Short stories are at their most memorable when they are intense and compressed, piercing more so than leisurely. Yet within walls of 3,000 to 8,000 words, they can contain entire universes. It seems safe to say that most of the time, American contemporary short stories center on humans. This month’s California Book Club author, Manuel Muñoz, in particular, renders the human condition with tender care, bringing out stories many of us don’t have firsthand experience of. Muñoz’s collection The Consequences draws us thoughtfully into the consciousness of people who are struggling, often with their own actions as well as those of others.
Standing somewhat outside the majority of short stories, some writers look for their material outside human consciousness, although escaping it entirely doesn’t seem possible. In a 2016 Vice interview by Lincoln Michel, the critically acclaimed short story virtuoso Joy Williams was asked, “Can fiction bring us closer to understanding animals, or are they ultimately unknowable for us?” Her response was,
It’s human beings who are unknowable—who can fathom or explain their cruelties and narcissism and nihilism? I used to rather like the word “empathy.” Now I feel it’s not nearly strong enough. Nor is sympathy hard enough. We need a radical shift in consciousness, a more generous conception of the whole, which is far more inclusive than we prefer to believe.
And in the list “Eight Essential Attributes of the Short Story and One Way It Differs from the Novel,” Williams’s fourth mandate is that a short story should have “an animal within to give its blessing.” One author whose short stories are marked by moving explorations of animal consciousness is Fresno fiction writer Talia Lakshmi Kolluri.
Kolluri wrote a deeply imagined 2022 short story collection, What We Fed to the Manticore, that was a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Fiction. The collection was long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. It was also selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. Kolluri’s short stories have appeared in One Story, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, the Common, Orion, Five Dials, and Adroit Journal.
In the nine stories of What We Fed to the Manticore, many of which touch on loyalty and betrayal (themes that resound in Muñoz’s stories “Anyone Can Do It,” “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” the title story, and others), Kolluri assumes the perspectives of a range of animals—donkey, tiger, vulture, hound, fox, pigeon. “The Good Donkey” is narrated by a donkey in Gaza whose owner paints him to look like a zebra for a makeshift zoo. “May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers” is told from the perspective of a hound who accompanies Joseph, a keeper of rhinos at a conservancy. Many insights in these stories relate to the relationship between man and animal. The hound catches the smell of a poacher and thinks, “I learned from another hound once that these kinds of men smell a certain way. You can smell them wanting to lash out and run at the same time. The sourness that clings to a man who is made of a particular kind of raging terror.”
But the collection is also marked by existential musings: “On the last day of my life, time becomes a thing that bends back on itself in an infinite loop and the day repeats itself in uncountable variations forever,” says a wolf mother in another story. And in the title story, the narrator, a tiger, considers, “Or maybe there is only one story. A living thing is born, it moves through the world, and then it dies. For this story, it’s less about the telling and more about the retelling.”
Like those in The Consequences, the stories of What We Fed to the Manticore are beautifully arranged, allowing for subtle resonances as the reader moves forward in the collection—a reference to colors that occurs in one tale gets picked up in a slightly different way in a subsequent piece. A story about a dog that is set on a ship is followed by “The Open Ocean Is an Endless Desert,” which is narrated by a baleen whale in love. Both collections are written as works of art that feel intended to be read in sequence for maximal effect.
Thursday’s conversation among gifted writers is bound to be deep and thoughtful. Join us!•
Join us on February 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Kolluri to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
STORIES OF LIGHT AND SHADE
CBC host John Freeman writes about Manuel Muñoz’s “masterpiece,” The Consequences. —Alta
PUNK SAGA
Books editor Anita Felicelli profiles novelist Joshua Mohr in connection with Saint the Terrifying, the bold first installment of Mohr’s trilogy set in a gentrified West Oakland and Norway. —Alta
32 YEARS COVERING HOMELESSNESS
Annie Vainshtein profiles Kevin Fagan, journalist and author of The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family, and Second Chances, which follows the lives of two homeless people. —San Francisco Chronicle
IRREVERENT BESTSELLERS
Intermittently Seattle-based counterculture novelist Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume) has died at age 92. —Los Angeles Times
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