importantly, it was a good reminder about how hard it can be to pull off something that might not seem too difficult on the surface.

"Boys" isn't a traditional story, although there is a story there; it's just told in a different way. However you classify this piece, it's memorable, and near hypnotic in its repetition: Boys enter the house, boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible), enter the house. And for me, the joy is in the sneaky passage of time, which is largely conveyed via poignant, amusing, ever-evolving details of boys becoming men: infant-pattern baldness, calling for mother, shooting at the neighbor's dog with a BB gun, mismatched tube socks, intoxicated posture, rakish sideburns.

I know, I know. I love good details in fiction.

Other stories I read this week:

"Nairobi" by Joyce Carol Oates
"Barn Burning" by Haruki Murakami
"I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen
"No One's a Mystery" by Elizabeth Tallent
"Childfinder" by Octavia Butler
"I'm Being Stalked By the Avon Lady" by Nancy Stohlman

As always, leave a comment if you read any of them!

5/52 — "Bettering Myself" by Ottessa Moshfegh

Last week I wrote about one of my favorite first lines of a short story, so I figured this week I'd mention one of my favorite last lines of a short story. And the story that immediately came to mind was "Bettering Myself" by Ottessa Moshfegh. Here's the last line of the story:

The sun shone on.

That might seem like an underwhelming sentence. But to me, it's a perfect ending, especially for a story that is so acerbic. In a different story, ending with an image of the sun might imply hopefulness; but in this case, I think it's basically saying, "well, that's life." I also think this sentence works because it's so simple. It's four words. And each word only has one syllable. Beauty in simplicity.

It's been a couple years since I first read "Bettering Myself," and when I revisited it this week, I was surprised by what I did and didn't remember. I remembered the beginning and the end. I remembered a few random details, like how the narrator's boyfriend wore the same clothes every day. Yet there's a major aspect of the story that I didn't remember at all. Does that ever happen to you, too? Do you find yourself remembering tiny details, yet forgetting big chunks of a story? I find that very interesting and strange.

Other stories I read this week:

"Living" by Grace Paley
"Your Duck is My Duck" by Deborah Eisenberg
"Haulers" by Jacob Weber
"The Game" by Rachel Heng
"Suburbia!" by Amy Silverberg
"The Door" by E. B. White

If you've read any of these, leave a comment!

4/52 — "Paper Lantern" by Stuart Dybek

One of my favorite first lines of a short story is from “Paper Lantern” by Stuart Dybek: We were working late on the time machine in the little makeshift lab upstairs. I love it because it works well on so many levels. First, the cadence is just lovely. Read it out loud. Doesn't it have a nice musicality to it? It also contains so much intrigue. Who's "we"? Why is their lab makeshift? Are they working in secret? And that time machine — what's going on with that? The time machine is interesting because it isn't really what the story is about, and yet it is — if you're talking about the time machine that memory is.

There's also something really satisfying about the structure of this story. It's a frame narrative, a story within a story. This device shows up a lot in fiction and movies (I mean, even Titanic is a frame story) so it's not anything particularly original. But I think it's extra satisfying to me because Dybek bookends the story-within-the-story with fires — in his story, those threatening, seductive, ruinous flames are what lure us into and out of the past.

Other stories I read this week:

"The Daughters of the Late Colonel" by Katherine Mansfield
"On This Side" by Yuko Sakata
"Friends" by Laura van den Berg
"Orange World" by Karen Russell
"Likable" by Deb Olin Unferth

Let me know what you've been reading!

3/52 — "To Get Rich Is Glorious" by Alexandra Chang

I have a thing for stories that cover long spans of time. But the vast majority of temporally expansive stories use flashbacks and jump back and forth in time; I rarely find stories that account for a lifetime worth of years chronologically. Alexandra Chang’s “To Get Rich is Glorious” is one of those rare stories. In less than 5,000 words, we get to witness the arc of Hang Chun Fu's life (otherwise known as FuFu) against the background of China from 1980 to present day. This type of intense compression of time isn’t easy to do, but Chang pulls it off. She knows what to include and what to leave out, and the overall effect is powerful.

Often, when I read, I'll come across a sentence that seems to encapsulate what the story is about. This was the sentence that stuck out to me in Chang's story: She who grows up wanting is never satiated. And, indeed, there is lots of wanting in this story — in particular, wanting for more out of life. Here's FuFu's first glimmer of wanting: Lying there in her cramped room, in her small bed, FuFu, now eighteen, feels as though her world is the least significant seed in a pomegranate. She yearns for the whole fruit. Then, later, when she's married: Her ennui grows so massive and wild some days that she forgets to eat or bathe. And even later: Our FuFu, at thirty-five years old, is desperate to burst out of her want. I'm purposely not mentioning specifics about how FuFu deals with her yearning, because I don't want to ruin the story. But I'll just say that I enjoy how Chang's story examines the relationship between success and happiness.

Other stories I read this week:

"The There There" by Antonya Nelson
"Gusev" by Anton Chekhov
"Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood
"Wants" by Grace Paley
"Love and Hydrogen" by Jim Shepard
"Now Wait for This Week" by Alice Sola Kim

If you have any thoughts, leave a comment!

2/52 — “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link

Lake Washington.

Kelly Link is one of those writers who I'd been aware of for a long time, yet for whatever reason, I hadn't read. So the other day, when a friend recommended reading "Stone Animals" as a way into Kelly Link's work, I was glad for the gentle nudge. I opened up the link; I was hooked right away. And I was absorbed to the very end. "Stone Animals" is strange, and funny, but also very human; I love how simultaneously entertaining and touching this story is.

Here's one of my favorite paragraphs. Henry is the dad, Catherine is the mom, Tilly & Carleton are the kids:

Henry came into the kitchen, holding silver candlesticks and a stuffed armadillo, which someone had made into a purse. It had a shoulder strap made out of its own skin. You opened its mouth and put things inside it, lipstick and subway tokens. It had pink gimlet eyes and smelled strongly of vinegar. It belonged to Tilly, although how it had come into her possession was unclear. Tilly claimed she’d won it at school in a contest involving donuts. Catherine thought it more likely Tilly had either stolen it or (slightly preferable) found it in someone’s trash. Now Tilly kept her most valuable belongings inside the purse, to keep them safe from Carleton, who was covetous of the precious things — because they were small, and because they belonged to Tilly — but afraid of the armadillo.

Isn't that fantastic? Partly, the unexpected details are what bring this description to life. But I also think a large part of what makes it work so well is the amount of thematic contrast. There's a touch of elegance (silver candlesticks, lipstick), the morbid ("made out of its own skin"), the ordinary (subway tokens), playfulness ("a contest involving donuts"), desire (covetous Carleton), fear (also Carleton), protectiveness (Tilly), and suspicion (Catherine). In other words, there are many, many different notes going on here, and yet instead of feeling disjointed, they complement each other. But how do you get the right combination? I'm guessing that Kelly Link didn't have all these exact details in her first draft; I'm guessing there was some trial and error, that she swapped out one detail for another until it intuitively felt right. Or maybe there's deeper symbolism here that I'm overlooking, a more logical connection between each element. Either way, when it works, it works.

Other stories I read this week:

"A Courtship" by Jonathan Liebson
"When We Were Happy We Had Other Names" by Yiyun Li
"The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado
"Dark Matter" by Caro Claire Burke
"The Message" by Clarice Lispector (not available online; find it in the Complete Stories)
"Explain It To Me" by Jenessa Abrams

If you've read any of these stories, let me know your thoughts!

1/52 — "Hell-Heaven" by Jhumpa Lahiri

A beach walk at Kalaloch Lodge on New Year's.

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading a short story a day. Partially I'm doing it because I love short stories, but I'm also reading them with a semi-selfish interrogative eye, because one of the best ways to learn craft is through close reading. A lot of the process of writing is about solving problems of "how do I convincingly pull off X?" and the answers are out there in existing stories — though, of course, realizing how to do something and actually doing it is a whole other issue altogether.

One of the stories I read this week was "Hell-Heaven" by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri is one of my very favorite writers, and I've read the majority of her stories multiple times; I never tire of them. I am constantly returning to her two collections — Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth — to try to figure out how to write such beautiful stories.

So. What has "Hell-Heaven" taught me about writing? For starters, it shows how to write in first person without a story feeling too internal or self-centered — a constant danger when writing from that point of view. Most of the focus in the story is on Pranab Chakraborty, a man who befriends the narrator's parents. Much focus is also given to the narrator's mother. And yet this external focus is filtered through the young narrator's eyes (which is also being filtered through her grown-up eyes, as the story is being told by her older self), and so it is ultimately very much about her. By the end of the story, it becomes clear how necessary it was for the narrator to be the one to tell this story.

Lahiri is also a master at portraying the intricate dynamics of family relationships. Take this passage, where the narrator guesses at how her father felt about Pranab and her mother's friendship: One might think that he would have felt slightly jealous, or at the very least suspicious, about the regularity of Pranab Kaku's visits and the effect they had on my mother’s behavior and mood. But my guess is that my father was grateful to Pranab Kaku for the companionship he provided, freed from the sense of responsibility he must have felt for forcing her to leave India, and relieved, perhaps, to see her happy for a change. Those layered, complex emotions are what make Lahiri's characters so compelling.

Other stories I read this week:

"Reunion" by Karen Bender (from Refund)
"The Invisible Child" by Tove Jansson
"Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty
"Adventure" by Sherwood Anderson
"Disagreement" by Lydia Davis
"The Falling Girl" by Dino Buzzati

If you've read "Hell-Heaven" or any of the other stories, leave a comment! I'd love to hear what you liked (or didn't like) about them.

52/52

Well, well. It's the end of the year. Are you making resolutions? Plans for 2019? A few weeks ago, I started to read a short story a day, so I'd like to keep that up. I'd also like to find a way to blog about the stories I'm reading, although I'm not sure the best way to go about it yet. So, we'll see. In the meantime, happy new year!

51/52

Merry Christmas!

50/52