Short stories with unusual perspectives, formats, characters, etc.

[nameraka]

best story I've come across written from the 2nd person point of view.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/06/until-gwen/302966/

[Bouvre]

It's in The Atlantic and most importantly it's Lehane -- no surprise it's a real winner.

That being said, I'm grateful you brought it to my attention. I love his punchy style.

 

I'm a sucker for second person, too. I experimented with it in my own story, told from the perspective of an incubus inhabiting/attempting to possess a lovestruck gay man.

It actually sort of blends itself with first person at one point, too: http://reservoirlit.com/leonard1

 

 

Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is one of my favorite uses of second person. A novel about trying to read a novel, only to come across -- instead of one single story -- various stories. It playfully begins with "You are about to read Italo Calvino's new novel If On A Winter's Night A Traveler."

 

 

as for other examples of unsung perspectives/characters:

"Grendel" by John Gardner, told from Grendel's perspective.

 

My classmate, Benjamin Ludwig, recently published "Ginny Moon," which is told from the perspective of a 14-year old girl with autism trying to get herself kidnapped by her biological parents. I highly recommend it; it's pretty incredible.

 

I'm a huge sucker for epistolary stories. One of my recent favorites was Claire Vaye Watkins' "The Last Thing We Need"

https://granta.com/the-last-thing-we-need/

 

J. Robert Lennon's "The Accursed Items" is a short story in the form of a list. The entire thing isn't available online, but This American Life included these examples in the transcript:

 

A bottle of pain reliever brought on a business trip that proves, at the moment it is most needed, to be filled not with pain reliever but with buttons.

 

An accomplished forgery of a famous painting that was thought to have been lost in a 1965 mansion fire, which now hangs in the largest gallery of a major American art museum.

 

Sneakers, hanging from the power line, with one half of a boy's broken glasses stuffed into each toe.

 

A Minnie Mouse doll you found by the roadside and brought home, intending to run it through the washer and give it your infant son, but which looked no less forlorn after washing and was abandoned on a basement shelf, only to be found by your son eight years later and mistaken for a once-loved toy that he had himself forsaken, leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame.

 

Love letters seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag and packed, along with a plush bear holding a plastic heart, into an unlabeled cardboard box, itself loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes when the police headquarters was moved and forever lost.

 

Nude Polaroid's of a 13-year-old female cousin.

 

An icicle preserved in the freezer by a child which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repair man.

 

A gay porno magazine thrown onto a ball field from a car window, and perused with great interest by the adolescent members of both teams, two of whom meet in the woods some weeks later to reproduce the tableaus they have seen, leading to a gradual understanding that they are, in fact, gay, an incident, the memory of which causes one of the two, when he is well into a life that is disappointing emotionally, professionally, and sexually, to fling a gay porno magazine out his car window as he passes an occupied ball field on his way to what will be an unsuccessful job interview.

 

A biscuit, crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot.

 

The orange toboggan, whisking her to her death.

 

 

That's all I got for now.

[Bouvre]

Ah! Charles Yu's Fable,

which is told in third-person but incorporates the voice of the character telling his therapist a story in an effort to get him to open up.

It's in turns hilarious and heartfelt. Highly recommended.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/fable-by-charles-yu

[nameraka]

i'm a huge sucker for anything calvino, but I don't think I've read that one.

[Bouvre]

Right?

Calvino's probably the writer responsible for revitalizing reading/writing for me.