A short story writer you especially like
We asked the following six writers if they could recommend a short story writer they especially liked. This is what they answered.
Imagen de Claudia Menéndez
Antonio Ortuño:
I tell everyone they should read Rubem Fonseca’s stories. I even do it with people trying to sleep next to me on planes: I wake them up, put the book right in front of their noses and pester them to read it. And I keep repeating it myself while the crew drags me to a corner where they can sedate me.
Fonseca is an agile, crude author, who both dives into lost cities and slums as well as the mansions of the wealthy bourgeois. His stories have disturbed me like almost no one else’s, they’ve enthused me, disgusted me, thrilled me. “The Taker” and “Happy New Year” could have been written last night. They’re pure Latin America, without the artificial sweetener of cronopios or things of that nature.
Ana María Shua:
Many authors and critics claim that the short story genre does not allow for great innovations. Short story writer Etgar Keret has proven them wrong. As Kafka did in his moment, without experimental braggery, Keret turns the story inside out like a glove and presents us with a different, unsettling, distressing universe, which is also the everyday world. His characters, as complex and contradictory as any human being, come face to face with the most unexpected cracks in reality.
Guillermo Barquero:
We all read, basically, whatever we feel like reading. No one can transfer their list of cult authors to our own. However, there are writers we should all read, because through their works we get to inhabit a new space, whether it be one of hopelessness, lassitude, greatness, or horror. Julio Ramón Ribeyro gives us this and more in his stories; beings touched by small daily misfortunes; mediocre and enamored bureaucrats; poor devils who populate our sad cities; smokers locked inside their vices and their thoughts…I was incorrect in my earlier point: we all have to read Ribeyro’s wonderful stories, we should all want to step inside that cruel universe, minimal and full of a strange thing called hope.
Sergi Pàmies:
I like Fabio Morábito’s stories, especially those in La lenta furia. When I read it, I wrote down the following notes, which might describe my impressions at the time: “An album on which you like all the songs. A restaurant in which you like all the dishes. A book of short stories in which you like all the stories.”
Andrea Jeftanovic:
I love Herta Müller, since way before she won the Nobel Prize, especially the stories collected in In Lowlands. From that collection I’d highlight “Rotten Pears,” which deals with two cousins who accompany their respective parents – who are brothers and sisters-in-law– to a family farm in order to pick fruit. But something strange happens there, a family betrayal which is never told but rather evoked through the aroma of rotten pears; a mix of sweetness, putrefaction, absolute ripeness. It’s so subtle and strong that in order to avoid talking about this secret transgression, the girls depend on an olfactory trope that comes up again and again. This reminds me that another one of my favorite “storytellers” is Sigmund Freud in his Clinical Tales. Although Freud is not attempting to write fiction and is supposed to be writing about the clinical cases of his female patients, the handling of the plot and of the symptoms make these great examples of the short story’s machinery. I suggest, for example, the text “Lucy R” and her obsession with the smell of “burnt pudding,” which recalls a difficult memory from the past and which returns in adulthood with disquieting meanings. Yes, these are storytellers who know how to handle condensed images and evocative atmospheres in order to uphold the tale’s minimal story as well as the many meanings it has to offer.
Slavko Zupcic:
I have the name on the tip of my tongue but I can’t manage to pronounce it. I’m still not demented, not yet, but in my life as a reader I must recognize that, justly or unjustly, I’ve never attached much importance to gender. In fact, that woman I want to name could have been a man when I read her for the first time because her name, my fault, did not seem evidently feminine and I rarely read the inside cover flap. I’ve read stories and novels of hers. Sometimes I find her quick, narrative. Other times, I find her slower, intimate, also depending on the translator. I like her in both registers, but much more when she illuminates dark spots of the memory or when she so adequately gets in touch with the intimacy of her characters, making the reader believe that lunacy is not foreign to her. Her name seems to come from nowhere, but her books came from Brazil: Clarice Lispector.
Previous entries:
Beers with a character...[Ricardo Sumalavia, Enza García, Marta Sanz, Sergio Chejfec, Mercedes Estramil, Luis López-Aliaga]
If not a writer... [Liliana Blum, Giovanna Rivero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jacinta Escudos, Francisco Díaz Klaassen]
Imagen de Claudia Menéndez
Antonio Ortuño:
I tell everyone they should read Rubem Fonseca’s stories. I even do it with people trying to sleep next to me on planes: I wake them up, put the book right in front of their noses and pester them to read it. And I keep repeating it myself while the crew drags me to a corner where they can sedate me.
Fonseca is an agile, crude author, who both dives into lost cities and slums as well as the mansions of the wealthy bourgeois. His stories have disturbed me like almost no one else’s, they’ve enthused me, disgusted me, thrilled me. “The Taker” and “Happy New Year” could have been written last night. They’re pure Latin America, without the artificial sweetener of cronopios or things of that nature.
Ana María Shua:
Many authors and critics claim that the short story genre does not allow for great innovations. Short story writer Etgar Keret has proven them wrong. As Kafka did in his moment, without experimental braggery, Keret turns the story inside out like a glove and presents us with a different, unsettling, distressing universe, which is also the everyday world. His characters, as complex and contradictory as any human being, come face to face with the most unexpected cracks in reality.
Guillermo Barquero:
We all read, basically, whatever we feel like reading. No one can transfer their list of cult authors to our own. However, there are writers we should all read, because through their works we get to inhabit a new space, whether it be one of hopelessness, lassitude, greatness, or horror. Julio Ramón Ribeyro gives us this and more in his stories; beings touched by small daily misfortunes; mediocre and enamored bureaucrats; poor devils who populate our sad cities; smokers locked inside their vices and their thoughts…I was incorrect in my earlier point: we all have to read Ribeyro’s wonderful stories, we should all want to step inside that cruel universe, minimal and full of a strange thing called hope.
Sergi Pàmies:
I like Fabio Morábito’s stories, especially those in La lenta furia. When I read it, I wrote down the following notes, which might describe my impressions at the time: “An album on which you like all the songs. A restaurant in which you like all the dishes. A book of short stories in which you like all the stories.”
Andrea Jeftanovic:
I love Herta Müller, since way before she won the Nobel Prize, especially the stories collected in In Lowlands. From that collection I’d highlight “Rotten Pears,” which deals with two cousins who accompany their respective parents – who are brothers and sisters-in-law– to a family farm in order to pick fruit. But something strange happens there, a family betrayal which is never told but rather evoked through the aroma of rotten pears; a mix of sweetness, putrefaction, absolute ripeness. It’s so subtle and strong that in order to avoid talking about this secret transgression, the girls depend on an olfactory trope that comes up again and again. This reminds me that another one of my favorite “storytellers” is Sigmund Freud in his Clinical Tales. Although Freud is not attempting to write fiction and is supposed to be writing about the clinical cases of his female patients, the handling of the plot and of the symptoms make these great examples of the short story’s machinery. I suggest, for example, the text “Lucy R” and her obsession with the smell of “burnt pudding,” which recalls a difficult memory from the past and which returns in adulthood with disquieting meanings. Yes, these are storytellers who know how to handle condensed images and evocative atmospheres in order to uphold the tale’s minimal story as well as the many meanings it has to offer.
Slavko Zupcic:
I have the name on the tip of my tongue but I can’t manage to pronounce it. I’m still not demented, not yet, but in my life as a reader I must recognize that, justly or unjustly, I’ve never attached much importance to gender. In fact, that woman I want to name could have been a man when I read her for the first time because her name, my fault, did not seem evidently feminine and I rarely read the inside cover flap. I’ve read stories and novels of hers. Sometimes I find her quick, narrative. Other times, I find her slower, intimate, also depending on the translator. I like her in both registers, but much more when she illuminates dark spots of the memory or when she so adequately gets in touch with the intimacy of her characters, making the reader believe that lunacy is not foreign to her. Her name seems to come from nowhere, but her books came from Brazil: Clarice Lispector.
Previous entries:
Beers with a character...[Ricardo Sumalavia, Enza García, Marta Sanz, Sergio Chejfec, Mercedes Estramil, Luis López-Aliaga]
If not a writer... [Liliana Blum, Giovanna Rivero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jacinta Escudos, Francisco Díaz Klaassen]
