Contemporary Literature
Books by Writers of Short Stories
Banks, Russell (“Lobster Night”)
The Darling: The darling of the title is narrator Hannah Musgrave, a privileged child of the turbulent 1960s
and '70s, who now, at 59, reflects on her life. After participating in radical politics, Hannah is wanted by
the FBI. Under an assumed name, she flees to Africa where she meets and marries a government official.
She also finds purpose in establishing a sanctuary for endangered chimpanzees. When Liberia explodes into
civil war, Hannah's life and the lives of her family are in danger, yet she makes gut-wrenching (and often
foolish) decisions. (SHS/WPL)
Hamilton Stark: Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from
which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so
obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a
handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides
to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time
that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated
connections between truth and fiction. (WPL)
The Reserve: Heiress Vanessa Cole, the twenty-nine-year-old adopted daughter of a NYC brain surgeon
and his socialite wife, appears to have found the man of her dreams until the death of her father and a secret
from her past causes Vanessa’s behavior to spin out of control. (SHS/WPL)
The Sweet Hereafter: Explores The story begins with a school bus accident and the loss of fourteen
children. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of
life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame? (SHS/WPL)
Bender, Aimee (“Off”)
An Invisible Sign of My Own: Mona Gray was ten when she became a quitter, abandoning each of her
talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood,
adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. At twenty when Mona begins
teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life
keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing
through her intricately built façade. (WPL)
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: Rose Edelstein, on the eve of her ninth birthday, bites into her
mother’s lemon-chocolate cake and is immediately aware of the hidden secrets the members of her family
hold. Every bite is filled with feelings and what might have become a gift becomes a burden, and perhaps a
curse. (SHS/WPL)
Baxter, Charles (“Poor Devil”)
The Feast of Love: In a re-imagined Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their
ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents
and, in some cases, find new ones.In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the
day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's
softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at
the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of
coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human
heart. (WPL/SHS)
First Light: As an astrophysicist Dorsey Welch studies the origins of the universe and its gravitational
forces. Similarly, this novel moves backward in time to trace the evolving bonds between Dorsey and her
brother Hugh and their radically different lives. Hugh remains in the small town where they were born,
lives in the house inherited from his parents, and sells Buicks. Dorsey travels to California, bears the child
of an eccentric professor, and marries an even more eccentric actor. Bridging all these differences, however,
is a sense of family. (WPL)
Saul and Patsy: The tale of a young couple whose complex marriage suffers through a series of tragic
events after an obsessed teenager infiltrates their lives. Saul and Patsy live out a simple dream life in the
American heartland, until one of Saul's high school students commits suicide in front of them. Following
that death, Saul becomes the focus of a group of disaffected teenage outcasts set on causing trouble.
(WPL/SHS)
Shadow Play: Wyatt Palmer's father spends his weekends in the family basement, building model houses
and filling a drawer with philosophical notes. After he dies, Wyatt's mother goes off the deep end, making
up words and talking to herself. Wyatt is eventually raised by his Aunt Ellen, who is writing a new bible.
Although Wyatt has artistic talent, after college he marries and cultivates a super-normal life in his
Midwestern hometown, manager. The outside world invades Wyatt's ``normal'' life when a schoolmate
builds a factory that emits toxic fumes inside its own building, which brings about the death of Wyatt's
jailbird cousin, Cyril. In the aftermath, Wyatt flees to New York City, where his mother feels at home.
(WPL/SHS)
The Soul Thief: As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of
relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive,
and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and
compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past
that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this novel of mischief and menace, we see a
young man's very self vanishing before his eyes. (WPL)
Kohler, Sheila (“Baboons”)
Becoming Jane Eyre: This fictionalized account of the life of the Bronte sisters and the collaboration that
led to Jane Eyre, describes the tragedies (multiple family deaths and addiction) that shaped their lives,
Charlotte’s love affair with a married man, and the bond between the girls. Kohler does not try to replicate
the heated prose of Jane Eyre, instead keeping a calm, quiet tone in writing the imagined recreation.
(WPL/SHS)
Bluebird: or, The Invention of Happiness: This fictionalized account of the life of Henriette Lucy Dillon,
a descendent of Irish Jacobites, who becomes one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies, traces Henriette’s childhood,
arranged marriage, and careers. The heroine has a zest for life, learning, and resourcefulness. (WPL/SHS)
Children of Pithiviers: In the summer of 1942, more than two thousand Jewish children were interned in a
concentration camp in Pithiviers, in the Loiret region of France. In Children of Pithiviers, a pair of young
sisters escape deportation and find shelter with a couple known to all as Madame and Monsieur. Seventeen
years later, a beautiful young Sorbonne student arrives to spend the summer as a guest of Madame and
Monsieur. Eighteen-year-old Deirdre discovers a diary kept by the two Jewish girls. In doing so, she not
only learns their fate, but reawakens suspicions of corruption and shameful secrets. (WPL/SHS)
Cracks: A beautiful schoolgirl mysteriously disappears into the South African barrens. Forty years later,
thirteen members of the missing girl's swimming team gather at their old boarding school for a reunion, and
look back to the long, dry weeks leading to Fiamma's disappearance. As teenage memories and emotions
resurface, the women relive the horror of a long-buried secret. A tale of the passion and tribalism of
adolescence, Cracks lays bare the violence that lurks in the heart of even the most innocent. (WPL/SHS)
Crossways: Set in a wealthy Johannesburg suburb in the late 1960s, Crossways is a family drama of love
and grief. The heroine, Kate, returns from Paris to the family home for the funeral of her sister Marion.
Marion was killed in a car accident that left her husband, Louis, the driver, in intensive care. Kate begins to
reflect upon the circumstances of Marion's fatal accident. From his hospital bed, Louis, who overcame a
neglectful and impoverished childhood to become a prominent heart surgeon, recalls his early fascination
with the glamorous, inseparable sisters. A third perspective is that of John, the Zulu man who essentially
raised the sisters, manages the home, and keeps all its secrets. The more Kate learns about Louis, the more
suspicious she becomes. (WPL/SHS)
The Perfect Place: At a hotel in Switzerland, a mysterious and elegant woman is recovering from an
unspecified illness. One day, a man approaches her on the terrace. "You were a friend of Daisy Summers,"
he says. With that simple statement begins the unraveling of a decades-old mystery and a journey into an
intelligent and amoral mind. Troubled by ghosts of the past, narrator of this chilling novel has totally
repressed a shocking secret. Triggered by current sensory images, it emerges slowly in fragmentary
memories that have blocked full awareness. Finally she remembers the crime she committed against a
schoolmate, which now haunts her until she can face its memory. (SHS)
Jhumpa Lahiri (“Once in a Lifetime”)
The Namesake: A young man of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens
to his thirties. Burdened with the first name Gogol, and just before he leaves for Yale, he goes to court to
change his name to Nikhil. He does his best to shed his Indianness, but he will always be Gogol and
Bengali, forever influenced by his parents. Lahiri considers the role of traditions and the lifelong work of
defining oneself. (SHS/WPL)
Interpreter of Maladies: Nine stories about the complexities of adjusting to new circumstances,
relationships, and cultures. All of the characters’ lives have been disrupted by their dislocations and try to
make peace with the changes. (SHS/WPL)
Unaccustomed Earth: Lahiri once again examines in short stories the assimilation of Bengali characters
into American society. The immigrants always feel at least a bit foreign, and their children often disappoint
their parents. (SHS/WPL)
Rick Moody (“Boys”)
The Ice Storm: The story of a winter ice storm in 1973 in an affluent suburb in Connecticut where men and
women swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and suicide. Two families, the Hoods
and the Williamses, come face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their
lives in a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life, the era of Nixon
and Vietnam, bad music and shag carpeting, cheap psychology and "key parties." (SHS/WPL)
Garden State: In Haledon, New Jersey, industry is declining, the middle class is moving out, and the kids
are looking for something to do. They have it all: rage, poverty, depression, paranoia, violent sex, cheap
booze, mental hospitals, nihilism, street drugs, suicide. Moody writes just how they feel, why they try to
escape, and why running solves nothing. In the end, can there be any hope that a cynical heavy metal
bimbo and a fragile former mental patient will help each other turn their lives around? Well, maybe. (SHS)
Right Livelihoods: (Three Novellas): Right Livelihoods begins with a cataclysmic vision of New York
City after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the "street
name for the buzz of a lifetime," is a mind-altering drug that sets “The Albertine Notes” in motion. The
collection's second novella, “K & K,” concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency,
where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie KnightCameron's responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. At
the center of “The Omega Force” is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. Jamie
Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat--its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and
beers) from "dark-complected" foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by
a fall off the wagon. Moody leads us to feel affection for this man and the other misguided, earnestly
striving characters in these alternately unsettling, warm, trio of stories. (SHS/WPL)
Chuck Palahniuk [Fair warning: some may find his language and imagery offensive.] (“Escort”)
Choke: Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay
elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food
while dining in upscale restaurants. The “heroes” who save him with the Heimlich maneuver, write him
checks as they bask in their own glory. Victor is an unlovable loser, always knew his mother was crazy,
but never blamed her. Mom is in a nursing home now, and Victor works two jobs to keep her there.
Between his jobs, he finds time to surf the Internet for foul images, hook up with a variety of Twelve
Steppers, and tries to figure out the identity of his father from his mother’s diary, written in Italian.
(SHS/WPL)
Diary: A Novel: Failed artist becomes wife of carpenter on picturesque island, then everything goes to hell.
The husband is comatose and as he sinks deeper his construction projects begin to fade and disappear.
What follows is a strange but inventive tale bordering on paranoiac horror. There are passages about art,
inspiration, suffering, and illness all driving creativity. (SHS)
Fight Club: When, on a whim, the two main characters take turns punching out their frustrations on each
other at a local bar, Fight Club is born. "The first rule about fight club is that you don't talk about fight
club." Soon they are spending their off hours beating each other to bloody pulp. After a night in Fight Club,
they go back to their jobs bruised and battered, but with the liberating sense that they can handle anything.
But Fight Club is only the first stage of their anarchic master plan. Soon random acts of unkindness
proliferate as mayhem and organized chaos spread across the country. If you’ve seen the movie, you have
to read the book! (SHS/WPL)
Lullaby: This is a fable of supernatural horror. If someone hears a certain verse, the listener dies. On a
deeper level, Palahniuk hints at his rage toward consumerism, radical environmentalism, class-action suits,
free will, sensory overload (“Imagine a plague you catch through your ears”), and the horrors of real estate.
Weird, creepy, twisted, and ultimately a great read for anyone who wants to be scared for pleasure. (SHS)
Pygmy: A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are
guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as
foreign exchange students. Their mission: to bring the nation to its knees through Operation Havoc, an act
of mass destruction disguised as a science project. Palahniuk depicts American life through the eyes of a
thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an
xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. (SHS/WPL)
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey: Buster Casey, destined to live fast, die young and murder as
many people as he can, is the rotten seed at the core this novel. Set in a future where urbanites are
segregated by strict curfews into Daytimers and Nighttimers, the narrative unfolds as an oral history
comprising contradictory accounts from people who knew Buster. These include childhood friends
horrified by the boy's behavior such as repeatedly infecting himself with rabies, policemen and doctors
who had dealings with the rabies "superspreader,” and Party Crashers, thrill-seeking Nighttimers who turn
city streets into demolition derby arenas. After liberally infecting his hometown peers with rabies, Buster
hits the big city and takes up with the Party Crashers. A series of deaths lead to a police investigation of
Buster (long-since known as "Rant" the sound children make while vomiting) that peaks just as Buster
apparently commits suicide in a blaze of car-crash glory. (WPL/SHS)
Tobias Wolff (“Bullet to the Brain”)
In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War: Wolff served as a junior officer adviser to a South
Vietnamese army unit in the Mekong Delta for his tour in Vietnam. Wolff, a reluctant warrior at best, offers
glimpse into his military service and his civilian life immediately before and after Vietnam. This extended
essay is not so much a combat narrative as the story of a young man's struggle to reach maturity and
coming to terms with his family, his loves, his America, and himself. SHS/WPL)
Old School: A young man at a prestigious New England preparatory school who has spent his entire time
there hiding his real self in order to fit in finds his façade and his world falling apart during his senior year.
In his desire to win a writing contest he “borrows” an idea and reveals a secret about his heritage that he
has carefully hidden. Although he wins the contest, the results are disastrous and his life is changed forever.
(SHS/WPL)
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir: Wolff’s account of his boyhood and the process of growing up includes paper
routes, whiskey, scouting, fistfights, friendship, betrayal, and America in the 1950s. Separated by divorce
from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. Toby fights for identity and
self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather. His various schemes - running away to
Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that
releases him into a new world of possibility. (SHS/WPL)
***Descriptions taken and/or altered with permission from Barnesandnoble.com.