Storyknife by Jess Row / A Short Story Collection
The knot and the knife.
A treat this week—a solid baker’s-dozen-plus of shoutout-able short stories, curated and bound in one of those…whaddaya call ‘em…books.
One stop shopping.
I love the experience I had getting to know the work of Jess Row. I’d read a story in a magazine (“The Empties” in The New Yorker was my introduction), enjoy it and get on with my day. Then I’d read another one, months later, without making an authorial connection. Then another again before it hit me: these very ambitious and very different stories were coming from the same writer. Finally, for seeing his name pop up over and over again, I got to “excellent, another Jess Row.”
Most recently it was “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” in The Massachusetts Review, which was Short Story Shouted-out this past April.
Jess’ short story collection Storyknife—which has been fifteen years in the making—will be released next week. You can pre-order it here.
From a Short Story Shoutout perspective, where I’m constantly trawling the lit pub ocean looking to net the latest and greatest, the list of magazines his work has appeared in (Boston Review, Guernica, Tin House, The New Yorker, N+1, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Electric Literature) is an aspiring writer’s dream.
The work speaks for itself, so what can I tell you beyond that?
What draws me to Jess Row’s writing is it’s everywhere-ness. Topically, geographically, he’s all over the place. You truly don’t know where you’ll land next. And his stories are voiced by every type of character—across genders, race, age, sexual orientation. All the way out to third-person-plural POVs. That curiosity, that desire to walk in the shoes of others, translates to nuanced, deeply considered storytelling.
Over the last year, his “Story of a Story” entries on Substack have offered a tale-by-tale annotation of his work—a great resource as a preface to or a closing reflection on many of the tales in Storyknife.
Here’s a quote of his that speaks to both the short story writer and reader in all of us:
“The whole point of Storyknife is that a story can turn into a knot that chokes us but also be the blade that cuts through it.”
Maybe, like me, you’ve teased a story out of yourself over time, letting the characters tell you where to go, “pants-ing” your way through it, only to realize much later that what you thought was a flight of imaginative fantasy was actually a metaphorical reframing of some deeply held issue you were trying to work through. The romantic break up transformed into a fictional bank robbery, the threat of financial ruin alchemized into a glorious-but-doomed Las Vegas craps table run.
We sometimes write ourselves into predicaments on the page to help us find a way to write through real life.
The knot and the knife.
My personal Storyknife favorites:
In “The Empties,” a young woman in a small Vermont town fends for herself in the aftermath of a total collapse of the national power grid, including all forms of communication.
In “Take the Child,” a young mother—a fiction writer locked in a post-partum depression—whose husband has abandoned her with their baby, has started to believe the baby can communicate with her telepathically.
In “Late Blues,” a celebrated quilter is swindled by her New York art dealer and after both pass away, their respective daughters—who have practically grown up together—are left to wrestle with the emotional and financial legacy of both the art and the crime.
…and the aforementioned “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.”
Pick up a copy of Storyknife and Johnny-Appleseed it. Pass one on to that young writer you’re mentoring. Ask for it at your local bookstore, your library.
Congrats, Jess Row
Are you reading enough short stories to know what lit pubs are looking for?
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