 If you're obsessed with your dog and books but try to avoid novels where something traumatic happens to animals... Biloxi has got you covered. Written by Mary Miller (author of Always Happy Hour: Stories), this story takes place in, you guessed it, Biloxi, Mississippi.
The book introduces a cast of fairly odd characters, starting with Louis McDonald Jr. He's a recently retired introvert who finds himself feeling lonely after his wife of 37 years divorces him. Additionally, he has isolated himself from his daughter (your heart will ache hearing him talk about his relationship with her) and granddaughter, but clearly craves an emotional connection with another living creature. Enter: Lyla. Louis decides to take her in on a whim after making a wrong turn and coming across a sign on someone's lawn advertising an available dog. He quickly builds a friendship with this human-like dog that'll captivate you and make you want to pet your own pup for hours upon end. Their story is a unique one with twists and turns that'll have you asking yourself "where is this all going?" but in a good way.
Miller does an amazing job illustrating the minutia of day to day life in a way that anyone who has awkwardly tried to make conversation with a bank teller can connect to. If you're a dog lover or have ever developed a relationship with an animal, you'll easily relate to this story. Definitely give it a go and get your copy of Biloxi now. —Heather Braga (@heather_braga)
In this new newsletter series, we're featuring interviews we've conducted with some of our favorite authors. Today, we talked to Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories. How does writing a collection of short stories differ from writing a novel?
You know, one key difference is that I have a lot more faith that I might actually finish a story. I've been working on a second novel, intermittently, for quite a while now, and one thing I'm struggling with at the moment is that I have changed, and the world has changed, so dramatically since I first dreamt up this book. I once read writing a novel described as "trying to ride a horse that is constantly changing shape underneath you." And that's just the half of it. Because you're changing, too.
Stories give you the freedom to take some wild risks, to hop bodies and continents and centuries, to set a new world spinning every twenty pages or so. With a novel, you're locked into the choices you make early on, to a large extent—point of view, tense, geography, plot. It can feel like a winnowing path. You're committing to spending years of your real life with a small group of imaginary people, fully immersed inside their world.
Working on a story collection, by contrast, can feel to me like moving from island to island, and discovering surprising connections between these seemingly discrete fictions in the process; eventually, with luck, you start to get the feeling that you are mapping an archipelago. Suddenly, instead of having brief and passionate romances with single stories and then moving onto your next one-night stand, you realize you're building a book. (More like a three-to-six month stand; I wish I could write a good story in a night!).
It's always a faith game, though, and a mad gamble, whether I'm working on a collection or a novel. The eight stories in Orange World took me a long-ass time to write—over four years. Kids who were freshman when I started this book are graduating this month, that's how long it took me!
What would you say is the central message or theme of the stories in Orange World?
You know, I never have any single message or moral when I'm writing a story—or if I do, the story fails, because it becomes a flat-footed allegory or a poorly disguised Op-Ed. But I do think there are certain questions that recur throughout this collection:
What and where is 'home'? Who gets to belong to a particular geography, community? How should we live with one another, and with nature? What turns a human desire into something monstrous? A hope into a delusion? So many of these stories feature people struggling with seemingly irreconcilable desires: a yearning to fly free of their moorings, and a wish for a stable, rooted existence. Or as one character puts it, "a desire to be somewhere, and a desire to be nowhere." How does one endure—cohere—with that destabilizing tension?
And what happens at the intersection of human and nonhuman nature; how do our landscapes infiltrate and shape us?
I thought of this as a collection of "landscape stories," where psychological states intersect with real ecologies. I found myself interested in how humans cohabit the planet with other kinds of animals and sentiences, and with the deep past. This book also turned out to be very much about love—how we tether ourselves to one another, how we hold on to one another through literal and figurative storms. Or fail to do so.
We are living in a world beset by so many fresh and ancient perils—violence that recurs in our families and countries, natural and manmade disasters. Can humans change in time to navigate it? There's a story in here about sisters who are gondoliers in a drowned South Florida, poling a new labyrinth of water. Somehow that story became a roomy metaphor, I felt—a way to ask this question that so many are echoing today.
What's the one short story that was the most difficult for you to write in this collection? Why?
Only one?! How much time do you guys have? "The Gondoliers" story I just mentioned was a real challenge for me. I wrote the first draft, the month before I got married, and now my son is two, just to give you some insight into how long it took me to arrive at a draft I felt good about. Part of the difficulty came from my stubborn commitment to what turned out to be the wrong point of view and my unwillingness to experiment with a different trajectory for the protagonist's night in the "deadspot." At one point, I had to set it aside for almost a year and then return to it, with fresh eyes. I had to rewrite the opening many times before I finally felt like I was picking up this Floridian gondolier's real voice on my antennae. I think I tried a dozen slightly different versions of the ending too, before building to a final line that I felt gonged the right note.
Is there one particular place/coffee shop/location etc. that you get your best writing done? If so, why is this place so special for your writing process?
For the first time in my life, I have a home office, but these days I sometimes have to leave my house to escape the mutely accusatory dishes in the sink / overflowing hamper / Daniel Tiger figurines that now surround me. My work time is now limited to the three days a week when my son goes to daycare, so I don't have the same luxury to be a maniac that I did a few years ago, when I would write at all hours of the night. I love when I am able to spend a few hours at the coffee shop down the street, which has the friendliest staff and a houseplant on every table. (Thank you, Rose City coffee!). There is this green underwater light, and it feels very much like an aquarium in there to me, with a very eclectic mix of creatures. At a coffee shop, you have "officemates" who also haul their laptops in every day, only you have no clue what they might be working on. Yesterday I overheard two people debating about the best way to market their driftwood sculptures. A couch away, I was trying to write from the point of view of a coral reef. This is par for the course in the fever dream of a self-employed Monday in Portland, Oregon.
Finally, can you share with us a book you read lately that you haven't been able to stop thinking about?
Jaquira Diaz has a memoir coming out from Algonquin in October, Ordinary Girls. It really got me where I live. Diaz was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Miami, and her story is wrenching and astonishing and unforgettable. It's a story for those girls "who never saw themselves in books." For those who descend into hell and discover there how badly they want to live. Her memoir takes on mythic dimensions, so powerfully does Diaz render a journey into and through the underworld of addiction, abuse, grief, loss, exile, and her ascent. BuzzFeed, Inc.
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