RIP

I’ve been wanting to write a little tribute to Ray Bradbury after his passing, but realized that it’s been some time since I read his books and thought revisiting his work was long overdue.

Jim and I have amassed quite a collection of his books from our teen years and I settled on The Vintage Bradbury, which I enjoyed immensely and only made his death sadder.

The stories I always most vividly remembered were of far away places like Mars or distant futures with wild (but not completely unrealistic) technologies (as in the memorable story The Veldt) but this time around, I responded more to his universal and terrestrial imaginings.

Many of his stories tackle relatable human fears and paranoia, whether giving birth or simply becoming aware of ones body, whether losing one’s status and sense of safety or finding out who you really are in your last moments – the horrors that face us daily.

A Vintage Bradbury is a “best of” collection, but one curated by the author himself and is a varied and thoroughly compelling read.

He was a prolific writer who helped bring speculative fiction to the main steam. A true original and an inspiration.

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Posted on June 15, 2012

by Maureen McHugh (2011)

After the Apocalypse has solidified Maureen McHugh as one of my favorite current authors. I recommended her novel China Mountain Zhang a while back and have only grown fonder of it over time.

Her latest, well reviewed collection of short stories is bookended by more well worn apocalyptic scenarios: zombies and refugees walking through abandoned, dangerous suburbs towards (hopefully) a safe place.

With McHugh’s unique prose (she’s got an amazing ability to speak believably from a wide range of points of view) and creative mind, even zombies can be new again.

The other stories, which take on the apocalypse in different ways, are unique, humorous, and very human. There’s a debilitating disease transmitted through chicken nuggets, a woman struggling to get by in a shattered economy by making custom baby dolls and dildoes, a boy who develops amnesia after a dirty bomb explodes in Baltimore, and a group of people that get the unnerving sudden ability to fly.

While the stories are paranoid and frightening, they’re also almost optimistic. Each one is about survival, not in a Rambo sort of way, but how normal people under horrible circumstances just manage to carry on.

I really love this book and want to run out and get more of her work. It’s been truly inspiring to me (especially as I am writing short stories myself) and I’ve even contemplated writing a fan letter (which I never do).

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Posted on February 1, 2012

by Haruki Murakami (1993)

Murakami’s short story collection The Elephant Vanishes opens with what would become the first chapter of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, a book that consumed and mesmerized me like only few great novels can. I tried to repeat that spell with his other works, but only came as close with Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

After finishing the second story, I was worried that this would be another miss for me and Murakami – though a miss from him is still guaranteed to be more curious and interesting than many authors’ best so I kept reading.

I was finally drawn in completely by the story Sleep, a subtly creepy story of a woman who lives two lives when she suddenly no longer sleeps. It’s a masterful study of inexplicable fears come to life, fears that sit dormant below the surface of the toil and small joys of everyday living.

Other notable favorites are Barn Burning, Family Affair, TV People, The Dancing Dwarf, and The Last Lawn of the Afternoon. Of course, every reader will have their own opinions depending on their tolerance for the bizarre surrealism that peppers his writing with such dark grace.

The best stories here have his hallmark gift for mood. You feel the people and places in essence if not in detail and are transported to strange territories that are both very near and very far from our own lives.

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Posted on February 11, 2011

by Miranda July (2007)

The stories collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You present a wholly unique point of view, absolutely nothing I’ve read is quite like it. The author, quirky renaissance woman Miranda July, tends to focus on the kind of people rarely examined in popular fiction. She shows tender empathy for the lonely, the misguided, the disappointed and the hopeful without ever stooping to paint them as “common”; the characters in these stories may be underemployed, retired, or generally just living on the periphery of American society, but July treats them with the kind of respect most writers toss out the window in pursuit of capturing the kind of broad stroked fictional America they think – but don’t actually know  – exists.

She also has an unparalleled appreciation for the real strangeness of sex and how we all react and deal with it. If you’ve seen her magnificent film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, you have a sense of her frank approach to the subject of human sexuality which, in nearly all popular books and movies, is cleaned up and purified or made into something equally unrealistic and elicit.

The stories are funny and sometimes heartbreaking and remind me of another of my favorite writers, George Saunders, so it’s no surprise he’s a big fan of her work. He says of these stories, “They are (let me coin a phrase) July-esque, which is to say: infused with wonder at the things of the world.”

Don’t let July’s adorableness (evinced below) make you wary of her work, as it inexplicably does (even for me, a genuine fan of her work), there’s real depth and passion here, not just quirky preciousness. This collection will make you wish she wrote more often.

Click here for the rest of No One Belongs Here More Than You

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Posted on January 17, 2010

I have been curious about the work of Kelly Link for a while. The quips on the back of the books make her work sound so mysterious and unique. How much you will get into the individual stories in Stranger Things Happen will depend on how easily you can get swept away in the specific fantastical language and devices. Often dreamy, with unexplained interjecting voices and sometimes bewildering plots, Link's stories demand some suspended disbelief and undivided concentration.

Some of these tales, I admit got away from me in the process of reading them bits at a time on subway platforms and a few moments before falling dead asleep, but several I found to be haunting and as magical as her rabid fans praise her for. Vanishing Act is a particular favorite.

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Posted on September 28, 2009