thoughts on two collections I recently read, for emerging writers network's short story month

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link

At the behest of this blog's readers, I read Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners." I liked but didn't love it. I'm glad Kelly Link exists. Certain stories I really loved (ie the title story, or "Lull"), others did much less for me. I get that Link's endings aren't always intended to "satisfy," but it sometimes seems like she uses "deconstruction of narrative" to mask an actual lack of clarity about where to take her own ideas, like instead of confounding expectations in a way that expands possibilities, she's sometimes maybe just dropping the ball. She has a tendency to introduce intriguing elements to stories -- like the yard full of bunny rabbits in "Stone Animals," or the chasm zombies in "The Hortlak," and then not really do much with them that's particularly meaningful. The interesting ideas are left dangling, maybe a little underworked, they never cohere into something as spectactular as they seem to promise. Stories like "Catskin" just don't seem to me to have the same emotional or philopsophical resonance of similar work by people like Aimee Bender. I could totally be missing something. Am I missing something? ...also, Link's language isn't always what I wanted it to be. She sometimes ends sentences with prepositions, which annoys me, and I felt like I wanted more poetry... and a few stories had weird and disconcerting tense shifts (from past to present and back again) that did not always seem deliberate.

In the Devil's Territory, by Kyle Minor

Holy shit wow, this was one of the most incredible things I've read in a long time. I couldn't put it down, I was completely absorbed, it caused me to feel things deeply, and I feel that I will at some future point recall reading this collection and summon residual bits of those feelings, like the book will leave an imprint. I was really struck by the empathy Minor feels for his characters, all of them, and these stories are about the real shit in their lives, real trauma, miscommunication and disconnection across generations and cultural divides. Many things impressed me about this collection, but I think one thing that especially impressed me was Minor's sympathetic but not uncritical exploration of conservative Christian faith. Minor's Christian characters (generally Southern Baptist, I believe) experience the expected oppression and repression as a result of their faith, but they also find meaning and relationship and maybe even a kind of freedom, and I feel this tension gives the stories real depth and profundity. The reader is reminded that religious faith is more than just a set of dogmatic prinicples, it shapes characters' identities and worldviews, how they process information, how they draw meaning from their experiences. Highly, highly, highly recommended.