Dylan Landis

Last night I went to a wonderful reading at Diesel Bookstore in Brentwood: Dylan Landis, reading from her new novel-in-stories, Normal People Don’t Live Like This. As a writer working on a novel-in-stories myself, one also centered on a difficult and complicated female character, and who’s been exposed to some of Dylan’s work, I have been keenly awaiting the arrival of this book.

Dylan read from the story “Underwater,” which revolves around, among other things, a charged friendship between the main character, teen-aged Leah, and her bad-girl friend Angeline. When Angeline brags to other girls how smart Leah is, “Leah glows as if Angeline has put a match to her.” They have one kind of dynamic in a group: “but when they are alone together Angeline is a knife under folds of silk and Leah can’t look away.”

More on Normal People Don’t Live Like This after I’ve had a chance to read the book cover to cover. Some of the stories have been previously published in journals like Tin House, Bomb, Night Train, Santa Monica Review, and St. Petersburg Review. The book has been praised by writers like Janet Fitch (White Oleander) and Elizabeth Strout (the Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge).

Is The Short Story Becoming Hip?

In noting, earlier this month, the appearance of major articles in both the New York Times and the Guardian on the short story (on the same day no less), Short Review editor Tania Hershman asked, “Have we slipped through a wormhole into another dimension?” Maybe not, but April was a good month for the short story:

• In the New York Times, A.O. Scott’s “In Praise of the American Short Story” acknowledges the commercial limitations of the form, but also warns against undervaluing it. The appearance of biographies of Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme offers occasion to look back at 20th century masters. And Wells Towers’ new Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (getting a lot of attention these days) “provides the most vivid recent example of the way a good story, or a solid collection of them, can do more than a novel to illuminate the textures of ordinary life and the possibilities of language.”
• In his Guardian piece, James Lasdun “celebrates growing confidence in an often overlooked form.” He does so with a tough look at five recent story collection debuts from around the world: the Wells Tower from America, but also authors from Ukraine, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.
• The 2009 Pulitzer for Fiction, just announced, went to Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked stories “set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.”
• Finally, the online journal The Rumpus earlier this week premiered a new column by Peter Orner (Esther Stories) called The Lonely Voice focused on… the short story (and, of course, taking its name from Frank O’Connor’s classic study of the form). His plan is to check in every week or so with thoughts about a particular story. This week: Peter Taylor’s “Allegiance.”