Going Away Shoes—Jill McCorkle’s first short story collection in eight years—is comprised of eleven stories, each of which introduces the reader to a woman who, in some way or another, feels trapped in her life or situation. These characters yearn for something better—or, at the very least, different—and range in circumstances from a wife who never stopped loving the boyfriend of her youth (“Driving to the Moon”) to a divorcee writing a brutally honest letter to her former marriage counselor (“PS”) to a lonely woman fantasizing that the stranger who left his truck parked in her yard might just be her soul mate (“Me and Bigfoot”).

Yet, despite their differences, all of these women seem to be having come-to-Jesus moments, giving their lives honest appraisals, perhaps for the first time, and trying to make sense of what has become of them. It is from that unflinching honesty and perception that the power of McCorkle’s fantastic collection derives. No shrinking violets here, and instead of the “quiet desperation” we so often see in literature (especially short fiction), McCorkle’s characters often have about them a very loud desperation.

Take for example the following passage from “Driving to the Moon,” in which the protagonist, now married with children, is contacted by the man she never stopped loving:

She looked down at her calendar as he talked. Her youngest son had varsity soccer tryouts and the oldest, a sophomore at Clemson, has planned to come home for the weekend. Her husband had to lecture out of town. The library where she worked in special collections was under construction and she had promised to work extra hours to get everything organized. In a movie, life would stop for such an event, but it doesn’t happen in reality. People bury spouses and go right back to work. Disasters happen and people pay their bills and go to the grocery store. In her mind she imagined the drive—just under three hours—she could get up early and make a day of it; she could rearrange a couple of things and be back in plenty of time to take the kids out to dinner and wash all the laundry her son would bring home from college.

Jill McCorkle

Here and elsewhere, readers get the sense that McCorkle’s heroes feel as if this might be their last good chance to act out, to effect some change in their lives, or correct some missed opportunity or mistake. And they’ll be damned if they’re going to let it slip on by.

In perhaps the most heartbreaking story in the book (“Intervention,” selected by Lorrie Moore for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2004), a guilt-stricken woman struggles to decide whether confronting her forgiving husband for his drinking would constitute one more betrayal. That conflict is captured perfectly in the very first paragraph:

The intervention is not Marilyn’s idea but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring “all right” into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. Things are so horrible all over the world that it makes them feel lucky just to be alive. Sid is sixty-five. He is retired. He is disappearing before her very eyes.

Like much of this collection, “Intervention” presents the reader with a woman whose back is against the wall. That she comes out fighting is what makes her—and many of McCorkle’s characters—so compelling. Even when they make bad choices, you can’t help but cheer for them.

These are certainly not comic stories—at least, not primarily—but, like Moore, McCorkle couldn’t not be funny, even if she wanted to. Writers who are able to make us laugh out loud are often viewed with unjust suspicion, as some readers seem to fear that humor is somehow “unliterary, ” that what makes us laugh cannot also be profound. That’s nonsense, of course, and the dark humor contained in these stories testifies to what Shakespeare knew well: that humor has the power to expose as much about our struggles and our pains as it does about our triumphs and our joys. Jill McCorkle has that rare ability to hit you from both directions at once, and Going Away Shoes is a fitting testament to her awesome talents.

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Five short stories modeled on the works of the old masters make up this smart, witty first collection

Damion Searls’s accomplished and erudite short story collection, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, opens with a quote from a novel by the French writer Louis Aragon:

Why does the painter need a model if he’s going to deviate from it? I know the way Matisse laughs with his eyes, and when I put this question to him he laughed thus, silently. He told me, mischievously, that if there were no model one could not deviate from it… I began to love Matisse’s very deviation from the model, the way he takes liberties with it. I understand him now, better than I understand myself.

That epigraph offers the first clue that Searls—a well regarded literary scholar and translator—has arrived upon a unique and fitting concept for his first book of fiction. As becomes clear in the collection’s acknowledgments (spoiler alert?), each of the five stories in this slender yet powerful book is inspired by a specific work from a past master (with the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges also making his presence felt). In “The Cubicles,” Searls re-imagines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” from the point of view of a drone swept up in the dot-com boom and bust; whereas Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin” has a second life as “A Guide to San Francisco.”

I happily admit that, although I had some vague understanding that muses were cavorting about, I was very much in the dark as to what kind of Matissian “models” Searls was operating under. And that is perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay this collection. While there is no doubt much pleasure and benefit to be derived from comparing these five stories to their archetypes—and the similarities and deviations here reveal as much about Searls’s source material as they do about his own work—the author is keenly aware that his stories must all succeed on their own merits, independent of their models.

Damion Searls

And they do. In all five stories—whether it be the portrait of a separating couple embarking on one last vacation together (“Goldenchain”), or the tale of a young writer whose life is circling back on itself (“56 Water Street”)—the writing is vivid and original. Consider the following passages:

When we arrived at last, a beautiful young woman opened the door with a radiant smile and told us where to leave our umbrellas. A second beautiful woman holding a baby wafted past and offered to take our coats, and a third beautiful young woman emerged from the kitchen like a butterfly from a cocoon and asked what we wanted to drink. Angela and I were as if snow-blinded. (“56 Water Street”)

Some time before, at the height of the internet boom, the jaunty yet autocratic leader I have already mentioned decreed that the “e” in “Prophet” should become italic, and it did not seem worthwhile to go back and make the name consistent: as at the birth of our Savior, a new era had begun, and you can now see at a glance whether an entryway sign or monument in stone or ID card dates from the new dispensation or the barbaric, pagan past. (“The Cubicles”)

Nothing old-fashioned or gimmicky there, and throughout What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going the sharp humor, impressive intelligence, and vivid imagination of the author is evident. At the end, yes, I was anxious to revisit the works of Gide, Hawthorne, Inoue, Nabokov, and Landolfi—but even more eager to read the next piece of fiction by Damion Searls.

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