Slate lets us peer into the life of an old maid in modern China.
(Brown’s evocation of Tampa, Florida is spot-on, I must add). Karen Brown’s “Isobel’s Daughter” also explores loss, communicating the profundity of those everyday tragedies we often look away from. I thought about “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen” for days after I read it and I made a colleague read it so that I could force him to discuss it with me. Joyce’s tale dips from a military procedural into uncanny, fantastic territory, making the reader question the perception of the narrator, who never wavers in his beliefs about the strange events (namely, meeting a djinn) that are (maybe) happening to him. This story of a British Army officer who may or may not have been exposed to toxic nerve gas during the first Gulf War unfurls in a realistic, funny, and often affecting voice. Take the lead story, Graham Joyce’s “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen,” for instance. Repeatedly, the stories in this collection explore what is at stake in the human condition, and a sense of loss underpins many (if not most) of the tales. Henry Prize Storiescertainly won’t disappoint as time-fillers, they offer so much more than simple leisure reading. And while the tales comprising the 2009 PEN/O. Sometimes we set aside our real Reading Time for those oh-so important novels, so that we might Learn and Grow as a Person (or whatever). Collections that are lauded tend to function (or at least pretend to function) as homogeneous “novels in short story” –which can be great, of course (see Denis Johnson’s inimitable volume Jesus’ Son) - but why should that be? To often, readers dismiss short stories, particularly short stories, as little more than time-fillers, neat little chunks of text to occupy specific moments in time: a subway ride, an term in a waiting room, a spare half-hour. There exists, perhaps, a feeling that the short story as art form is incapable of making Grand Gestures or Big Important Statements. I would take any one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales over the interminable stuffiness of The Scarlet Letter. There’s a strong case to be made that Kafka’s little fables are far more perfect than his unfinished novels, and yet The Trial, incomplete as it is, is still considered his finest work. While Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is an astounding feat of economy, it’s rarely mentioned in the canon of Hemingway’s masterpieces like For Whom the Bell Tolls.
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