Welcome to Litsy!

Relationships are at the center of all stories: child and parent, husband and wife. Other themes are displacement through immigration and how the generations cope differently with their longing for the other country. I love Madeleine Thien‘s writing style, the way she crafts characters and leads us into their world is masterfully done. It makes me want to read everything she ever wrote. Definitely a pick.

What‘s your favorite collection of short stories and or essays? Welcome to the Monkey House is one of my favorites. Which would you recommend?

(2020) It's a collection of five stories set in and around the Rwandan genocide. It's a gut-wrenching theme, Mukasonga's prose is graceful and restrained, and the stories will break your heart. The last story, “Grief,“ centered on a woman who attends funerals of strangers in search of comfort for the unobserved deaths of her own family, broke mine. This is what stories are for, so much that I found it hard to take more than one or two at a time

I feel too much I think. I'm easily shamed; easily hurt. So I go nuclear quickly in confrontations. I do know better. I'm learning not to resist; to let it go. William Trevor is my soundtrack. He sees the things that move me. He sounds like my own thoughts. Although his plots can be unnerving, his understanding of his characters is comforting. There won't be a happy ending, but there will be an ending. And I will understand.

3 favs: Lady Bird, Selma, The Black Panther

Lisa Schneidau is an ecologist, conservationist and storyteller, knowledge and passion that she combines in these faithful retellings of British and Irish folktales.
Each story has a short introduction in which Lisa gives some ecological, historical and/or folkloric details, and she chooses a reasonable geographic spread of stories from across the Isles. I liked her inclusion of a couple of Romany stories, Appy and the Eel being one of the ⬇️

Finally read this battered copy I bought a few years back. These stories are about women and men AT love. That preposition matters. The settings are 1950s, urban, gritty. Think Marlon Brando yelling Stella! Single moms and deadbeat dads, wiley kids and absent parents, naive women and old lotharios, nymphets and crusty bachelors. The voice is strong in each. Paley has an ear for dialogue. Every story has a zinger sentence that rings with truth. 👇

I don‘t have the emotional bandwidth to handle this one right now…Might pick-up again in the future.

A scalpel-sharp collection that dissects failure, self-delusion, and romantic erosion with bleak precision.
Each story drags you through the ego bruises of people who crave connection but flinch from vulnerability.
It‘s funny until it‘s not—then it just hurts.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 black hearts 🖤

I donated 4 books to the Rufford Old Hall charity bookshop, so it only seemed fair to buy 4 replacements: a nice set of recent edition Penguins of Roald Dahl short stories.
Then, we went to Martin Mere, where, in addition to the usual suspects, I spotted an oystercatcher and a black-tailed godwit, of which there are only 50 breeding pairs in the UK.
I'm not an avid birdwatcher, but I do like to be out in nature, and MM is a peaceful place 😌⬇️