by Kelly Pickerill

Josh Weil’s debut, The New Valley, is comprised of three novellas set in rural Virginia.  I read the first novella, “Ridge Weather,” through in one sitting and, exercising much self-control, decided to blog about Mr. Weil and his upcoming event at Lemuria (this Thursday, the 25th, starting at 5 o’clock) before devouring the next.

In an earlier post, Lisa sang the praises of the short story; quite a few of us Lemurians share a soft spot for this form of prose and regularly find ourselves having to defend it.  I’d like to add the novella to our defense.  The novella often reads like a short story, able to hone in on the mundane to make it majestic, while still having room to flex its sprawling muscles the way only a novel can.

Josh Weil’s collection is no exception — the novellas are almost impressionistic as their language attempts to paint a picture of a succinct moment in the lives of their protagonists.  But the painting that emerges is not a portrait, as it would be in a short story; instead, it is more of a focused landscape, one in which all of the peripheral details are as sharply defined as the subject.

The first novella in The New Valley, “Ridge Weather,” uses the winter elements — bitter cold, snow, wind — as a backdrop for the main character, loner Osby Caudill, who has just lost his father to suicide and finds only small comfort in continuing to care for the herd of cattle he and his father once tended together.  Osby’s increasing desperation for socialization and physical contact with another person leads to his ever more desperately pushing people away, until he finally clings to a dying steer as a replacement for human connection.  Throughout the novella, Weil’s expertly drawn detail guide the journey Osby takes.  Osby may not come to many revelations, as usually occurs in a novel, but Weil’s sense of place and mood gently envelop the reader in Osby’s isolated world as well as any short story could hope to do.

“If a short story is a piece of furniture and a novel is a house, then a novella is a room — and in that room a skilled writer can sometimes find space for all the aberrations and terrors and longings of a character’s life. The right room can intimate its occupant’s past and future, frustrations and failures, the shape of the house beyond . . . Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.”  — Anthony Doerr, in The New York Times Book Review

The New Valley is a great addition to any collection: order a signed copy through our website or come to Lemuria Thursday to meet this talented new writer.

In May, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize for her body of fictional work, which consists mostly of short stories. This honor reminded me of  a lovely article written by Steven Millhauser for The New York Times Book Review last fall. In comparing the short story to the novel, Millhauser points out the dominance of the novel and describes it as “the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature . . . insatiable . . . it wants to devour the world.”

Ah yes, but what I really appreciate about this article is Millhauser’s praise for the short story. I continually have so many customers who turn their noses up at the short story, turn their heads in disgust at the mere suggestion of a collection of short stories. But wait a minute folks! Listen to Millhauser sing praises for the virtues of brevity:

“The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there–right there, in the palm of its hand–lies the universe . . . it looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature . . . the short story becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel”

“Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power . . . It exults in its shortness. Its wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.”

And so these customers who are missing out on the short story inspired me to set up a large display in the fiction room solely dedicated to the short story . . . old and new, known and unknown, paperback and fine first edition . . . all short stories!

As Ann Patchett says, “SUMMER IS SHORT, READ A STORY.” Harper Perennial has launched a series of Public Service Announcements to deal with the short story reading deficit. Apparently, HP is also very aware of the painfully distorted faces at the mere mention of the word ‘story.’

I just keep several short story collections nearby . . . and there is no guilt if I do not finish the whole book in a short time. I can always pick it up later! Short stories are great for busy people who still want to do some reading. Some of my favorite collections include: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart by Alice Walker, The Boat by Nam Le, Tongues of Flame by Mary Ward Brown, and Bad Behavoir by Mary Gaitskill.

Some collections that I am reading now: Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon, Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno, My Father’s Tears by John Updike, and It Wasn’t All Dancing by Mary Ward Brown.

Some collections I would like to read are by Alice Munro, Barry Hannah, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter . . . .

*      *     *     *     *
If there is a short story writer that you really like, let me know!

part two: walter kirn

check out walter kirn’s books by clicking this sentence

the complete stories by flannery o’connor

killer inside me by jim thompson

under the volcano by malcolm lowry

lolita by vladimir nabokov

postman always rings twice by james m. cain

jesus’ son by dennis johnson

miss lonely hearts by nathanael west

the most everything in the world

last night my husband asked me, if you lived on a desert island and could only bring three things, what would you bring, and i said, i’d bring pen and paper and you.  he said if he could bring only three things he’d bring pen and paper and cheese.  i asked him why he wouldn’t bring me, and he said he didn’t think of me as a thing, plus he knew i was already there.  i said, well, i don’t think of you as a thing either, but i wouldn’t want to be on a desert island without you.  anyway, if  you know i have pen and paper already, wouldn’t you bring something else?  he said, good point, and then said he wasn’t so sure about the pen and paper anyway, because he could probably draw in the sand, or on some bark or something.  so i guess i’d bring bread and cheese and wine, he said.  but we don’t drink, i said.  he said, i think if we were on a desert island we might want to start.  i wonder, though, if we couldn’t make cheese and wine on the desert island, i said.  well, we probably wouldn’t know in advance if there were grapes and milk available.  i think i’d like to bring a lot of clothes, i said.  those people on that tv show are only there for thirty-nine days at most and they start looking really grungy by the end of the first week.  yeah, but who cares, my husband said.  we could just go naked always.  i dunno, i’m not that into being naked, i said.  but i’m into you being naked, he said.  what if it gets cold, i said.  i’ll build you a nice hut, he said. okay, maybe i could go naked if we had bug spray.  and sunscreen.  i don’t think i’d look too sexy naked, sunburnt, and covered in bug bites.  if you were sunburnt you might not notice the bug bites, he said.  if i were sunburnt i might get melanoma, i said.  look at it this way, though, if we moved to a desert island, my husband said, we wouldn’t have to worry about health insurance.  no, i said, we’d only have to worry about health.  but we worry about that anyway.  this way there’s one less worry, he said.  okay, but i still don’t want melanoma.  you could sit in the shade.  yes, but what if i got eaten by a wild animal while i was sitting in the shade trying not to get melanoma?  some weird cross between a warthog and a mountain lion, i said.  i don’t think health insurance would do us much good if that happened, he said.  a doctor might, i said.  but there probably wouldn’t be a doctor on the desert island, i guess.  these are the chances we have to take, he said.  so if i have you right, that if some warthog mountain lion eats my legs off and i don’t happen to die, what then?  then that’s what’s meant to be, he said.  we can take comfort in knowing that we are not giving our money to the man.  look, i said, i don’t like giving my money to the man any more than you do, but i’m the one lying here with my legs eaten off.  it’s not like i’d be immune to the warthog mountain lion, my husband said.  or rare diseases that we’ve never even heard of, he added.  you could be lying there with you legs eaten off and i could be unable to help you because my arms are paralyzed from poison mango syndrome.  and this would be better than having health insurance how?  i asked.  we would lead the only truly all-natural lifestyle anywhere on the planet; we would be accepting our fate, he said.  in a lot of pain, i said.  that’s when the wine would come in handy, my husband said.  i don’t think wine is going to do it, i said.  we could bring morphine, he said…

just a sample of the book of short stories i’m currently reading

this is the beginning of a series of blogs that will consist of a few of my favorite authors’ favorite reads.

here goes…

part one: a.m. homes

check out a.m. homes’ books by clicking on this sentence

who’s afraid of virgina woolf by edward albee

bullet park by john cheever

disturbing the peace by richard yates

a severed head by iris murdoch

the loved one by evelyn waugh

flat stanley by jeff brown

crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky

lolita by vladimir nabokov

by Zita

a bit daunting in length but completely worth the time spent reading it,  this novel has the distinct apperance of a school text book including diagrams and side notes.

t.s. spivet is a 12 year old cartographer on a mission to accept an award at the smithsonian and prove that he, a pre-teen, did indeed draw all of the marvelous scientific illustrations which he is being awarded for.

congratulations to you reif larsen for this fantastic first novel.

keep on keeping on.

by Zita