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A CUPBOARDFUL OF SHOES

Name: A CUPBOARDFUL OF SHOES
Author: A. Colin Wright
ISBN: 978-1466900974

AND OTHER STORIES

by A. Colin Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2012

Best when intimate and straightforward, yet often undermined by whimsy and impish urges to experiment.

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A diverse collection of short fiction culled from 30 years of the author’s writing life.

Wide-ranging in style and subject, the 20 stories in this collection also vary wildly in quality. Several stories are stellar: The most successful piece in the collection, “Night Train to Cologne,” tells the tale of a man contemplating leaving his wife; it possesses an admirable introspective mood, as well as an emotionally suspenseful conclusion. Also poignantly rendered is the claustrophobic familial atmosphere in the title story. Several tales, particularly “The Jump,” are notable for their attempts to deal with characters gripped by crises that are as much spiritual as emotional. The prose is consistently solid, and Wright has a clear gift for small-scale, character-driven stories. Unfortunately, structural and stylistic experiments frequently dilute these strengths. “Seven Minutes’ Silence” and “The Bells of Khatyn” both employ motifs (a compressed time span in the former and the relentless ringing of a bell in the latter) that feel gimmicky, which detracts from the human impact. In the case of “The President Reminisces,” the collection’s sole foray into both sci-fi and satire, the humor is so broad as to be tedious. And yet, even the book’s failures can be intriguing. “Queen’s Grill,” a story with an unreliable narrator who may or may not have had a relationship with an unhappy film star on an ocean voyage, contains moments of levity and poignancy that contrast with the strained inclusion of the narrator’s doubting brother and the fussiness of the whole story being a confession to the character’s dead mother. In this story, the lovingly rendered details of ocean travel also cry out for a less frivolous production. Indeed, when viewed as a whole, many of the settings and evocations of vanished eras contain moments that will charm readers, even when the stories themselves aren’t fully successful.

Best when intimate and straightforward, yet often undermined by whimsy and impish urges to experiment.

Pub Date: March 15, 2012

ISBN: 978-1466900974

Page Count: 260

Publisher: Trafford

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

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Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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DEATH COMES TOO LATE

by Charles Ardai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.

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Ardai celebrates the 20th anniversary of his publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, by reprinting 20 of his own noir tales from 1990 to 2023.

Any collection this big is bound to be a mixed bag, but even the lesser stories here illuminate the formulas they depart from. “The Investigation of Things,” in which two Chinese brothers compete to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk, shows that Ardai’s gifts aren’t best suited to whodunits. The cancellation of a boy’s promised trip to see the circus in “The Day After Tomorrow” pushes Ardai’s ability to plot a short-short story to the limit. And “Nobody Wins,” which chronicles the gratuitously calamitous effects of a private eye’s search for his missing fiancee, has a title that would have been perfect for this whole volume. Ardai’s best stories walk a tightrope between noir fatalism and surprising invention. Some of them boast unsettlingly original premises. A fed pursues a doomed relationship with the grieving mother of a boy he arrested and got killed in “The Home Front”; “Game Over” follows a roll of quarters intended as a birthday gift; “My Husband’s Wife” showcases the coolly amoral voice of a conference attendee’s wife as she commits an escalating series of infractions. Other stories present endings bound to startle the most hard-bitten fans. “The Case” follows the adventures of a suitcase bomb that hasn’t (yet) exploded; a bodyguard’s search for a lubricious charge who’s disappeared from under his nose leads to a bloodbath in “Jonas and the Frail”; the man who hires a trio of contract killers in “Masks” turns out to have a shocking motive; and the ending of “A Free Man,” neatly balancing disillusionment and sentiment, provides a fitting close to the volume.

Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.