Astray

 

 

Jane Johnson grips the rail of the Riversale, watching the estuary water heave and sink below her. She reckons the dates: nearly five weeks since she boarded at Belfast, and the city of Québec is only one more day west. The provisions might almost have lasted, if it hadn't been for the heat and the maggots in the ham. The same journey took Henry eight weeks last year, when the seas were high. Tomorrow she will be beside him.

Today she is bedside herself. On this voyage Jane has discovered herself to be a most imperfect creature...

"Counting the Days"

Astray

Emma Donoghue

pg. 77

Beautifully written; historical fiction. Short stories. I love her approach. Selecting news from small historical events: social history she calls it. Donoghue weaves facts into stories of interesting characters and stirring emotions, and captivates.

From a NPR interview...

I just keep an eye out for these things. I read social history. I, you know, in art galleries, I read the little captions underneath the paintings. I listen to the radio and just keep my ears open. I think the only difference between me and other people is that when I hear of an interesting historical incident, I immediately write it down and Google it. I'm just a very persistent researcher and I find things all the time. I would say the 14 stories in Astray come from about more like 40 different incidents that I came across.

 

Tenth of December

From the title story, excerpted in...

“Writing short stories is very hard work.” That, at any rate, is what George Saunders had to say on the subject some years ago, in an essay about the postmodern master Donald Barthelme, and lest anyone raise a skeptical eyebrow — since by then Saunders had already proved himself to be one of the most gifted, wickedly entertaining story writers around — he continued to wring his hands, revealingly, a few pages later: “The land of the short story,” he fretted, “is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.”

NYTimes

By GREGORY COWLES

Published: February 1, 2013

 

I always enjoy short stories, and George Saunders' are supremely well-written and quirky. I found the opener--Victory Lap--to be poignant, introspective, and realistic. Stories layered into, around, and beneath the tale. I wonder about these kids' futures...

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can't because you're balancing a ball on your head.

pg. 26

Tenth of December

George Saunders