What’s Important Is Feeling
By: Harris Sockel
Tags: Books, Short Story, Fiction

Story me short, summer 2k15. Here are six of the best new short story collections — silent mixtapes for those pockets of downtime between eating, beaching and sleeping.

1. What’s Important Is Feeling by Adam Wilson

No one knows who slept with her first. Besides, sleep isn’t the right word. What we did: pressed lips to closed lips, tried to slip in some tongue; buried her beneath us on carpeted floors and futon mattresses; felt her dry skin against our sweat-wet hands; said, “Don’t cry”; wiped tears with our T-shirts; kept on because she said, “Don’t stop.”

So raw, so good. A boy works at a suburban diner, falls in love with a girl who plays with her pancakes, and invites her into his (embarrassingly bad) band. He grows weed with a friend — “a weakling of a plant that turned out to be male and unharvestable” — and talks about girls. In another story, a homeless man breaks into a college apartment and begins to cry. These stories are vulgar, young, and tinted with Instagram’s Nashville filter. Most are told in first person, by narrators under thirty. Summer reading, definitely. Porches, dead time, and soft thunder. It’s impossible for me to describe just how good these are. I was up all night.

2. Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis

When I fell asleep, I dreamed about the guillotine; the strange thing was that my little niece, who sleeps downstairs, also dreamed about a guillotine, though I hadn’t said anything to her about it. I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.

A reminder that it doesn’t take more than a sentence to make a story. Little drops of water in a bucket. Most of these stories are only a paragraph long, and some just a few sentences. Tiny fragments, a few of them poems. Together, they’re a catalog of thoughts — some are dreams (marked “dream” in tiny letters at the bottom). Lydia writes about the feeling of slogging through a bad novel, getting catfished, an eight-sentence story about a lazy bodyguard. The book also includes a few anecdotes based on letters by Flaubert, sprinkled in just for fun. This book is like a pointillist painting. The message is that everything is important.

3. Don’t Kiss Me by Lindsay Hunter

Back at his house he asks if I want to play Princess Leia and I am touched, I know he’d rather have her for a girlfriend than me, It’d be an honor, I tell him, and he hands me my lightsaber and then knocks it out of my hand with his. You’re dead cinnamon-bun dumb-hair, he says, looking up at me through his bangs, my hand is throbbing from where his lightsaber hit, again I die for him, I shudder and quake and cry out and fall at his feet and die. Now I’m going to maybe spit in your hair, you don’t know, keep your fat eyes closed, he says. Okay, I whisper.

WORD. MAGICK. Ugh, this book is very funny and totally unique. Strong characters say weird shit in those fat margin-to-margin paragraphs that make you want to stop breathing. These short, punchy stories experiment with form and voice, and they’re exhilarating, bordering on poetry. You’ll find all kinds of wacky here: a story about an apocalypse at P.F. Chang’s, an all-caps soliloquy about a candle shoppe, and a game of “Lips” where two girls touch lips until one of them screams. You will probably never be bored again in your life after these.

4. The Miniature Wife and other stories by Manuel Gonzales

To be honest with you, Jim, my face is unevenly shaved because my three-inch wife has climbed up the porcelain sink, hoisted herself up to the medicine cabinet, opened the heavy mirror door, and has dulled all of my razor blades.

What would happen if you were stuck on a hijacked plane for twenty years? What if loud, annoying noises gave you visible cuts and bruises? Check into these stories-slash-thought-experiments for some totally serious (but also insane) answers. Manuel’s stories are trippy: A scientist who works in “miniaturization” manages to unwittingly shrink his wife — she is no bigger than a coffee mug — and builds a dollhouse for her. A composer is paralyzed from the mouth down — he can’t speak with his mouth, so he teaches himself to speak through his ears. In each one, Manuel takes a tiny, ridiculous premise, and describes it with so much detail it becomes plausible. Like a lucid dream.

5. Making Nice by Matt Sumell

Thing is she didn’t think that pots and pans should go in the dishwasher, so I pointed out that there’s a setting on the dishwasher for pots and pans, just look, it’s right there, open your fuckin’ eyeballs. Well she didn’t like that very much and started in with this business about me being a loser and headed nowhere […] Either way it made me upset, and I slammed the refrigerator door so hard the milk exploded, then I turned around and told her to shut it or I’d punch her mustache off her face and watch it fly across the room like a hairy bug.

Say what you want about angsty male narrators who think in long curmudgeonly sentences, but this one is very funny. These stories are offensive, angry, hilarious and sad. Inhibitions are killed and left to rot. All of these stories are told by the same character, a thirty-year-old named Alby whose mother recently died of cancer. The callous jokes only make the poignant moments — Alby alone with his mother, in the hospital at home, emptying her piss bag or doing her nails — more heartfelt. Think: vulgar family jokes that are funny and sad at the same time.

6. We Live in Water by Jess Walter

Wayne eases the door closed, steps down the hall to the boys’ room. Little and Middle, nine and eleven, splayed on twin beds like they were dropped fifty feet. The Little one could be it out of temperament alone. He’s a hoarder, a brooder. Dark eyes like his mother. Looks up from his Legos like you interrupted church. Kid didn’t say a word until he was four and then it was a full sentence: “I want more applesauce now.”

These are the most tender stories you will read in your life. Stories about people who unravel and cry at the past. Most of these stories are told in close third person, and the protagonists are drunkards/cheats/divorcées with broken families and good intentions. Many weave their way back and forth between past and present, giving you clues as they go. The kind of book that pairs well with slow Billy Joel, or Dylan. Gotta be honest and say this is my favorite on this little list.