I love short story collections. In high school, I could hardly wait for my father to finish his copy of the annual anthology of award-winning short stories. Some of the best work I have ever read has been in the form of short stories. George Saunders’s brilliant Tenth of December comes to mind.
But I don’t only read fantasy or science fiction. I read in all genres, and one recent compilation of short stories that I feel good about recommending is Scrapings and Leavings by Dennis Mansker. This collection includes stories and plays written over the course of many years. Each story or play offers the reader food for thought.
I liked that he included background as to why he chose the title and also why he wrote each story or play.
Mansker takes us into some of the darker days of the 1960s and 70s, sometimes introducing us to people we may not want to know and situations we don’t want to be in. Some protagonists are endearing, and some not so much—but all are intriguing, and all kept me reading.
The story that really stood out to me was My Summer of Crime. It details the youthful misadventures of Farnsworth, who later becomes the protagonist of his novel, A Bad Attitude, which is set during the Vietnam War.
You can find this book of short stories and Dennis Mansker’s other work at Amazon.com: Dennis Mansker: books, biography, latest update.
About the Author
Dennis Mansker considers himself at 78 one of the latest of late bloomers. He published his first book, A Bad Attitude: A Novel from the Vietnam War, in 2002 at the age of 57. His second book, Scrapings and Leavings, will be published in 2023, and he is hard at work on his third book, Destiny in Dallas, which is on track to be published early in 2024.
He was born in Longview WA, spent five years on a dairy farm near Bristow OK, and is a 1973 graduate of Western Washington University in Bellingham WA.
He was drafted into the army in 1967, and spent nearly a year in Vietnam as company clerk of two US Army Transportation Corps trucking companies, an experience which formed the basis for the plot of his first book.
He retired after 31 years of state service with the Employment Security Department. He is responsible for producing four children, nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren (so far).
He lives in Olympia WA with his long-suffering wife Susan and two cats, who generously allow their humans to think that they are in charge.
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