The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard has said that one of the stories in this collection, although she does not specify which, took her more than 20 years to write and that there was a gap of eight months – during which she was working on the piece five days a week – between two of its sentences. It is true that her writing is remarkably condensed, not least in ‘Cheri’, the story of a real woman who had a particularly hideous case of terminal cancer (exacerbated by the fact that all pain medication made her vomit). Cheri Tremble contacted Jack Kevorkian, a euthanasia expert sometimes nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, so that he could help her end her life. As she begins to die, Cheri, in Beard’s version, wryly reflects: ‘The fear of dying tonight is nothing… compared to the fear of still being alive tomorrow morning.’

Beard has barely been published in the UK, but her fans include Jonathan Franzen, Sigrid Nunez and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mary Gaitskill has called her ‘a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of’.

The Office of Historical Corrections

Danielle Evans, who published her 2010 story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self to great acclaim and has fans including Alicia Keys and Roxane Gay, has said she writes long, rather than short, stories – and this new collection certainly provides space to explore knotty subject matter.

In “Boys Go to Jupiter”, a picture of a white college student wearing a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. The image antagonises her black hallmate Carmen, who reposts it, and Claire – the bikini wearer – receives angry, supportive and even pornographic messages.

Carmen moves dorm for her own safety, but Evans writes the story from the point of view of Claire, showing the way in which a social media storm can develop its own momentum: “Her student account’s address has been posted on several message boards and #clairewilliamsvacationideas is a locally trending topic (Auschwitz, My Lai, Wounded Knee).”

Short story collections by Richard Ford, A. L. Kennedy & Maria Reva

Sorry For Your Trouble, Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song. The mainly male middle-aged protagonists of these nine stories seem often to be assessing their regrets but coming to terms with them. In ‘Second Language’, a man is enchanted by his glamorous second wife but able to accept when, after two years, she tells him (for no clear reason) that the marriage is over. Alongside multiple divorces, there are plenty of sudden deaths here — not least that of a wife who simply lays her head on her hands and stops breathing. A doctor later diagnoses cancer, but the conclusion is: ‘Dying was likely the only real symptom she’d experienced.’

The most disturbing story is ‘Displaced’, in which a vulnerable boy becomes desperate for friendship after the death of his father. His only mate is a jaded, older adolescent who, unprompted, kisses him when they go to a drive-in movie. The friend concludes the evening by saying: ‘You’ll kill and steal and break people’s hearts and fuck your sister and burn down houses.’