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Stories
A first-time book by filmmaker and native West Virginian Scott McClanahan.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
146 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 2008
264 people want to read
About the author
Scott McClanahan
29 books506 followersScott McClanahan (born June 24, 1978) is an American writer, filmmaker, and martial artist. He lives in Beckley, West Virginia and is the author of eight books. His most recent book, The Sarah Book, was featured in Rolling Stone, Village Voice, and Playboy. NPR called the book "brave, triumphant and beautiful — it reads like a fever dream, and it feels like a miracle." McClanahan is also a co-founder of Holler Presents, a West Virginia-based production and small press company.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 17, 2011
Tonight, I was in the mood for an easy read, but I didn't want to disappear in words on pages, as much as I wanted to be effortlessly entertained by them in something I'd never seen before.
I looked through my books. I flipped through the first few chapters of Whores For Gloria, and thought: No, not tonight. Vollmann's so stylized, reading him's almost exhausting if it's not the right time.
Then I opened Scott McClanahan's Stories and read the first few pages.
By the end of the hour his stories were so smoothly siphoned into my head that I found myself wishing it was 11 instead of 2am, so I could read them all over again, to revisit its charming characters, and maybe smile and wave hello, as if I'd known them in some other life.
McClanahan deserves a hand for putting together a tight collection of humorously absurd, sometimes dark and heartfelt tales: an accidental phone sex misadventure, car and cross-dressing accidents; an impromptu evening visit with the Prettiest Girl in Texas, in a double wide trailer covered with Christmas lights.
The epiphanies from Stories feel honest and earned. They have a subtle, lingering hold, and the prose stands upright and strong within a wellspring of well-executed simplicity.
I looked through my books. I flipped through the first few chapters of Whores For Gloria, and thought: No, not tonight. Vollmann's so stylized, reading him's almost exhausting if it's not the right time.
Then I opened Scott McClanahan's Stories and read the first few pages.
By the end of the hour his stories were so smoothly siphoned into my head that I found myself wishing it was 11 instead of 2am, so I could read them all over again, to revisit its charming characters, and maybe smile and wave hello, as if I'd known them in some other life.
McClanahan deserves a hand for putting together a tight collection of humorously absurd, sometimes dark and heartfelt tales: an accidental phone sex misadventure, car and cross-dressing accidents; an impromptu evening visit with the Prettiest Girl in Texas, in a double wide trailer covered with Christmas lights.
The epiphanies from Stories feel honest and earned. They have a subtle, lingering hold, and the prose stands upright and strong within a wellspring of well-executed simplicity.
August 28, 2011
I read this book out loud to someone I care about very much. I think that is the best way to read these stories. These are stories about family and friends that you would tell to family and friends. They feel honest and personal, not only because Scott gives his own name to the narrator. These are memories of youth and childhood that outsiders wouldn't normally get to share. I don't know how to end this nicely
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July 1, 2020Endlessly conversational and engaging, Stories is a series of more or less intertwined fictional non-fiction folk tale influenced pieces full of giants, picnic table sex and dead deer. It is an America we rarely visit unless we grew-up there and it is the bomb.
February 17, 2011
This was a really mixed experience.
The stories were good. Fast-paced, interesting stuff. Very rural, good for fans of Cormac McCarthy or Robert Olmstead.
The bad, and this seems to be more common with self-published and small press books, was that the editing was a little lacking.
It’s kind of a sad situation, really. It feels often like you have to make a choice, Do I read something that is mainstream and well-edited, or do I go outside the norm a little and read something different, but that likely could use a good once-over?
A misspelling here and there doesn’t really bother me. That’s not the issue. The issue is that I think it’s sad that good stories, like these, don’t find a home with a publisher who would give them the care and consideration they deserve.
The stories were good. Fast-paced, interesting stuff. Very rural, good for fans of Cormac McCarthy or Robert Olmstead.
The bad, and this seems to be more common with self-published and small press books, was that the editing was a little lacking.
It’s kind of a sad situation, really. It feels often like you have to make a choice, Do I read something that is mainstream and well-edited, or do I go outside the norm a little and read something different, but that likely could use a good once-over?
A misspelling here and there doesn’t really bother me. That’s not the issue. The issue is that I think it’s sad that good stories, like these, don’t find a home with a publisher who would give them the care and consideration they deserve.
May 30, 2017
A bit too simplistic at times. Not that that's necessarily a detriment, but more that, here, the simplicity is overly repetitive, and, at times, a crutch. The language, the structure, the themes, the characters...all just a bit too simple. Lacks the magic of early Hemingway, or, say, Breece Pancake.
July 14, 2010
The cover of Scott McClanahan's book of short stories has the mug shot of an 1930's felon with a bright yellow background. So just on a quick glance at the cover, I was expecting hard-boiled stories about low lives in the mid-west. To my pleasant surprise, the book was funnier than I thought it was going to be and if a book can make you laugh out loud at the characters and situations, then that's a book that I will highly recommend. Mainly because comedy is difficult in literature. Not every writer can be what's his face - Amy Sedaris' brother. Sorry, I'm an Amy Sedaris fan. I forgot her brother's name. But I hear his books are funny. Stories by McClanahan is like watching Charlie Brown go through puberty into young adulthood in a West Virginia setting. And I have no idea where Charlie Brown was from. Anybody? McClanahan gives us the set up and paints a nice picture of the type of person the narrator is right from the get-go in the first story Randy Doogan - which wasn't even my favorite story in the book. In that particular story, the narrator, a fellow also named Scott, is telling us about the last good deed he did and the consequences. By the end of that telling, he has become a kind of Charlie Brown character which to whom strange, funny things keep happening to. Scott the character gets taken advantage of, gets bullied by a homeless guy, and is a witness to various people getting run over by cars. What I liked about the narrator, is that he never once judges the characters or situations and just presents them as they are. The book concentrates mostly on the town of Rainelle, its quirky inhabitants, and the narrator's adventures sprinkled through out. From beginning to end we encounter flying possums, people that prefer to be arrested in protest of getting speeding tickets, funky beatific strippers, and bums that interrupt your daily living just because they can. The book reminded me a lot of Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. The narrator is also a kind of everyman with a unique way of looking at his world and the special characters that inhabit it. What makes this book work is that McClanahan knows his subject. He knows his character's strength, weaknesses and what ever makes them tick. There are some characters that jumped off the page like the main character in The Rainelle Story. There are short-shorts like The Chainsaw Guy which had me laughing out loud. From the beginning of every story it was difficult to determine where Scott McClanahan was taking the reader. I would compare Scott McClanahan the narrator to a modern day George Willard from Winesburg, Ohio. There were a lot of stories, specially Poop Deck Pappy that had me thinking about George Willard and his quirky townsfolk. The weakest stories in the collection might be a couple of the vignettes but they are not so poor that they bring the whole book down. And they also help paint a better picture of the narrator and his family. The book is very enjoyable and very funny. The publisher, Six Gallery Press, has been churning out top quality literature by interesting and innovative writers like Noah Cicero and Che Elias. Reading books like Scott's makes me very happy about the state of small publishers in the US. Despite the odds, these small publishers are releasing quality work. And mark my words they have their nose to the ground, and the next important literary movement and/or author will come from there. It's just a matter of time.
May 29, 2009
(this review originally appeared at OutsiderWriters [dot:] org)
Simply titled, Stories, Scott McClanahan’s collection intentionally disregards enough structural, grammatical, and formatting rules on the first page alone to challenge most readers’ dedication. The collection not only discounts the understood importance of a descriptive title, but also adopts irregular paragraph formatting, a few misspellings, and a lack of page numbers or table of contents. But in a respectable adherence to the story form, Stories is just that in the best sense of the word: stories.
Taking its lack of compromise from the world of personal journals and oral folklore, Stories places a hyper-focus on the fundamental delivery and purpose of a story, exchanging linguistic flair for simple, campfire-styled narrative, and swapping convoluted plot for a poetic sense of ultimate justification. Sentiment and emotion are conveyed beautifully by way of just enough style guidelines to keep the pages from drifting away entirely into the oral traditions from which this collection takes its influence.
The collection enlists a narrator, often soft-spoken, always riding a fine line between innocent child and weathered old man in that he speaks in alternating beats of onomatopoeic EEEEEKKKKs and buzzzzs and good ol’ boy simplicity (“…wearing this ratty ol gray coat that he always wore” pg 31*). Yet this delivery always produces a ending of well stitched optimism. “ODB, The Mud Puppy, and Me,” for example, depicts a roadway encounter with a deer that builds to a slapstick, yet endearing struggle to put the animal out of its misery, culminating in the question “…is this what you called kindness…” (pg 22*).
This simple narration builds from one story to another, allowing each subsequent story to be approached with an implied history, similar to bound journal. “The Phone Girl” works because “Possums” works because “The Prettiest Girl in Texas” works and so on.
It takes a brave author to willingly risk a dull-witted perception for the sake of conscientious style. As McClanahan has said in a recent interview with OrangeAlert, “the worst thing a storyteller can do is start thinking like an intellectual.” But the best thing a storyteller can do is to allow his intellect to organically permeate his words, which is just what Stories accomplishes.
* remember, this collection doesn’t have page numbers. You’ll have to count (as I did) to find these quotes
Simply titled, Stories, Scott McClanahan’s collection intentionally disregards enough structural, grammatical, and formatting rules on the first page alone to challenge most readers’ dedication. The collection not only discounts the understood importance of a descriptive title, but also adopts irregular paragraph formatting, a few misspellings, and a lack of page numbers or table of contents. But in a respectable adherence to the story form, Stories is just that in the best sense of the word: stories.
Taking its lack of compromise from the world of personal journals and oral folklore, Stories places a hyper-focus on the fundamental delivery and purpose of a story, exchanging linguistic flair for simple, campfire-styled narrative, and swapping convoluted plot for a poetic sense of ultimate justification. Sentiment and emotion are conveyed beautifully by way of just enough style guidelines to keep the pages from drifting away entirely into the oral traditions from which this collection takes its influence.
The collection enlists a narrator, often soft-spoken, always riding a fine line between innocent child and weathered old man in that he speaks in alternating beats of onomatopoeic EEEEEKKKKs and buzzzzs and good ol’ boy simplicity (“…wearing this ratty ol gray coat that he always wore” pg 31*). Yet this delivery always produces a ending of well stitched optimism. “ODB, The Mud Puppy, and Me,” for example, depicts a roadway encounter with a deer that builds to a slapstick, yet endearing struggle to put the animal out of its misery, culminating in the question “…is this what you called kindness…” (pg 22*).
This simple narration builds from one story to another, allowing each subsequent story to be approached with an implied history, similar to bound journal. “The Phone Girl” works because “Possums” works because “The Prettiest Girl in Texas” works and so on.
It takes a brave author to willingly risk a dull-witted perception for the sake of conscientious style. As McClanahan has said in a recent interview with OrangeAlert, “the worst thing a storyteller can do is start thinking like an intellectual.” But the best thing a storyteller can do is to allow his intellect to organically permeate his words, which is just what Stories accomplishes.
* remember, this collection doesn’t have page numbers. You’ll have to count (as I did) to find these quotes
April 4, 2009
West Virginia native Scott McClanahan is a no-nonsense storyteller who blends nonfiction and fiction in his debut collection Stories. It's no coincidence that each story is narrated in first person, and the likeable narrator's name is Scott. Also consistent is the humor. Take, for instance, the opening line of "The Firestarter": "I went through this weird period about ten years ago where every time I went outside, I saw somebody get hit by a car." A few pieces assume a more serious tone, but most are thought-provoking in one way or another. Unfortunately, there aren't page numbers and the text isn't justified, so the interior isn't the easiest to navigate or the prettiest to look at. Nevertheless, Stories is a highly entertaining collection. Readers who like the forthrightness of Barry Graham's work and the small town nature of Chris Offutt's stories will likely enjoy this, too.
June 9, 2010
I'm rarely so impressed by an author to read two of their books in a row, but McClanahan is definitely one special talent. His stories go down so smooth, you could almost complain that they're too simple...if you were an asshole anyway. And yeah, usually weird layout quirks bother me (Scott has since learned how to use a tab key) but it makes little difference here. Like Stories II (which I liked a tad better), this here is a collection that is thoroughly enjoyable and refreshingly real and heartfelt. "The Prettiest Girl in Texas" is especially classic.
September 3, 2011
read to me via skype by jackson nieuwland. some creepy things, some sad things, some smart things, some happy things, some things that will stick with me for a long time, some forgettable things. we remarked on the conversational tone. felt like storytelling :)
February 18, 2011
I loved this book. If you complain about this book's format, then it's like complaining about how The Sex Pistols album doesn't sound like Hall and Oates.
July 30, 2012
This collection really reminded me of the stories of Breece D'J Pancake (one of my all time favourites). I cannot wait to try more from this exciting writer.
May 7, 2015
It's so simple and accessible. That's the beauty of McClanahan's work. You can hear his voice while you're reading him.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews