skygiants | (no subject)

I picked up Kaui Hart Hemmings' House of Thieves for fifty cents, which was one very good reason to buy it! The other, better reason was that Kaui Hart Hemmings was a Stegner Fellow at my school for a year and we read one of her stories in one of my classes, and I liked that story and have an odd wistful feeling of school-patriotism now I am gone from it. So I bought and read it despite my problems with the Literary Short Story*, and I am overall glad I did, I think. Although some of the stories were very, very Literary Short Story ("I am writing about a middle-aged man who is having difficulty connecting with people and quite possibly a mid-life crisis! My workshop will LOVE this") there were some that I thought were very good, mostly all the ones that had younger and very unique voices. My favorite is still probably the one I read at school, "Begin With an Outline," which does fun things with the short-story format; I also quite liked "Secret Clutch," in which a teenaged boy tries to lay a claim on his nanny and she punches him in the groin. I think the author has a book out now going off one of the stories, but unfortunately it is one of the Middle-Aged Man stories that did not grab me so much, so I will probably not be reading it.

*To elaborate further on my problems with the Literary Short Story, which I think I have talked about before: there is a trend in the LSS to think that denouement is not really necessary so long as you have an interesting setup and conclude with an image that could pass for Epiphany. I blame this on James Joyce. Genre short stories tend to be better about this, i.e. they actually have a plot and a point.