My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories

by Carol Bly, Tobias Wolff (Introduction)

The Upper Midwest, with its scattered small towns and bitter winters, is Carol Bly's source for stories that are, as Tobias Wolff says, "as particular in their settings and culture as those of Turgenev and Joyce and Flannery O'Connor, and as far from being simply regional." My Lord Bag of Rice collects Bly's best and most recent work, 11 stories fortified with sharp-eyed characters who stand a little apart from their routine, stolid lives, nurturing hardy seeds of self-worth in a mostly mediocre world. Tinged with humor, her stories always portray Midwesterners - and people in general - who manage to cultivate a sense of greatness in their lives.

326 pages, Paperback

First published February 3, 2000

Reviews

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure where the world has been hiding Carol Bly; I never even heard of her until I found her story "Talk of Heroes" quietly nestled inside The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. The voice is so strong-- calm, wise, searching, and funny-- I immediately went and picked up this collection. And it's great, too. My favorites were "Gunnar's Sword," about an old woman in a nursing home who goes for a walk, "The Tomcat's Wife," about a Midwestern couple who befriend the Citified Folk who move to town, and "Chuck's Money," about a small-town bookkeeper who stumbles upon a suicide. All three of them left me actually shaking by the end. If Carol Bly weren't dead I'd write her a thank you letter.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forget the Bible, these are the greatest stories ever told. Carol Bly is like a god to me, only not as harsh. In MY LORD BAG OF RICE: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES she creates a universe in Minnesota and populates it with regular people mostly going about their normal lives and finds that junction where their moral core is tested. As Tobias Wolff notes in his introduction Bly is a master of her craft, but craft in and of itself never mattered that much to me. On the framework on her art rises a humanity and emotional oomph that may be supported by craft but speaks to a talent well beyond mere artisanship. Her work is both regional and universal. She writes about standing up to power on a micro level that never ignores the macro. Her tales aren’t explicitly political, but they don’t ignore how the political is present in even the most personal of our relationships. Each and every one of the stories in this collection hit me in the heart. I loved them, and I want to read everything Bly ever wrote.

[Chris - Quarter Press Editor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared to most short stories, I can't say that I didn't like any of these. Each one held its own charm and its own appeal.

That being said, I'd be hardpressed to recommend this to anyone, as these stories have a unique quiet that a reader will either like or not. I liked it. Plus, when Bly is good, she is nothing short of amazing. (Two of these were extremely wonderful.)

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning collection of short stories. Ms Bly is easily one of the finest short story writers I've read, I found myself thinking of Alice Munro and her wonderful story collections.
Minnesotans will especially enjoy the geographical references to local landmarks and cities.

[Christopher Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having just reread this story collection, I thought I'd recommend it, well, because it's pretty amazing. Carol Bly is often compared to Flannery O' Connor because her stories center around morals and religion, sometimes. But that's not fair, in my opinion, because her stories more closely deal with human interaction, love, and opposition. If you have to read one of the stories from this collection, choose the novella "Chuck's Money" but otherwise, read them all, and enjoy.

-C

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a voice I trust.

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Bad Government and Silly Literature, published as a chapbook by Milkweed Editions in 1986, the late Carol Bly begins making her case with this statement: "If an American were to turn out a novel or a story in the 1980s in which men and women characters consort together without one mention of physical desire, we would wonder in reviews and at lunch why the author suppressed sexuality. Yet hundreds of novels and stories offer us American characters who live out their lives without any political or ethical anxiety. We ought to be calling it suppression because we are as much political and moral creatures as we are sexual creatures."

Following two previous collections of short fiction, in My Lord Bag of Rice Bly gave us new and selected stories in which her small-town characters come up against the anxieties of modern life and sometimes win through to an honesty and clarity that take your breath away.

Bly is a natural story-teller who delights in detail. She can set a scene and pull you in at once, as in this opening to one of her finest stories, "The Dignity of Life":

"Two people stood quarreling in the casket showroom. They were a sixty-three-year-old man named Marlyn Huutua and his unmarried sister Estona. She was so angry that she bent toward him from her end of the casket."

With that, you are ready for Estona to speak, and does she! As in reading Eudora Welty, one of the pleasures in reading Bly is the way the speech of her characters is icing on the cake to the author's own strong narrative voice. Whether she's writing about carpooling women traveling to a church conference ("Chuck's Money") or a widow who buys a boarding house and finds a starving woman in the basement ("My Lord Bag of Rice"), you're treated to dialogue that frequently has you laughing out loud.

The cut-the-baloney tone in many of the stories is irresistible, as in this passage from "Chuck's Money":

"Leona was sick of how people pretended to be more involved in a death than they really were. `Funny thing,' they would say between mouthfuls of funeral bun, `the way it worked out. I mean, I was one of the last people to see so-and-so.'"

The vernacular of "funeral bun" is particularly satisfying there, with that proofreader-defying "mouthfuls" thrown in for good measure.

At just the right what-can-be-done moment in "Chuck's Money," Bly places this sentence before your eyes: "The smartest thing a small-town church can do after a funeral is the same thing the greatest churches and temples of Europe and Asia have always done: toll the bell." Has a bell ever tolled better in writing?

Surely Carol Bly's work should be represented in any general anthology of American short stories from now forward. She shares with Canada's Mavis Gallant the ability to deliver more in the space of a story than you often find in a novel.

[Suzann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Good well written collection. For MFA book circle.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know a damn thing about Carol Bly before reading this, but now I'm going to have to go and read everything else she's written. These are stories the way I want to write them.

Her moral and political outrage, intelligence, humor, and compassion made her voice stand out anywhere. She was anti-apathy, anti-complacency, anti-smalltalk, anti-ignorance, anti-war. She was pro-dissent, pro-judgment, pro-arts, pro-feeling, pro-action, pro-farmer, pro-sustainability, pro-local-theater-productions, pro-conversation….. She wanted to talk with children and teenagers and old people about contemporary art and music and politics and farming. And she proposed solutions to the problems she identified, starting at the very grassroots level, with 4-H meetings, church groups, and the town parade committee, and urging people to seek accountability from Washington. She demanded respect for people living in Minnesota farms and small towns, and she demanded that these people learn to respect themselves, by which she almost always meant to educate themselves. That goes, of course, for everybody.
I've moved my review to:
http://alisonkinney.com/2015/07/26/ca...
Thanks!