Now is a great time for serious literature.
While the major New York houses seem to be struggling to find a new business model that accommodates Internet sales and tablet readers, small presses have sprung up with a common-sense formula for success: book first, marketing second.
Engine Books, founded this year by writer and editor Victoria Barrett, is perhaps the newest boutique press to emerge with a focus on serious writing. With the publication of Patricia Henley's new collection of short stories, "Other Heartbreaks," the press has found a gem.
Henley is the author of three previous collections of short stories and two novels. She now has returned to the short form with a book of character-driven stories told in clear, polished prose that brings to mind work by Andre Dubus Sr. or Alice Munro.
Like that of her literary kin, Henley's work contains a wide emotional range — love, lust, friendship, envy, grief and doubt. In these nine stories, young lovers discover hard truths, while older characters consider the folly of their lives and struggle to enter some new phase of adulthood, which Henley terms the "reality project."
The collection opens with "Rocky Gap," in which a character watches her lover walk off with another woman and thinks, "There was a time when June might have felt a little buzz of romantic anxiety ... but now that the worst that can happen in love has happened, she is past fear."
In "Sun Damage," a woman comes home for her father's funeral and ruminates on her childhood: "Meg thought her mother's rules quite odd. But you don't know that when you're young; you imagine everyone lives as you do. Finding out they don't is one of the best or worst discoveries of childhood."
Meg comes to realize that adulthood means learning to hold yourself back, to keep secrets: "At some point what you told became only gossip on yourself, stirring up old trouble. And no good can come from that."
But with secrets come a new set of problems, among them "spite and jealousy and meanness."
In "Red Lily," a college administrator, Jen, finds out her secret crush is moving to Florida and breaking up with Jen's colleague. Her colleague puts on a front, saying, "I really don't care, Jen. I never wanted to get married. Marriage breaks your backbone."
Of course, the colleague does care, and her inability to speak the truth leaves them both repressed and isolated, dreaming of their own escape: "There were places where people listened to music outdoors, where they drank tropical drinks and barbecued whole pigs. Loyalties were not secure in places like that. People ran off on boats with strangers. Women wore thongs. Inhibitions were considered old-fashioned, out of the last century."
The collection ends with a trio of finely wrought stories about the March family: the near-70-year-old Joe, his 55-year-old wife, Emma, and the tensions that lie beneath the surface of their marriage — her income, his stubbornness, their age difference.
In a recent essay for Glimmer Train, Henley writes about ambition, the nature of writing and her own, at times, rocky path to publication. She says a short story, "like a potholder, is a humble piece of work."
Taken together, "Other Heartbreaks" showcases Henley at the top of her form — her ability to create wholly realized characters and to empathize fully with their plight. These stories might seem "humble," but they contain multitudes.
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