Office Romances, William Trevor

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse "Office Romances," by William Trevor. Angela Hosford is young, acned, only once laid, new to work at C.S. & E., easy pickings. Married co-worker Gordon Spelle knows it, and asks her out for a drink. At the bar, they see Miss Ivygale, Angela's fifty year old boss, with her longtime married paramour, Mr. Hemp, who, let's be frank, will never leave his wife, never ever.

The story concludes the next day, after Angela has literally painful sex with Spelle on Miss Ivygale's office floor (both declaring their love throughout the act), they adjourn to the same bar, Spelle leaves to be with his wife, and Miss Ivygale buys Angela a consolation drink. Miss Ivygale gets the last word: "How could she say that everyone knew that Gordon Spelle chose girls who were unattractive because they were an easier bet? . . . The thing about Gordon Spelle was that with the worst possible motives he performed an act of charity for the girls who were his victims. He gave them self-esteem, and memories to fall back on -- for the truth was too devious for those closest to it to guess, and too cruel for other people to ever reveal to them . . ."

Bookslut

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse Jessa Crispin's webzine Bookslut. Issue 79 is now online. It has an interview with Cynthia Ozick, a review of Keith Lee Morris's to-die-for-ish The Dart League King, and discussions of Hemingway, Jonestown, and Islam. Transvestism! Group Suicide by Kool-Aid! The Peace that only Allah Can Bring! Jessa Crispin, you a supastar!

In the Devil's Territory, Kyle Minor

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse "In the Devil's Territory," by Kyle Minor. We feel its ambition is exemplary, and reminds us in many ways of the long stories of Alice Munro and Andre Dubus. The story starts in postwar East Berlin, crosses the ocean to West Palm Beach, Florida, intertwines the stories of at least four generations in sixty pages, along the way giving a history-in-passing of Iron Curtain Communist oppression, Southern religious fundamentalism, integration in south Florida, the rise of the religious right, and the anonymous sins of NAFTA-era globalism, concluding with these extraordinary words: "Mistakes were made long ago. It is someone else's fault. We can't be held responsible, but we are very sorry."

I want to know more about this writer, and I want to know why I haven't more of him until now. The book is published by Dzanc Books and another of the stories in it, "A Day Meant to Do Less," appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2008.

Stitches, Antonya Nelson

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse the story "Stitches," by Antonya Nelson, a nightmare scenario in which a naked sleeping mother's dreams of a man with whom she recently had an affair are interrupted by a frantic call from her faraway collegegoing daughter, who reports something that seems at first to be a rape, but which, as the night call progresses, as the father makes the hundred-some mile drive to where the daughter is, as narrative confuses as narrative will, turns out to be something infinitely more complicated, confusing as sex might be to the young, and, yes, to the old.

A prayer: "Good Lord above, would Ye please maketh more models akin to the Antonya Nelson? We need 'em, Lord. We need 'em badly."

Robert Birnbaum, Interview King

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse the literary interviews of Robert Birnbaum of Massachusetts. He is the best in the business, and we wish he would do more business, because his business makes us more knowledgeable about our business.

We also wholeheartedly endorse Albert Camus's inspired sendup of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Camus's slightly more famous book is called The Stranger (in English it is.)

To the right you will see a photoshopped image of James M. Cain, who must surely have cut a more intimidating swath through the world than said photoshopping would allow.

Where Is the Voice Coming From?, Eudora Welty

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse the story "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" by Eudora Welty. So far as we can tell, it was the last or second-to-last story Welty ever published, and in it she took on literature's bravest task, which is to inhabit the self of the monstrous other for the purpose of showing us how much like us the "monstrous" really is.

In this case, she's inhabited the headspace of the Medgar Evers killer, a poor white man from her stomping grounds in ole Mississippi. She completed the story while the man was still an unidentified fugitive, sent it to the New Yorker, and, legend has it, had to change details of the story to avoid a libel suit because she had guessed so rightly the man's everything without knowing who he was. The killer, in other words, was a Mississippi everyman of the sort Welty lived among, loved, and eulogized as her life's work.

Ya'll oughtta go get Welty's Selected Stories and read it and learn you a thing or three, you hear?

Emerging Writers Network

We at Story Train do wholeheartedly endorse the Emerging Writers Network, which we read with regularity. Dan Wickett is the literary heartthrob of the twenty-first century, and his blog has introduced us to writers we dig such as Brian Evenson, Steve Yarbrough, and Dean Bakopoulos.

Other literaryish sites we grok:

Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Puritan Blister

New York Review of Books

New York Times Book Review

KCRW Bookworm

The Ego is Blind in the Glove Compartment

"Crazy" Tao Lin