MobileRead December 2015 Book Club Nominations

[WT Sharpe]

Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for December, 2015.

The nominations will run through midnight EST November 26 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

Book selection category for December is: Short Stories

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.


Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nicolai Leskov
Amazon US / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Written over the course of Leskov's career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of nineteenth-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

(2) The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Spoiler:

“Anyone who cares about the best mystery writing of the past century and beyond would be lucky to receive this thick volume during the holidays. . . . One of the joys of the collection is how many are delightfully funny. . . . Note that many of these stories turn on simple theft, of diamonds or candlesticks or a lottery ticket; they hark back to simpler days before the modern thriller began to provide endless serial killers and ax murderers for our edification. To read today’s talented crime writers can be a pleasure, but it’s good to be reminded that they build on the work of others whose talents remain undimmed."
—The Washington Post

(3) The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: THE BOOK edited by Michael Amadio
Goodreads | Amazon CA / Amazon UK / Amazon US

Spoiler:

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes is a British television show, which includes two series of 13 fifty-minute episodes aired in 1971, the first, and 1973, the second.

The program presented adaptations of short mystery, suspense or crime stories featuring, as the title indicates, detectives who were literary rivals, and contemporaries, of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes took its inspiration–and title–from a number of published anthologies edited by Hugh Greene, elder brother of author Graham Greene. Hugh Greene, a former director-general of the BBC, is credited as a program creative consultant.

All the stories adapted to the show are included in this ebook, with the exception of “The Sensible Action of Lieutenant Hoist” (Episode 6) and “Anonymous Letters” (Episode 8) of the second series, a Danish and Austrian detective story non readily available in English.

However, this ebook includes, as a bonus, the complete book Hagar of the Pawn Shop by Fergus Humes, from which the story for Episode 12 of Series 2 (“The Mystery of the Amber Beads”) was taken.

The stories are presented here in the order in which they appeared in the TV series.

(4) Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
Amazon CA / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

In her lengthy and fascinating introduction Margaret Atwood says “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.”

This splendid gift edition is sure to delight Alice Munro’s growing body of admirers, what Atwood calls her “devoted international readership.” Long-time fans of her stories will enjoy meeting old favourites, where their new setting in this book may reveal new sides to what once seemed a familiar story; devoted followers may even dispute the exclusion of a specially-beloved story. Readers lucky enough to have found her recently will be delighted, as one masterpiece succeeds another.

The 17 stories are carefully arranged in the order in which she wrote them, which allows us to follow the development of her range. “A Wilderness Station,” for example, breaks “short story rules” by taking us right back to the 1830s then jumping forward more than 100 years. “The Albanian Virgin” destroys the idea that her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario’s “Alice Munro Country.” And “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story behind the film Away From Her, takes us far from the world of young girls learning about sex into unflinching old age.

This is a book to read slowly, savouring each story. It deserves a place in every Canadian book-lover’s library.

(5) Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
Goodreads | Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.


Sometimes known as "Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories"

[WT Sharpe]

Wondering if a particular book is available in your country? The following spoiler contains a list of bookstores outside the United States you can search. If you don't see a bookstore on this list for your country, find one that is, send me the link via PM, and I'll add it to the list. Also, if you find one on the list that is no longer in operation, let me know and I'll remove it from the list.

Spoiler:

Australian
Angus Robertson
Booktopia
Borders
Dymocks
Fishpond
Google

Canada
Amazon. Make sure you are logged out. Then go to the Kindle Store. Search for a book. After the search results come up, in the upper right corner of the screen, change the country to Canada and search away.
Google
Sony eBookstore (Upper right corner switch to/from US/CA)

UK
BooksOnBoard (In the upper right corner is a way to switch to the UK store)
Amazon
Foyle's
Google
Penguin
Random House
Waterstones
WH Smith

** The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece D'J Pancake [peterwardgd, BenG]
Amazon UK / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Amazon/Goodreads:

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a remarkably promising career when he took his own life in 1979 at the age of twenty-six. In 1983 the posthumous publication of this book - a collection of stories that depict, with astonishing power and grace, the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia - electrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across two decades. "One is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's" - Joyce Carol Oates "An exceptional voice" - Margaret Atwood "The best, most sincere writer I've ever read" - Kurt Vonnegut

** The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King [WT Sharpe, peterwardgd]
Goodreads | Amazon CA / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

A master storyteller at his best—the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. “Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune” who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader—“I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”

** Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules edited by David Sedaris [BenG, sun surfer]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

[/i]From USA Today[i]

David Sedaris, best-selling author and National Public Radio humorist, collected 17 of his favorite short stories for the new paperback Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.
And fans are apt to be as happy as if Sedaris wrote these stories himself.
Sedaris, of course, is author of five best sellers that mix memory and wit: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Barrel Fever, Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
In Children Playing, he brings together a group of stellar storytellers, most of them Americans, plus one from Canada and one from New Zealand.
They include Richard Yates (Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired), Charles Baxter (Gryphon), Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party), Alice Munro (Half a Grapefruit), Jincy Willett (The Best of Betty), Dorothy Parker (Song of the Shirt, 1941), Flannery O'Connor (Revelation) and Tobias Wolff (Bullet in the Brain).

Sedaris chose stories "that have stuck with me over the years and that I turn to again and again."
In the intro, Sedaris says he gravitated toward short stories when he was young and working at a packing plant, where he would read during breaks. "A good (short story) would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. This led to a kind of trance that made the dullest work, the dullest life, bearable."

* "Movement" by Nancy Fulda [BearMountainBooks]
Kobo

Spoiler:

When her concerned parents investigate a treatment that could change her life forever, Hannah's world is thrown into turmoil. Unable to speak -- at least not in ways most people can understand -- Hannah struggles to face the question of who she really is, and who she wishes to become.

* "A Starscape Slightly Askew" by Nancy Fulda [BearMountainBooks]
Amazon US

Spoiler:

Kittyhawk Gruff never wanted to compete with her sisters. It's not her fault she's good at everything from alien artifacts to hyperspace mechanics. She'd far rather be ordinary than deal with her family's resentment. But when a trans-dimensional entity lures her sisters into an archaeological death trap, Kittyhawk knows she will have to stop pretending and live up to her own potential.

*** The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nicolai Leskov [issybird, WT Sharpe, bfisher]
Amazon US / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Written over the course of Leskov's career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of nineteenth-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

* Rock Springs by Richard Ford [peterwardgd]
Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Kobo:

In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter; an unhappy girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiselled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

*** The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: THE BOOK edited by Michael Amadio [WT Sharpe, CRussel, fantasyfan]
Goodreads | Amazon CA / Amazon UK / Amazon US

Spoiler:

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes is a British television show, which includes two series of 13 fifty-minute episodes aired in 1971, the first, and 1973, the second.

The program presented adaptations of short mystery, suspense or crime stories featuring, as the title indicates, detectives who were literary rivals, and contemporaries, of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes took its inspiration–and title–from a number of published anthologies edited by Hugh Greene, elder brother of author Graham Greene. Hugh Greene, a former director-general of the BBC, is credited as a program creative consultant.

All the stories adapted to the show are included in this ebook, with the exception of “The Sensible Action of Lieutenant Hoist” (Episode 6) and “Anonymous Letters” (Episode 8) of the second series, a Danish and Austrian detective story non readily available in English.

However, this ebook includes, as a bonus, the complete book Hagar of the Pawn Shop by Fergus Humes, from which the story for Episode 12 of Series 2 (“The Mystery of the Amber Beads”) was taken.

The stories are presented here in the order in which they appeared in the TV series.

*** The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler [GA Russell, bfisher, issybird]
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Spoiler:

“Anyone who cares about the best mystery writing of the past century and beyond would be lucky to receive this thick volume during the holidays. . . . One of the joys of the collection is how many are delightfully funny. . . . Note that many of these stories turn on simple theft, of diamonds or candlesticks or a lottery ticket; they hark back to simpler days before the modern thriller began to provide endless serial killers and ax murderers for our edification. To read today’s talented crime writers can be a pleasure, but it’s good to be reminded that they build on the work of others whose talents remain undimmed."
—The Washington Post

*** Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories by Alice Munro [CRussel, GA Russell, sun surfer]
Amazon CA / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

In her lengthy and fascinating introduction Margaret Atwood says “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.”

This splendid gift edition is sure to delight Alice Munro’s growing body of admirers, what Atwood calls her “devoted international readership.” Long-time fans of her stories will enjoy meeting old favourites, where their new setting in this book may reveal new sides to what once seemed a familiar story; devoted followers may even dispute the exclusion of a specially-beloved story. Readers lucky enough to have found her recently will be delighted, as one masterpiece succeeds another.

The 17 stories are carefully arranged in the order in which she wrote them, which allows us to follow the development of her range. “A Wilderness Station,” for example, breaks “short story rules” by taking us right back to the 1830s then jumping forward more than 100 years. “The Albanian Virgin” destroys the idea that her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario’s “Alice Munro Country.” And “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story behind the film Away From Her, takes us far from the world of young girls learning about sex into unflinching old age.

This is a book to read slowly, savouring each story. It deserves a place in every Canadian book-lover’s library.

*** Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx [sun surfer, BenG, bfisher]
Goodreads | Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.


Sometimes known as "Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories"

[peterwardgd]

First book i thought of when i saw this months title was The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by (unsurprisingly) Breece D'J Pancake.

Taken from Amazon/Goodreads

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a remarkably promising career when he took his own life in 1979 at the age of twenty-six. In 1983 the posthumous publication of this book - a collection of stories that depict, with astonishing power and grace, the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia - electrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across two decades. "One is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's" - Joyce Carol Oates "An exceptional voice" - Margaret Atwood "The best, most sincere writer I've ever read" - Kurt Vonnegut

This is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.

I've already dipped into it myself and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of writing.

Amazon

Kobo

[WT Sharpe]

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King.

From Goodreads:

A master storyteller at his best—the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. “Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune” who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader—“I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”

Amazon CA / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

[BenG]

I second The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. I bought the book a couple of weeks ago but haven't had a chance to read it yet.

I also nominate Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules edited by David Sedaris. It's a collection of his favorite short stories.
All the proceeds from this book go toward 826NYC, a nonprofit organization offering free writing workshops and after-school tutoring to students ages six to eighteen.
The book's title references a painting by Adriaen van der Werff.

David Sedaris, best-selling author and National Public Radio humorist, collected 17 of his favorite short stories for the new paperback Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.
And fans are apt to be as happy as if Sedaris wrote these stories himself.
Sedaris, of course, is author of five best sellers that mix memory and wit: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Barrel Fever, Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
In Children Playing, he brings together a group of stellar storytellers, most of them Americans, plus one from Canada and one from New Zealand.
They include Richard Yates (Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired), Charles Baxter (Gryphon), Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party), Alice Munro (Half a Grapefruit), Jincy Willett (The Best of Betty), Dorothy Parker (Song of the Shirt, 1941), Flannery O'Connor (Revelation) and Tobias Wolff (Bullet in the Brain).

Sedaris chose stories "that have stuck with me over the years and that I turn to again and again."
In the intro, Sedaris says he gravitated toward short stories when he was young and working at a packing plant, where he would read during breaks. "A good (short story) would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. This led to a kind of trance that made the dullest work, the dullest life, bearable."

- USA Today

Amazon

Amazon UK

Kobo

[peterwardgd]

Cool, i'll second The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. I am guilty of avoiding King's more recent books and i've never read any short story collections of his as far as i can remember.

[BearMountainBooks]

I'm kind of new at this nomination thing, but I'd like to nominate Nancy Fulda's "Movement." There are short stories she's written that I enjoyed more (I like her adventure stories and mysteries because that's what I generally like anyway!)

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/eb...-a-short-story
This story was nominated for the 2011 Hugo and Nebula awards.

When her concerned parents investigate a treatment that could change her life forever, Hannah's world is thrown into turmoil. Unable to speak -- at least not in ways most people can understand -- Hannah struggles to face the question of who she really is, and who she wishes to become.

If we are supposed to nominate one we haven't read yet, I'd pick her:
http://www.amazon.com/Starscape-Slig...ds=nancy+fulda

It totally looks like the type of fun read I'd enjoy.

Kittyhawk Gruff never wanted to compete with her sisters. It's not her fault she's good at everything from alien artifacts to hyperspace mechanics. She'd far rather be ordinary than deal with her family's resentment. But when a trans-dimensional entity lures her sisters into an archaeological death trap, Kittyhawk knows she will have to stop pretending and live up to her own potential.

[issybird]

I'd like to nominate The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, by Nicolai Leskov.

Written over the course of Leskov's career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of nineteenth-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

Kindle Kobo OverDrive

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

If we are supposed to nominate one we haven't read yet, I'd pick her:
http://www.amazon.com/Starscape-Slig...ds=nancy+fulda

Are you nominating that as well as "Movement"?

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Are you nominating that as well as "Movement"?

Yes, please!

[WT Sharpe]

Second The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nicolai Leskov.

[WT Sharpe]

I've read "Movement" and it's a good story. The only reason I don't feel compelled to give a nod to either of the Nancy Fulda stories is because they are not part of a collection. Of course, that doesn't mean they can't win; it's just that I feel a collection would make for a better discussion. That having been said, "Movement" does raise some interesting issues, and if a single short story could make for an interesting discussion, "Movement" could.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I've read "Movement" and it's a good story. The only reason I don't feel compelled to give a nod to either of the Nancy Fulda stories is because they are not part of a collection. Of course, that doesn't mean they can't win; it's just that I feel a collection would make for a better discussion. That having been said, "Movement" does raise some interesting issues, and if a single short story could make for an interesting discussion, "Movement" could.

Good point. I thought about nominating her collection, but it doesn't have Movement in it so I leaned towards that particular story. I tend to like individual stories more than collections for the most part. But I'm glad you read it and found it interesting (as did I).

[bfisher]

I'll third The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, by Nicolai Leskov.

[peterwardgd]

I'd like to nominate Rock Springs by Richard Ford as my third choice. Another short story collection i bought last year but still haven't got round to reading, sigh. I remember thinking at the time it would be a good introduction to his novels.

Taken from Kobo

In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter; an unhappy girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiselled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

Kobo

Amazon