"The Sex Lives of African Girls" by Taiye Selasi (2012)

I first became aware of Taiye Selasi when Judith Mok mentioned her in a Q and A Session as someone she was currently reading.  I was very happy to find that her very first work of fiction, "The Sex Lives of African Girls" was included in a book I have, The Best American Short Stories 2012.  (It was first published in Granta in 2011.)

"The Sex Life of African Girls" by Taiye Selasi is set in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, in the grand home of a very rich man, the uncle of the central character.  The opening sentence of the story is "The sex lives of African girls begin, inevitably, with Uncle".  This is a very sensuously rich story, one can feel the heat, the rain, taste the fruit and visualize the women and men in the story.  I hate to tell to much about this work as it is beautiful and at the same time a heartbreaking tale of cruelty and the power of the rich in a very poor place.

The story opens on a party.  The central character lives with her Aunt and Uncle.  We get a vivid picture of life at the house, we feel the many class markers prevalent in the society.  There is a heavy rain for a few minutes.  The rich African women are like "Japanese giesha in wax-batik geles, their skin bleached too light. They are strange to you, strange to the landscape of the dark, with the same polished skill-set of rich women worldwide:  how to smile with full lips while the eyes remain empty;  how to hate with indifference; how to love without heat".  

As the story goes on we learn more about the central figure, how she came to live at her uncle's house, what goes behind closed doors or sometimes in rooms where the door should have been closed but was left open.    We how people are exploited, why the poor sometimes hate the poor more than the rich.   It is very much about the loss of innocence without being at all cliched.   

There is really a lot in this story.  I totally enjoyed reading it

You can learn more about the author's work on her webpage

Mel u

"Axis" by Alice Munro

"Axis" by Alice Munro (2011)

The Best American Short Stories 2012

A Reading Life Project

Alice Munro
1931
Ontario, Canada

I have three "Best of 2012" short story anthologies, one devoted to British Short Stories, one to European Fiction and The Best of American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta.   It is my hope to finish these three collections by the end of the year    I will  keep a running best of the best contest in which I list the top five from each collection and the top ten overall.   There are about seventy stories in these collections so I hope to get a bit of a sense of the contemporary short story from this project and read some great stories in the process.   I will only be posting on a small percent of the stories as it will often take me as long or longer to write a post on a story as to read another one.    In order to be eligible for inclusion in the collection a writer must be either an American or a Canadian (or have taken up long term residence) and their story must have been published in an American or Canadian journal.

Top Five Stories So Far (with only four read-in random order)
1.  "Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka
2.  "Axis" by Alice Munro
3.  "The Last Speaker of the Language" by Carol Anshaw (no post)
4.  "Miracle Polish" by Steven Millhauser (no post)

I think a lot of people were hoping either Alice Munro or William Trevor was going to get the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature. I certainly was.    Many of the short story writers I have been in contact with in the last two years have said they greatly admire the work of Alice Munro.   Buried in Print, one of the best of book blogs, is doing a read through of all of Munro's stories.   I have only read and posted on only one of her short stories, "Runaway" so I was very glad to find one of her stories included in The Best of American Short Stories 2012.

This story is set in rural Ontario, just like most of her other stories.   Munro is known for covering many years of characters lives in her stories.   That is just what she does in "Axis".   Reading this story I cannot help but wonder how influenced her work is by the extreme cold of the Canadian winter during which just going outside without heavy clothing can kill you.  It also essentially traps most people inside in small quarters often heated to an uncomfortable degree. People say escaping from a trap is one of the common threads found in many of her short stories.

"Axis" introduces us to two Canadian college women, good friends.   They are on the bus taking them back to their rural homes.   They carry serious books with them like The Medieval World, Montcalm and Wolfe, and The Jesuit Relations, so their families can see they are serious students.   They will most likely end up as high school students.   To their families, they are farm girls.  Of course the big event in the life of college women is "the first big romance".   In one great scene, the mother of one of the women walks in on her daughter and her boyfriend naked in bed.  Any parent can relate to the horror of this.  (We have three three teenage daughters)   It was a very ugly scene and the man fled the house never to be seen again.  The other woman ends up marrying and having six children with her first boyfriend.  

As the story closes, Munro flashes us decades forward to an accidental encounter between the man who ran away and the other woman.   This is where the brilliance of Munro shows through.

"My Life Would Make a Great Movie,
Mr Le Fanu left out the best parts"
Carmilla

"Axis" is a great short story and I really hope to read a lot more of her stories.  

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka

"Diem Perdidi" by Julia Otsuka  (2012)

I have three "Best of 2012" short story anthologies, one devoted to British Short Stories, one to European Fiction and The Best of American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta.   It is my hope to finish these three collections by the end of the year    I will  keep a running best of the best contest in which I list the top five from each collection and the top ten overall.   There are about seventy stories in these collections so I hope to get a bit of a sense of the contemporary short story from this project and read some great stories in the process.   I will only be posting on a small percent of the stories as it will often take me as long or longer to write a post on a story as to read another one.

Top Five Stories So Far (with only two read)
1.  "Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka
2.  "The Last Speaker of the Language" by Carol Anshaw (no post)

I was very happy to see a story of JulieOtsuka included in the collection.   Her debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, based on the lives of her parents, was set in Japanese American intern camps during World War Two.   It has received numerous awards and been greatly lauded in the book blog world.  Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, has also been very well received.

In the notes from Otsuka she says that "Diem Perdidi" was inspired by her observation of her mother's    extreme mental decline brought on by the failure of her memory.  "Diem Perdidi" is told in a very creative fashion.  It has almost none of the textbook elements of a short story.   Here is how it starts out and it basically goes on like this for the whole story.   "She remembers her name.  She remembers the name of the president.  She remember the name of the president's dog.   She remembers what city she lived in".   All of the story is told in sentences that begins in "She remembers".   Otsuka allows us to see the great love the daughter has for her mother and we reconstruct the wonderful person the mother was from the daughter's impressions of what she thinks her mother recalls.

"Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka is a very good very moving story that show great depth of feeling.

You can read more about Otsuka and her work on her webpage

Please share your experience with Otsuka or any of the various best short story anthologies with us.

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife