Short Stories

Department of Collections

'After lucking his way through one senseless bloodbath after another, staying home to chill with the fam starts to sound nice to a Viking. He doesn't just get tired of all the rowing and berserking, he outgrows it. At least that's the way things are leaning for the middle-aged marauders in the modern-classic title track at the end of Wells Tower's first collection. Like a lot of these stories, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" is a tragicomic study in the bleakly slow personal evolution of the human male. It's not just Vikings; all men are stupid, at least as stupid as women, and by the time their brains wrest control from their balls, they've already got blood on their hands, and the world is a bit worse for them having spent their extended youth in it. OK, most of the guys in 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned' aren't murderers, just relatably noncriminal douchebags, hothead ex-husbands, opportunist bastard brothers, moral weaklings. Which is what makes Tower's eloquent insights — his sentences can be surgically brilliant or slyly vague — so damning and shaming for the male reader, and enthralling for either gender. These aren't the worst of the species, they're just the species. It's an amazingly funny and smart debut. But dude, you're throwing us under the bus. '

—Patrick Rapa

'Despite the critical success of her 2005 novel 'Veronica', Mary Gaitskill might still be best known for her tale of workplace S&M, "Secretary," which inspired the film of the same name. Gaitskill's writing is, as "Secretary" suggests, fascinated with sex: its perversities, its power, its comedy. But sex in Gaitskill is not just titillation. Rather, as the aging model narrator of 'Veronica' reveals, it's a desire for connection, and a response to the conundrum of life and death. No surprise that her latest collection tackles the conundrum again, and with great success. A middle-aged woman relives her past while interacting with a young boy in an airport. The Iraq war connects the consciousnesses of strangers on a Hudson River train. And in the title story, a widow mourns her husband while helping her friend adopt an Ethiopian child. As always, Gaitskill's language is raw and elemental, dripping with archetypes and sensory detail. A decaying, lichen-covered church in Ethiopia smells "like rocks and hummus." A student who learns his friend has slept with their teacher imagines her as a pair of spread legs. In these stories, characters traverse physical space while their thoughts traverse memory, linking mind and body in a single, lusting quest. '

—Katherine Hill

'Stylist and storyteller Joyce Carol Oates' collection of 14 stories takes the reader behind closed doors, beyond shuttered windows and into something close to the heart of darkness, exploring how innocent, even well-meant actions can backfire destructively. Consider the frat guy who gets drunk and is pushed down the trash chute as a joke, only to be carried off in the Dumpster the next day and compacted. Or the woman who kills her four children because they are not perfect, but believes she will find perfection in heaven. Oates explores incest, death by fitness center, accidental death; it's not light reading, but twined into these human tragedies are bits and pieces found in all our lives. '

—Janet Anderson

Big World

'"I liked to say things to shock him, the truth," says one of many lethargic, deeply unsatisfied female characters in Mary Miller's stellar pocket-size debut. "Like my father, he had sent me out into the big world all alone and I was going to show him how ugly it was." For Miller, the almost-hilarious pointlessness of life is best delivered in sudden, glancing blows by narrators who are as shrewd as they are lost. These women aren't really looking for love or peace in the big fucked-up world, they just wanna find a little corner they can fuck-up the way they like it. '

—Patrick Rapa