Skip to content

Silent Eloquence

Silence. Eloquence. Everything in between.

Menu
  • About
  • Check-in
  • Contact
Menu

Short story collections of 2009

Posted on April 4, 2009April 4, 2009 by Surya

James Lasdun at the Guardian has a wonderful piece on the short story as an art form and reviews some of the best collections of 2009:

“…it raises the question of whether there is any special quality, aside from length, that distinguishes the short story from other literary forms, and if so to what extent these particular writers avail themselves of it. I think there’s at least a unique potentiality in the short story, and that it has to do with, among other things, omission and a quality of internal resonance between the parts that, if handled well, can escalate the emotional power of the whole”

He definitely gave me good reason to add five more books to my must-read books.

One more year by Sana Krasikov

“…What makes the collection so good is partly the fineness of detail – emotional as well as social and sensory. Story after story plays with the same set of variables, but always in different, vividly imagined situations, and always with unpredictable outcomes.”
Buy from Amazon

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Loosely connected around the family of an elderly landowner, KK Harouni, the stories tell of servants and poor relations navigating the whims of their patrons with a mixture of mercantile calculation and surprising love.The harsh realities facing powerless, impoverished women are especially well handled.
Buy from Amazon

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“…a collection of 15 stories that shuttle between Nigeria and the US. Once again the strains and betrayals involved in fleeing one culture for another figure prominently, with the uprooted heroines caught between the devil of a dysfunctional homeland and the deep blue sea of suburban America.Adichie has a flair for drama, particularly where violence is involved.”
Buy from Amazon

Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly

“..Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer currently living in Switzerland. Aids, corruption, lethally callous attitudes to women and surreal levels of inflation (“we handed over a million dollars each to our driver” is a typical line) form the outward coordinates [of this collection]…All of these pieces depend on swiftness and lightness for their effect; flaring up into momentary life and then fading out before they acquire any burdensome solemnity, and this, too, seems true to the essential nature of the form.”
Buy from Amazon

Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

The least favorite among the five, Lasdun still says “…what turns it from a good story into a great one is the leopard, and the connection Tower sets up between this unlikely creature and the boy whose murderous feelings it comes to embody. That he does this via the almost delinquently playful motif of spottedness, risking the seriousness of the story’s emotion, but getting away with it, and thereby adding a level of pure joy to the performance, suggests that he is a natural-born short story writer.”
Buy from amazon

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Related posts:

  1. Short Story Month
  2. Short Story Review: Chechnya by Anthony Marra
  3. Short Story: The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie Minor
  4. Short Story Review: Departure by Alistair Morgan
  5. Short Story: Edgemont Drive by E.L.Doctorow

1 thought on “Short story collections of 2009”

  1. Divya says:
    April 12, 2009 at 7:49 pm

    Awesome. I am gonna add the books on Nigeria and Zimbabwe to my list!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please answer: (required) Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

Recent Comments

  • 10 years | Silent Eloquence on Remembering a journey
  • J. on Excerpt: The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Surya on Mother
  • Siddhartha on Mother
  • Loxley on Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
  • Ajish on Me too..!
  • Punjabi on Languages or Dialects?
  • Alpha on Why do we appreciate art?
  • sameer on Me too..!
  • lol 7 years later on Languages or Dialects?

Archive

Categories

  • Asides
  • Blog related
  • Books
  • Catch-all
  • Culture & Languages
  • Entertainment
  • Favourites
  • Featured
  • Fiction
  • India
  • Links
  • Management
  • Musings
  • Personal
  • poetry
  • random
  • Science
  • Short Story Month
  • Society
  • Tech
  • Travel
  • Women
  • Writing

Twitter

  • 32 pages. 10975 words. 2.5 chapters. Progress. #writing #WritingCommunity about 6 days ago
  • Wordle 326 2/6 🟩🟨🟨⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 about 1 week ago
  • I never know what to do on the days when I get the word in under 2 mins. The day stretches ahead… Wordle 322 3/6… https://t.co/rjIVh5MrzX about 2 weeks ago
  • RT @ceciliaclyra: Sometimes it makes sense to put away a story that lives inside you ---- but please don't put away the storyteller. about 2 weeks ago
  • I sent out my first newsletter today. #happy about 3 weeks ago
  • #story by Yefim Zozulya about citizen’s right to life, decided arbitrarily by an elected authority. The story may… https://t.co/75CRJKg63t about 1 month ago
  • “Triumph—rare, lucky, dull, and brief—is an artifact of editing: failure, failure, failure, failure, a moment of ju… https://t.co/F5st6e1pwx about 1 month ago in reply to silenteloquence
  • “Flaubert observed, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when w… https://t.co/59aKu02lNF about 1 month ago
  • A problem that deserves urgent attention - how to ensure #ArtificialIntelligence objectives will align with a plur… https://t.co/7ivfCJ61yl about 2 months ago
  • Few beliefs shape our reality than our sense of self. Whether you believe you are powerful or powerless, you are ab… https://t.co/U1me5PNDEI about 2 months ago
@silenteloquence
©2022 Silent Eloquence | Built using WordPress and Responsive Blogily theme by Superb