Weekend Reading: Toibin, Kingsolver, and Lessing
To understand the short story form, I am reading any story I can lay my hands on, good or bad, classic or contemporary. Since I started this exploration in April, I have since discovered, but haven't read all, the leading names in the genre.
This weekend I am reading stories from these books:
Homeland and other stories by Barbara Kingsolver
Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
African Stories by Doris Lessing
These are authors I have always known as novelists, yet they have also written some great stories. I met Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible, which I reviewed for a publication called English Tales. I remember admiring the research that Kingsolver did for the novel, and the way she exposed the stereotypes of Africa, critically revisiting the concept of the Dark Continent. Beyond these issues, the novel displayed great craft, especially in Point of View.
Doris tends to be overwhelming, and I have only read two or three of her novels, but my all-time favorite is The Grass is Singing . It is an intense novel which tranforms with each reading. But I didn't know that early in her career, Lessing had written a lot of short stories. Africa Stories was published in 1951, years before Things Fall Apart, for a non-African audience. This fact is obvious because the narrators in the stories I have read always seem to address a distant reader and practice some reportage, but that's okay because Lessing is a critical and compassionate writer. From the beginning she was disgusted by colonialism, and her stories were critical of the government of the day in what was then Rhodesia. Reading these stories about Africa, written in the fifties, opens a window to this era in Zimbabwean history.
Mothers and Sons, by the award-winning author of The Master, Colm Toibin, is a moving writer. I discovered him through Petina Gappah, who shared a stage with him in New York City (in May). Once I started reading him, I found myself pulling out my copy of Dubliners, and that led to Anton Chekhov, to Maupassant, to Turgenev, to Flaubert. I love it!
Mothers and Sons, as you can see, is a book full of promise. That's such a "nice" subject--mothers and sons. I have tried to write a mother-son story since 1997, and I pull it out every year on Mother's Day, sometimes just to look at it. My poetry collection, Forever Let Go, has a poem entitled "Remembering Mother", which was originally published by African Writing Online as "Tea-break Thoughts".
What I like about Colm Toibin's writing so far is its lucid, seamless, but stinging nature. He has a way of gripping your attention without being gimmicky; the writing seems effortless, as if it comes to him easily. But, of course, to write so beautifully must be the most difficult of processes.
I am addicted to the short story, but I am also discovering great authors and rich collections. I think in my future creative writing classes I will start using collections of stories in place of craft texts.
This weekend I am reading stories from these books:
Homeland and other stories by Barbara Kingsolver
Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
African Stories by Doris Lessing
These are authors I have always known as novelists, yet they have also written some great stories. I met Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible, which I reviewed for a publication called English Tales. I remember admiring the research that Kingsolver did for the novel, and the way she exposed the stereotypes of Africa, critically revisiting the concept of the Dark Continent. Beyond these issues, the novel displayed great craft, especially in Point of View.
Doris tends to be overwhelming, and I have only read two or three of her novels, but my all-time favorite is The Grass is Singing . It is an intense novel which tranforms with each reading. But I didn't know that early in her career, Lessing had written a lot of short stories. Africa Stories was published in 1951, years before Things Fall Apart, for a non-African audience. This fact is obvious because the narrators in the stories I have read always seem to address a distant reader and practice some reportage, but that's okay because Lessing is a critical and compassionate writer. From the beginning she was disgusted by colonialism, and her stories were critical of the government of the day in what was then Rhodesia. Reading these stories about Africa, written in the fifties, opens a window to this era in Zimbabwean history.
Mothers and Sons, by the award-winning author of The Master, Colm Toibin, is a moving writer. I discovered him through Petina Gappah, who shared a stage with him in New York City (in May). Once I started reading him, I found myself pulling out my copy of Dubliners, and that led to Anton Chekhov, to Maupassant, to Turgenev, to Flaubert. I love it!
Mothers and Sons, as you can see, is a book full of promise. That's such a "nice" subject--mothers and sons. I have tried to write a mother-son story since 1997, and I pull it out every year on Mother's Day, sometimes just to look at it. My poetry collection, Forever Let Go, has a poem entitled "Remembering Mother", which was originally published by African Writing Online as "Tea-break Thoughts".
What I like about Colm Toibin's writing so far is its lucid, seamless, but stinging nature. He has a way of gripping your attention without being gimmicky; the writing seems effortless, as if it comes to him easily. But, of course, to write so beautifully must be the most difficult of processes.
I am addicted to the short story, but I am also discovering great authors and rich collections. I think in my future creative writing classes I will start using collections of stories in place of craft texts.
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