Over the holiday break I read—more like gorged on—Sandra Cisneros’ short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek. Many of her short stories are only a couple of pages, yet they left me feeling full, complete and utterly haunted. Cisneros speaks of her writing on her website: “A good story doesn’t care. What matters is that the story cast its magic, that it silence you into listening, and move you to laugh, and even better, to cry and then laugh, and a long time later, to haunt you. Long after you have closed the book, it’s what haunts and stays with you that matters, for then the story will have done its work.” I encourage you to read these short stories, as well as post a comment on any books or stories that have recently been haunting you.
“Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it’s not that way at all. It’s like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they’re not colors anymore and all that’s left is a white hum.
“There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn’t talk, just walked around all day with his harmonica in his mouth. Didn’t play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out.
This is how it is with me. Love I mean.”
— Sandra Cisneros, from Woman Hollering Creek
12thstreetonline's Weblog 
January 31, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Sandra Cisneros’ humor, sweetness, empathy and poetry is inspiring. Unlike so many of today’s writers she never pretends that cleverness is honesty. Thanks for the recommendation!
February 2, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Something I sped through in the midst of last semester was “As a Friend,” by Forrest Gander, which reads as a novel, a story, a poem all in one. Today I flipped open a page at random searching for examples to post here, and this is what I read, from the viewpoint of a character in mourning: “They say the South American ghost eel makes a high-pitched piercing hum. Sometimes, it seems like the air around me must be full of them. Invisible. Screaming. / In your underwear drawer, I found an uncut geode. Everything means something, what does this mean? A memento? A present for someone? For me? / That first morning when you slept in my bed, I woke before you. And waking was the climax denied me all night.”