What I don’t know about short stories could fill a book. Two books, actually, so far. When I teach, I’m always striving to explain what a short story is, usually by comparing it to something it surely is not. As a teacher (as well as a writer), I love metaphor, which might not speak well of me. It’s like talking to someone who won’t stop doing impressions. I love impressions, too. I love all imitations of greatness. A short story is a single instrument upon which any piece of music may be played; a novel is an orchestra, every song and every sound. A short story is the fin cutting the ocean’s surface that lets you feel and fear the shark beneath; a novel’s the entire Atlantic. A short story is an optical illusion: the hag and then the young beauty and then the hag again, the hag eyeballing you uncannily, the beauty always turning away. Or a vase, and then two faces in profile about to kiss and never getting there. A novel — well, it’s any number of old hags and young beauties and old beauties and young hags and, chances are, a fair number of kisses.
The good news? A growing number of SF authors are talking about climate change overtly, imagining futures full of flooded cities, droughts, melting icecaps, and other disasters. Amazon.com lists 382 SF books with the keyword “climate” from 2018, versus 147 in 2013 and just 22 in 2008. Some great recent books dealing with the effects of environmental disasters include Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, Edan Lepucki’s California, Cindy Pon’s Want, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. It’s simply not true, as Amitav Ghosh has suggested, that contemporary fiction hasn’t dealt with climate issues to any meaningful degree.
But we need to do more, because speculative fiction is uniquely suited to help us imagine what’s coming, and to motivate us to mitigate the effects before it’s too late.
There are phrases people tell librarians that raise my hackles every time. “My fines pay your salary” is absolutely one of them (thanks for the 15 cents, Brenda, I’ll try not to spend it all in one place). “Isn’t print dead?” is another (please stop saying this, don’t say this to anyone, ever again, I’m banning this phrase forever, amen). I especially loathe hearing “It must be so nice to have a job where you can read all day.” A big part of my job is working with the collection, sure, but that doesn’t mean I’m lounging behind a desk leafing through a big stack of novels—absolutely not! I save those massive to-be-read piles for home, where they can tower menacingly next to my bed, threatening to fall over and crush me to death at any given moment.
Since I’m a writer, a particular phrase I often hear is “librarianship must give you so much fodder for your work.” I mean, hey, they’re not wrong! Here I am, writing you all a column every other week about libraries! I’m writing about what I experience in my work life. I’m writing about what I know (or what I’m thinking about, God knows I never feel like I really know anything). Librarianship is a huge part of my life, so it’s absolutely gonna factor into my work.
At the start of each year, Southern California gets a glimpse into a future of rising seas, through an annual event called the king tide. On that day, the sun, moon and Earth align to create a heavy gravitational pull, leading to the highest tides of the year. If “king tide” sounds ominous, that’s because it is, particularly for a city like Imperial Beach, a small coastal town near the Mexican border surrounded by water on three sides: San Diego Bay to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Tijuana River Delta to the south.
In 2010, a powerful El Niño storm hurled the king tide over Imperial Beach’s sand berms and onto Seacoast Drive, where the city’s higher-priced condos are located. In 2015, another El Niño year, the king tide raised the surf from 3 to 7 feet, tearing sand away from the beach and flooding the city with salt water that soaked the streets for days.
Currently an anomaly, the king tide is a portent of things to come. Researchers warn that, due to myriad factors including the Earth’s rotation, California will deal with even higher sea-level rise than other locations, as the atmosphere and oceans warm. The oceans are now rising at a faster rate than any time since the last Ice Age, about half an inch or more per decade. While much of this is understood by researchers and informed readers, very little has been done by coastal cities to confront this slow-moving catastrophe. That is what makes Imperial Beach so interesting. Here, at the southernmost beach town in California, in an obscure corner of the United States, one small city is asking: What if we just got out of nature’s way?
I awoke from a dream this morning in which I was at the Breslin for one of their ten-person whole-pig dinners, except I was the only guest — it was sad, it was just the two of us, with sides. So began the first day of eating.
I don’t really eat breakfast during the week, but walk to work instead. My route today took me past Augustine, where I imagined ordering their egg-in a-hole, which I had once, but continued along Nassau Street, past Pisillo Italian Café, famous for its Panini #26. At the corner I had a change of heart and turned back. I returned to snag that Pisillo pistachio croissant in the window and walked it to work.
The chef Timmy Kang is a rising star in the culinary world, known as much for his reputation as an enfant terrible as his innovative cooking. Now, thanks to the success of his restaurant Moo Moo, the radical chef has proven that he can do haute cuisine without compromising his vision or his nap schedule.
He is four years old.
As the title alerts us, this book takes place in a territory beyond reason, in all its connotations — beyond explanation or understanding. The mother does not require them. In the final reckoning, there is nothing she needs from Nikolai other than his company, his ghost; to carry him for a moment more, to keep the story going.
“We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words,” she writes. “Where else can we meet but in stories now?”
Diverting and often amusing as it can be to join Power on her George Plimpton-like adventure through some of the classics of self-help, readers won’t have trouble anticipating the happy ending. It involves nature and friends and a baby (not her own). Lesson learned: Happiness comes from appreciating the little things. “Now it was time to stop thinking about myself, to look out rather than in. To live life rather than analyze it.”
Unless there’s an offer for a sequel. Then all bets are off.
Set in Pakistan in the year 2000, Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable is a faithful retelling of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—down to the naming of its characters. The Pakistani Binats are the new Bennetts; Alys is the new Lizzie, and Darsee the new Darcy. The plot, too, hews pointedly close to the Austenian original. But even as Kamal consciously retraces the storylines of Pride and Prejudice, she explores new thematic terrain, as defined in her novel’s two epigraphs.
It’s fall, & my mother meant to die. Gallons of wine & cartons of cigarettes amount to suicide.