Stories within Stories: Zadie Smith and Kyle Minor

TS. “The Embassy of Cambodia” by Zadie Smith, found in New Yorker, Feb. 11 & 18, 2013

TS. “Seven Stories about Kenel of Koulèv-Ville” by Kyle Minor, found in The Iowa Review,  Vol. 42, No. 3, Winter 2012/13

Both of these stories employ numbers to break up the narrative sequence.  In Smith’s case, it allows for a series of disconnected brief scenes.  Settings, characters, and images repeat, so it’s not as though the scenes are entirely disconnected, but rather the “flow” of the plot and conventional development of tension is replaced by repetition with difference.  In fact, if anything, this method allows for more connection than a conventional narrative, rather than less.  For Minor, as the title implies, the seven stories are seven stories, which means that seven “short shorts” involving the same characters, settings, tone, and some shared imagery, combine together to create the one complete short story—though in Minor’s case the seven sections are themselves clearly stories with the basic beginnings, middles, and ends.