Short stories are interesting things. I've written them because I have yet to actually sit my ass down and complete the novel that I've been carrying around with me for so long; but, I don't read them that much, except for the fact that the project lists are riddled with them. Kate loves the short stories; I LOVE plays. If I'm not reading novels, I'm reading Williams, O'Neill, Ibsen or any other playwright that I can get my hands on. There's something about the theatre. I can't get enough of it, and reading plays is almost like being there, sometimes it's even better, since you can imagine, then, in your head, exactly who you would cast, where they would stand, what the set would look like, based on the playwright's direction.

Until getting into the lists of Pulitzers and Governor General winners, I never really got into short stories, I think mainly because I love rich, meaty novels, drenched in multi-generational character development, rife with poetic quotes and descriptions. Short stories just always seemed, well, too short. I didn't feel like there was ever enough time to really get to know a character, to feel their soul; short stories never ripped through me with the sheer, raw quality of human experience that many of my favorite novels have.

Hugh Garner's Best Stories is of a different animal. Garner won the Governor General in 1963 for his collection of short stories, and I know very few Canadians who even have any idea who the hell he is. Well, they'd better pick up this book and find out. At first, I had a hard time with the stories, because they are so incredibly raw, and express the some of the basest human emotions and desires out there, which was a little depressing, but as I got through the collection, I became more appreciative of what it had to hold. The stories are all fairly brief, but so tightly crafted, they are rich despite the length. A contemporary writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, of whom I've written before, wrote a similar collection of short stories that won the Pulitzer in the past 10 years. Her collection is about people of Indian descent both in the U.S. and abroad, unlike Garner's characters which inhabit a variety of places in Canada, but the stories evoke similar emotions, and are fine examples of people who have mastered the art of short stories.

Hugh Garner writes about a mentally diminished man whose anger, frighteningly to the young boy who has befriended him, drives him complete and totally brutal destruction of a neighboring farm. The descriptions are visceral, gut-wrenching; real. Garner writes about a boy becoming a man, and watching the town whore go from being glamourous in his eyes to desperate and tired.
Nuns, and dried up old spinsters, reminiscent of Dickens' Miss Havisham, also have their own stories in this collection. There are boys that lust after young, unattainable women(something I have faced myself), there is a man who visits his young son after the death of his mother and years away at sea, only to find the child, through the influence of his maternal grandparents, does not want to have anything to do with him. Factory workers watch the physical destruction of a man's body after their foremen had ignored the deterioration of faulty equipment. A woman lets herself be taken advantage of, and violated, in the name of love. These are experiences that some human being has somewhere every minute of the day. They are not pretty, they are often heartbreakingly sad, but they are still there, and if you look at us all as one great collective experience, which I believe that the human race is, these experiences are a part of all of us, as we are all part of each other.

My favorite story, by far, and possibly one of my most favorite short stories of all time(this is a list that gets added to all the time), is "The Nun in Nylon Stockings." I was lying in bed, reading this story before I went to sleep, and actually exclaimed "Holy Crap!" (to the cats) when I finished it. It's the kind of story that I want to thrust in the face of anyone who questions this project, who questions my desire to even read as much as I do in general; I want to thrust it in their face and say "Read this Motherfucker!" It is a simple story for all intensive purposes, about a man on a train, bored and perhaps a little lonely, who strikes up a conversation with a young nun about her reading choice for the trip, Field & Stream. This story is all about the assumptions that we make about strangers, and how we can consistently recreate our own history, or better yet, withhold that which we do not want to confess. I'm not going to go on any further, you're just going to have to read it for yourself. If I ever had any doubts about this book, which I did in the beginning for sure, this story killed them all for me. Hugh Garner is a master of short prose, going up against Robert Olen Butler, Michener, Lahiri, and Mavis Gallant to name a few. I would include Alice Munro in this list, because her short stories are quite well crafted, but I do feel like she's a bit overrated. It's time to give others out there a voice in the short story canon.:)