Small Craft Warnings: Stories

by Kate Braverman

The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman’s characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of "Pagan Night" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has so enjoyed. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror. Braverman’s language is ripe, intense, as vivid as the sun-drenched California landscape, and her characters are contrary, unpredictable, and unforgettable. These haunting stories evoke the glittering expectations and shattering disappointments of the postmodern West.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

191 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Kate Braverman (born 1950) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.

Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this collection is akin to being in a baroque cathedral with incense and gold-plated mirrors and gilded ceilings and frescoes and sweet-smelling smoke everywhere. It's pretty to the level of cloying, stuffed to the point of suffocation. I wanted to shake these protagonists and yell "The afternoon is not like powdered violets! Especially not for the third story in a row! What are powdered violets? How can the air be full of them? And no, you are not thinking of aquariums or the morphology of the ocean. You are 12 years old."

There are some truly excellent stories in the collection ("Pagan Night," "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows") where Braverman's repetitive and hovering poetic style works really well to express the thought process revolving around transgressive acts and the way the human mind returns obsessively to the same subjects. But for the most part, these literary creations don't feel like characters, they feel like Braverman's mouthpiece. I'm pretty stubborn about upholding an author's right to lyric flights of fancy, but I have to say, with extreme reluctance, that now I know what lyric excess can look like.

(on a related note - those authors who truly win over readers will have them following everywhere, including down the crazy language rabbit hole. So lyric excess does work in the best, incantatory hands.)

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

First off, this isn't poetry. No matter how many times you inject inarticulate fluff into a piece of fiction—i.e. 'the sunlight dappled down over the golden boughs of sweetgum, glaring off golden waters in an impossible game of gold, like chorus-line girls on the outskirts of a golden town's driving range, glowering in mother moonlight, also gold'—it's not poetry. Poetry is not some meaningless smattering of glossolalia that one uses to sound thoughtful at social functions. It similarly is not a half-assed handful of jive that can cobble together a shoddily-written narrative.

It seems like Braverman is concerned with conveying a feeling rather than an idea, and this removes the emphasis on characters and places the brunt of it on a scene's depiction. She has a nasty habit of blindly grabbing onto images, whichever way the synapse firings go:

"Gwen envisioned the end of the universe as a sequence of blue, fragile and translucent like the skin of infants. It was the blue of a stamp fading on a passport. We are given documents at birth. Life is a visa. At the end, one final port of exit."

And the big epiphany at the end of this jettisoned detritus? That life is indeed fleeting. Which gives the reader no new knowledge, no additional emotional involvement.

*** What kills empathy faster than anything?
A. joist-less flotsam,
B. boisterous bagatelle,
C. flippant frippery, or
D. being full of shit.

Anyhow, I give this book two stars rather than one because I can tell Braverman is an intelligent person who can write but cannot quite pre-write or edit her stories to be much other than full of potential on good days and tiresome on others. However, I do recommend reading this, if only for a few wonderful moments ("Pagan Night" being the absolute best of these).

[Britta Stumpp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think my husband, Adrian Stumpp, said it best: "Braverman is a wordsmith after my own heart. Her stories are dense and anti-lyrical and read like prose-poems. They consist of the internal monologues of women trying to make sense of their lives. There is very little action and no resolution, but if you love astonishingly wrought sentences as much as I do, this collection of short stories is a feast. Just opening the book at random, I find: "The light is oddly amber and warm. It is old light. It contains lost properties of how to assemble objects for auguries, of how to clear the lungs. A boat is coming to save you. You are absolutely certain. A great man will offer you a bouquet of silver roses, violet orchids, gardenias out of season. Here there are no shadows, only the arc cast by complexities the color of sails, rain-driven." I dig it. Favorites include "Pagan Night," "Guerilla Noon," and "The Woman After Rain."

[Adrian Stumpp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Braverman is a wordsmith after my own heart. Her stories are dense and anti-lyrical and read like prose-poems. They consist of the internal monologues of women trying to make sense of their lives. There is very little action and no resolution, but if you love astonishingly wrought sentences as much as I do, this collection of short stories is a feast. Just opening the book at random, I find: "The light is oddly amber and warm. It is old light. It contains lost properties of how to assemble objects for auguries, of how to clear the lungs. A boat is coming to save you. You are absolutely certain. A great man will offer you a bouquet of silver roses, violet orchids, gardenias out of season. Here there are no shadows, only the arc cast by complexities the color of sails, rain-driven." I dig it. Favorites include "Pagan Night," "Guerilla Noon," and "The Woman After Rain."

[Krista · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was the longest 180 pages I've ever struggled through. But I wasn't going to let it win. I made it through every single turgid metaphor. Did "internal geography" really need to appear at least once in each depressing, anxious, claustrophobic story?

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every one of these stories could have appeared in The New Yorker. While Braverman revisits many of the same characters and themes over and over again, no one comes close to her abilities. I found much to emulate here.

[Jackie Ngo]

Wanted to read this because Kate Braverman was Janet Fitch's mentor and I'd die to write sentences like Fitch. The stories were interesting but I just couldn't get invested. I wouldn't mind picking it up again, but I never felt excited to return to it.

[Naomi]

DNF. I tried several times to get into this, but it would take me a half hour to read 10 pages. My mind kept drifting. I couldn’t force myself to be interested.

[Christa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms. Braverman is one fierce lady. It was fun reading this on the heels of The Informers because Braverman's L.A. is very similar in some ways and wildly different in others. Personally, I wouldn't want to live in either Ellis' L.A. or hers, but hers is much more vivid and visceral in its color, smell, texture and air quality. Her stories read like viciously beautiful prose poems, which is no surprise as she's a more prolific poet than story author.

[Krok Zero · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was lovin' this crazily overripe language for a while. Then it got tiresome. This is what happens when poets write short stories, I guess. I recommend that you read at least the first four stories in this collection.

[Bebop2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Braverman is one of my top 5 favorite writers. I so wish she would come out with another novel. It's been a long time since Frida K.