Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

In her first collection of stories since her PEN/Faulkner-winning The Caprices , Sabina Murray confronts the manipulation, compassion, ambition, and controversy surrounding some of the most intrepid and sadistic pioneers of the last four millennia.

Iconic explorers and settlers are made intimately human as they plow through the un-navigated boundaries of their worlds to give shape to modern geography, philosophy, and science. As Ferdinand Magellan sets out on his final voyage, he forms an unlikely friendship with a rich scholar who harbors feelings for the captain, but in the end cannot save Magellan from his own greed. Balboa’s peek at the South Sea may never have happened if it wasn’t for his loyal and vicious dog, Leonico, and an unavoidable urge to relieve himself. And Captain Zimri Coffin is plagued by sleepless nights after reading Frankenstein, that is until his crew rescues two shipwrecked Englishmen who carry rumor of a giant and deadly white whale lurking in the depths of the ocean.

With her signature blend of sophistication and savagery, darkness and humor, Sabina Murray investigates the complexities of faith, the lure of the unknown, and the elusive mingling of history and legend.

Genres: Short Stories, Historical Fiction, Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2011

About the author

Sabina Murray was born in 1968 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is of mixed parentage—her mother a Filipina from Manila, her father a former Jesuit scholastic turned anthropologist from Boston. Her parents met in Washington DC, where both were pursuing graduate degrees. At the age of two she moved to Perth with her family, when her father accepted a position at the University of Western Australia. In 1980 the family moved again, this time to Manila, to be closer to her mother’s family. Although Sabina Murray is an American citizen, she did not live again in the United States until she attended college. She feels that she moves easily through the various cultures that have forged her own identity: Australian, Filipino, and American. She now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family, where she directs, and teaches in, the Creative Writing Program at Umass.

In 1989, Murray’s novel, Slow Burn, set in the decadent Manila of the mid-eighties, was accepted for publication, when Murray was twenty years old. Later, she attended the University of Texas at Austin where she started work on The Caprices, a short story collection that explores the Pacific Campaign of WWII. In 1999, Murray left Texas for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. In January, 2002, Murray published The Caprices, which won the PEN Faulkner Award.

Murray’s next novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, follows Katherine Shea, a woman of strange appetites, as she moves from man to man ruminating on the nature of cannibalism in western history, literature and art. The book is a dark comedy that is concerned with power and hunger. Forgery is her most recent book, and this looks at authenticity by following Rupert Brigg, who is exploring art and escaping grief in Greece in the early sixties. Both novels were Chicago Tribune Best Books.

Her most recent book, Tales of The New World, a collection of short stories with an interest in explorers, was released by Grove/​Black Cat in November, 2011. She is hard at work on a novel that looks at the friendship between the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and the artist Herbert Ward.

Murray is also a screenwriter and wrote the script for the film Beautiful Country, released in 2005. Beautiful Country follows the story of Binh, a young Amerasian man who comes to the U.S. from Vietnam in search of the father he never knew. Terrence Malick commissioned Murray to write the screenplay.

Murray has been a Michener Fellow at UT Austin, a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received the PEN/​Faulkner Award, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a Umass Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred Brown Award for The Novel from the University of Pittsburgh. Beautiful Country was nominated for a Golden Bear and the screenplay was nominated for an Amanda Award (the Norwegian Oscars!) and an Independent Spirit Award.

Reviews

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very solid short story collection with all of the entries focusing on exploration (sometimes loosely). The author has a strong, original literary voice that impressively delves deep into exploring human emotions and fears. She also provides new insight into familiar characters and long-discovered lands, bringing some “heroes” down from their historic pedestals and stirring the explorer in all of us. From Balboa to Mary Kingsley (and even Jim Jones), these stories force us to contemplate whether exploration is about discovering new places or whether we are really searching for ourselves all along.

The “top three” stories were:

Fish
Translation
Last Days

[Jeff Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed "Balboa" and "Translation" very much. Pigafetta's infatuation with Magellan, his following him around the world and into battle compels. Especially the Battle of Mactan: "Pigafetta was wading too. The armor was heavy and he couldn't keep track of Magellan, whom he'd planned to protect. His terror was transformed into a kind of ferocity paired with cold reason, which, as he raised his musket and fired at a native, presented this: you had less to fear from the fearless than the truly terrified."
The depth Murray descends into each of her protagonsists' psyches--sometimes the explorer, sometimes an observer, even a distant historian--marks these stories as unique and striking.
Some of the esoteric abstractions suddenly interrupted by scene--sometimes a jump of years from the former scene, as in "His Actual Mark"--was a stylish tic that I struggled with. It's my own failing and lack of attentiveness that prevented me from a clearer appreciation of these moves. Clearly, each story in this collection has steeped in its historical materials for some time, long enough for a compelling modern narrative to form.

[Patricia O'Sullivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

In ten short stories, some as short as seven pages and others over seventy pages, Sabina Murray considers the motivations, fascinations, and inner demons of various explorers. New World in this context does not refer to the traditional European idea of the Americas. Indeed, Murray’s longest story, “Fish”, features Mary Kingsley, an English woman who defied Victorian strictures by exploring and writing about West Africa. In “Paradise”, Murray writes about Jim Jones, comparing him to Hitler, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin. And in “Periplus” Murray gets inside the head of a Jesuit seminarian contemplating the library’s holdings. Then there are stories of men who explored Australia such as William Dampier and Edward John Eyre. Of course some of Murray’s short stories do concern the Americas such as “Translation” about Magellan, “Balboa” about the explorer of the same name who crossed the isthmus of Panama to find the Pacific Ocean, and “Last Days” which is a conversation between Texcoco ruler, Nezahualpilli, and the king of the Aztecs, Motecuhzoma.
Murray’s detached writing style made it difficult for me to feel engaged with her characters. Especially in “Fish” so often I almost began to care for Mary Kingsley before the narrative pulled back and left me feeling that Murray had missed the opportunity to develop Mary Kingsley as in interesting character.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this collection very much. A friend gave it to me for Christmas, knowing that I share her love for the work of Andrea Barrett. She wondered if I would like Murray's tales of explorers. I do. The first piece in the book, the novella "Fish," is brilliant. It's beautifully written--all of Murray's stories are. But it's also imaginatively structured. What it includes (snarky fairies, images of incredible specimen-collecting journeys in Africa by a single white woman) and excludes (expected scenes of failed love and family quarrel) gives the novella a feel of rich and urgent compression. I couldn't put it down. The stories that follow range widely across the globe and recent centuries, but they are all innovative in construction and focus. There is nothing dull about Murray's sensibility. And she is, as a writer, full of gratifying surprises. And she made tihs reader want to explore the entire globe all over again.

[Christopher Hebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a word I use sparingly, so believe me when I say this is an enchanting collection-—witty, irreverent, and endlessly inventive. It’s hard to imagine there being anything new to say about many of the explorers whose stories Murray tells here, and yet none of it has ever been told like this. The most brilliant piece of all is the novella about Mary Kingsley, alone worth the price of the book. Kingsley is as iconoclastic a heroine as one is likely to find anywhere in literature—-I would gladly have read about her for hundreds of more pages.

[Jaksen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recently finished this book. Excellent stories overall, though there was one I just couldn't get into and ended up skimming. (And I never skim!) I will def. look for more of her books. I happened to pick this up off the 'new shelf' in my local library and am glad I did. Some of the stories which were written in a 'contemporary-for-the-times style,' (I just made that up) blew me away. Writing as a young man, say in 1814, is not so easy. For those who like short stories and enjoy thinking while reading, pick this one up.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

God I love Sabina Murray's writing. Her insights and creative turns of phrase really work for me. I also love books about seafaring and polar expeditions, so this book featuring explorers and historical events and people really hit the sweet spot for me. This is the second book that I've read of Murray's (the other being A Carnivore's Inquiry- another 5 star read that was one of my favorite books of the year that I read it in) and I can say that I will be checking out all of her other works! So excited to have found a new favorite author!

Stories Ranked by best to least best:
- Fish- Mary Kingsley's adventure story was so wonderful and feminist. Traveling alone in the Congo, her relationships with her guides and the tribes she meets and fighting against the strictures of the English society and the dictated roles that she is being forced to conform to.
"The whole ordeal of defending herself to strangers is demeaning, yet her endless articulating...has given her a collateral resolve."
- The Solace of Monsters- A combination of Moby Dick and Frankenstein and featuring cannibalism. This was such an eerie gothic tale.
- Last Days- Told from the perspective of an aging Aztec leader/seer who foretells the fall of the Aztec's civilization. Such a quietly sinister and sad story. The sacrificing scene was just so subtly gruesome.
-Paradise - Jim Jones told in such a creative way. Really delves into just how sad the whole situation was.
-Balboa- Really showcases the brutality of exploration, colonialism, and men.
- Full Circle Thrice- Follows Dampier a navigator/pirate who sails around the world 3xs in his lifetime. Introspective, yet also a seafaring adventure this one again really worked for me. Although it is slightly less memorable. "But my life is lived in knots and naughts-a speedy tangle of days amounting to nothing."
- On Sakhalin- Anton Chekov the author visits an island penal colony between Russia and Japan. Such abysmal people, despair, and torment featured in this. Another very brutal and somber story that shows how horrible humanity (men?) can be.
-Translation- Follows Magellan and his admirer. Very gay and very doomed from the start.
- Periplus- A Jesuit Seminarian going through the library and commenting on his studies. This was by far my least favorite story and the weakest of the bunch. It rambles, is boring, and lacks the verve and creative wit of all the other stories.

[Galen Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read half the book about three years ago, let it sit forever, and finished it in less than 48 hours after picking it back up. The stories required a lot of research, and yet flow naturally. I loved the dark humor, especially between the colonized and the colonizers/explored and explorers.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wildly uneven collection of short stories about exploration.

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

among other aspects, really touching writing about stars

[Jane S · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm delighted to have discovered Sabina Murray's work - her evocations of the solitary natures of her cast of explorers in this new collection of stories sound authentic (even if most of the internal soliloquys of her characters tend to give an impression of uniformity), and I thought she captured the sense of the many situations and far-flung locales in the stories well, from Sakhalin to Victorian London to life on the high seas etc. What I found particularly interesting was how she imaginatively conveyed the many layers of complexities within the characters, their very human self-doubts, foibles and naivete in their circumstances, the sense of dealing with the unknown future they faced and how they made decisions. Murray brings them to life far beyond the singular achievements they each are remembered for in history books.

If I were to quibble though, I'd say that her writing might have evoked more fully the visceral 'presentness' of their situations as they were being experienced - the sense of desperate hardship, the squalor of dirt and smells, the sensation of cold and starvation or dead thirst, the pervasive fear and tenuousness of life on a whale or pirate boat or in the outback. Her drunks were largely well-behaved, all her characters almost too even-keeled and lucid even when raving; it may be Murray's prose but they seemed to share a general overlying sense of equanimity and somehow not enough mania, whimsy, craziness or drift in their musings. Apart from the first story in this collection about Mary Kingsley, Murray's characters were all men who seemed to share a kind of uniformity in temperament, philosophical outlook and character - or perhaps we are to surmise that explorers share those traits? Kingsley's character has the distinction of feisty wit and humor, and the way she was drawn rendered a spunkier, more inquisitive and more believably intrepid character than any of the male characters. As imagined character portraits however, I must give Murray credit where credit's due.

However closely (or not) they hew to reality and the actual persons, these stories were intriguing in the way they place the reader in the shoes of these explorers, allowing you to see and feel much of what they saw and felt at the time, and vicariously taste the lived experience of adventuring and being in the moment (albeit somewhat detachedly) in the high as well as low and more mundane moments.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murray writes well (really well in the first story, "Fish") however, I will say I derive a lot more pleasure from her descriptive language than her experiments with narration (i.e.: "Paradise", "Full Circle Thrice"). Two things I also liked about this book: 1) I learned a lot about Western explorers (and Jim Jones?) 2) "Full Circle Thrice" and "Last Days" actually relays the perspective of natives of lands the Europeans "discover". (I wish it went on longer for "Full Circle Thrice", tbqh. It was probably the best part of the story.) "Last Days" is probably my second-favorite story in this collection, after "Fish".

[Chrissy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the first story in this book. It was a historical figure I knew, but seen in a whole new life. Not the sweet, or happy, or triumphant version you usually get in biographies or children's books, but a much more real, confused, and frustrated life. I absolutely loved the story. Several others stood out for me as well, like the tale of the seaman who survived the whale attack in the Pacific, but ultimately, I got bogged down in the middle of the book and couldn't finish it. I probably missed some great stories near the end, but I just couldn't push through.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this had been a sandwich rather than a book, the bread would have been the best part...the opening story, about explorer Mary Kingsley, was riveting, and the story that Murray chooses to end with is perfect to keep you thinking about it long after you've put the book down. However, while some of the stories in the center were humorously dark, I felt that those were the shorter pieces, and I struggled to keep full attention with the longer ones, mainly due to their chopped up style and lack of empathy/feeling garnered for the characters.

[PopcornReads - MkNoah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I asked for an advance reader’s copy (ARC) of Sabina Murray’s Tales of the New World but the title sounded enticing. For some reason, and this is embarrassing to admit, I didn’t even realize it was a collection of short stories until I had already begun to read. I guess my brain was taking a mini-vacation without me that day. Whatever led to me choosing this book, however, I’m really glad I did. Read the rest of my review at http://popcornreads.com/?p=2243.

[Ulysses · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author chose her subjects for these stories well, and with the impressive research and effort she clearly put into the writing, she does a great job of bringing the diverse times and places in which the stories are set to life off of the page. And the stories themselves are mostly quite good as well. However, it's a shame her style is so ungainly, because it makes what could otherwise have been a much more enjoyable and fluid read a sometimes unpleasant slog to get through.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories are hugely hit or miss; the ones I enjoyed were memorable, rooted in a really visceral interpretation of history and the quests of explorers, whereas others seemed a little lofty and her attempts to get creative with the language and structure of the narrators felt clunky. Solid 3 overall.

[Ben Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this book on the radio. It's 10 short stories about explorers. It turned out to be a little less adventurous and more poetic than I expected. It did make me look up the explorers, and some of the other people and places mentioned in the book at least on wikipedia and read a little bit about them.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection of stories, Murray imagines the experiences of explorers and takes us to fascinating moments in history. I especially liked the story about Mary Kingsley, a British woman who found freedom from Victorian life, by setting out to conduct research in the Congo. Another looks at Jim Jones's "paradise" in Guyana.

[Robert Wechsler]

This story collection's novella, "Fish," is a good palate cleaner between longer fictions. There’s a nice, calm anarchism about it, both in its flow and in its protagonist. There’s a coyness to it that could have been cloying, but isn’t. I give it a 4, and look forward to reading the other stories, over time.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ten short stories about explorers. I loved the first story, "Fish," about Mary Kingsley, a Victorian woman who broke the mold by heading to Africa, and wish it could have been expanded into a full-length novel. As for the rest, ehh.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

DON'T listen to the other reviewers! This book is incredible. Some charge Murray's style is too detached. Those people have attachment issues! Her style is perfect to the material! Perfect to the past! This book is so good I want to plow through it over and over until I can do what she does!

[Tony Helies · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this set of short stories, all of which are fictionalized accounts of famous (and not so famous) explorers.

An example is a story about the Essex sunk by a whale. Read this shortly before reading Moby Dick.

[Melly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short stories about world travelers. The first one drew me in, but nothing after that really grabbed me.

[Sanyashnick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read most of this book...

[K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a random pickup from the library, so I'm not disheartened that I didn't like it. I couldn't get through the first story. Ho hum.

[Faye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this pretty interesting. ODD collection, no doubt.
But the story about the woman that travels to Africa was intereseting; as was the one about Magellen.

Worth checking out.

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

the four stars are mostly for the very first story. the rest were good, but not quite the same magic and intensity as Fish.

[Joanne Kamens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would have been a 4 if I liked reading short stories more. If you like short stories, the real/fictional characters are fascinating and all but 1 story kept me interested.

[Kris Simonian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautifully written. Standouts include: "Fish", "Paradise", "Last Days" and "On Sakhalin.