Michael Glenn’s SELECTED STORIES include short but profound stories that transform apparently mundane experiences into revelations about human nature and connection, selfishness and love, intimacy and conformity. They focus on protagonists who are, for the most part, essentially sleepwalking through their lives: marrying and doing their jobs, raising children, or—like the protagonist of “The Room,” who takes the tendency to an extreme—simply hiding in a small dark room and living in memories and snippets of images from the past. Sometimes the characters are aware of the monotony and artificiality of their lives, as in “On Being On” and “The Schedule,” and the stories focus on how they choose to cope in order to remain human (or at least as human as they can be). Sometimes moments of connection, intimacy, and revelation arrive, breaking their routines and snapping them awake; and how they cope with them varies from person to person.

Some, like Will Hartman in “Bree,” or the father in “The Oldest in the Family,” find the revelation comes too late, and can only mourn what they might have missed. Some, like the protagonist in “Piano Lesson” or the family in “The Seventies,” find it breaks off a piece of them—leaving their lives apparently untouched but with something forever gone or damaged. A few, like Andy in “Making Friends” (not coincidentally one of the youngest and most emotionally flexible of the stories’ characters), are able to break old patterns and find new ways of doing things. The stories are deeply intimate. In “The Room,” for example, the protagonist lovingly lingers over the procedure of frying eggs, finishing with a near-ode to eggs: “An egg exists to please. It does not ask to be pampered […] An egg is an instrument of love, there’s no denying.” That ode turns dark and creepy when he compares eggs to women, and the reader realizes that what he loves about eggs are their passivity and willingness to be devoured, as the protagonist longs to devour others so that he can gain something from their loss.

These stories are not joyous or triumphant; they sit smack in the middle of human despair and isolation to reflect them back at the reader—showing us our own coping mechanisms, routines, and efforts to reach out and find meaning in the apparently meaningless. They are powerful little stories indeed, and worth taking some time to digest.

Michael Glenn’s SELECTED STORIES profoundly transform apparently mundane experiences into revelations about human nature.

~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader