The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins

Published by Scribner on July 4, 2017

The Graybar Hotel is a collection of stories about men in jail or prison. Most are told in the first person, although not always by the same narrator. They generally progress from the Kalamazoo Jail to a Michigan prison, although “The Boy Who Dreams Too Much” takes place in a transitional facility where prisoners are transferred after leaving jail as they await an assignment to a prison. “Swans,” which tells of a friendship that the narrator had before he was incarcerated, takes place in a reformatory, although it is narrated by an adult who is eight years into a life sentence. The last story, “Leche Quemada,” is told in the third person and focuses on a man who, having just been released from prison, soon realizes that a part of his mind will always live behind bars.

The tone is set in “County,” the collection’s first story. The narrator’s new cellmate in the Kalamazoo Jail describes being hit by a Cadillac, the conversation being one more way to pass time in days that are filled with emptiness, just like the fake suicide attempt that hastens the new inmate’s desired path back to prison.

Some of the stories deal with the theme of alienation, an inmate’s desire to connect in some way with the outside world. The narrator of “The Human Number” makes random collect calls from jail, connecting with people so lonely or bored that they are willing to chat with an inmate they don’t know. The narrator of “The World Out There” makes up a story about a girl who is sitting in the stands of a baseball game he’s watching on television.

Many of the stories are slices of life behind bars. “Sunshine” is a vignette about an inmate whose sister may or may not have cancer. “In the Dayroom with Stinky” relates a series of conversations between inmates. “Daytime Drama” focuses on an inmate who seems to be having mental health issues. “Depakote” talks about cigarettes, prison scams, and the perils of owing debts to other prisoners. A goose gets caught in the prison’s razor wire in “Brother Goose.”

A couple of stories discuss the lives that inmates led before they entered prison. “Six Pictures of a Fire at Night” spotlights Catfish, who cleaned up suicides and other dead bodies for a living and who may or may not have killed his wife. But “Engulfed” suggests that the inmates who talk about their outside lives are probably lying, and that the lies are an essential means for inmates to feel less bad about themselves, to construct a more productive past than the one they lived.

The most poignant story, “573543,” mixes memories of the narrator’s time as an addict with the arbitrariness of prison guards who are eager to dehumanize inmates in ways that drugs never manage to accomplish.

This is a strong collection and a valuable contribution to the genre of prison literature. Incarceration is challenging and dehumanizing, but Curtis Dawkins makes the reader remember that the majority of prisoners are ordinary people who, like most of us, are trying to make the best of our circumstances.

RECOMMENDED

The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak

Published by Open Road Media on July 4, 2017

The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories is volume 10 in the Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak. It doesn’t include Simak’s best stories, but all of the stories are good, making it one of the best volumes in the series.

In “The Money Tree,” money does grow on trees. Rich people have them, which is why they have walls and fences surrounding their property. But as Chuck Doyle learns, stealing from a money tree isn’t easy when it is protected by an alien. This is a light and amusing story and, like many Simak stories, it comes with a moral. It is also one of Simak’s many stories about kind aliens who are better than the Earth deserves.

“Shotgun Cure” is typical Simak in its focus on small towns and simple lives. A “one-horse doctor in a one-horse town” is approached by an alien who gives him the cure for all disease. Soon the entire planet is vaccinated, but it turns out that the cure comes with a price.

“Paradise” is one of the stories that comprises City. This is the story in which Fowler returns to human form to spread a utopian message about humanity’s future that is suppressed for fear that people will listen to it.

“The Gravestone Rebels Ride by Night!” might be the longest of Simak’s westerns. The hero is a frontier lawyer.

“How-2” imagines a future in which “how to” kits supply instructions and materials for everything from home dentistry to making a robotic dog. A fellow named Knight plans to build a dog but he gets a kit for a robotic person by mistake. Lawyers also play a role in this story, although they are robot lawyers who bring much needed logic and reason to the law. The courtroom scene echoes themes from some of Asimov’s robot stories, but with a unique spin. A moral of many Simak stories, including this one, is that honest hard work is a good thing, and that trying to avoid it will only lead to trouble. Too much leisure may even take the value out of life. This story was new to me, but it is on my growing list of favorite Simak stories.

“The Shipshape Miracle” tells of a lawless man who needs a miracle to leave the isolated planet on which he is stranded. The miracle comes in the form of a ship that has merged with a human (an early example of transhumanism in science fiction), but all miracles come with a price. The story has the sort of ironic ending that would have made a good Twilight Zone episode.

“Rim of the Deep” is one of Simak’s early stories, and for that reason is written in a pulp style that he largely abandoned in his later years. The story is sort of an underwater western with a gangster element and a Venusian.

Simak hinged more than one story on the relationship between immortality (or longevity) and the need to find a place to put all the people who haven’t died. Like other Simak stories that explore the theme, “Eternity Lost” (a story about a corrupt politician’s attempt to gain another life extension) asks whether longevity is a blessing or a curse and suggests that people only appreciate life because they know it has a relatively short span. Simak often gave his stories a twist ending, and is one of the better twists.

The future of an evolving mankind was another frequent Simak theme. In “Immigrant,” Seldon Bishop visits Kimon, a world that only welcomes the smartest immigrants from Earth and that has eschewed foreign trade or diplomatic relationships with other planets. Earth’s government hopes that Bishop will explain why that’s true, although no other emigrant to Kimon has chosen to do so. While aliens in Simak’s stories are usually kinder and wiser than humans, the aliens on Kimon are smug and condescending, perhaps an inevitable trait of a highly-evolved race. But the story is about the human qualities of vanity and pride, as well as the human capacity to set those qualities aside in order to gain knowledge and wisdom.

RECOMMENDED

Eveningland by Michael Knight

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 7, 2017

Eveningland is an excellent collection of related stories, loosely linked by location (Mobile County, Alabama) and time frame. They are also linked by Michael Knight’s gentle humor, his keen power of observation, and his ability to encapsulate lives over the course of just a few pages. And nearly every story has a dog, cementing my belief that dogs always makes a story better.

“Water and Oil” tells the story of a teenage boy who spends his summer on his boat as a volunteer, looking for the remains of an oil spill. The boy takes an interest in an older teenage girl who treats him with the unthinking callousness that is common to attractive young females who reject younger boys. The story draws a nice parallel between life’s disappointments and oil spills, which eventually dissipate and leave the impression that all has returned to normal, when only time will reveal the hidden changes they cause.

“Smash and Grab” is an amusing story about a teenage girl who overpowers a burglar and spends the evening telling him about her teenage woes.

“Our Lady of the Roses” is about an art teacher at a Catholic school who has a crisis after she is told that her art lessons should have a more religious theme. The young woman may need a miracle to pull together the threads of her disordered life.

“Jubilee” is the snapshot of a marriage that has endured without fuss or drama. It’s kind of sweet to imagine that such marriages exist, even if the spouses are settled in their ways and don’t really listen to each other.

In “Grand Old Party,” a man with a shotgun confronts his cheating wife and her lover. The story has an absurdist appeal. Does love make people crazy, or is it crazy to fall in love?

“The King of Dauphin Island” tells of a wealthy man who buys every property on an island that is eroding away to nothingness. The man’s wife has died and the island might be a symbol of how he sees the rest of his life. But the daughters he loves think he’s gone off the deep end, and the man must decide how to remake himself. This is a touching story of grief and dignity and the importance of allowing the people we love to be themselves. The ending is beautifully ironic. This story is a gem.

“Landfall” is another story of a family in crisis as disasters come in bunches. A hurricane that receives a mention in “The King of Dauphin Island” takes center stage in “Landfall.” The story follows siblings who need to deal with the hurricane as well as their mother’s fall and her resulting brain injury. Flashbacks put the family in perspective, while sharp characterization is the story’s strength. The story captures: “The impossibility of living up to the past. The burden of trying. A last chance to measure up.”

RECOMMENDED

Foreign Soil and Other Stories by Maxine Beneba Clarke

First published in Australia in 2014; published by Atria / 37 INK on January 3, 2017

Maxine Beneba Clarke demonstrates remarkable range in Foreign Soil. The stories shift between Australia and less developed countries, as Clarke explores triumphs and tragedies that connect lives in cultures that are quite different from each other.

“David” tells the story of two Sudanese women in Australia. One fled from her village with two sons and memories of a third. The younger woman faces the older woman’s disapproval because she wears her hair short, dresses in jeans, has abandoned religion, and rides a bicycle. Yet it is ultimately the bicycle rather than Sudanese tradition that binds the two women in this touching, sad story. It’s easily my favorite in the collection.

“Harlem Jones” is a young man whose parents moved to London from Trinidad. He establishes his individual identity by joining a group protest against the police killing of a black man. The story is honest in its refusal to paint a more uplifting picture of forsaken lives.

“Hope” is about a girl from the mountains who goes to Kingston to find her place in the world and instead learns hard lessons about love. It’s a sweet “slice of life” story that should please fans of romance (as opposed to fans of romance fiction).

“Foreign Soil” tells the story of Angela, who falls in love with Mukasa and leaves Australia behind when he takes her to Uganda. In his own world, however, Mukasa seems like a different person. The story is bleak and troublingly unfinished.

“Shu Yi” is the name of the new kid in school. The story’s narrator, a brown-skinned girl named Ava, is relieved that someone has replaced her as the target of bullies in their white suburban Australian neighborhood. When Ava’s mother forces her to be Shu Yi’s friend, the outcome is surprising. This is my third-favorite story in the collection.

“Railton Road” is the Brixton headquarters of young black rebels who are assembling to express their growing discontent. The story highlights characters who take different approaches to black empowerment while sniping at each other and treating women as slaves.

“Gaps in the Hickory” is a story of poverty, prejudice, and pride. Poverty should transcend race as a unifying force, but some characters in the Mississippi setting of this story are blinded by bigotry as they rage against people of different races and sexual identities. The themes are particularly relevant today, as bigots cling to an imagined past that never existed. This story, like some others in the collection, is masterful in its use of dialect. Its combination of an ugly present and a hopeful future make it my second-favorite story in the volume.

“Big Islan” is about the restlessness of life in Jamaica. The story is again notable for its use of dialect.

“The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa” tells the story of Ansanka, a boy soldier who fled from Sri Lanka and is now being detained in Australia. The story alternates between Ansanka’s harrowing young life and the unsatisfying life of the lawyer who interviews him in a detention facility. I love the story’s contrast between people who think they have problems and people who really have problems.

A girl who gets stuck hanging upside down symbolizes life’s deeper problems in “The Sukiyaki Book Club.” The writer enters the story to explain that she doesn’t know how to rescue the girl. Parental fear -- the writer’s need to assure that her own kids are safe and well adjusted (or at least safe) -- is the story’s focus. I’m not fond of stories in which writers intrude into the narrative, so this was my least favorite.

In “Aviation,” a woman whose husband was killed on 9/11 is asked to become an emergency caregiver for a Middle Eastern child no family will take. The story is a brief but powerful look at misdirected prejudice.

None of the stories in Foreign Soil are bad, most are quite good, and a handful are excellent. I appreciate the attention to important themes that are overlooked by modern authors who so often devote themselves to the trivial.

RECOMMENDED

Earth for Inspiration by Clifford D. Simak

Published digitally by Open Road Media on July 5, 2016

This is volume 9 of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak. The introduction to this volume focuses on Clifford Simak’s westerns. A western has been included in each of the volumes that I’ve read, but the bulk of this book, like the other volumes, consists of the science fiction stories at which Simak excelled.

“Earth for Inspiration” (1941) doesn’t fit within the cycle of stories that Simak assembled into the book City, but it does feature a robot valet named Jenkins (apparently not the same Jenkins who appears in City). This Jenkins tells a blocked science fiction writer to visit Earth for inspiration. There the writer meets a rusty robot named Philbert who probably would have fit nicely into the City plotline. This isn’t a great story but it’s interesting to see how Simak played with some ideas that he later used to produce great stories.

“Idiot’s Crusade” (1954) is one of Simak’s alien visitor stories, although it is far from his best use of that theme. The alien takes over a human idiot and launches a crusade against people who are unfriendly to idiots.

“Hellhounds of the Cosmos” (1932) is one of Simak’s earliest published stories. Even the volume’s editor admits that it doesn’t make much sense.

“Honorable Opponent” (1956) illustrates a point that Simak made many times -- that aliens and humans are likely to have very different perspectives on almost everything. In this clever story, aliens have a concept of war that humans only come to understand in defeat.

“Green Flight, Out” (1941) is one of Simak’s aviation combat stories. Not my thing.

“Carbon Copy” (1957) takes on a greedy realtor. Greedy or exploitive businessmen never do well in Simak’s stories. This one is pranked by an alien, deservedly so.

“The Asteroid of Gold” (1932) is a science fiction action/adventure story that borrows its themes from westerns. Prospectors exploring new frontiers fight for survival (using wits, science, and overall toughness). The story is better than some of Simak’s other early efforts.

“Good Nesters Are Dead Nesters” (1945) is a western. I am usually entertained by Simak’s westerns and this one was no exception.

“Desertion” (1944) was one of the stories that Simak incorporated into City. It is also one of his best stories. In fact, this story of a man and a dog who move beyond life on Earth remains my favorite Simak story.

“The Golden Bugs” (1960) tells of aliens who try to steal the Earth’s metal, not realizing that humans take it personally when aliens mess with our cars. The story is notable for the narrator’s ambivalent reaction to Earth’s response.

“Full Cycle” (1955) returns to the theme of deserted cities that was integral to City. This take on the theme takes a more optimistic view of humanity’s ability to endure the breakdown of society.

This may not be the best volume in the series, but it contains two of the best stories: "Desertion" and "Honorable Opponent." Several of the rest have retained their entertainment value.

RECOMMENDED