We love the initiative to name the month of May as the short story month. Who has come up with this? We don’t know; but in any case, hooray for his great idea. To celebrate this, here is an account of some of the most important short story books published by our authors in recent times.
In Mouthful of Birds, Samanta Schweblin, finalist of the Man Booker International Prize 2017, brings together twenty stories already published in different editions and an unpublished one. From this selection, J. M. Coetzee has said: “The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin's darkly humorous tales of people who have slipped through cracks or fallen down holes into alternate realities.”
Among the new releases, the publisher Páginas de Espuma, specialized exclusively in short stories, has just published in Spanish Mundo extraño by José Ovejero and The Calves of the Venezuelan writer Rodrigo Blanco, who had already caught the attention of critics with The Night. Together with How High the Twilight by Jaume Cabré, these make up our last year most remarkable short stories.
Also a novelty, although the author is already a classic of Spanish literature and a best-selling author, is La bruja Leopoldina y otras historias reales, an unpublished short story by Miguel Delibes compiled with other of his best stories. Few authors like Miguel Delibes have portrayed nature and rural life as he does.
And talking about classics, we can’t forget about Julio Cortázar’s short stories, in permanent reissue. And precisely by Cortázar is the famous distinction between story and novel in analogy with a boxing match: "The novel always wins on points, while the story must win by knockout." And last but not least, the volume of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, whose centenary will be celebrated in 2020, and which has been considered "together with Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo and her 19th-century countryman Machado de Assis– one of the true originals of Latin American literature."(Terrence Rafferty, New York Book Review).