Short Stories – Lemuria Books

Category: Short Stories (Page 1 of 2)

by Norris Rettiger

As someone who has graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing, I know there’s a strangely consistent correlation between writing that tries to “break down conventions and experiments with the form” and writing that is utterly unreadable. I’ve read it, hell, I’ve written it. We all know it, because sometimes it manages to pass through the filters of the publishing sphere and maybe lands itself squarely in the “revolutionary” or “visionary” box, and it is hailed by critics as being the hottest book you’ve ever laid your sensitive little bookworm hands on… but it still has that remarkably under-mentioned quality of being painfully unreadable.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s book, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory breaks down conventions in the conventional “breaking conventions” genre by being an absolute joy to read from cover to cover. Rarely will the comments “brilliant disregard for deeply-entrenched constraints of prose” and “the funniest summer read on the shelf” sit so close to each other as they do with this gem of comedy and insight.

There’s so much that could be said about the humor, the creativity, the style, and so on, but the real reason to fall in love with this book is: this book has already fallen in love with you. That “You” in the title? That’s you. And that “someone” is Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who has filled this book to bursting with absolute, undying affection for the human condition in all its damaged glory. This is a book that doesn’t only feel like it was written about you (it’s the most relatable thing ever), it feels like it was written for you. Bob-Waksberg writes like a good friend coming up with magnificent and personal stories that will help you through late night anxieties and those sudden moments of hopelessness that can make us all feel like we’ve missed something important. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory might be about the ways we mess up and struggle to live honestly and meaningfully in a messed up world, but in those hard and sometimes bizarre moments we are at our most human, and Raphael Bob-Waksberg is celebrating and loving that humanity with every page he writes.

Whether it’s finding strange beauty in nonsensical wedding rituals or that moment of eye contact on a train that sometimes lasts a lifetime, no story loses touch with humanity, even if they do tend to spin off from reality. With creativity and a heightened sense of events, Bob-Waksberg takes our quirks, fears, loves, and wonders and explodes them up in bursts of narrative genius that make you laugh for pages on end, thinking to yourself that surely nothing could be so accurate and so ridiculous, but then, when each moment lands, he allows us to feel the honesty of what he wrote, and the emotions of what we’ve been laughing at.

Sometimes, I think, we start to believe, mostly subconsciously, that the best books are written by the best liars; lie upon lie, creatively layered so deep and dense until we believe it, until we are convinced. But this book reminds me that’s just not how it is. The best books are written by the truth-tellers. Raphael Bob-Waksberg is a truth teller. These stories tell the truths we forget and the truths we tell ourselves are lies, the truths that are hard to stare in the face and the truths that can only be shouted after a long silence. Truth is quiet, truth is unpredictable, truth is big, truth is weird, truth is too much, and truth is everything. I guess you might say truth is us, and maybe that’s why we like it so much.

For anyone who recognizes the fact that nothing will ever be quite as strange as people, these creative and completely original stories will be a comfort, a wild ride, and a mile or two in the never-ending marathon of human empathy and our desire for connection. This is the book for anyone looking for a fresh, modern, and incisively humorous take on human relationships and the many ways we just can’t seem to stop making a beautiful mess out of our strange and brief time on earth. It’s one of my favorites of the year.

John M. Floyd’s ‘The Barrens’ is full of surprises

By Guest Author

On October 30, 2018

In Mystery, Short Stories, Southern Fiction

By J.C. Patterson. Special to the Mississippi Book Page

Well, the season is upon us: hundreds of hungry children dressing up like princesses and superheroes, anticipating candy by the truckload. But my treat came early in the form of John M. Floyd’s seventh exciting collection of mystery short stories. The Barrens contains thirty tales set mainly in the south, some in different time periods. But they all have zingers of a punch line.

In Floyd’s opening volley, “The Sandman,” the owner of a diner is being forced to close by nefarious mobsters. One of her patrons gets a double shot of revenge through his deceased friend’s help.

An escaped prisoner uses a one-armed fisherman as his hostage in “Crow Mountain.” But where will the old man lead the escapee? “Trails End” features an out of the way café that caters to murder, a returning sheriff and some suspicious circus folk.

Thugs confront an elderly man in a protection for hire scheme in the clever “Safety First.” Watch out for what the old fellow has up his sleeve. Set in New Orleans, “Dawson’s Curse” drums up some villainous voodoo that backfires on its owner. “Merrill’s Run” traps a man in the trunk of a car with a very unexpected outcome.

The middle section of “The Barrens” makes way for six chuckle-worthy short stories in Floyd’s “Law And Daughter” series. Featuring small town sheriff Lucy Valentine and her crime-solving mom Fran, these snappy stories convey some of the author’s most fun efforts.

In “Flu Season,” a talented knife thrower with a cold aims to keep his blades true when his wife is the target. An ex-gunslinger investigates a 22-year old murder in “Gunwork.” Another period piece, “Rooster Creek” would make a sure-fire movie, in which a young woman returns to her childhood home, only to find it inhabited by true evil.

“Pit Stop,” my personal favorite, tells a double tale of a mother defending her kids in the present while recounting a chilling narrative of how she became so brave.
A killer on the run with a fear of snakes confronts his worst nightmare in “The Blue Delta.” One of the shortest stories ever written, “Premonition” casts a shadow on a couple getting ready for an evening at the theatre. A deadly west coast virus threatens a family’s happy vibes in “Life Is Good.” A mom minding her daughter’s store must make a harrowing decision in “Rosie’s Choice.”

In one of Floyd’s strangest stories ever, “The Red Eye To Boston,” an old man tells a fellow passenger that there’s something in the bathroom in the back of the plane they’re on. And it isn’t extra toilet paper.

The finale takes two children into The Barrens, a dark haunted woodland featuring a vengeful stepfather, monsters and a witch who will surprise them all.
Be sure to grab this creepy, fast, violent, mischievous, clever and fun collection of some of John M. Floyd’s finest short stories. Each tale in The Barrens is like popping Halloween candy into your mouth. Savor these tasty tidbits of mystery gold.

J.C. Patterson is the author of Big Easy Dreamin’ and Mo’ Dreamin’.

John M. Floyd will be at Lemuria tonight on Tuesday, October 30, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Barrens.

‘Sweet & Low’ is newest book from emerging southern writer Nick White

By Guest Author

On June 22, 2018

In Short Stories, Southern Fiction

By Bryce Upholt. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 17)

Sweet & Low, the new collection of stories by rising young writer Nick White, revives an old tradition: its pages are filled with exiled Southerners and new arrivals trying to grapple with what to make of this strange place.

The plots of White’s stories, when summarized, sound like the standard fare of short literary fiction. Lovers endure a strained vacation in the touristy Tennessee mountains; an angry father stares down his impending death; a young boy makes a brave choice that results in an uncomfortable coming of age. But in White’s hands, these small personal dramas are spiked with edgy hilarity.

The book’s first section, “Heavenly Bodies,” is a tour-de-force quartet. The four stories together showing that a singular, distinct voice can nonetheless span a range of settings and tones.

White delights in unexpected turns and outsize characters. “These Heavenly Bodies,” a highlight story, features an unexpected set of stars: drop-dead gorgeous Siamese twin teenagers who strut about in a bikini at the local pool. They are at once mythical and absolutely real.

The second, longer section is really a short novel in stories. The stories are connected by Forney Culpepper, whose family arrived in the Delta three generations back. That’s not long enough to be deemed true locals by their neighbors, he says—though it seems just as likely that the trouble is the family’s atheism and its unorthodox living arrangements.

We first meet Forney as a troubled child and see him through to his still-troubled old age. An aspiring writer, a rakish lover, a frequent failure, Forney contains multitudes. The stories’ different narrators offer such different visions of Forney that at times it took a few pages before I recognized the man.

Forney is sometimes charming, sometimes sympathetic—and often an unrepentant jerk. Those shifts can be frustrating, but they are the point. There are so many versions of each of us, known by the many people we have met.

The title of this section, “The Exaggerations,” references an uncle of Forney’s who likes to whip up tales—not for the sake of conveying morals or lessons, Forney tells us, but because he wants “to shape the world into something better than it [is].”

White, in the tradition of the great Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan, is attempting the same. Not that he avoids the harsh truths of the world. His exaggerations—his over-the-top humor, his eccentric characters—function like the sunglasses we wear to look at a solar eclipse. White’s South is complex, hard to square, and full of pain. You’ve got to shield yourself before you can look at the blaze of that truth.

White’s warmly reviewed debut novel, How to Survive a Summer, depicted the traumatic consequences of a young man’s summer at a conversion-therapy camp in the Mississippi Delta, which aimed to cure its campers of their gayness.

In this collection, too, characters in every story are—to use the word that White embraces—queer. Which is an important and fresh addition to the Southern canon.
Queer need not mean the characters are gay, necessarily. It’s just that his or her notions, from what bodies he finds alluring to how she wants to live her life, don’t find into simple constraints.

But whose notions do? We’re all queer in our own ways, even if the label might make some of us squirm. White is often praised as an important, emerging queer writer, and as evidence the emergence of the New South. But with stories this strong, it’s just as fair to call him one of the country’s most promising young fiction writers, too.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer based in the Mississippi Delta. His journalism and fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and the Sewanee Review, among other publications.

Nick White will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “LBGTQ+: Southern Perspectives” panel at 2:45 p.m. in State Capitol Room 113.

Aimee’s Sizzling Summer Reads

By Aimee

On June 14, 2018

In Fiction, Humor, Mystery, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Remember when I had that reading slump in February? Well, I’m having the opposite of that now. Nothing motivates me to stay indoors and read like the sticky heat of the South. In the month of May, I read 7 books, 4 of which I read while I was at the beach for a week. This is my roundabout way of telling you what to read this summer!

I’m not a huge fan of short stories but when I heard that Lauren Groff was coming out with a new book of them, I knew I had to read it. I finished Florida in one sitting; it was that good. Groff does a fantastic job of evoking the feeling of Florida; you know, the feeling when you’ve been standing out in 100% humidity for several hours and your clothes are clinging to you because they’re soaked through with sweat. “Dogs Go Wolf” tells the story of two young sisters who are abandoned on an island and go a bit feral in their fight for survival. A boy from the swamps of Florida is surrounded by snakes and loneliness in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners”. A woman brings her two boys to the hometown of her favorite French author only to find that France isn’t as romantic as she remembers from her youth in “Yport”.

While digging my toes in the sand, I read two page turning mysteries. A tarot reader in dire need of money is told that she has inherited a small fortune in Ruth Ware’s latest thriller, The Death of Mrs. Westaway. Harriet “Hal” Westaway is a struggling fortune teller who has some dangerous money lenders on her back. When she is trying to figure out what to do, she gets a letter saying that her grandmother, also named Westaway, has died and left her an inheritance. Hal, who is desperate for relief, decides that there is no harm in assuming the role of long lost granddaughter and heads to the Westaway estate to claim what is wrongfully hers. This was my first Ruth Ware book and now I’m kicking myself for not reading her other books already. I love a good English mystery, so this book was right up my alley. There is a twist at the end that I truly did not see coming; as I was reading, I felt very smug about thinking I had figured it out, only to be taken by surprise.

The Word is Murder features the author, Anthony Horowitz, as a character in his own book. Horowitz is the Watson to a grumpy, almost unlikable detective named Hawthorne. Hawthorne approaches Horowitz to write a book about his detective work. In order to do this, Horowitz follows Hawthorne around on a case involving a woman who plans her funeral on the same day she is murdered. The conflict arises when Horowitz’s dislike for Hawthorne bubbles up now and then; the detective tends to have a one track mind when it comes to cases, forcing the author to put his life on hold. I had fun reading this one. Horowitz is great at planting clues and dropping hints so that the reader can try to figure out whodunit before the end of the book. I’m a dunce, so I didn’t figure it out until it was written down on the page in front of me. If you were a fan of Magpie Murders, Horowitz’s previous book, then you will enjoy this one, too.

The only book I read in May that isn’t new, was The Martian by Andy Weir. I do not claim to be smart when it comes to science; in fact, the only test I’ve ever failed was in my high school chemistry class. There is a lot of science talk in The Martian, and I do mean a lot. But! It was all explained in a way that made me want to get a degree in rocket science. Mark Watney is an astronaut that was sent with a small team to live on Mars for about six weeks. The mission is quickly aborted only a few days in, though, when a storm blows in. Watney is injured and presumed dead, and is therefore left behind when the team leaves. He was the team botanist/engineer, so he has to use every bit of his knowledge in order to survive. I loved this book, and it took me by surprise just how much I loved it. Watney is hilarious, and stays positive throughout his entire fight for survival. I found myself laughing out loud, dismayed when something went wrong, and cheering when something went right.

I will lastly mention David Sedaris’ new book Calypso. Sedaris is in fine form with this one, and it reminded me a lot of my favorite of his books, Me Talk Pretty One Day. The overall theme I gathered from this book of essays is Sedaris’ own mortality. In “Stepping Out,” Sedaris is obsessed with his Fitbit and is continuously trying to outdo his last record of steps. He becomes a fixture around his neighborhood, taking long walks and picking up trash as he ambles. He and his partner buy a vacation beach house in North Carolina that they name the Sea Section. Several of the stories are based out of this beach house where he vacations with his siblings and their families. Sedaris has a tumor that he gets removed in a back alley operation, that he wants to feed to a snapping turtle that also has a tumor in the titular essay “Calypso”. (It’s a lot funnier than it sounds, trust me.) Calypso reminded me that David Sedaris is one of my favorite authors with a particular brand of humor that few people can get away with.

Summer reading is fun again, now that I can actually pick the books I want to read. Stop by Lemuria on your way to your vacation to pick up your summer books!

Tom Hanks’ collection ‘Uncommon Type’ are my type of stories

By Former Lemurians

On November 29, 2017

In Celebrity, Fiction, Short Stories

by Abbie Walker

Let it be known that I am a big Tom Hanks fan. Like HUGE. You’ve Got Mail is my favorite movie, and Hanks is my favorite actor. So when I learned that he had a book of short stories coming out, I just had to get my hands on it.

And guess what? America’s dad can actually write.

hanks gif

Uncommon Type is a collection of short stories and Tom Hanks’ first book of fiction. These 17 stories are simple in nature, diverse snapshots of lives from past to future. From a man who decides to date his friend and gets a lifestyle overhaul to a man who keeps bowling the perfect game, these stories are sentimental and sweet, just like Tom.

There’s a strong sense of nostalgia in this collection, which can best be seen in a four-part series of stories called “Our Town Today with Hank Fiset,” in which a writer comments on the shift from print to digital newspapers and other “good ole days” discussions, via his typewriter (of course). This theme is also strong in “The Past is Important to Us,” a Midnight in Paris-esque story about a man who keeps going back in time (literally) to the World’s Fair 1939.

uncommon type There is also, of course, the underlying presence of typewriters. For those of you who don’t know, Hanks has a slight obsession with the machine. He even typed up this collection on one. So he made sure that one crops up in each of his stories in some way, just another element of the “yearning for older times” theme that’s present throughout the book. In particular, “These are the Meditations of My Heart” is all about a woman who falls in love with typewriters.

As I read this collection, I couldn’t help but compare the stories to Hanks’ movies. That WWII veteran reflecting on the friends he lost in “Christmas Eve 1953” gave me images of Saving Private Ryan. The immigrant from a war-torn country in “Go See Costas” reminded me of The Terminal. And “Alan Bean Plus Four” definitely had Apollo 13 vibes. Even minor characters in other stories had me pondering one of the star’s many roles. There’s one story, “Junket in the City of Lights,” about a debut actor’s packed touring schedule that I assume Hanks drew upon personal experiences to write. He even said in an interview that he wrote many of these stories while traveling for films or on press tours.

What I love about this collection the most is how diverse it is. Hanks definitely played around with character, style, and setting to tell a larger story about humanity and how things change over time. The most powerful story in the book is “Go See Costas,” a heartfelt depiction of immigration. But there are also light-hearted, comedic moments in the book to balance out the more emotional ones.

Unlike a lot of stars-turned-author, Hanks actually holds his own as a strong writer. While I think he played it safe and could have done a little more risk-taking with this debut, he is a good storyteller, and I look forward to any more pieces of fiction he comes out with next.

Thankful for Jeffery Eugendies’ ‘Fresh Complaint’

By Former Lemurians

On November 22, 2017

In Fiction, Short Stories

by Trianne Harabedian

I recently told someone that Fresh Complaint, Jeffery Eugenides’ new collection of short stories, is so well-written I could cry. I lied. I had already cried, specifically while sitting by my apartment’s swimming pool and reading the story “Early Music.” I don’t think anyone saw, but if they had, I would have told them the truth–that one of my favorite authors has reminded me how much I love books, and that I am not sure I will ever be so passionate about anything else.

It all began three Christmases ago when I did something completely out of character: I went home to California without a book. The going home part is normal enough, but I am the type of person who always has a book. Work, coffee with a friend, shopping? There’s probably a book on the front seat of my car or hiding in my purse. My plan was to find something random to read at home, some literary junk food to pass the time. I distinctly remember looking through my shelves one night, thinking, “I should probably start reading more adult fiction,” and picking up The Marriage Plot. That was when I fell in love.

There is something about the way Jeffery Eugenides tells a story. Instead of focusing on plot points or crazy adventures–although his works contain both–he draws the reader towards the characters themselves. He begins by introducing us to a character and her current life. Then he steps into a short flashback, and then another with more details, until we are caught in a whirlwind of the past and the present. When we know the characters as intimately as we know ourselves, Eugenides allows them to progress, or regress, and we proceed with them. In his story “Complainers,” two women become friends despite unlikely circumstances. As they grow older, one moves away and eventually develops dementia. Her friend’s attempts to help are both painful and relatable, set against the backdrop of a snowstorm. “Timeshare” is about a man whose aging parents throw themselves into renovating a motel in Florida. Each person’s feelings towards the property are unique, and it comes to symbolize dreams for reliving life. My favorite story, “Early Music,” is about a man who based his entire higher education on learning to play an early form of the piano. Now, years later, he is called daily by debt collectors asking for his remaining payments on this instrument. Despite having a wife and children to support, he cannot bring himself to give up his dreams in the form of the clavichord.

If you crave intimacy with a character the way I do, you will not get enough of his Eugenides’ writing. On the other hand, the amount of detail is intimidating. People shy away from his novels because they think they are too long, or too detailed, or too boring (none of which are true). I was a bit apprehensive that his short stories wouldn’t incorporate the trademark detail and introspection. But this is exactly why his short stories work so well. In just a few pages, Eugenides is able to capture a person, their entire life, and boil it down to the important scenarios. If you have been intimidated by the sheer length of Middlesex, or bored by the idea of the Marriage Plot, or put-off by the subject of The Virgin Suicides, this is the collection for you. It’s time to stop being afraid and pick up Fresh Complaint.

The Real Housewives of America: ‘American Housewife’ by Helen Ellis

By Former Lemurians

On August 10, 2017

In Short Stories

by Trianne Harabedian

I am not an American housewife. And although I joke that my life goal is to marry strategically, become a trophy wife, and live comfortably on someone else’s money, I am nowhere close to marriage, financially advantageous or otherwise. Despite this fact, I recognized myself in the stories of American Housewife by Helen Ellis. Smart, concise, honest, and a bit creepy, this is definitely the most entertaining collection of short stories I have ever read. (Plus, she’s coming to the Mississippi Book Festival in less than a month!!!)

The women of American Housewife display a wide array of American stereotypes, from the New York socialite to the Southern lady. Stereotypes exist for a reason, so of course these figures are recognizable to me, both as women I know and as myself. But Helen Ellis takes the familiar forms a step further. A neighborly conversation between two lovely and civil women becomes an all-out decorating war. A feminine writer who takes part in a reality TV show finds herself psycho-analyzing her competitors until no one can hide from their faults. A young woman married to a bra fitter questions her husband’s attention span, given the constant temptation in his line of work.

Each story appears to be about normal, stay-at-home women. They are perfectly polite and rather lovely. But as the story progresses, the strange details and heightened emotions escalate until you suddenly find yourself somewhere you never imagined the story could go. An all-inclusive book club morphs into an unsettling hostage situation. The domestic tragedies of an apartment building become more personal and more connected to the lonely, delusional wife. mop segway And Tampax decides that their sponsorship of a woman’s novel warrants extreme “productivity encouragement” in the form of house arrest and abductions. Towards the middle of each story, I began to connect the bizarre details. But every single time, the story went even further, until I found myself whispering, “Ohhhhhh, I didn’t think she would go there, BUT SHE DID.” The story would not end until I was thoroughly unsettled and, frankly, creeped out in the best way possible. I pride myself on my ability to see plot twists from a mile away. With Helen Ellis, I had no idea what would happen in the next five seconds.

American Housewife is hilarious and satirical. It’s more than a little unsettling, and always surprising. And yet beneath the manicured nails, cherry-red lipstick, and unshakable poise, there is a wealth of honest emotion. These women go extreme lengths to protect themselves and the things they value. They choose people to love, and care for them without question. They know exactly who they are and how they want their lives to be. It is rare to find a collection of stories that celebrates strong, feminine characters while embracing the ridiculousness that is being an American woman. We are complex creatures, full of duality, and I appreciate a writer who can portray this with a healthy dose of sarcasm. I enjoy recognizing myself and laughing at the reflection.

Helen Ellis will serve as a panelist on the “Stories from the South” discussion at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 19 at 10:45 a.m. at the State Capitol in Room 201A.

ms book fest

Julia ‘Delights’ in Sharma’s short stories

By Former Lemurians

On July 21, 2017

In Foreign Fiction, Short Stories

by Julia Blakeney

life of adventure and delight

Akhil Sharma’s third book, a collection of eight short stories entitled A Life of Adventure and Delight, is complex in a way that I did not anticipate. Throughout their individual stories, a host of interesting characters find out what it means to be a good person. Each story has a way of making you think it is over, but each leaves the reader with the sense there is always so much more to it. Each story holds so much emotion and feeling. Along with an ever-present theme of loving despite flaws, there is an overarching theme of exposing the inner workings of the human heart juxtaposed with the deepest traditions of Indian culture. At times both darkly comedic and deeply emotional, these eight stories present the many different complex relationships between humans which require love: husbands and wives, parents and children, and even friends and enemies.

I am not sure I have ever read a more moving collection of short stories. Each story seems to have its own individual impact on the reader. I was riveted from the very beginning. This collection is immensely enjoyable, lovable, and quotable.

“It’s a big world. A lot of people are worth loving. Why love someone mediocre?”

Dislocation, fantasy roil in ‘A Life of Adventure and Delight’ by Akhil Sharma

By Guest Author

On July 18, 2017

In Foreign Fiction, Short Stories

By Paul Rankin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 16).

In Akhil Sharma’s collection, A Life of Adventure and Delight (W.W. Norton), we meet a sequence of remarkable characters in the throes of profound dislocation.

Five of the eight stories take place in the United States, while the remaining three occur in India. All, however, focus on characters struggling to preserve cultural roots and traditions even as they feel themselves getting swept along by the forces of modernity and westernization. These struggles produce narratives which are by degrees horrifying, heartbreaking, and hilarious.

In the opening scene of the opening story, for instance, we meet Gopal Maurya, recently abandoned by his daughter (Gita) and wife (Anita) and sleeping on a couch in the living room. Having banished himself from his own bed “in a burst of self-hate,” he’s resolved “to avoid comforting himself with any illusions that his life was normal.”

The absent women provide immediate backdrop for Gopal’s despair; together they also function more broadly, as a controlling metaphor which informs the dramatic tensions throughout and creates a coherence and unity that may collections lack.

Gita has become fully westernized; Anita has returned to India where she met a guru, achieved enlightenment, and moved into an ashram to sweep floors and pray. Left behind, cut off from every familiar thing, Gopal fantasizes about “calling an ambulance so that he could be touched.”

When his neighbor Mrs. Shaw comes over to borrow the lawnmower, he attempts “to extend their time together” by tangling “her in conversation.” Through she won’t even accept a drink–“Orange juice, apple juice, or grape, pineapple, guava. I also have some tropical punch”–Gopal clumsily pursues her, visiting a hair stylist rather than his “usual barber” and reading articles in popular magazines like Cosmopolitan for advice about what makes a good lover. Along the way, Gopal also fights to preserve his tenuous connection to the past by becoming involved in the Indian Cultural Association.

Each subsequent story centers on the particular desires and frustrations of its individual protagonist, but each explores similar themes of conflicted longing. In the wake of a recent tragedy, a young boy prays daily before a traditional Hindu altar at the same time he attempts to make sense of his loss by identifying with iconic western superheroes like Batman and Superman for whom personal catastrophe became the catalyst that reveled their true greatness.

A temple pandit places his cellphone on the cushion beside him while performing sacred burial rights and when, “Periodically it would ring, and he would gesture for (the others) to keep singing while he answered…with one hand played the harmonium with the other.”

A doctoral student at NYU uses the internet to hire prostitutes while maintaining the conviction that “any Indian girl who had sex before marriage had something wrong with her was in some way depraved and foul, and also unintelligent.”

A young woman, living abroad in America, soothes the pain of isolation by drinking more and more until “the drink overtook her,” at which point her husband “sends her back to her parents” knowing they “will kill her, because the shame of having an alcoholic as a daughter…is staggering.”

These stories are poignant, gripping, and subtly profound in their investigation of the moral complexities confronting all citizens of an increasingly globalized society. Each stands alone in its own right. At the same time, largely because of how deftly Sharma weaves these common threads of alienation and dislocation throughout, the sum is far greater than its parts.

Paul Rankin holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, works as a freelance writer and editor, and is on the verge of finishing his first novel. He lives in Jackson with his family.

A Life of Adventure and Delight is the July 2017 selection of the Lemuria First Edition Club. Its author, Akhil Sharma, will appear at Lemuria on Tuesday, July 18, at 5:00 to sign and 5:30 to read.

We Lived Our Little Drama: Michael Knight’s ‘Eveningland’

By Former Lemurians

On March 15, 2017

In Short Stories, Southern Fiction

by Abbie Walker

Lately, I’ve been in the mood for short stories, so I found it the perfect time to pick up Eveningland, the latest from Michael Knight. I haven’t read his work before, but Knight is known for his ability to weave an engaging novella. Sure enough, his new book is a perfect example of beautiful southern storytelling.

Eveningland is a collection of Alabama short stories that mostly take place around Mobile and the Gulf Coast area. A teenage girl holding a thief hostage in her home. A young art teacher trying to figure out her life. A vengeful husband. A boy with a summer crush. Knight does a skillful job of connecting these seemingly unrelated stories into a tale about the complexities of life in all its forms.

I’ve quickly become a fan of Knight’s writing. From page one, his prose pulled me in, and I found myself reading several stories in one sitting. I love the way he plays around with perspective, choosing various narrators and points of view to tell each story. His writing is clear and to the point, while also quietly poetic. Each sentence flows perfectly into the next, and the rhythm often reminded me of waves lapping along the Alabama beaches.

waves My favorite story was “The King of Dauphin Island,” in which a real estate tycoon seeks to buy up and restore the crumbling island after the death of his wife. Relationships are at the heart of this collection, and I couldn’t help but care for each of the characters, though their struggles varied from infidelity to navigating middle-aged life.

I also appreciate how Knight framed the story with events such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Hurricane Raphael. He manages to put a face with the impact these events had on a personal level. I may not be from Alabama, but as a Mississippian who has visited Mobile and Dauphin Island numerous times, I think the stories have a vivid sense of place. Knight captures the essence of the area through his descriptions of the land and through his use of voice.

Overall, Eveningland is a well-written collection that demonstrates how life goes on through heartbreak and change. I would recommend it for anyone in need of some good southern short stories. I’m sure I’ll be picking up more of Knight’s works soon.

Micheal Knight will serve as a panelist on the “Stories from the South” discussion at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 19 at 10:45 a.m. at the State Capitol in Room 201A.

Category: Short Stories (Page 1 of 2)

Love, American Style: ‘Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory’ by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

John M. Floyd’s ‘The Barrens’ is full of surprises

‘Sweet & Low’ is newest book from emerging southern writer Nick White

Aimee’s Sizzling Summer Reads

Tom Hanks’ collection ‘Uncommon Type’ are my type of stories

Thankful for Jeffery Eugendies’ ‘Fresh Complaint’

The Real Housewives of America: ‘American Housewife’ by Helen Ellis

Julia ‘Delights’ in Sharma’s short stories

Dislocation, fantasy roil in ‘A Life of Adventure and Delight’ by Akhil Sharma

We Lived Our Little Drama: Michael Knight’s ‘Eveningland’

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