Catching Up: Reading a Backlog of Short Stories…

I admit I had been putting off reading severalcollections of short stories.  I kept themon a separate shelf divided by those I’ve read, those I haven’t.  A couple of months before the end of last year,I committed myself to plowing through them once and for all.  I began with Nadine Gordimer’s anthology, TellingTales with award-winning writers like Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Arthur Miller. 

Then came Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shilo andOther Stories; Joanne Greenberg’s Rites of Passage (read the firststory a couple of decades ago, liked it, but never got around to reading therest); Isaac Asimov’s Nine Tomorrows (signed copy, though second hand.  “The Last Question” blew me away—never sawthat great ending coming!)  Later, I cameacross an interview where Asimov stated that was his favorite story.

Next, I read Lorrie Moore’s Birds ofAmerica (I sort of met her in Madison, Wisconsin before I knew who she was,other than a writer making photocopies, before I began writing my own stories.  Never on a first name basis, though; a missedconnection).  Jhumpa Lahiri’s UnaccustomedEarth (loved her first collection so don’t know why it took me years toread this.); Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman; The Stories ofJohn Cheever (the big red hard cover that won the Pulitzer Prize); TheCollected Stories of Jean Stafford (another Pulitzer Prize winner); and ThomasPynchon’s Slow Learner (his early work).      

I was just getting warmed up.  I then read three anthologies:  American Short Story Masterpieces editedby Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks; Anthology of American Short Storiesedited by James Nagel; and Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, thirdedition, R.V. Cassill.  These last threealone had combined pages of 3,038, which may explain why I kept putting themoff.  Some of the stories were repeats ofwhat I had read earlier or years before. Many of those, I reread.  Others Ihad never heard of, nor the writers (some brilliant stories, too).  I enjoyed the sheer variety of great, well-writtenshort stories, some dating back 170 years.

Some stories you read once and stays with youa lifetime like an Edgar Allan Poe story, or Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”  Haunting stories about life and death andsurvival, like escaping capture in the desert and finding yourself sharing acave with a panther as in Honoré de Balzac’s “A Passion in the Desert.”

So, the next time you have the urge to pickup a collection or an anthology of short stories, do so.  You won’t regret it.  In fact, it may inspire you to write one ofyour own, even set in your own country like Malaysia—a great story, no matter where it isset, is a great story…. I began writing my own set-in-Malaysia stories a couple ofyears before I decided to move here for good. One of the stories, “On Fridays,” after rewriting it (rewriting all my stories), is appearing this summer, as a reprint, in Thema (USA).

Next up, or maybe next decade, TheComplete Works of William Shakespeare which I bought four decades ago whenI was still a bachelor living in America before I began to write...

        

—Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with other Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban JourneyPreeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 
Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens.