Remind Me

My nightstand is rich with short story collections-and why wouldn't it be? Bedtime is the best time for short fiction, which can pack a satisfying wallop without the risk of keeping you up all night.

Drenched (Soft Skull Press, 2010), a luscious confection of stories by Californian Marisa Matarazzo, is on the top of the pile. I picked it up at the Pittsburgh airport. Short stories, it seems, are much better loved in the States and even airport bookstores carry a wide range (bless them).

And what a delightful find Drenched is. These are linked stories about love-all-in, high-volume, supercharged love. The kind of love that makes you seal your apartment and fill it with water so you and your lover can dive down deep. The kind of passion that can transform Jello into the very essence of love-a product so incandescent and marketable a major retail chain will pay handsomely for the exclusive right to the recipe (sullying, of course, the very thing that made it magical...but you saw that coming).

Matarazzo's stories have that exhilarating, fantastical quality that some of Carol Shields' glittering shorts did. Shields was masterful in convincing a reader that a framed print of an orange fish could really change your life, or that the earth's crust might give way, gouged by the weight of too many words.

I like my novels grounded in realism, but stories can fly off in all directions and I'll happily fly along. Maybe it's just too hard to maintain the fantastical-made-plausible facade through a novel's long haul, or to expect a serious, grown-up reader to stay wide-eyed with wonderment for 300 pages. Stories are the perfect place to take those flying chances.

Beneath Drenched in my pile is another magical collection: Jessica Grant's Making Light of Tragedy. (Grant's more recent novel, Come, Thou Tortoise, has been much lauded. All that praise is deserved, but Tortoise is not suitable bedtime reading-not unless you want to wake the neighbourhood with peels of laughter, anyway.) Like Matarazzo, Grant's short stories are full of incandescence. The prose glows, and so do random objects. Especially that flight attendant's badge in the book's latter-half (where, in lesser collections, things can get rather dull). Every time I find that story I'm aglow, too. I am flying along. It reminds me of why I read.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Leslie Vryenhoek is a writer, poet and communications consultant based in Newfoundland who also works and studies at Memorial University. Before moving out East, she lived in Manitoba where she completed a bachelor of arts at the University of Manitoba and raised two daughters. She has won many prizes for her short stores and poetry, including the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award 2010 for Senior Fiction. Scrabble Lessons is her first book.