COVER STORY .

Book Quarterly: Small Fortune


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Published: Dec 2, 2009

Might as well start with short fiction's reigning champ: The Best American Short Stories series. Recruiting from a year's worth of literary outlets — The New Yorker, Tin House, AGNI — guest editor Alice Sebold has assembled an all-star team for the 2009 edition (Mariner, 368 pp., $14, Oct. 8), though they're not household names in every household: Kevin Moffett, Annie Proulx, Yuyin Li. Even if this volume contained only the provocative stories by Daniel Alarcón and Steve De Jarnatt (co-writer of Strange Brew?!), it would still be worthy of the BASS brand.

Is it the cover? Or the title? Something about Jill McCorkle's new Going Away Shoes (Algonquin, 272 pp., $19.95, Sept. 22) looks kinda featherweight. Rest assured, it lands all its punches. In "Driving to the Moon," she creates enough friction and history between two likable, quotable characters to fill a novel, but strips away all but the most necessary baggage for a friendship tale told at a rocket's pace. McCorkle's knack for clever dialogue and subtle gestures helps sell even her most unlikely plot devices.

Alice Munro used to be the Mary Queen of Scots of short fiction, deserving of the throne but locked away by her pastoral prose, her litera verite plots, her Canadianess. You could call it a power play that her new Too Much Happiness (Knopf, 320 pp., $25.95, Nov. 17) runs wild with ghosts and psychopaths and nudity. So there's a little pizzazz, but it's the same old Alice, a prisoner to her own tasteful, sublime storytelling.

No amount of hard-drive-robbing could sully Kurt Vonnegut's rep as American's most brilliant humanist satirist, but you gotta hope kids today stumble onto Deadeye Dick or Slaughterhouse-Five before they pick up Look at the Birdie (Delacorte, 272 pp., $27, Oct. 20). The second of what is sure to be several collections of posthumous previously unpublished Vonnegutiae, Birdie is a good read — funny, inventive, powered by low-tech sci-fi — but hardly the author's A-game.

The newest collection by Ha Jin, A Good Fall (Pantheon, 256 pp., $24.95, Nov. 24), focuses on the often invisible barriers that Chinese immigrants experience in the U.S. A monk who can't speak English loses his martial-arts-instructor job and has to slum it in a friend's tiny New York apartment. Two sisters switch from paper letters to e-mail, only increasing the efficiency with which one mooches from the other. But the collection's most effective moments come less firmly rooted in the world as we know it. As in "A Composer and his Parakeets" — about a cuckolded musician taking inspiration from his girlfriend's oddly intuitive pet — Jin proves a master of simple, near-allegorical plot-weaving.

(pat@citypaper.net)

WIN 'EM ALL: Plenty of BQ trivia at citypaper.net/criticalmass.