A Nisei daughter herself, Yamamoto often opts for the child’s-eye view of events, with deceptively simple language throwing traumas like domestic violence and wartime internment into starker and more poignant relief than a “sophisticated” adult analysis could. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto - Like Santos, Hisaye Yamamoto contends with immigrant life in America-in this case, among Japanese laborers settling in the U.S.
Sebald, who similarly create strange-but-not-entirely-unwelcome moods and seduce with narrative voices so compelling I can’t help but follow wherever they lead.ĥ. To me, reading Essence of Camphor feels a bit like spending time with Roberto Bolaño or W.G. Masud moves his characters swiftly through time and space-inviting us, sentence by sentence, to think about the nature of reality and illusion, attraction and revulsion, and memory and consciousness, in new ways. As they revisit mysterious boyhood memories, the men in these pages don’t do all that much besides stare at images or objects (a miniature glass chandelier made of perfume-filled vials, in the title story the faded photograph of an old friend in “Remains of the Ray Family”) or wander through houses (an ancestral home in “Interregnum,” a stranger’s courtyard in “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire”). Essence of Camphor, Naiyer Masud, translated from the Urdu by Muhammad Umar Memon and others - This collection isn’t exactly what you’d call “plot-driven,” but I dare any reader not to be transfixed by its dreamlike qualities and Naiyer Masud’s stark, heady prose. Spanning a range of countries, continents and even (in some translated cases) languages, they still share what every great story collection has in common: fully realized worlds compressed into a few pages, and a multiplicity of perspectives shedding light on what it is to be human in the world.ģ. Here’s a list of favorite collections that may have skipped your radar, or perhaps deserve a revisit after some time. I fell hard for short stories in college, when fiction workshops first opened my eyes to the wonders that George Saunders and Junot Díaz and Alice Munro and Salman Rushdie, among other masters, could accomplish within the form.
You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Similarly, I’ve found that a great short story collection can cover as much, if not more, ground than an epic doorstopper, one brief vignette or character at a time. Doctorow has said that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Here are her picks for the 10 best short story collections you've never read.Į.L. Mia Alvar's stunning debut story collection marks her as a writer to watch: In the Country moves from Manila to Bahrain to Tokyo, from 1971 to 1986 to the 21st century.
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