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THE TREE STAND

STORIES

A thoughtful and well-written collection with a strong sense of place and identity.

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A volume of short stories gathers grim and touching moments of New England life.

Longtime New England writer Atkinson returns to fiction (following his 2015 history book, Massacre on the Merrimack) with a collection of tales set on both sides of the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border. The seven stories move back and forth across the Merrimack River and cover a variety of time periods, spanning the late 20th century to the present day. While many of the protagonists are blue collar, barely getting by or just breaking even, a few have made it to more stable circumstances only to discover that there will always be struggles, though they may take different forms. The title story, which opens the book, is one of the bleakest, a day spent with a man whose marriage, house, finances, and work are all in tatters, though a successful hunt brings him a small respite. “Bergeron Framing & Remodeling” is a twisted but moving family tale in which deep dysfunctions overlay the fundamental love between a father and his sons. “Hi-Pine Acres” is the evocative story of a widowed farmer with a layabout son who struggles with the decision to sell off land that has been in her family for more than a century. In “Java Man,” high school nicknames and relationships follow the characters into adulthood. The volume concludes with “Hoot,” in which a struggling singer/songwriter returns to her hometown, hoping that performing at a local bar will throw her career the lifeline it needs.

Life is precarious for almost everyone in these tales, even Thom McNulty of “Ellie’s Diamonds,” whose real estate ambitions offer him the highest earning potential of any of the characters, though he is also trapped in a cycle of debt. Atkinson is skilled at depicting small details that reveal much about his players—for instance, when Goody, the protagonist of “The Tree Stand,” brings down a deer, he quickly calculates how much the meat will allow him to shave off his upcoming grocery bills. One character has her “annual glass of wine” while doing her taxes; a neighborhood bar is replaced by a CVS. There are some delightful turns of phrase (one man has “two Kennedys’ worth of shiny brown hair”) and wry asides that succeed in being quietly funny but not excessively arch. Many of the stories are dominated by men who spend much of their time in predominantly male social and professional settings, but in “Hi-Pine Acres” and “Hoot,” Atkinson shows that he can also write fully developed female protagonists. While all the tales have their strengths, the book really hits its stride with “Java Man,” the first one written in the first person, which allows the author to explore his character’s view of the world from the inside, and he does so effectively. Characters, rather than the plots, drive most of the narratives, but Atkinson’s solid authorial voice and engaging writing style bring an intensity that is likely to win over many readers who would otherwise prefer their fiction with a bit more action.

A thoughtful and well-written collection with a strong sense of place and identity.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-60489-336-6

Page Count: 322

Publisher: Livingston Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022

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THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2024

All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.

Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.

Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.

All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024

ISBN: 9780063275959

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

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