Girls at War and other stories/Chinua Achebe/120 pp.

A group of short stories by Nigerian author Achebe. The collection includes some stories that take place during the Biafran War era, and others that take place in pre-war Nigeria. Many of the stories end, not with a resolution of the problem, but rather with a situation that acts more like a moral, making them seem like a native folktale. (In fact, some of the stories include the native gods of the region.) My only caution is that it is easier to follow the stories if you know a little about Nigeria and the Igbo or Ibo ethnic group that inhabits the region. Having read a book in the past year that deals with the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria made it a bit easier for me to understand some of the unusual figures of speech and the cultural and religious differences.

First Love and Other Sorrows/Harold Brodkey/223 pp.

A MULSA book sale remainder!

Originally published in 1958, this collection of short stories was reissued in 1988, and that's the edition I read and am reviewing. A St. Louis native who attended Harvard, Brodkey writes stories that seem almost autobiographical. His description of St. Louis locations, and of growing up poor (but formerly well-off), remind me of another St. Louis resident, Tennessee Williams.
I especially enjoyed the first story, "State of Grace", and all the stories that dealt with the narrator's sister/Laurie/Laura and her attempts to find a "good man" to "settle down with". Although the people have different names in each story, you can't help feeling that these are all the same people, and that they are somehow personally known by Brodkey himself.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich/Danilo Kis/135 pp.

A collection of seven loosely-connected short stories, each of which is a brief "biography" of a fictional figure in the creation of the Soviet Union and the Comintern. The stories, all set outside Yugoslavia (most in the Soviet Union, but one in Ireland and Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and one in Inquisition-era France), on the surface appear to be a statement on the violent excesses of the Soviet leadership in the Stalinist (and pre-Stalin) era; however, the book was published in 1976, and it is easy to understand that Kis was using the historic example of the Soviets to call attention to the activities of the secret police and government in Yugoslavia in the second half of the 20th century.
As mentioned above, one (seemingly) incongruous story takes place during the Inquisition in France in 1330. In the city of Toulouse (and all across France). Jews are being killed or forcibly converted to Christianity. Kis uses the story of Baruch David Neumann to show the ways in which those in power ignored (and often conspired with) the rabble's violent attacks on Jews.

Homely Girl, A Life and Other Stories/Arthur Miller/115 pp.

This short compilation of Miller short works includes just three stories: "Homely Girl, A Life", "Fame", and Fitter's Night". The shortest of the three, "Fame", is a possibly autobiographical look at how a popular playwright deals with his new-found celebrity. Random strangers approach him on the street, offering their unsolicited opinions of his work or gushing as if they were old friends. Rich people in restaurants think nothing of interrupting his meal to make him meet their friends. The key point of the story is when an old schoolmate recognizes him in a bar. The schoolmate, unaware of the playwright's celebrity, brags about his own success in life, but when the playwright is approached by a stranger asking for his autograph, the schoolmate completely changes his behavior, becoming shy and taking back an invitation for the playwright to join him for dinner. Success changes not only the celebrity, but also his relationships with those around him.

Oddly, the story I enjoyed least was the title story. A woman, treated badly in life because of her lack of physical good looks, comes to the realization that she doesn't need affirmation from others to feel good about herself.

The third story in the volume, "Fitter's Night", was the one I found most enjoyable. A pipefitter, working in the New York shipyards during World War II, spends most of his time (at work and at home) trying to land the easy jobs and find a way to avoid responsibility. But when he's forced into a repair job on a ship heading out to war, he realizes how important it is for him (and all his coworkers) to do the best job they can, because all these sailors' lives depend on the quality of his work.

Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories/various authors/576 pp.

Wow, I can't believe there have been no posts since my last one. As long as it took for me to finish this book, I thought for sure some other reviews would have been posted before I could review this one.
As the title implies, this is a collection of short stories, organized by their different points of view. As any English major worth his salt will tell you, point of view (POV) has to do with what relationship the story's narrator has to the events being related. Is the narrator recounting events that happened to him personally? Then he tells the story in first-person POV. Is the narrator recounting events that happened to the reader? Second-person POV is the route he takes. And so on. The anthology's editors go into much deeper division of the various points of view, including interior monologue, diary narration, and anonymous narration, but it all basically has to do with whether the narrator was directly involved in the events. The editors provide several examples of each type, and that's where my interest returns. (This was something that always got me in trouble in high school/college literature courses - I didn't care about things like POV and theme and so on; I just wanted to read the damn stories!)
The nice thing about this anthology is that it collects stories from a wide variety of time periods and cultures. While it leans pretty heavily on pre- and post-WWII America, we also have Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil", as well as stories by Poe, Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce and Joseph Conrad (including some lesser-known stories by these masters). One of my favorite pieces was Dorothy Parker's "But the One on the Right", which is a dinner party guest's inner monologue about her fellow guests. The collection even includes a story by long-time MU faculty member Tom McAfee, "This Is My Living Room".

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner/Alan Sillitoe/144 pp.

This is one of the best collections of short stories, by an artist I'd never heard of, that I have ever read. Sillitoe was born and raised in Nottingham, England, in a working-class family. At the age of 14 he left school and went to work with his father in a local bicycle factory. The stories in this collection mostly deal with families like Sillitoe's - poor factory workers living in cramped, dirty houses where the noise, soot and grime of the nearby factory is a constant part of their lives.
The title story is about a young man (Colin) who robs a bakery and is sent to a borstal, a sort of part youth prison, part reform school. The governor (warden) of the borstal gives him the opportunity to run cross-country meets for the prison track team; Colin is a good runner, and the governor thinks he will help him to win against a posh private school and get the borstal some good publicity. Throughout the race against the private school, Colin is way in the lead, but he stops running shortly before the finish line, intentionally losing the race to show the governor he is in charge of his own life.
"Uncle Ernest" is about a veteran of World War I who has suffered a mental breakdown due to his experiences in the war. There is an almost childlike innocence to him; when he meets two young girls at a diner, obviously poor and hungry, he offers to buy them something to eat. He continues to meet the girls at the diner, and the older of the two begins taking advantage of his innocence, getting him to buy them other things. Unfortunately, Ernest's motives are misunderstood by other patrons of the diner; they (and the police) assume he is a pervert, and warn him away from the girls.
I enjoyed all the stories in this volume, but I think my favorite was "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller". Frankie is a young man of about twenty, who has the mental capacity of a younger boy; he acts as general (though he prefers to be called sergeant-major) in the neighborhood boys' skirmishes with other groups of boys. World War II is approaching, and Frankie assumes that when the war starts, he'll go to join his father's regiment; obviously, when the war does begin, he is rejected for service and ends up assisting the local civil defense patrols. This story is obviously at least partially autobiographical; Frankie addresses the narrator as "Alan", and Alan is a writer of stories about his old neighborhood. Sillitoe uses the story to reminisce about his own childhood and to express regret over having "moved on" to be a well-known writer who seems to have lost touch with his roots.
Reviewers have compared this book to The Catcher in the Rye, calling Colin a "British Holden Caulfield". It's easily one of the best collections of short stories I've ever read. Unfortunately, this copy of the book will not be going back into the MULSA book sale - it was missing a front cover when I got it, and has lost several pages since then. However, I note from MERLIN that there are several copies in the Libraries' collection: MERLIN

The Magic Barrel/Bernard Malamud/214 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder! This collection of short stories, published in 1958, won the National Book Award the following year. In 1956 Malamud spent a year in Rome working on the manuscript for this collection, and three of the stories are set in Italy as a result - "The Last Mohican", "Behold the Key", and "The Lady of the Lake". In fact, "Behold the Key" seems almost autobiographical in its description of a struggling writer's attempts to find cheap lodging for himself and his family in Rome. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Malamud incorporates his Jewish heritage into much of his work; of the thirteen stories in the compilation, ten deal with the life of New York Jews. Malamud's characters, mostly poor Jewish immigrants, speak in a beautiful mish-mash of fractured English and Yiddish. The subject of the Holocaust comes up often in these stories - the loss of loved ones, and in some cases, guilt at having survived unscathed while others did not. The main character in "The Last Mohican", Fidelman, is accosted by a Jewish refugee who almost demands assistance based solely on the fact that both are Jewish. Even after very poor treatment by the refugee, Fidelman continues to feel an obligation to this survivor of horrors that Fidelman himself avoided through the lucky coincidence of growing up in America.
I enjoyed most of the stories in the collection; if I had one complaint, it was the fact that many of the stories ended without a resolution of the central problem. (Strangely, the story I enjoyed the most, "Behold the Key", is one of these stories that ends too soon.)

Rest Area/Clay McLeod Chapman/178 pp.

It's difficult for me to describe the feeling I get from this collection of short stories by Chapman; "disturbing" would be a good start. In some ways, they have a sort of Edgar Allen Poe quality to them. All the stories are written as sort of stream-of-conscious monologues by their narrators; looking back, I see very little dialogue in them. In fact, the author's biography says that he performs some of his stories onstage.
In the title story, a father strikes up conversations with travelers stopping at a highway rest area, telling them that he's waiting for his daughter, who just stepped into the ladies' room - months earlier. In "Fox Trot", an elderly woman is caught in a life-or-death struggle with a fox that has found its way into her house. "Rodeo Inferno" explains where rodeo clowns really come from, and what happens to them after the rodeo leaves town. In "Second Helping" a troop of boy scouts, lost in the woods, finds a new use for their worthless scoutmaster when food supplies run low. The thing-under-the-bed has some advice for the young boy above him in "Bladder Companion". "Chatterbox" relates the feelings of a ventriloquist's puppet when he discovers his owner has gotten married.
Amid all the gruesome tales, there are several really good, basic stories: In "Spoonfed", a younger brother takes care of his severely handicapped sister; in "The Pool Witch", three adolescent boys decide to finally face the lifeguard at the top of the water slide; and in "And the mothers stepped over their sons", a woman searches a battlefield for her son's body.

Shelf Life/various authors/173 pp.

Subtitled "Ten Original Stories to Benefit ProLiteracy Worldwide", this book is a compilation of stories by various authors, edited by Gary Paulsen. I didn't realize it when I bought the book, but apparently it was geared towards younger readers. The collection includes a story by Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked and Son of a Witch), titled "Tea Party Ends in Bloody Massacre, Film at 11". In "In Your Hat", by Ellen Conford, a high school prankster becomes the butt of someone else's joke. Other contributors to the volume are Margaret Peterson Haddix, Jennifer L. Holm, A. LaFaye, Kathleen Karr, Ellen Wittlinger, Marion Dane Bauer, M.T. Anderson, and Joan Bauer.

Frog Gig and Other Stories/Speer Morgan/109 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder!
The author, Speer Morgan, is an MU English professor and editor of The Missouri Review. This volume is a collection of some of his early short fiction. Morgan attended school at the University of the South, and received his BA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and the stories in this collection are set in the small towns of the American South. In the title story, a college student visits a childhood friend, and the two go on a late-night frog hunt. The narrator of "The Oklahoma and Western" is a country/folk singer who has hit the big time in Los Angeles. "The Bad Cat", set in Columbia, MO, relates the problems a retired professor of agriculture is having with a stray cat, and with the coming of old age. In "Momma and the Moonman", Momma causes problems with NASA's moon launch when she "magics" an astronaut off of her television and into her living room. Morgan grew up in Ft. Smith Arkansas, across the river from Oklahoma and the old Indian Territory. The story "Jack Woman Killer" deals with a young Native American man's difficulty in balancing the customs of his ancestors with the White Man's world of the 20th century. Finally, "The Bullet" appears to be a semi-autobiographical piece about Morgan's life growing up in Ft. Smith, where his family owned a hardware store.

Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files / Jim Butcher / 418 p.

All but one of these short stories have been published before, in one or another anthology, but I don't read a lot of short-story anthologies, and picked this book up only for the sake of the final story, which takes place a few hours after the end of Changes, the latest full-length novel in the Dresden Files series that I am addicted to, the story-world within which all the stories take place

Jim Butcher uses several of these stories to bring out elements of the series that have not appeared in the novels - to narrate from the perspective of characters other than Harry Dresden (Harry's half-brother, the vampire, and Harry's bff Murphy, the cop), or to tell a story with a lighter tone than the nail-bitingly suspenseful and high-stakes novel series.  Other stories just read like shorter versions of the kinds of problems Harry deals with in the novels: a crime or spate of magic/monster-related crimes occurs in Chicago, Harry the wizard PI, with help from one or more of his sidekicks, confronts the perps and removes the menace.

The only short story in this collection that didn't thoroughly please me was "Last Call."  Not that it was awful, but it just didn't seem all that fresh.  I like the Dresden Files series for Harry's mixture of doofus and daredevil, and Murphy's strong action-heroine mojo, and even some of the amusement of recognizing a genre cliche...but I found "Last Call" a little too strong on the latter.

"Aftermath," the one previously unpublished story, written from the perspective of Murphy, performed pretty much as expected.  It added new action and developed some key character relationships in the series, while leaving the reader in the dark about the major unresolved question at the end of Changes.