BY SUZI STEFFEN
Who Reads
Short Shorts?
Full libraries in one little package
O
nce upon a time, I took a break for
Thanksgiving and cleaned up my
messy room. Turned out I had
more than 300 books lying around, needing
homes. And because I lived in the home of
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and frequented
Prairie Lights Books, many of those books
were short story collections.
Recently, I performed some pre-
Thanksgiving cleaning and started to pile
books left, right and center for re-sorting into
appropriate bookshelves. More plays, more
literary nonfiction, more young adult books
… but not too many short story collections.
And that’s a shame, even though I
already have hundreds of short stories on
my shelves. For one thing, it’s an axiom
among publishers that people don’t buy
short stories, and I like to counter that with
my spending money. For another, short sto-
ries offer a wide range of experience in
compact form.
The best short story I’ve ever read, by
Lorrie Moore, comes from her 1998 The
Birds of America. I reread “People Like That
Are the Only People Here” so often some sen-
tences are practically engraved on my brain:
“Baby and Chemo, she thinks: they should
never even appear in the same sentence
together, let alone the same life,” for example,
or “Overheard, or recorded, all marital con-
versations must sound as if someone must be
joking, though usually no one is.”
Moore’s mordant humor and her mock-
ing self-awareness, which leave room for
tender and surprising flashes, charm tears
and smiles out of me every time. Do yourself
a favor and order Birds from, say, Books
Without Borders. Or, for more reading pleas-
ure (including Alice Munro’s depiction of
the price of longing, “The Children Stay,”
and a barely known gem called “Brokeback
Mountain” by Annie Proulx), find “People
Like That,” the first-place winner, in 1998’s
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.
Prize anthologies — my usual suspects
include Best American Short Stories and
the O. Henry Awards — provide danger-
ously seductive reading. “Oh, I can just
read one story while I’m cooking dinner,” I
might think, or perhaps, “I’ll check and see
which story took second place in 2003
while I pack for the trip to the Midwest.”
Yeah, good plan! Not.
But neither is opening books by a single
author. I remember being charmed by Isaac
Asimov’s terrible short story puns when I
was 12 or so. Now I’m more likely to return
to Junot Diaz’s intense and vulnerable debut
collection, Drown, or Ethan Canin’s rich
and complex The Palace Thief. If I want
tough Scots immigrants and their emotion-
ally stunted offspring, I’ll pick up one of
Alice Munro’s collections; to balance Scots
with Irish, I’ll read Andrea Barrett’s 1996
National Book Award-winning Ship Fever.
And if I want a new book about our state,
I’ll pick up my copy of Eugene-born
Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh.
Refresh, Refresh is clearly a young
writer’s collection; some stories could have
been revised after aging. Yet Percy (whose
first collection, The Language of Elk, was
published in 2006) captures sides of the
Pacific Northwest that most people don’t
know — the brutal depression of rural
poverty, the dangers of the mysterious for-
est and the people who grow up within its
powerful grip, the allure of guns and fight-
ing and fury in a landscape that demands,
and defeats, big gestures. Our current wars
with their hot charge of death and despair
blow through Tumalo’s lava-based country
in the prize-winning title story, and David
Brin’s The Postman shadows every step of
the apocalyptic “Meltdown.” Bittersweet
revenge works, for a while, for the working
class guys in “The Killing” and “Somebody
Is Going to Have to Pay for All This.”
Wisely, Percy saves the strong “When the
Bear Came” for last, a hardscrabble reward
for a book about the hardscrabble lives of
people who aren’t merely vacationing in
the demanding terrain of Central Oregon.
“There is no frigate like a book / to take
us lands away,” wrote Emily Dickinson. In
Percy’s case, there is no dirt bike like this
collection to take us into the depths of the
high plateau.
ew
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BOOK NOTES: Kenny Moore signs Bowerman and the Men of Oregon,
7 pm 11/28, Barnes & Noble. Deborah Madison discusses Vegetarian Suppers
from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen, 7:30 pm 11/28, Powell’s on Burnside,
Portland. Ehud Havazelet and Dorianne Laux read, 8 pm 11/29, Knight
Library, UO.. Shannon Wheeler discusses the latest Too Much Coffee Man col-
lection, Screw Heaven, When I Die I’m Going to Mars, 7:30 pm 11/29, Powell’s
on Hawthorne, Portland. Contributors to It’s So You read, 7:30 pm, 12/4,
Powell’s on Burnside, Portland.
NOVEMBER 21, 2007
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