{"id":9380,"date":"2013-05-15T00:48:21","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T04:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=9380"},"modified":"2013-05-15T00:48:21","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T04:48:21","slug":"gregory-spatz-thirteen-favorite-short-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/05\/15\/gregory-spatz-thirteen-favorite-short-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Gregory Spatz’ Thirteen Favorite Short Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I reviewed Gregory Spatz’ excellent new collection of short stories,\u00a0Half as Happy<\/em> (here<\/a>). I have had the pleasure of corresponding briefly with Mr. Spatz since then, and we were discussing his favorite short stories. I asked if we could post his list here with some of his thoughts. Thanks for putting this together, Mr. Spatz.<\/p>\n

Thirteen Favorite Stories:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why thirteen? Because it\u2019s a lucky number, actually . . . and it\u2019s three more than ten. Ten gets too much attention. Top ten this, top ten that.<\/p>\n

I have my biases, of course. I like big, capacious stories that spread out with an unconventional shape but never lose focus. And the emotional highs and lows.<\/p>\n

In no particular order:<\/p>\n

1. \u201cThe Displaced Person,\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor:<\/strong>\u00a0Of the many O\u2019Connor stories worthy of inclusion on any list, I chose this one because, in addition to featuring all of her usual scathing comedy about the foolishness of societal norms, and about the avarice, hubris, stupidity, and misbegotten religious righteousness of so many humans, the story features an actual flesh-and-blood Christ figure in the character of the displaced person himself — something O\u2019Connor doesn\u2019t usually do. To me, that inclusion kicks the story into a higher gear, emotionally, and allows her to give us possibly the most fully worked out picture of her ideals for grace and salvation (with an assist from the ubiquitous peacocks). It\u2019s also astonishing, all these years later, to see how little has changed in the benighted\u00a0 opinions of xenophobes from the more backwards corners of our great nation.<\/p>\n

2. \u201cA Painful Case,\u201d James Joyce:<\/strong>\u00a0What makes this story stand out from the many stories of Joyces\u2019s that I love, is the main character\u2019s level of self-awareness. That he is able to see himself and to understand his emotional\/intellectual paralysis in the final moments of the story, and with the same kind of \u201cscrupulous meanness\u201d Joyce so famously used to depict all of his characters in Dubliners<\/i>, gives this story an extra fullness and poignancy that I find especially moving.<\/p>\n

3. \u201cCarried Away,\u201d Alice Munro:<\/strong>\u00a0As with O\u2019Connor, there are many stories from Munro worthy of inclusion on any favorite list. I chose this one because it has so many of her hallmark elements — stretches of epistolary narration, gruesome death, surprise match-making, huge time scope, multiple viewpoint-characters — and ends with one of the most serenely haunting and logic-defying scenes of transcendence I\u2019ve ever encountered. As many times as I\u2019ve read it, I can\u2019t understand that ending, and I can\u2019t be unmoved by it. It\u2019s a miraculous thing.<\/p>\n

4. \u201cPet Milk,\u201d Stuart Dybek:<\/strong>\u00a0I love the swirling shape of this story, and how that shape mimics the story\u2019s central image or metaphor — the movement of pet milk through coffee. By spinning sideways and backwards through time, making associative leaps to break its own narrative framework, the story presents us with a moment in time as sweetly condensed and elusive as the taste of pet milk (or of nostalgia) itself.<\/p>\n

5. \u201cLull,\u201d Kelly Link:<\/strong>\u00a0Every time I read this story I feel turned inside out by its virtuosic inventiveness and crazy handling of time. Backwards narrations featuring none other than Lucifer, and an army of green-skinned women named Susan . . . this is unlike any other story I\u2019ve read.<\/p>\n

6. \u201cLast Night,\u201d James Salter:<\/strong>\u00a0Written with the same detached, scrupulous meanness<\/i> Joyce used in his stories, \u201cLast Night\u201d builds from the kind of scene most of us shy away from writing — the kind that\u2019s so difficult to do without tipping into melodrama: a husband assisting in his dying wife\u2019s medically induced suicide. And then . . . the story goes where you\u2019d never anticipate. A perfect example of Henry James\u2019s maxim about narrative tension and the need to keep turning the screw ever tighter on the reader.<\/p>\n

7. \u201cHow To Be a Writer,\u201d Lorrie Moore:<\/strong>\u00a0One of the funniest and most truthful things about writing ever written.<\/p>\n

8. \u201cThe Pretty Girl,\u201d Andre Dubus:<\/strong>\u00a0This story embodies many of the things that I admire in Dubus\u2019s work, particularly his ability to write physical action from so deeply within his characters\u2019 hearts and\u00a0 minds you forget there\u2019s a story in your hands. The prose is dense, crystalline; long lines with a staccato beat. But most of all I admire Dubus\u2019s ability to impart a sense of moral outrage in story action without ever trivializing a thing. I don\u2019t know of another writer who can\u00a0 quite as convincingly and compellingly make you feel the need for and rightness of homicide.<\/p>\n

9. \u201cHoney Pie,\u201d Haruki Murakami:<\/strong>\u00a0I love this story for its inventiveness and heart. In condensed form, it touches on so many of the most enviable aspects of Murakami\u2019s craft and style — the long line of romantic tension, the playful magical elements, hints of meta-fiction, light, uncluttered vivid descriptions, and an ending full of longing that lifts and breaks your heart at the same time. An unabashedly sweet story, as the title suggests, that somehow manages never to feel too<\/i> sweet. As many times as I\u2019ve read it, I can\u2019t finish it without a knot in my throat.<\/p>\n

10. \u201cA Small Good Thing,\u201d Raymond Carver:<\/strong>\u00a0Among the many brilliant things in this big, heartbreaking story, most brilliant of all to me is Carver\u2019s refusal to fill in any history or back story for the main characters. It\u2019s such a great move because it prevents the reader from making any of the usual causal linkages between the tragic death of the boy and past actions or misdeeds for him or his parents — it disconnects us from any foothold in meaning, pattern or fate, (all the usual ways of making \u201csense\u201d of tragedy in fiction), leaving us purely face-to-face with loss. No one \u201cearns\u201d what they get. There\u2019s no lesson, no reason. Only loss. And perseverance in the face of loss. Another one I can\u2019t finish without a knot in my throat.<\/p>\n

11. \u201cEcorche: The Flayed Man,\u201d Melissa Pritchard:<\/strong>\u00a0There\u2019s something so natural in the way this braided historic narrative of multiple parts and viewpoints comes across, the reader can easily forget how ambitious and innovative it is. Vivid, concise, searing, smart and utterly itself. I\u2019m tempted to say something about zombie precursors, but the story is so much better than that.<\/p>\n

12. \u201cBreak it Down,\u201d Lydia Davis:<\/strong>\u00a0For me, there\u2019s a kind of release into hilarity that results from the tension between Davis\u2019s deadpan style and the tortuous self-awareness and over thinking her characters are given to. It\u2019s incredibly satisfying. The only writer who gets to me in quite the same way is Franz Kafka. Speaking of . . .<\/p>\n

13. \u201cThe Metamorphosis,\u201d Franz Kafka:<\/strong>\u00a0Literary perfection. Of course, Gregor gets all the attention for his famously fantastic transformation into a giant bug, but his is possibly the least important transformation in the story. Who can ever forget the image of that apple thrown at him by his father and stuck in his bug-body carapace, there to fester until he dies? It\u2019s not about Gregor or his transformation after all . . . it\u2019s about his family\u2019s epic self-centeredness coming into its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I reviewed Gregory Spatz’ excellent new collection of short stories,\u00a0Half as Happy (here). I have had the pleasure of corresponding briefly with Mr. Spatz since then, and we were discussing his favorite short stories. I asked if we could post his list here with some of his thoughts. Thanks for putting this together, Mr. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[404,39],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gregory-spatz","category-interviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-2ri","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9381,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions\/9381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9380"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}