Short Stories - St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves; American Salvage

I have been on a short story kick lately. I think when some people go toward light reads during the summer, I go for brevity. Blame lack of attention span, or just a desire to absorb as much as possible - whatever it is, short stories seem to do the trick! Anyone who reads a lot of short stories knows that they aren't always light. In fact, it is an opportunity for a writer to show us just how good they are at their craft, and they have less space to do so. Two authors recently have really wowed me for completely different reasons.


St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves , by Karen Russell, is a set of stories with quirky protagonists, most of them children, who live so completely in their own universes that I was absorbed quickly into each story. Russell herself got so attached to one of the stories, Ava Wrestles the Alligator, that she turned it into Swamplandia! , a novel that has recently had great acclaim. One of my favorite little quotable bits comes from that story:
"My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather."
You can see how easily Russell captures the reader with this kind of language.

I enjoyed all the stories in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves , but my favorite was probably Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers. I could so easily imagine myself there.


American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, is memorable to me for entirely different reasons. Where Russell creates worlds of fantasy and imagination, Campbell is able to reflect the lives of people living in rural, poor, and sometimes drug-torn communities. There are these moments of subtle but deeply felt heartache that I found myself thinking about days later. It is rare to have a fictional character, much less one found in a short story, stick with me for so long. The one that keeps coming to mind is the man in "The Burn," and the many ways he would accidentally appear threatening and dangerous, when really he was in the wrong places at the wrong times.

Bonnie Jo Campbell just came out with a novel, Once Upon a River, earlier this month, and I can't to give it a try.

I will probably continue to read short stories throughout the rest of the summer. Right now I have The New Yorker Stories
by Ann Beattie on my bedside table, and find myself reading one every night. They are a nice anecdote to the audiobook I'm listening to, which is very long and dark fantasy.