Kindle Singles are pieces of short fiction and nonfiction, often long for a short story or article but shorter than a novella. Some new and noteworthy examples currently priced at 99 cents include:
Nate in Venice – Richard Russo (4/5 stars)
Richard Russo (“Nobody’s Fool,” “Straight Man,” “Empire Falls“) transports his characters from the working-class East Coast of his novels to one of Europe’s most romantic cities. In classic Russo fashion, however, he packs along their foibles and frailties. His latest foray into the messy beauty of the human heart, “Nate in Venice” is written with the same wry humor and ready generosity for which he’s been so richly praised.
After a tragic incident with a student, Nate, a professor at a small New England college, retires from teaching and from life. He ends his self-imposed exile with a tour-group trip to Venice in the company of his overbearing, mostly estranged brother. Nate is unsure he’s equipped for the challenges of human contact, especially the fraternal kind. He tries to play along, keep up, mixing his antidepressants with expensive Chianti, but while navigating the labyrinthine streets of the ancient, sinking city, the past greets him around every corner, even in his dreams: There’s the stricken face of the young woman whose life he may have ruined, and there’s Julian, the older brother who has always derided and discounted him. Is Nate sunk? Is the trip, the chance to fall in love—in fact, his whole existence—merely water under the ponte?
Maybe or maybe not. In Russo’s world, the distance between disaster and salvation is razor thin, and a mensch can be a fool (and vice versa). Nate’s Venetian high-wire act proves as surprising as a potboiler and as full of reversals as a romantic comedy. It’s an emphatic tribute to all the pleasures and possibilities of the novella.
Rules For Virgins – Amy Tan (4/5 stars)
In her startlingly sensual new story, “Rules for Virgins”—this 43-page jewel of a tale is the first fiction she has published in six years—beloved bestselling author Amy Tan (“The Joy Luck Club,” “The Bonesetter’s Daughter”) takes us deep into the illicit world of 1912 Shanghai, where beautiful courtesans mercilessly compete for the patronage of wealthy gentlemen. For the women, the contest is deadly serious, a perilous game of economic survival that, if played well, can set them up for life as mistresses of the rich and prominent. There is no room for error, however: erotic power is hard to achieve and harder to maintain, especially in the loftiest social circles.
Enter veteran seducer, Magic Gourd, formerly one of Shanghai’s “Top Ten Beauties” and now the advisor and attendant of Violet, an aspiring but inexperienced courtesan. Violet may have the youth and the allure, but Magic Gourd has the cunning and the knowledge without which the younger woman is sure to fail. These ancient tricks of the trade aren’t written down, though; to pass them on to her student, Magic Gourd must reach back into her own professional past, bringing her lessons alive with stories and anecdotes from a career spent charming and manipulating men who should have known better but rarely did.
The world of sexual intrigue that Tan reveals in “Rules for Virgins” actually existed once, and she spares no detail in recreating it. But this story is more than intriguing (and sometimes shocking) historical literary fiction. Besides inviting us inside a life that few writers but Tan could conjure up, the intimate confessions of Magic Gourd add up to a kind of military manual for the War of the Sexes’ female combatants. The wisdom conveyed is ancient, specific, and timeless, exposing the workings of vanity and folly, calculation and desire that define the mysterious human heart.
You Were Never Really Here – Jonathan Ames (4.5/5 stars)
A hero whose favorite weapon is a hammer clearly has issues. Lots of them.
Novelist, essayist, and creator of the beloved HBO series “Bored to Death,” Jonathan Ames is celebrated not only for his comic sensibilities and devotion to the absurd but for his lurid attraction to inner demons. In this shocking and suspenseful new novella, the author goes darker than noir, with an ass-kicking and psychologically tormented guardian angel who rescues others but refuses to save himself.
A former Marine and ex–FBI agent, Joe has seen one too many crime scenes and known too much trauma, and not just in his professional life. Solitary and haunted, he prefers to be invisible. He doesn’t allow himself friends or lovers and makes a living rescuing young girls from the deadly clutches of the sex trade. But when a high-ranking New York politician hires him to extricate his teenage daughter from a Manhattan brothel, Joe uncovers a web of corruption that even he may not be able to unravel. When the men on his trail take the only person left in the world who matters to him, he forsakes his pledge to do no harm. If anyone can kill his way to the truth, it’s Joe.
“You Were Never Really Here” is a tribute to Raymond Chandler and to Donald Westlake and his Parker series, and it testifies to Ames’s versatility and capacity to entertain in any medium or genre. A character for the ages, Joe shows us, with every bent cop, junkie, and pimp he confronts, that it’s hard to be an angel in a fallen world.
Phoenix – Chuck Palahniuk (4.5/5 stars)
No author can shock readers quite like bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk (“Fight Club,” “Choke,” “Damned“), whose meditations on the darkest depths of the American ego have been known to induce fainting fits in his audiences. Palahniuk channels both Stephen King and John Cheever in this singularly sinister and hilarious short story, straight from the passive-aggressive front lines of modern marriage, where a wife’s frustration, along with the family cat, become weapons of mass destruction.
Rachel married Ted because he was uncomplicated and loyal. But he was also devoted to his wretched house (done up in black granite, black appliances, even black dishware) and his first love, an old, flatulent cat named Belinda Carlisle. Once Rachel becomes pregnant, Ted reluctantly agrees to move and give up the cat. But the house doesn’t sell, and Belinda Carlisle still haunts their home: every day the creature becomes fatter and more malodorous. When the house burns to the ground in a freak conflagration and the couple’s daughter, April, is born blind soon thereafter, the marriage is never the same again. Only on a business trip three years later does Rachel begin to reckon with the damage.
In an Orlando motel room far from Ted and April, Rachel wonders: Is her simple-minded husband more vindictive and manipulative than even Rachel could have imagined? How far will she go to keep the upper hand—a bit of emotional and physical torture, perhaps? Will she win the battle, only to lose so much else?
If all is fair in love and war, there are few contemporary writers better equipped than Palahniuk to travel the extremes, right to the chilling intersection of “I do” and “I’m damned.”
Noir – Linda Mannheim (5/5 stars)
Laura and Sam are obsessed with film noir. In their sun-drenched apartment in Miami, they watch 1940s black and white movies whose characters move in shadows and narrow slats of light. They ‘re fascinated by a Hollywood genre without happy endings where everyone is corrupt, where lovers betray one another, where the war might be over and the boys might be home, but nothing is going back to the way it was. And in Miami in 1986, the tide of another war is about to sweep in. Refugees are arriving from Central America. Cocaine kings cruise the highways with impressive artillery. Mercenaries rehearse in the Everglades for involvement in the Contra War. By November, 304 people have been killed in Miami. Anything can happen there.
Linda Mannheim’s first novel, Risk, is set in South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. It was shortlisted for book of the year by journalist Jenny Crwys Williams.
When A Camel Breaks Your Heart – Kodi Scheer (4/5 stars)
In this haunting and fabulist tale, a young woman’s would-be fiancé, Mahir, transforms–quite literally–into a camel.
Mahir–once the object of her affection and muse for her art–now embodies the vast differences between their respective backgrounds as a white American woman and a first-generation American Muslim. She attempts to uncover the mystery of his transformation, sorting through their past, trying to understand the present, and coming to terms with the future–all while dealing with the practical needs of the large exotic animal nesting in her living room.
Set against the backdrop of the American invasion of Iraq, the story weaves together the magical and the mundane, with a dose of wry humor and the absurd, building toward a surprising ending.
This Kindle Single is part of Day One Fiction, a new short-story series by today’s best new voices in fiction. Day One stories are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always compelling and insightful.