sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: short stories

A collection of short fiction by NK Jemisin. I don't have a lot to say about this collection, tbh! Jemisin's a good writer, and she has a bunch of very good stories in her. Like in almost any short story collection*, I don't love every story in the collection, but when you're reading a collection by a writer who works for you, the baseline level of worth-reading in the collection is still not bad. And some of the stories are excellent!

A few of the stories in the collection I've read before, but most of them are new to me, and the ones I already knew were worth rereading.

My biggest problem with this collection, tbh, is the ongoing war between my descriptivist values and prescriptivist instincts for language, as applies to the title of the book. "Until" as a word is actually a derivative of "till" so if you want a short form of "until," "till" is right there! You don't need to go for "'til"! That's a form of over-correction! But given the prevalence of "'til," including (obviously!) in professionally-edited writing, I think I am losing this one, and I need to learn how to accept it. Sigh. The eternal struggle.

*every story collection except Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, where I love every single story!

I've been holding on to this review since last November since it's for a book published by a HarperCollins imprint, but the HarperCollins Union finally has a contract with their employer (yay!!!!! go union go!) and has said to feel free to post reviews again! So here we go.

Moira's Pen is a book of short stories (and poetry, and anecdotes, and descriptions of relevant archeological objects) from the Queen's Thief universe. And ehhh, it's fine? But at the end of the main series, my increased understanding of the actual themes and priorities the overarching series narrative was engaging with meant I have lost much of my enamourment with it, and the stories and content in Moira's Pen are mostly pretty slight and meant to just be fun little additions to the novels. I did enjoy the new Immakuk and Ennikar content!

This is a pretty elderly collection of folk tales, published nearly 60 years ago, and and it is hugely invested in Aarne-Thompson tale types and Thompson's motif index, which is a highly european system and not....ideal as a framework for investigating stories outside the bounds of the areas the types and index were based on. When you're choosing which stories are worth studying, and what elements of a story are the important elements for what the story is doing, if you do this based mainly on stories from a different background, it's going to affect how the folklore of the culture you're studying is represented!

Anyway, so there's that, and then I also actually have a concern about how accurately the stories are translated. Of course I have not read the originals in Japanese because I am monolingual, but there was a word choice at one point that just stopped me in my tracks.

At one point a character is referred to as having been "crucified". My understanding of Japan is that Christianity is an extremely minor presence there, and even more so historically -- and none of the other stories in the collection show the slightest hint of Christian influence as far as I could tell. So either in the original the character really was crucified and the (generally fairly comprehensive) annotations did not bother discussing the highly unusual presence of this element in the story, or the translator was so laissez-faire about his translation that he paid no attention to the connotations of his word choices. This does not fill me with confidence about the things I DON'T know enough to question in the rest of the collection!

I did appreciate that in the story introductions there were often explanations about elements of Japanese culture that underpin a story, as it helps contextualize aspects of the story that would otherwise be confusing to the outsider reader. And it was very readable as a whole, and included both stories I knew already and stories that were new to me.

So.....a decent collection for its era, but not one I can unambiguously recommend.

A short story collection by my favourite writer of short stories! This is a recently re-released and expanded collection; the original was published by a smaller press back in 2014, which I loved, but now it exists with Extra Stories so obviously I had to buy this version too.

Most of the stories in this collection are old familiar friends to me, but there were a few stories I've never read, and they were also excellent. Cho really excels at writing about the intersection between the supernatural and the mundane, and at writing about people who have all the quirks and foibles and irritating habits of real people but are still people you like and care about. This peaks in her skill at writing ghost grandmas/ghost aunties but really everything she writes is great -- every single story in this collection is worth reading, which I find is a rarity in short story collections!

My aunt J is a person who cycles through a lot of different hobbies (relatable), and one of her recent ones has been translation. This book is a collection of folktales which she translated into English from German - some of them are originally German tales, and some of them are stories from other sources for which she found German translations and then she translated the German into English. I can't speak to the quality of the translation, especially for the stories that went through multiple levels of translation, but Aunt J's writing style is clear and a pleasure to read.

It's a lovely collection of stories; Aunt J has good taste, or perhaps I should say similar taste to me :P She focused largely on stories that feature women and girls who play an active role in the story, which is a subset that often has not gotten a lot of attention from the (mostly snooty academic male) folklorists of the past.

The collection includes many stories I already knew, but also some stories that weren't familiar to me, which is truly impressive! Though often there were still elements that were familiar even in those stories, because there are often thematic patterns you'll find in traditional stories.

It's a self-published book that was self-edited, so there are a couple small proofreading errors, but honestly it's doing great by the standards of self-publishing, and even by the standards of some professionally published books, lol. As I would expect from Aunt J and her perfectionist tendencies! (you should see the CORNERS and the PERFECTLY DYED COLOURS on the art quilts she made in a previous hobby!)

This book has been my bedtime reading for the last few weeks and it was a lovely read. So glad Aunt J gave me a copy of this collection at Christmas, and that I finally got round to reading it.

This is a collection of short stories translated from Japanese, and inspired by traditional Japanese ghost stories, from what I understand, so I am absolutely confident I'm missing nuance and implications since I don't know any of the stories it's based on -- but you know what, this was an entirely charming book even coming in cold as an outsider.

The stories feature an exuberant mixing together of living people and ghosts, of people who have supernatural talents and people who don't, all just living their lives (or their deaths, lol) and being themselves. Some of the stories intertwine with each other, with characters who are minor background characters in one becoming the main character in another, giving you different perspectives on things in a fun way, but each story is complete in itself. The overall impression one gets is that the author just likes people, even the ones who are irritating or who make bad choices or who don't like other people themselves, and it's a very cheering sort of impression to come away with.

Thanks to

skygiants for the recommendation!

Let's move on to the novelettes! These are also, like the short stories, all available to read for free online.

1. Colors of the Immortal Palette - Caroline M Yoachim
Wow, this is really incredible. It isn't a story that I personally love, but I really respect and admire all the excellent things that it's doing so skillfullly.

2. That Story Isn't the Story - John Wiswell
I missed this story when it first came out, and....huh. It's real good at getting the reader into a mindset, at creating a mood and a feeling. I'm impressed.

3. Bots of the Lost Ark - Suzanne Palmer
I found it mildly interesting, but it didn't really move me.

4. Unseelie Brothers, Ltd - Fran Wilde
There are some very interesting elements, but I felt like the characters were all pretty flat, and I don't think I followed the thematic arc of what the story was trying to do.

5. O2 Arena - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
Again, some interesting elements, but doesn't come together well for me.

6. No Award

7. L'Esprit de L'Escalier - Catherynne M Valente
Ugh, retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as disaffected miserable modern young people in an unsuccessful marriage, and it's just not....not a version that I care to read about even a little bit.

Hugo finalists are out, and alas I'm not hugely excited about the results in a lot of the categories. BUT She Who Became the Sun is a finalist for best novel, and that's the most important thing!!! I was also very pleased to see "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" and "Unknown Number" in the short story list.

I've now set up my spreadsheet of all finalists in the categories I am able to engage with cogently, to keep track of what I've read and what my opinions are! So get ready for posts to trickle out over the next months with hugo opinions.

Let's start with going through all the short story nominees, since those are quick reads that are all available to read for free online.

1. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather - Sarah Pinsker
I may agonize a bit longer about which order to place my top two stories in this category, as both this one and the next one are SO brilliant, but they're doing such different things that it's hard to actually compare them head-on. I love the way it engages with the folk tradition, and internet message boards, and also how it plays with how to communicate information to a reader beyond what is explicitly stated in the text.

2. Unknown Number - Blue Neustifter
The other story that's tied for first place! I love the premise of two versions of the same person from alternate universes communicating with each other by text message, and it's full of so much of both compassion and radical honesty about accepting who you are, it's incredible.

3. Proof by Induction - Jose Pablo Iriarte
Over the years I've read a number of short stories on the topic of a recorded copy of a person remaining after they're dead, and the living loved ones of that person interacting with the copy, and although this one's fine, I just don't feel like it's top-of-the-line in its particular subgenre.

4. Mr Death - Alix E Harrow
I can see and appreciate what this one's doing, but it just doesn't work for me personally. Plus the ending really irritates me, it feels far too facile that in the end it's actually TOTALLY fine what he did and it just means he gets a different job, even though he was gearing up to make a real sacrifice for something he thought was worth it.

5. Tangles - Seanan McGuire
This appears to be Magic: The Gathering fanfic, so I come at it with a disadvantage of knowing nothing about Magic other than that it's a deck-building card game, but not knowing canon has never actually a barrier for me in reading fanfic, lol. But I just found this story so uncompelling! I think there was a kernel of something mildly interesting in it, but the way it was expressed didn't work for me at all.

6. No Award

7. The Sin of America - Catherynne M Valente
When this first came out I think I gave up on it PRETTY early on. I have now tried reading it again, to give it its proper chance against the rest of the slate, but I found it SO boring that my eyes glazed over enough while reading and I definitely missed things. So like. I tried to read it again but I don't know if that really counts! But no thanks, this one's not for me.

Islamicates Volume I, edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

A collection of stories that was made available free online, this book is specifically focused on collecting works of sff inspired by Muslim cultures. My initial reaction to the book is that it badly desperately horribly needs a copyeditor (AUGH it was painful to read in places!!) and tbh could also have used a stronger hand in a more in-depth editing too, but if I set that aside, it was a pretty interesting read!

Not all of the stories worked for me, and even the best stories were only fairly good, but I really enjoyed reading a whole book of stories about Muslim characters, a demographic who don't tend to get a lot of focus in sff. My favourite stories in the collection were "Calligraphy," "Searching for Azrail," and "Congruence."

A Mosque Among the Stars, edited by Ahmed A. Khan and Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Like Islamicates, this book is a freely-available collection of Muslim-focused sff short stories. But it's an earlier effort and, imo, a weaker one. It's also badly in need of a strong copyedit and editor. But it has an even greater disparity between the stronger stories and the weaker ones, with the weak ones very weak, imo, and I was left with some complicated feelings even about some of the stories I enjoyed reading. I'd recommend reading Islamicates over this one.

This book was published through a kickstarter, which I very happily backed, based on the premise of: a book of sff short stories featuring wlw where one woman is skilled in fighting and the other woman is skilled in something not-fighting. Delightful!

I finally got around to reading the result, and although none of the stories really blew me away, as a whole reading the anthology was just very lovely. It's nice to spend that much time reading sff that's about wlw who get happy endings! To just spend some time in a headspace where that's normal!

My favourite story in the collection was "The Sweet Tooth of Angwar Bec" by Ellen Kushner, a short story set in her Swordspoint universe which features Katherine from about five years after Privilege of the Sword. It was very charming! But a number of other stories in the collection were also fun and charming (especially "Margo Lai’s Guide To Dueling Unprepared," "Elinor Jones vs. the Ruritanian Multiverse," "The Commander and the Mirage Master’s Mate," "The Parnassian Courante," and "The Scholar of the Bamboo Flute"), and even the stories I felt meh about were still worth reading on some level. I didn't actively dislike any of the stories.

Overall: I'm unlikely to ever bother rereading, but glad I decided to back this kickstarter and get my hands on this collection!

I've loved the two novels by Nalo Hopkinson I read, so I was really looking forward to this short story collection of hers, but it turns out I guess her short fiction doesn't work for me :( Some of the stories were more interesting to me than others, but none of them were stories that I completely liked, and a number of them I did not at all like.

My experience of her novels thus far is that it took me a while to get into them but once I was there I was very invested. Perhaps it's just that in short story form there isn't enough time for me to get into each new set of Hopkinson's characters and worlds, before it's over. Too bad!

A collection of mostly short stories and a few poems, by Ursula Vernon under her penname T. Kingfisher. I'd read most of these works before, in the various venues they'd been published, but there are a couple new ones, and also it was nice to revisit the ones I'd read before.

A solid collection, where even the works that I like the least I still like a fair amount -- unusual for a short story collection! I just really like Vernon as an author and she rarely goes wrong for me. The two stories about Grandma Harken are probably the best of the collection, but there's other great ones too, and I got something out of all the stories.

Here's my thoughts on the six short story finalists for this year's Hugos! None of my fave stories for the year ended up on the list, despite me nominating them and everything, but so it goes. I at least like this list better than the short story list from last year! There's even a story I like well enough to be voting it #1 without complaint!

I'm putting these down in the order in which I will vote for them.

1. Open House on Haunted Hill, by John Wiswell
Aww, I'm charmed by this! I love the pov of the haunted house, and the decisions it makes as it tries to bond with people. This is the only story on the list of finalists I hadn't already read before, since it's not published in one of the venues I regularly keep on top of, so it was a pleasant surprise.

2. Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
I like it for what it is, but it's pretty lightweight and short, and feels more like an introduction to an idea/world than like a story that's complete in itself.

3. Metal Like Blood in the Dark, by T Kingfisher
It's interesting and I found it compelling, but I don't like it.

4. A Guide for Working Breeds, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Okay so I like the idea of robots rebelling against the capitalist framework they're trapped in, through the power of FRIENDSHIP, but the focus on cute dogs is not working for me, and the voices of the main characters feel pretty one-note, so the story didn't really resonate for me.

5. Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse, by Rae Carson
A decent story, but it's about a) zombies and b) giving birth, so I'm just not that interested.

6. The Mermaid Astronaut, by Yoon Ha Lee
The prose style feels so distancing to me that I just glaze over when I try to read this story. I think it's going for a fairy-tale feel, given that it is clearly inspired by The Little Mermaid, but it doesn't land for me. Sometimes when I push through to keep reading a story that is boring me at the start, it picks up eventually, but I skimmed my way all the way to the end of this one and never got pulled in. Which is too bad because I think the things it's trying to do are probably interesting.

I read this short story collection for the promise of a story about the Thousand and One Nights with time travel, despite having decided after reading Chiang's other collection that his writing is not for me.

And...his writing continues to not be for me. The vast majority of the stories in this collection, like his other collection, are explorations of thought experiments housed in a light narrative frame--and in one case he doesn't even bother with a narrative frame at all. Also the story I was lured in by isn't actually about the Thousand and One Nights or any of the stories in it, it's just vaguely inspired by the structure and setting!! And I didn't find it emotionally satisfying either! Sigh.

I don't know what else I expected though. Chiang is the kind of writer he is, and I am the kind of reader I am, and the two just don't get along. That's how it goes sometimes. I'm going stop trying with Chiang going forward, and leave him to be enjoyed by readers better suited to what he has to offer.

An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova

This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort of....canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if it's gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.

As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.

Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singer's errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.

It's GREAT.

Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but that's going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and it's used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!

One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something that's.....kind of a simile in reverse? It's a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with what's actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Here's an example:

"A white birch wasn't bending to the ground,
Pale leaves weren't spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his mother"

It's not a method of presenting imagery I've ever seen before, but it's clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.

Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these like....agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someone's head, only to someone's "reckless head." Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always "green wine" and it's always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are "daring good youths." And so on.

Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didn't like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They weren't funny to me at all, because I don't have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but it's cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!

A collection of short stories by a renowned sff author. I've read a few Chiang stories before, but this was my first time reading a bunch of his work at once and my overwhelming impression is that he's very good at writing a very specific type of story and that type of story is mostly not my thing.

Chiang's stories are all "here is an idea, let's see all the ways we can use a narrative to explore the full implications of the idea," and characters are used solely as props for the narrative explorations rather than as full people worth being interested in. And I must say he's really good at coming up with interesting implications for his ideas and conveying them in a narrative!

But the thing about writing this sort of story is that it turns out that if I don't particularly care about the idea then I don't particularly care about the story, and at their worst the stories read like an essay with a thin veneer of storytelling. And even if I DO like a story I don't CARE about it, I'm just like "hmm how interesting" and then move on, because I'm not drawn in emotionally.

Occasionally Chiang does manage to integrate a character arc a little more fully into the idea he's exploring, stories where the idea and the human interest combine and affect each other. These are the strongest stories imo. "Stories of Your Life" is one of these, and it's rightly one of his better known stories - the one the film Arrival is based on, not that I've seen the movie. But I actually had a bit of a Feeling at the end of the story, and it's the only story of the bunch to manage that. It's about a linguist working to decipher the language of an alien species, and the way that her experience with the aliens affects her experience of her life, though also of course about exploring ideas around what language is and what it does.

I'd say the other strongest story in the collection is the last one, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." Although that MIGHT be just because I found it the most compelling idea to explore amongst them all It's about being able to turn off people's ability to see some humans as more beautiful than other humans, and what that would mean for a society.

Anyway. Not sure I'll bother to seek out more of Chiang's work specifically. He's very talented, for sure, but for the most part his works are aimed at a different kind of reader than me.

(Okay no I am going to probably read more of his work, apparently his book Exhalations includes a story about time travel and the Thousand and One Nights, so I need to read that story.)

It's been a while since I've read any Sutcliff, but her prose style is immediately comfortably familiar to me. This book is a series of six linked short stories spanning centuries of Roman Britain, rather than a novel like she usually wrote. I think she does better in novel length, because these stories all felt too slight for me to get much of an attachment to any of the characters - each story featured a new lead character, in a new generation of people living in the area, so there wasn't a lot of space to develop their story. But they were still an interesting read! And it's neat to see the progression over time of the situation in Roman Britain like this, in a way that makes the changes feel real and lived-in.

A different sort of book than any other folktale collection I've encountered! It's a book entirely consisting of explicit material - mostly sexual and some scatological in nature. The book starts with a lengthy introduction explaining why this has reasonable academic value, which is kind of funny, but also I do get why they feel the need to defend the publishing of this!

As the introduction refers to, many folktale collections are thoroughly bowdlerized, at one of several stages. Sometimes an informer feels uncomfortable sharing certain stories with an outsider, sometimes a collector tells an informer that they don't want to hear certain types of material the informer has in their repertoire, sometimes the collector collects it but does nothing with it, sometimes the collector wants to publish the full range of what they have but nobody wants to publish it. And this is very true and something I'm aware of in the other books I read, the levels of biases in what material is or is not considered worth attention.

Vance Randolph, the collector of these stories, apparently collected vast ranges of material from the Ozarks, but was unable to include these particular stories in his previous publications because it wasn't considered appropriate. And the book makes the point that reading these stories just with each other in one fairly sex-focused collection gives the reader a skewed perspective of the Ozarks, and that it would be better to be able to situate these stories amongst all the rest of the stories told in the region. But here we are.

Although the book is a really interesting artifact, it wasn't actually super great as a book to read straight through. The stories are pretty much all short joke stories, where the point is the shocking humour, which got tedious for me to read. And the material, as you might expect as a result, contains a LOT of very bad consent practices which got uncomfortable to just keep plowing through. I think Randolph might be right that these stories would be better understood when contextualized along the other sorts of stories also told in the region -- though as I haven't read any other Ozark folktale collections I can't say for sure how I would read them differently in that context!

Feng Menglong published Stories Old and New in the 17th century in China; it's a collection of stories which were traditionally told by popular story-tellers. Cyril Birch then chose six stories from that collection that he saw as "representative" and translated them and presented them in this book which I read.

It makes for a very interesting read, to be sure, but I am curious about how actually representative Birch's selections are or aren't. And also I have concerns about what biases Birch's translation has introduced! There's one place where his endnote makes it clear he has bowdlerized something: "I have however preferred to follow the 1947 reprint of the original in omitting a few phrases, which add nothing but might be found offensive." He also in one story translates the name of a type of bird local to China as a "canary" because it'll be more familiar to the presumed reader. Which means I do not exactly trust him as a translator to be presenting me with stories that are a close reflection of the original. Even though he noted these two egregious changes in his endnotes, what other more insidious changes might he have made without thinking it worth mentioning?

At any rate I did enjoy reading the collection. I appreciate that these are traditional stories collected and retold by a person from the same culture as the stories themselves; so many folk stories now available to read were collected by 19th century upper-class European men to "save" the oral traditions that their own colonialism was in the process of wiping out, which is sure a thing. China has its own traditions and its own history of publishing and scholarship though, and the stories in this book come out of that instead! Even if my monolingual self had to read them through the lens of Cyril Birch. SIGH.

My favourite story in the collection was The Canary Murders, which is a fun murder mystery about all the knock-on effects of people dying as a result of one initial murder. Good times. My least favourite was probably The Fairy's Rescue, which I found just kind of uninteresting. Possibly I lack the cultural context to be able to emotionally invest in the story. It's definitely the story with by far the most explanatory endnotes, but endnotes can only do so much in bringing a reader along for the ride. Or possibly having my eyee glaze over for all the poetry was more detrimental for this story because it's got a higher proportion of poetry.

I do want to give special recognition to The Lady Who Was A Beggar, which contains two morality tales within it, each about a spousal rejection, and the difference in what happens to the rejecting spouse when it's the wife vs the husband is sure, uh, NOTABLE. The wife who rejects her husband dies in shame. The husband who rejects his wife (by trying to murder her!!) gets a second chance at happiness in their relationship and remarries her!

I don't know why I decided that updates to my efforts to read through all those folk-and-fairy-tale books I was given should be posted three books at a time but apparently I did so here we are. I've finally gotten through three more of them!

A Mountain of Gems: Fairy Tales of the Peoples of the Soviet Land, translated by Irina Zheleznova
This decades-old collection of folk tales first arrived in my possession along with all the others I got earlier this year second-hand, and yet the further I read into it the more I was convinced I've read this book before. So many of the stories within it are familiar to me! One of the libraries I had access to as a child must have had a copy of this book, because I can't think of any other way I would know all these stories. Anyway: some nice stories in this book and I enjoyed reading it, but it's distinctly thin on introductory material so I have no idea how much to trust the collector/translator. And googling gives me nothing but site after site wanting to sell me a copy of the book, and no further actual information about it. So it goes. At any rate I have definite fondness for some of the stories in this collection, especially the one about the woman who makes the rich prince learn a profession before she'll agree to marry him, which later allows her to save his life when he's kidnapped. (He weaves a message asking for her help into a piece of brocade! Amazing.)

Flatlanders and Ridgerunners: Folktales from the Mountains of Northern Pennsylvania, by James York Glimm
A fascinating book, recording an oral folk culture as it was at the time the author collected the materials for this book. I appreciated how it encompassed more than just the standard sort of fictional folk story, but showed how the storytellers also used their skills to embellish on real events from their own lives or local happenings, and talked about their traditions. The individual storytellers are all cited by name, too. The mountains of Pennsylvania have some significant logging history, and so I was interested to note that a couple stories from this collection have analogues in that Paul Bunyan collection I read earlier this year; although here they're not connected with Paul Bunyan, the heart of the story remains the same. I was also interested to note that a couple of the sayings sounded familiar to me, and I wonder if they have broad enough use across the state that I might have heard them when I was a kid in southern Pennsylvania.

Folktales of Israel, edited by Dov Noy
This is one in a series of books about folktales from various countries, which seems to be very reputable, and in which each story is given with detailed notes about the source -- who told it, who recorded it, where it's from, the tale type, and more. Which is great! And there are more from this series in my pile of books to get through so you'll be seeing more of these at some point :) Anyway, this is also one of those collections where tales are organized by theme, which is excellent for being able to note the way that themes are used between different stories. But it makes for a bit more of a tedious reading experience when read cover-to-cover like I do, even if it makes sense from a scholarly standpoint. I just get bored with how similar the stories are that are placed one after the other, and am not able to give them their due attention as a result! I enjoyed though that this was a collection where the stories were collected more recently and so things from the last century (eg airplanes) made it into some of the stories, because folk stories are ever evolving.