Tag Archives: Ted Chiang

Our Favorite Short Stories

We asked our team to name one of their favorite stories in the hope it will shed some light into what the Orcans are hoping to discover within the slush pile.

David Anderson, Reader:

“Quaestio De Centauris” by Primo Levi. One of my favorites. How Levi, with such apparent ease creates the world so efficiently blew me away. There are no excess words. In no place does it sag under its own weight. Since the world has been built so well and the characters developed, the reader participates in realization and the heartbreak. 

Tommy Anderson, Reader:

For my favorite short story, I decided to go back and read some of the work that I remembered from some of my early fiction classes in college. There were a lot of great ones, but one that has stuck with me that  I honestly haven’t heard much about in any other instance is “Sugarbaby” by William Gay. I think the voice is done so well. The aggressively passive ways in which the protagonist, known as Beasley, tries to cling to the world he understands, even after he blows it up (sort of literally) is as heartbreaking as it is captivating. I find myself chasing these characters in my own writing: broken people who try, but often fail, to find what comfort they can.

Renee Jackson, Editor:

“Understand” by Ted Chiang is a brilliant example of using form as a core element of storytelling. First person is critical here as it allows the narrator’s vocabulary and sentence structure to change as the story progresses. The story also does an interesting job of taking a Flowers for Algernon concept and pivoting it so that it’s still a fresh account.

Ai Jiang, Reader:

I thought about it for a while and I think I’d have to say Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The narrator speaks about Omelas rather than themselves—a way of storytelling that we usually would find somewhat distancing. But I feel in this case, the descriptions presented and the way the narrator talks about Omelas embodies their personality. The narrator often interjects with their personal thoughts and comments on certain aspects of the society. It does a lot of scene setting, but it’s done purposefully because of the narrator’s reveal in the latter half of the story, which offers equally descriptive imagery but a shocking contrast.

Zachary Kellian, Publisher/Senior Editor:

I chose “The Man Who Went to Chicago,” a short story from Richard Wright’s posthumous 1961 collection Eight Men. Another literary great, James Baldwin, had this to say of Wright (one of my idols): “His landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, of the human heart.” To map the human experience with words should be the goal of every short story. To that end, “The Man Who Went to Chicago” has stuck with me ever since I randomly picked it off a bookshelf in the Chicago Public Library many years ago. I was looking to read a story that I could relate to, and instead, read something that helped me relate to others. It was a gift that Wright’s words keep on giving.

Zoë Mikel-Stites, Reader:

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman. It’s awkward and weird, and when I read it, it struck me hard enough to be something I think about to this day, even though I hadn’t read it in years. It plays with tone, awareness, and vocabulary in a way that I always find fascinating. Now it’s something I look to when I think about when I consider the effect I want my own writing to have. It was also made into a feature film in 2017, which I now have to go watch.

Ronak Patel, Reader:

“A Temporary Matter,” by Jhumpa Lahiri. This is not the first story about a couple’s marriage falling apart due to the loss of a child. But the lens in which it is told, that of a South Asian immigrant couple, provides a unique look at an old subject. I think that’s what first drew me not only to this story but writing as an art. I feel represented reading Lahiri’s work.  I see how these stories can unfold with people that share common experiences, something I did not have growing up. The cultural lens aside, this story nails so many of the indicators of great writing that we look for at Orca: quality imagery and narration, realistic dialogue, deep subtext, and skillful insertion of backstory.

Marci Pliskin, Reader:

This was tough! I’m going with Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” It is dark, funny and heartbreaking. Every word on the page has purpose and each image is crystal clear. Hempel makes me feel generous toward the narrator who fails to be supportive of her dying friend. Oh, and this is the first story she wrote. 

Joe Ponepinto, Publisher/Senior Editor:

I was tempted to go with James Joyce’s “The Dead,” but everybody already knows that’s the best short story ever written. And then I thought about Thomas Mann’s “Death In Venice,” (which is also one of my favorite movies) but at 70 pages long it is more of a novella than a short story. So I am going with an old favorite that I have read many times and never tire of reading, “Bullet in The Brain,” by Tobias Wolff. Wolff gives us a completely unlikable character and then transforms him, in the milliseconds between life and death, into a heartbreaking reminder that every person was once a child, innocently embracing the hope of life to come.

Lauren Voeltz, Reader:

“The Redwoods” by Joyce Carol Oates  (Issue 70 of American Short Fiction, 2020). The story is experimental in form—taking on the literal shape of the interior of a redwood tree, weaving in and out of the present and the past. Oates connects these sections seamlessly. Oates has an excellent style and voice. The story is understandable on a first read, but upon rereading, it reveals deeper meaning. This story challenges emotionally, and I keep coming back to it for these reasons.

Orca Blog for November — Announcing Our Literary-Speculative Issue

We’d like to take November’s blog to introduce an upcoming concept issue for our journal. While Orca was founded on our love for literary storytelling, we like to champion any use of rich, carefully crafted language. Some of our favorite novels and short stories fall under the umbrella of genre fiction, but they remain classics in our heart for their wonderful use of language and their broad exploration of imagination.

With that in mind, beginning with our fourth issue and continuing with every third issue of Orca, we will be celebrating submissions of literary speculative fiction and shining a deserved light on those storytellers who push boundaries and manage to break away from the conventions and tropes of their genre and seek to craft something truly special.

What do we mean by the terms Literary and Speculative—and what does it mean when those two worlds combine?

Literary: A style of writing in which the focus is on language and character, and plot is often secondary. A literary story is about ideas. It has an overarching theme distinct from the narrative and a leitmotif running through it. It treats its characters as real human beings and not as props to espouse an author’s opinion or to simply move the plot forward. It approaches language as art: a literary writer pays attention to every sentence, every word.

Speculative: The term “speculative” has been employed by writers and editors to connote works from a variety of genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopian, space opera, and similar subjects. All of those genres are welcome, and we hope to celebrate shining examples of them all, but for Orca we are specifically looking for submissions that adhere more closely to the original sense of the word, which is to consider what might be, instead of what is. Think a near-future where the political structure is turned on its head. Think about an alternative present where the South won the Civil War. Imagine a fantastical horror that over the course of ten pages begins to feel all too real. Think Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone. Think “what if….”

Both definitions pay particular attention to the idea behind the story. Good, literary speculative fiction has its basis in concepts that are larger (often much larger) than the story itself, and seeks to examine one aspect of it, and how that aspect affects the story’s characters.

A great example of excellent literary speculative fiction can be found in the opening paragraph of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Notice how, on its surface the narrator is simply establishing a setting, but then marvel at how, within this description, Atwood manages an incredible amount of world building:

We slept in what had once been a gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirt, then pants, then in one earring, spike green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, and undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands make of up of issue paper flowers, cardboard devils, and a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with snow of light.

Not a word is wasted. Notice how the backstory it hints at creates far more questions than answers. Notice how the future being described is done, not through heavy-handed narration or purple prose, but through carefully constructed sensory images that give the novel’s world a full past, present, and future, all in a brief 150 words.

Other great examples of this type of writing include works by Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. LeGuin, Julio Cortázar, and Ta-Nehisi Coates latest novel, The Water Dancer. Notice how Chiang’s stories are much more about the people dealing with and affected by the great unknown than they are about defining the unknown itself. Remember that LeGuin was using the lens of science fiction and fantasy to tackle subjects like institutionalized racism and transgender rights long before they were at the forefront of the political realm.

Horror, too, can find a home within the speculative literary world, for what genre better epitomizes the collective sentiment of the human condition that we tend to feel today? In this world of polemics and 24-hour push notifications, who among us can turn on the news or read an article and not be stricken with a sense, false or not, of impending doom?

There are few better than Shirley Jackson when it comes to writing literary horror. Consider her opening to Hill House and the world it opens up to us, like the day to twilight shift of a full eclipse:

No organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

One of literature’s most ominous openings. More examples of great literary horror can be found in the works of: Robert W. Chambers, Alma Katsu, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King.

While we want to keep this upcoming issue open to all types of literary speculative fiction, it is unlikely that we would publish anything considered high fantasy or hard sci-fi. So too, would we be likely to pass on anything that focuses on extreme gore, violence, or eroticism. All of those can be great tools for a skilled writer, but only when used sparingly.

Consider this thematic issue our challenge to the many writers who have submitted to us in the past, to break away from the mold and to craft something boldly imaginative. To pose a “what if…,” explore it, and perhaps, even attempt to answer it. We cannot wait to read your submissions!

– Zac and Joe