I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories

by Noy Holland

"These new and selected stories testify to the fact that there are still fine short story writers out there, doing the hard job of serious literary production in our age of tweets and memes...Holland's language is challenging, elliptical, bristling with sensations and resounding with the interior lives of complicated, recognizable people." ― The New York Times Book Review

In the twenty years since her first short story collection, The Spectacle of the Body , Noy Holland has become a singular presence in American writing. Her second and third collections, What Begins With Bird and Swim for the Little One First , secured her reputation as a writer who excels and excites, her prose described as unsettling and acutely wrought, rhythmic and lyrically condensed. Following the recent publication of Bird , her first novel, I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like is a gathering of stories, the majority of which have never before been published in book form. Set on two continents and ranging in length from a single page to a novella, these stories beguile and disrupt; they remind us of the reach of our compassion and of the dazzling possibilities of language.
"I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like," from which the collection takes its title, is part love song, part fever dream―a voice demanding the ecstatic. Holland's stories do not indulge in easy emotions, and they keep to the blessedly blurred frontier between poetry and prose.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 10, 2017

About the author

Noy Holland’s latest work is I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, out now from Counterpoint Press. Noy's debut novel, Bird, came out in 2015. Other collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most works of fiction are broad highways, swooping the reader from start to destination, with maybe a bump in the road or two. A story by Noy Holland is a chain of mossy, slick rocks crossing a fast-rushing stream; each sentence, if your attention wanders, is a chance to lose your footing.

In a story like "Rooster Pollard Cricket Goose" or "What Begins with Bird" or "Love's Thousand Bees," chronology is shredded, the POV skitters from one character to another like a water strider, the realism dances on the edge of magic.

It's a little easier to get a grip on one of the one-page miniatures, gleaming tesserae like "Not So the Donkeys" or "Instructions for Xu Yuan Flying Or the Lifting Force Let Go."

[katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The structure of Holland's writing gets really tiring once you've read the same short story about a messed up family in the country for the fifth time, which is unfortunate considering how much I liked Bird.