NBA 2022: Short Stories!

In which this title feels like a late season of American Horror Story—and where we discuss the short story collections on the NBA longlist.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

This week, the National Book Foundation dropped the shortlists for the 2022 award, with the Fiction shortlist being a somewhat predictable lot. We saw three debut novels—The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty, The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela, and All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews. Previous National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones made the list with her novel The Birdcatcher, and the sole short story collection comes from Jamil Jan Kochai, with The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. While I was a bit underwhelmed with the longlist, I’m actually really pleased with the top five. While Jones and Gunty’s endings didn’t work for me, I still found their novels well written and captivating, and Mathews and Varela’s novels were my top two favorites so far. I didn’t read Kochai’s until this week, but now that I’ve read it, I can say that I think it’s totally deserving to be on this list.

I think any time you overlook established writers with critically acclaimed works, it’s going to raise some eyebrows. The judges this year took a big risk in leaving off such big hitters like Julie Otsuka, Hernan Diaz, and Jennifer Egan—whether or not it paid off is still up for debate. I personally feel like one or two of the longlisted books could have been exchanged, but at the same time, I’m super thrilled to have discovered some writers who weren’t previously on my radar.

While I have plenty of thoughts about the shortlist and the longlist altogether, I wanted to take today to cover the four short story collections from the list.

I started with Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman, a collection of stories set in Alaska. The collection explores the varied experiences of the women there, whether it be young girls or single mothers or older women, but I also think the collection is more fleshed out than that. In many ways, Newman’s stories recalled writer Annie Proulx, just in how both write about landscape and their economy of lanuage—I also found that Newman’s stories are structured so interestingly, that you don’t immediately see the underpinnings of her stories. Her work isn’t flashy, it’s clear and refined. While some stories were more captivating than others, I didn’t think any one of them was weak. Altogether it was a really strong collection.

The next collection I read was If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, which is a linked collection—also known as a short story cycle, and one could possibly even argue that this operates as a composite novel. Books like these always lend themselves to being more easily considered as a whole work than the average short story collection, because people can consider the development of the reoccurring characters in the ways that they do a novel, and they can point out the ways each story operates to further break apart and re-contextualize our understanding of the initial story. I think that’s exactly what this collection does, and it works really well. Escoffery has a strong, exciting voice on the page, and his characters feel alive and complex. The way he structures his stories is smart, but I could also follow those structures a bit too easily, could see the underpinnings that I couldn’t spot in Newman’s—being able to clearly see the structure of a story in this way almost feels like being able to spot the sketch lines underneath the pigment of a finished painting. It’s these little things that I wouldn’t really nitpick if reading the book on its own, but when debating whether one book or another is going to win an award, these are the kinds of things I feel like have to be taken into consideration. Still, the stories in If I Survive You are truly great and this is one of the books I really enjoyed and was excited by as I read it.

The third book I read was Maria, Maria by Marytza K. Rubio, which my husband read first and loved. He had nothing but praise for this one, and I can see why. The stories are all entertaining and exciting, the prose is glittering and beautiful. The most notable thing about this one is how inventive and experimental it is, formally. I always enjoy risk takers when it comes to how a writer chooses to play with their structures and such, and this one does some exciting things. I don’t know if some of the stories fully came together for me, but I still admired them all for their innovation. And because I can’t help myself, I’m including my husband’s mini book review:

Maria, Maria is a magical, darkly humorous, and sometimes deliciously twisted collection of stories that explore aspects of identity, love, grief, and power. Rubio’s unconventional voice and structural decisions in the first story left me literally short of breath as the story concluded. Rubio continues to stun stylistically from one story to the next, while anchoring you into the lives of a cast of Latinx characters; each story, each life, building your understanding of the world in which these stories exist so that you can experience the finale, the titular novella, in its full glory. The stories will stay with you, and the prose will move you. 5/5

Now, the last collection we’re looking at is the one that actually made the shortlist, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. I mentioned this when discovering several other books, how many of these books feel like they could be in conversation with other major works, and this collection of stories about war feel like they’re in conversation with previous books about war. Where Kochai differentiates his work is in the perspective he offers, the characters he’s choosing the focus on, how he showcases the people who were impacted by war even when they weren’t on the frontlines. His work here is bold and assured, tight prose and great construction. I reread some of the stories here that didn’t initially work for me, and realized that my initial resistance came from my own biases and not with the work. I think the first two stories are the ones I enjoyed the most, but still found something to like in each of them. I don’t think it’s a collection for everyone, but I think it’s a great choice for the shortlist.

I’m still working through my thoughts on this shortlist, AND I also still have to discuss When We Were Sisters. I plan on doing a more in depth discussion of this longlist along with my thoughts on that last book next week—hopefully I will have finally had enough time to process all of these! If you have thoughts about these collections, the longlist, the short list, or book awards in general, let me know!

Until then,

XOXO