I used to love reading giant, epic novels—Pillars of the Earth, anyone? Something grand that you could sink into and live with for a while. But these days, if a book is more than 400 pages long I often won’t even start it. It has to be an all-time favorite author, or something heavily praised by readers I would trust with my life—and even then there’s hesitation. When a big part of your job is recommending books across any genre to readers of all stripes, it can be hard to devote so much time to one specific thing.
But for my increasingly shorter attention span, short-story collections are perfect. If done well, after each “chapter” I’ve visited a complete world and heard a fully engrossing tale. There’s a real sense of accomplishment, and I can make the choice to set the book down or to keep going. It’s also fascinating to find an author who can create an entire world in just a few pages. Sometimes saying less really can be more.
Vermont author and folklorist GennaRose Nethercott is a master of the short form. I loved her previous novel, Thistlefoot, but the stories in her newest collection Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart show her skill at crafting worlds, characters, and situations within only a few paragraphs or pages. She’s a poet—literally: her first published book was an epic poem—and her phrasing can be luxurious, just the kind of thing to read out loud. I imagine the audiobook version of this book would be a delight to listen to.
Nethercott’s background in folklore feeds heavily into the soul of this collection. Some of the tales even read like fables, and they all explore the inner workings of us humans—even if the main character is a goat-woman, or the story centers around a mysterious roadside attraction that may or may not induce madness in visitors. If you love for your stories to be both skillfully written and include a bit of the monstrous, magical, or just plain weird you should definitely give this collection a try. It might be just the kind of thing to get you out of your mud season ruts!
Kari Meutsch and Kristian Preylowski co-own and run the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock.