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Stories
by Maggie Shipstead
Book Reviewed by:From the Booker Prize nominee and New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle, a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range.
A love triangle plays out over decades on a Montana dude ranch. A hurdler and a gymnast spend a single night together in the Olympic village. Mistakes and mysteries weave an intangible web around an old man's deathbed in Paris, connecting disparate destinies. On the slopes of an unfinished ski resort, a young woman searches for her vanished lover. A couple's Romanian honeymoon goes ominously awry, and, in the mesmerizing title story, a former child actress breaks with her life in a Hollywood cult.
In these and other stories, knockout after knockout, Maggie Shipstead delivers another "extraordinary" (New York Times) work of fiction and seals her reputation as a writer of "breathtaking range and skill" (Kirkus Reviews). Rich in imagination and dazzling in its shapeshifting style, You Have a Friend in 10A excavates the complexities of love, sex, and life in ways unsparing and hilarious, sharp-eyed and tender.
The Cowboy Tango
When Mr. Glen Otterbausch hired Sammy Boone, she was sixteen and so skinny that the whole of her beanpole body fit neatly inside the circle of shade cast by her hat. For three weeks he'd had an ad in the Bozeman paper for a wrangler, but only two guys had shown up. One smelled like he'd swum across a whiskey river before his truck fishtailed to a dusty stop outside the lodge, and the other man was missing his left arm. Mr. Otterbausch looked away from the man with one arm and told him the job was already filled. He was planning to scale back on beef-raising and go more toward the tourist trade, even though he'd promised his uncle Dex, as Dex breathed his last wheezes, that he would do no such thing. Every summer during his childhood Mr. Otterbausch's schoolteacher parents had sent him to stay with Uncle Dex, a man who resembled a petrified log in both body and spirit. He had a face of knurled bark and knotholes for eyes and a mouth sealed up tight around a burned-down ...
Shipstead released three novels before this collection of her stories appeared. However, she had been writing and publishing short stories all along: The 10 in this volume all first appeared in literary magazines or on websites between 2009 and 2017. In the acknowledgments, she reveals, "this book came out of years spent learning to be a writer, a process that will never be complete." In a way, then, reading this book is like following along with an apprenticeship. Perhaps that explains why there is not much in the way of thematic cohesion. She's experimenting with topics and structure here, so there is more variety than continuity...continued
Full Review
(621 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Maggie Shipstead was known as a novelist before releasing her first short story collection, You Have a Friend in 10A. A number of its stories date back 10 or more years, though, some having been written while she was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. The individual stories originally appeared in publications such as Guernica, Tin House and VQR (the Virginia Quarterly Review). So, what goes into the decision to publish a novel or a short story collection first?
For authors, short stories can be a way to practice all the skills that go into novel-writing, such as dialogue, scene-setting, characterization, plotting and the use of voice. A piece can be finished, polished and published ...
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