LGW to MAD

Book Suggestion by Angella Meanix, Bookseller

If you’re looking for a long-drawn-out book with lots of complicated characters and convoluted storylines, don’t read this book.

Turbulence by David Szalay was a great read. It’s a book of short stories that took me on a journey of brief escapades. I love that I didn’t have to get too involved or keep too much track, rather I enjoyed little insights – moments, decisions, and actions. Each character’s life felt brief and transient mirroring the structure of the book itself; boarding flights, Uber rides and layovers. I still felt connected to each of them and wondered how things would turn out though.  I was completely absorbed.

I am a fan of short stories.  Not all ideas have a full 300 pages in them.  This type of book is great for a quick escape.  Curled up on the couch, the stories played out around me.  The Fall season coming on, a cup of tea and a blanket seemed particularly conducive to the delicate relationships in these tidy chapters.

If you find yourself saying “I don’t have time to read”, you might consider this book or any collection of short stories.  Interpreter of Maladies, Fly Already to name a couple.

Excerpt:

GRU to YYZ:  The next morning she had to lose the pilot before she could leave.  He was still in her bed.  Asleep. “Hey”, she said, “Hey, I have to go.”  He opened his eyes (light blue).  There was reddish stubble on his big jaw.  He looked around still not sure where he was.  Outside the last rain of the São Paulo summer was falling audible in occasional plinks and tinks on the window.  “What time is it?”, he finally asked propping himself up.  “Almost eleven”, she told him, “I have to leave in ten minutes”.

Buy this book

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Interview with Sadie Stein author of “Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story”

Today at 5:00pm on WCHE 1520am, Sam interviews Sadie Stein, author of Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story.

What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty-one contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favorite stories from the pages of The Paris Review.

A laboratory for new fiction since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of the last half century. This anthology – the first of its kind – is more than a treasury: it is an indispensable resource for writers, students and anyone else who wants to understand fiction from a writer’s point of view.

A repository of incredible fiction, Object Lessons includes contributions from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcon, Donald Antrim, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, Mary Gaitskill, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Colum McCann, Lorrie Moore, Norman Rush, Mona Simpson and Ali Smith, among others.

Listen to Sam’s interview with Sadie on Podomatic or you can download the podcast on iTunes.

Interview with Charles Yu author of “Sorry Please Thank You Stories”

Today at 5:00pm on WCHE 1520am, Sam interviews Charles Yu author of Sorry Please Thank You Stories.

The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.

A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date … A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape … A company outsources grief for profit, their tagline: “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you.” Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, filling his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in Sorry Please Thank You, we have resounding proof of a major new voice in American fiction.

Charles Yu is  is the author of the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and the short story collections Third Class Superhero and his latest Sorry Please Thank You.

How to Live Safely was ranked the year’s second best science fiction novel by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas — runner up for the Campbell Memorial Award.

His fiction has been published in a number of magazines and literary journals, including Oxford American, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and cited for special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology XXVIII. He received the 2004 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award for his story, “Class Three Superhero.

If you miss an interview you can always catch it at Wellington Square Books or on the Avid Reader at iTunes.