Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
I’ve slept on this book now for something like two months, and when you read the book (please, please read the book), you should absolutely be pissed that I took this long to mention it, and you’re right: I’m sorry. I’m an idiot for not writing large and strongly about this book the second I cracked it.
Light Lifting is one of two story collections I’ve read recently (see below), and I wrote awhile ago, in March, that one could be forgiven for believing 2011 was some mystical glory year for short fiction—new Jim Shepard, the debut collection from Alan Heathcock, etc.: Light Lifting is further evidence of that, and the collection works (I think) well as a complentary collection alongside Heathcock’s ever-incredible Volt.
Salient facts: L. Lifting‘s got seven stories and the average length is about 30 pages. If you don’t read a lot of short fiction: them’s some long stories (and the collection’s central story—it’s longest, and it’s the one halfway through the collection—clocks in at 40 pages). It’s entirely up to you whether or not that’s too long for a story, but I’d urge you strongly to take this test before you decide: read the collection’s first story, “Miracle Mile,” and try to keep track of whether or not you even breathe as the story’s unfolding. Or try to measure how many pages you feel you’ve just read, when that story’s finished. Obviously this stuff’s rhetorical: MacLeod‘s a master (and it may be genetic: his dad’s quite lauded as well [I say this stuff so passively (and this sounds just awful, and for it I apologize) because MacLeod's Canadian, and as shameful as it is, I'm like most of my countrymen, and I read very little other than US writers]), but what he’s a master of isn’t just the terse litttle short stories some of us may come to expect if we’ve read too many lit journals: MacLeod’s making thick, strange, dense narrative monsters. I can’t describe it: that threshold, of having stories top out at more than 20 pages, seems to do something: these stories feel much more similar to novellas or novels than to short stories. What I’m trying to say is there’s some over-the-line aspect that MacLeod’s expoiting, and it’s not terribly different from what (I’m not just saying this because they’re both Canadian) Munro does: stories stuffed just a little more full than you’d expect or are used to, stories with just a bit more life.
Oh shit, just read the thing.
Nobody Ever Gets Lost by Jess Row
And here’s part two of the debut duo of releases from Five Chapters books, and does it even need to be said? Emma Straub’s book was, I thought, quite good, and a whole bunch of smarter and better readers and writers thought the same, and that was a 5C book. Does that, by even the worst logic, mean shit about Jess Row‘s book? Of course not, necessarily. However: of course, yes, Nobody Ever Gets Lost is fantastic.
What you should do is read the title story and/or “Sheep May Safely Graze” and then decide what it is you think you really know about things—your life, the people around you, the causal shit you understand about your day and pattern/routine. That sounds aggressive or loaded or sillilly large, but I mean it: I read half of this book with my back on the ground and my feet up on the couch and felt fundamentally shifted somehow on finishing the book, and the shift had primarily to do with feeling like I’d been slowed. This gets weird and dicey quickly, because what I’m talking about is the magic way stories can actually make us better people. Do stories owe us that? That’s a debate I don’t think matters here. But for sure what good stories have to do, on some level, is offer a new view to our usual lives, however that happens. And I’d like to here push Nobody Ever Gets Lost as one of those hugely offering books, one of those which throw open doors you don’t even know you need opened. I’d also like to posit that maybe the fact that the world didn’t recently end has something to do with small pressed like 5 Chapters coming along and filling the cracks of publishing in unexpected and fantastic ways.
