The Short Story Reading Challenge

The First Person and Other Stories - Ali Smith

2010-09-24T12:31:00.000-04:00

A fresh collection of short stories from Ali Smith. The first story was definitely my favourite and looked at the form of short stories set with a cancer patient as the backdrop. There is a new expensive drug that could help lots of women, but as it’s expensive is not readily prescribed by doctors. The other one that really stood out was what happens when a woman is shopping in a supermarket and when she turns back to her trolley there is a toddler in it who calls her Mummy and everyone assumes is hers. I love how she deals with the situation.

I like how most of the stories feel like they could actually have happened in Smith’s real life. She is excellent at blending reality with fantasy. Unfortunately they didn’t grab me as much of some of her other collections and stories so I wouldn’t recommend this for your first dip into Ali Smith’s world.

Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman

2010-08-18T04:51:00.001-04:00

A collection of short stories, a follow up to Smoke and Mirrors, by acclaimed Fantasy author Neil Gaiman. I won’t go through each story, just the ones that I particularly enjoyed. The first was A Study in Emerald that matches Sherlock Holmes with Cthulhu myths. Everything is twisted around in this excellent detective story. How to talk to Girls at Parties was a fun look at what happens when two human teenagers stumble into a party filled withwomen not quite of this world. Teenage angst with a sci fi twist.

The Problem of Susan is a tale I had often wondered about myself and it was interesting to read Gaiman’s take on what happened to Susan after the events of The Last Battle. She isn’t taken by Aslan as she is too into fashion and make-up. Harlequin Valentine was another dark and fun tale looking at love and is included in a Lisa Snellings-Clark book inspired by her artwork. The final tale is a novella which catches up with Shadow after American Gods finishes. American Gods is my favourite Gaiman book and it was a lot of fun catching up with him again. A strange tale, but one that will stick in my mind for some time to come.

There were a couple of stories I had read before in other collections, but for the most part they were all new to me. I read Smoke and Mirrors about 8 years ago and I don’t remember enjoying it as much as this set. There were a couple I didn’t take to, but overall a fun and freaky read. Everything you would expect from Gaiman.

Elementals - AS Byatt

2010-08-09T12:35:00.001-04:00

This was my first collection by AS Byatt. It is a collection of six short stories and it is subtitled "Tales of Fire and Ice". They all have fantasy and fairy tale elements to them although "Cold" is the most traditionally fairy tale. It was also my favourite by far in the book. It follows a princess, the youngest child of the king and queen. She is loved by all but isn't very emotional and is often tired and sleepy. One day it snows and she finally comes alive and discovers one of her ancestors was a woman from the cold north lands. Her father wants her to marry (ideally from the North so she can be happy in the cold), but she chooses a man from the desert hotlands. She travels with him but begins to wane until her husband finds a compromise. It was beautifully told and mixed fantastical with cruel. It will definitely stick with me for a long time to come.

The other stories that stood out were "A Lamia in the Cvennes" and "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary". These were about a man who paints a lamia who lives in his swimming pool but tries to get out of marrying her once the painting is done. Christ is about two models who stood for Velsquez as Martha and Mary and where their lives have taken them since.

Unfortunately I wasn't so keen on the other three in the collection. They were a little dull and dragged. The three I did like more than made up for their lacking and as I said, Cold will stay with me a long time. From doing a search online it looks like this isn't the best introduction to Byatt's writing and I know I will be reading more by her in the future.

Nina Berberova, The Tattered Cloak (1943, 1993)

2010-05-10T09:46:00.001-04:00

Cross-posted at Smithereens

When the mood for something Russian strikes, I turn towards Berberova. I know she has been sparsely translated in English, but in France in the 1990s many of her novellas have been republished and have achieved some success. That said, I’m not sure this particular novella was such a good choice. The story of two sisters, Ariadna and Sasha, spans from in the bleak years of the immediate post-revolution in Soviet Moscow until the 1940s in Paris (when the novella has actually been written), but the light doesn’t shine much.

Sasha is the narrator. A younger sister to Ariadna, she hasn’t known anything but the harsh misery her family has been thrown into. In Moscow they live in one room of their former house, sharing a sofa close to the fire. Only an old Countess visits them and tells them tales of the glamorous past. Sasha is the pragmatic one and she prides herself for being good at waiting in line for the scarce food they can get, in this hunger-stricken town. Ariadna is the romantic one, and she falls for bohemian artist Samoilov, and leaves Sasha and their father without turning back. Sasha’s life from then doesn’t get any better, even after they leave for France. She toils as a laundry worker in the Russian emigrant milieu. Even the war with Germany doesn’t change her life so much as Samoilov’s sudden reappearance, 20 years later.

Well, I guess this story should come with a warning, just like a cigarette pack. “Reading This Story Greatly Endangers Your Mood”, “Do Not Use While Depressed”, “Do Not Over-read, Beware of Side-effects”… At least, it’s not long, so the bleak fate of Sasha is not too developed, thank God. Of course, focusing on the other sister would have been even more tragic, if this is even possible, but I have the feeling that Berberova wanted to shun the obvious. Did Ariadna regret leaving Sasha behind? That we will never know.

Junot Diaz, The Pura Principle (NewYorker, March 2010)

2010-04-19T08:34:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted at Smithereens

I’ve heard a lot of good about Junot Diaz without having read his (Pulitzer-winning) novel, so when I saw his short story on a recent New Yorker, I thought it was a nice introduction. It’s indeed nothing like I usually read, so I’m clearly out of my comfort zone, but it was nice enough.

The young narrator is a Dominican-American high school student, Yunior, whose smart-ass, streetwise big brother Rafa has cancer. Through him we get a glimpse of the family’s life after they all “landed on cancer planet”. The little brother gets high a lot, the mother finds solace in religion (which in Diaz colourful language becomes:” she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she’d had one handy.”) and the elder brother still pretends to be the same ghetto tough guy he used to be. But his illness changes him too: he tries a serious (read: dull) job in a shop, and when he gets to ill to continue, brings home an illegal Dominican immigrant girl named Pura, whom he seems to fall seriously in love with, to his family’s dismay. Is Pura in it just for the green card? Rafa’s mother thinks so and gets really mean with her, even as Pura tries hard to be the ideal daughter-in-law. But is she really so naïve?

The whole fun of the story is in the ghetto Spanglish language. I really can't tell if it’s realistic, but it flows nicely and the images are both funny and effective. At times it sounds like a rhythmic rap poem, and at times it’s just a teenager trying to get to terms with terrible family events. The brother relationship is nicely done too, reminding me (somehow) of Ethan Canin (which is quite a stretch, given than Canin mainly “does” white suburban middle-class, I guess). I’m not sure I’m ready for a whole book-length of Dominican slang, but it was indeed a revelation.

Mavis Gallant, Across the Bridge (1992)

2010-03-21T14:16:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted at Smithereens

Is it a bad omen to start a challenge (Kate’s revival of the Short Story Challenge) with a book I am not really enthusiastic about? At any case, this long-due discovery of Mavis Gallant is quite a surprise. I knew that she wrote short stories about France and Paris, but somehow I’d thought she was writing about the 1930s bohemia, Montparnasse etc.. I’d pictured her a bit like a female Hemingway and Henry Miller perhaps. Prejudices…

I was not expecting at all her portrait of the French bourgeoisie of the 1960s, 1980s and even more recent (it’s sometimes difficult to know precisely because her stories are timeless). And how well does she picture them! Conservative, stingy, cowards, stuck in their habits and blind to the society changes, because the most important thing is to remain “respectable”… Her characters are difficult to love, but strangely compelling and difficult to forget afterwards.

The title story is about Sylvie, a shy girl in the 1960s, whose parents have arranged a marriage to a relative and business partner, who rebels in a very meek and mild way, by getting infatuated in someone just as bland as her first fiancé. Thinking that things are serious, the mother throws the wedding invitations out into the Seine, but when she demands proofs that the other man has proposed to her daughter (as she has insinuated), there is none. The family loses face, scrambles to win back the first fiancé again, and the girl somehow concedes that she might start loving this man.

It’s difficult for me to come to terms with this portrayal of French society. But I can’t deny that it’s (was) also true! I guess I’m having a “Pride and Prejudice” moment. I can’t believe that a Canadian woman saw through the superficial aspects of the rancid Parisian bourgeoisie so well, a bit like Gide (Yes, Gallant has to be compared with big names!)

In another story, a petit-bourgeois woman writes to a Portuguese woman who had sublet a room in her flat more than ten years ago, shared the family life for a while, before she disappeared after an abortion and made it “big” as a TV actress. Of course, a classic story would have the Portuguese tenant as the main character, with her ambition, own secrets and tragedies. But the focus on the stingy landlady and how she consistently misunderstood the girl and projected her small life on her is revealing of this collection’s voice. Gallant use sidelong glances into small worlds that she paints with delicate brushes.

There are also stories about Eastern Europeans intellectuals and refugees in Paris, living in memories of a faded world. It was quite delicate and moving, but the timeless context made it difficult for me to relate, especially as later on, I realized they were supposed to live in the post-1989 world!

The first few stories in the collection are linked and tell the story of 3 generations of a French Canadian family in Montreal. I loved the first one best, set in 1933, when the widowed mother instructs her 2 daughters never to tell that she had to work as a seamstress. They must instead say that their mother “was clever with her hands”.

The last story, “The Fenton Child”, also departs from the rest of the collection. The teenaged heroin, Nora Abott, has to take care of a new-born baby for a few hours while a hushed drama unfolds in the background. I’d have loved to see more of this tone, because Nora was a lot more bright and active than the rest of the characters.

All in all, after a bumpy start, I’d like to try other stories by Mavis Gallant, now that I better know what to expect. Have a nice weekend everyone!

Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley

2010-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

This collection of short stories features the Easy Rawlins character. Each chapter involves a case that he solves. While the chapters are sequential, each story is written in such a way that they don't depend on one another.

As a big Rawlins fan, I was not disappointed by this collection. I enjoyed how each story unfolded. While the stories didn't depend on each other, they came together to paint a full picture. The downside for me was how he had to repeat details each time.

In essence, Easy has created a "normal" life for himself. He has a job as head custodian of a school, a live in girlfriend, and two adopted children. But he is haunted by the death of his best friend and is drawn in to cases while trying to answer some questions for himself.

Reviving the Short Story Reading Challenge for 2010

2009-12-30T19:50:00.001-05:00

I hosted the initial incarnation of the Short Story Reading Challenge in 2008 and was thrilled at the number of readers that I encountered through it who proved to be already devotees of or who were willing to embrace the short story form. I took a year off from challenges this past year, but after several expressions of interest in another round, I'm feeling enthusiastic about a revival of the Short Story Reading Challenge for 2010. So here goes. The challenge could take a number of different forms depending on your level of familiarity with short stories and on the amount of reading time you expect to have at your disposal in the coming year.

Options 1 & 2: If you're short on time, you can simply commit to reading ten short stories by ten different authors over the course of 2010. If you're relatively new to reading short stories, any ten will do. If you’ve already got a lot of short stories under your belt, make it ten short stories by ten writers whose work you have not yet read. How about that—a year long challenge that you could conceivably complete in the course of a day! Of course, I would encourage you not to do that but rather to heed the words of Mavis Gallant, short story writer extraordinaire, who advises:

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Completing this version of the challenge could be as simple as participating in the short story discussions at A Curious Singularity throughout the year (after a lengthy hiatus, A Curious Singularity is also slated for revival in 2010⎯stay tuned for an announcement about that). Or picking up a short story anthology, whether of classic or contemporary stories, or of stories of a particular genre or on a particular theme, and slowly working your way through at least ten of the stories contained within. Of course, my hope is that once you get started you’ll get hooked and you’ll spiral out into other stories by those writers and more!

Options 3 & 4: If you've got a bit more time to devote to this endeavour, you can commit to reading between five and ten short story collections over the course of 2010. Again, if you're a short story novice, the world is your oyster as far as selection is concerned. But if you're a seasoned short story reader, you'll want to choose collections by writers whose short stories you have not yet encountered.

Option 5: This is the custom option under the rubric of which you can tailor your reading list to best meet your personal reading aspirations. You might wish to craft a list that focuses on a particular place, or era, or genre. Or you might wish to include reading about short stories as well as of short stories, for example, such works as Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. It's entirely up to you.

If you'd like to participate in the challenge, let me know in the comments section below or via e-mail, and if you provide me with an e-mail address, I'll send you an invitation to join this blog. Even if you don't plan to participate in the challenge, please post the titles of some of your favourite shorts stories or the names of your favourite short story writers below so that participants in the challenge can benefit from your recommendations.

Happy Reading!

The Ebony Hand by Rose Tremain

2008-12-16T06:12:00.000-05:00

Rose Tremain is a local author whose work I came across when I was researching the county of Norfolk, where I have lived for the past two and a half years. I have never been drawn to her work before, when working in the bookshop, but was at a loss of short stories for my challenge and this, part of The Darkness of Wallis Simpson collection, seemed appropriate.

Set in the 1950s, still in the aftermath of the Second World War, The Ebony Hand is the story of a spinster living a contented quiet existence in a small Norfolk village. She works part-time in a haberdashery shop, a quiet job that she loves, and becomes enamoured with an ebony glove hand on the counter, that she polishes and dresses with loving care. After the death of her sister from influenza, her brother-in-law checks himself into the local mental asylum; leaving their thirteen-year-old daughter, Nicolina, with no family.to take care of her. Our protagonist takes the girl in and raises her, despite knowing little about raising children, and finds her peaceful life shattered. Determined to find a good husband for Nicolina, she settles upon Paul Swinton, a good hardworking young man devoted to her niece, but she is thwarted by teenage emotions.

My favourite passage concerned Nicolina’s father, a tragic figure in his madness, fixating on the bull in the field opposite the asylum and attempting to hatch eggs on his windowsill.

“Victor was given a small room with orange curtains and a view of some water-meadows where an old grey-white bull foraged for grass among kingcups and reeds. Victor said the bull and he were ‘as one’ in their abandonment and loneliness. He said Aviva had held his mind together by cradling his head between her breasts. He announced that the minds of every living being on the earth were held together by a single mortal and precarious thing.”

Another passage perfectly describes how someone can pin their hopes on something unusual and inanimate as this ebony hand.

“When Victor said what he said about our minds being held together by peculiar things, I thought to myself that the peculiar thing, in my personal case, was this wooden hand. It was well made and heavy and smooth. I polished it with Min cream once a week. I enjoyed the way it had never aged or altered. And I began to think that this hand was like the kind of man I had to find for Nicolina: somebody who would not change or die.”

The Ebony Hand has a gentleness to it, a sweet tragedy to its main character. All her time and effort is spent on this young girl who disappoints her, but to whom she remains loyal, the faithful aunt and protector. She focuses all her hopes on this inanimate object, the ebony hand, only to have the haberdashery close and the hand sold and lost beyond her reach. It is a fragile tale, of love, loss and longing. As someone relatively new to the world of short stories, I found it charming and bittersweet.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke

2008-12-16T06:07:00.000-05:00

"Magic, madam, is
like wine and,
if you are not used
to it, it will make
you drunk."

Those of you who have read my blog in the past may have realised that I have fallen head over heels in love with Susanna Clarke's writing. I did not cope well with Dickens at school and to this day have never finished any of his novels. Then I discover Ms Clarke, who writes like a modern day Dickens, and her fabulous book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. A mysterious journey through the Napoleonic era, following the rivalry of two magicians, and their effect on the fate of English magic. Now one of my favourite novels, and reviewed here, it left me wanting more.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of short stories set in the same world as magic and faery as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. There are eight stories, each written in the same delectable style, and each delving into a different faery story.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu is perhaps the story most reminiscent of Clarke's first novel, introducing us to a trio of female magicians and their struggle to get accepted by their male counterparts. Jonathan Strange himself makes an appearance in this glorious tale of magic, superstition and vengeful owls.

On Lickerish Hill is the tale of a sly woman who sells her daughter to a nobleman, under the proviso that in the last month of the first year of their marriage, she must spin five skeins of flax every day. The young woman, as cunning as her mother, devises a way to fulfill her husbands demands, by making a deal with a fairy. All she has to do, is discover his name, or her life will be his.

Mrs Mabb is the sad tale of a young woman who loses her love to the mysterious Mrs Mabb. Only her determination can rescue her love.

The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse is an amusing story, set in Gaiman's fictional village of Wall. There in The Seventh Magpie Inn, the Duke of Wellington quarrels with a local villager over a pair of embroidery scissors and is later forced to cross the Wall to retrieve his stallion, released in spite by the angry man. There he discovers a small house where a young woman is embroidering some beautiful images of the Duke's past and possible future. When faced with his own death in gloriously coloured thread, the Duke must take matters into his own hand.

Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower, is a series of extracts from the diary of a young Italian man, who takes a position as cleric in a small town, where he has hopes over marrying well and creating a good home for himself. There he encounters a Fairy Widower, only to learn and discover more about his heritage and future destiny.

Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby is the tale of a young Jewish doctor and his fairy friend, travelling to visit a sick patient, when they come upon the poor begotten village of Thoresby. Tom is persuaded to build a fairy bridge across the river with unforeseen results.

Antickes and Frets is the tale of Mary, Queen of Scots, thrown into prison by her cousin, Elizabeth, and who ends up in the care of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his ambitious wife. She soon begins to suspect that the Countess had gotten where she was through dark means in her embroidery. Mary endeavours to use the same means to get rid of her cousin and thus usurp the throne of England.

The final story, John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner, is an amusing tale of a Charcoal Burner (and his pig Blakeman!), whose life is rudely interrupted by the Raven King himself, and who enlists Saints to have his revenge on Uskglass.

Clarke's style is perfect for me. She manages to write about a world so unusual and unfamiliar to us, yet makes it so evocative and believeable that I for one, got completely sucked in. Her writing is a sheer delight to read, and I found myself having to take breaks after each short story, just as I would with a great novel, in order to really digest and enjoy the experience. My fear was that the next story would never be as good, but each was as good as the last.

A fabulous collection by a wonderful author. I cannot recommend these stories enough, and dearly hope that Susanna Clarke writes more very soon.

Murder in Baker Street: New Tales of Sherlock Holmes

2008-12-07T16:48:00.001-05:00

Description:

"Eleven times over, the stories written especially for this premier volume by some of the finest talents at work in crime fiction today -- Anne Perry, Loren D. Estleman, Gillian Linscott, Edward D. Hoch, Peter Tremayne, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Jon L. Breen, Bill Crider, Howard Engel, Carolyn Wheat, and L. B. Greenwood -- celebrate the keen mind, ratiocinative methods, personal eccentricities, and singular manners that epitomize the most admired fictional sleuth of all time: Sherlock Holmes.

More than a century has passed since Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes to the reading public, but no literary detective has yet to match the Great Detective in popularity and to command the esteem of such legions of fans -- not least among them the mystery writers who pay tribute to him in this collection. Ingeniously contrived and shrewdly executed, their tales revisit the comfortable clutter of the rooms at 221B Baker Street where Holmes in an old silk dressing gown, his gaze piercing and his fingers stained with chemicals or ink, again peruses a telling trifle or perhaps takes up his violin.

Again, too, the inscrutable Holmes and his redoubtable companion, Dr. Watson, display at their peerless best the science and arts of detection -- whether they are investigating a crime in the wilds of Africa or uncovering villainy in the heart of London, whether it's the case of the bloodless sock or borderline dandelions, a remarkable worm or a vampire's mark" -- from the inside flap

Contents:
• Introduction • Daniel Stashower
• The Man from Capetown • Stuart M. Kaminsky
• The Case of the Borderland Dandelions • Howard Engel
• The Siren of Sennen Cove • Peter Tremayne
• The Case of the Bloodless Sock • Anne Perry
• The Case of the Anonymous Author • Edward D. Hoch
• The Case of the Vampire’s Mark • Bill Crider
• The Hansom for Mr. Holmes • Gillian Linscott
• The Adventure of the Arabian Knight • Loren D. Estelman
• The Adventure of the Cheshire Cheese • Jon L. Breen
• Darkest Gold • L. B. Greenwood
• The Remarkable Worm • Carolyn Wheat
• Sidelights on Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• 100 Years of Sherlock Holmes • Lloyd Rose
• And Now, a Word from Arthur Conan Doyle • Jon L. Lellenberg

My thoughts:

I enjoyed this collection of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, especially the ones "The Siren of Sennen Cove" and "A Hansom for Mr. Holmes". I also liked the essay "100 Years of Sherlock Holmes" which looked at how the Holmes character has been portrayed over the years on stage and film.

Date read: 10/30/2008
Rating: 3*/5 = good
(SS) Yearly count: 5/5

Challenge Completed

2008-12-01T13:28:00.000-05:00

I finished this challenge, 5 short story collections completed!
My Reads:
Skin, Roald Dahl
The Little Black Book of Stories, Byatt
Fragile Things, Gaiman
Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Robert Etty
A Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler

My favorite was definately Fragile Things, I love Gaiman so that wasn't unexpected, coming a close seconf was A Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of very simply told stories about Vietnamese citizens who moved to America as a result of the war.

I hadn't read many short stories till this challenge, now I seem to be reading a lot more of them in snatches.

Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

2008-11-22T10:32:00.000-05:00

In his stories, Vladimir Nabokov so perfectly captures a character, or a setting, or an emotion, that I feel that the character is real, the setting surrounds me, and the emotion is my own.

His writing in these stories is so well done that I, a very amateur writer, feel the urge to try my hand at capturing the images around me, a task I will surely fail because I know I will never even remotely measure up to Nabokov’s incredible talent.

The unfortunate aspect of reading more than 60 of Nabokov’s short stories in one month is that the characters he so adroitly creates, the settings he so carefully draws, and the feelings he so perfectly captures are, for the most part, miserable, gloomy, and ultimately depressing. Also, some of his stories have fantastical elements that failed to resonate with me, and most dwell on negative aspects of human nature - subjects that weren’t pleasant for reading in bulk.

But I feel that the overall quality of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing is so extraordinary that he should be read simply for the marvelous experience that comes from reading his words, even if the reader doesn’t necessarily consider the negative underlying themes amazing.

Nabokov’s stories tend to be rather sad. My two favorite stories happened to be the least unpleasant. A number of other stories have also stayed with me.

Two Stories

In “First Love,” a man reflects on his first love. In the course of his description of a childhood summer’s events, it’s unclear to the reader whether his first love was traveling by overnight train; swimming at the beach; learning about butterflies; or meeting the little French girl, Colette. This story doesn’t have much plot or grand finale, but it is a beautiful story that I’ve already reread three times.

In “The Vane Sisters” story, a man reflects on his relationships with two sisters, one of whom was once his girlfriend. It also is incredibly subtle. (Highlight to read spoiler.) Nabokov’s subtle ending tells us that this man’s life really hasn’t been all that affected by the life and then the death of these sisters. It’s kind of depressing for the sisters, but an interesting realization for the man. It made me think about my own life and relationships. What impact do certain people have on me? For example, how often do I think about old boyfriends? Did they really impact my life significantly?

The Gift Of Years

2008-11-22T10:04:00.000-05:00

He decided at one point that if what he thought was, in fact, true, he would forgive her --- it would remain their secret. He made up his mind that relieving himself of the curiosity was all that mattered and kept this firmly in mind when he approached her to ask the question outright.
But then always a certain laziness would set in, for by now he had conceived of the right words, only his mouth could not utter them; at once anxious and weary, he realized it was not curiosity that wanted relief, it was the uncertainty of his disappointment. The laziness was just one symptom of fear, for though he would remind himself to try, the threat of an answer, of a finality terrific in its inevitability, made the uncertainty and self-denial already there a pain he preferred to bear, only so the alternative could never hurt him more --- which was why the question could not come, and would not come. And then he would remember all those moments in her life when she revealed her strange nature to him and him alone, those aberrations of the person she normally was and, he wanted to believe, had always been... . He would remember these images, hold them fast to his chest, then convince himself that meaning and connections conceived in memory were flimsy bridges and that to corrupt a good memory would be to corrupt them all. And so, selfishly, not because his suspicion might have been wrong but because it could have yielded the truth, he never asked her.

The Gift of Years by Vu Tran is a short story about Nguyen Van Lam and his youngest daughter Nguyen Tram-Mai. Lam is a husband and father of five. He has done his time in the army, been good to his wife and kids, and lived a fairly respectful life. Lam shares a special relationship with his youngest child Mai. Throughout the years he has watched his daughter with much concern in her reaction to violence, fighting, killing and death. He observed a pattern of interest and indifference through questions and actions during much of her youth and teen years. Also, Mai has always confided in her father about the events and details of her actions that she doesn't ordinarily share with others, even into her adult life. When Mai's husband is found dead after a night of usual drunkenness, Lam is too afraid to ask about and discover the truth behind this tragic event. But he knows that some day she will share this secret with him as well. Throughout the short story, Lam recalls his memories of Mai over the years. And in the end, prior to Lam's death, Mai shares one more event with her father that leads to a revelation that even he had never suspected.

The Gift of Years is a story that comes full circle in its presentation through an ending that is not expected. It shows how observations and memories over time are not always what they seem to be. I very much enjoyed this short story.

"The Gift of Years" by Vu Tran (from Fence) from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 edited by Laura Furman

Irish Girls About Town: Anthology of Short Stories

2008-11-18T02:23:00.000-05:00

Irish Girls About Town (2002)
Anthology of Short Stories, 310 pages
This edition: Simon & Schuster, Inc. for Barnes & Noble (2006)

As with the U.K. and Irish edition, Barnardo's and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul will benefit from the sale of this edition of Irish Girls About Town.

Another review that has been languishing on my desk since October. Ay yi yi.

No sooner did I recuperate from the Read-A-Thon, than I began preparing, and then became immersed in, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). As a first time participant, I had no idea what I was getting myself into - and yes, that would be par for the course.

I had decided early in the marathon, that short stories were the way to go, and so I read Interpreter of Maladies , this book, and a little bit of The Book of Lost Things.

I flew through this book of 15 stories, all written by Irish women. The theme throughout is that of relationships, ranging from familial to marriage, and even though there is a single theme, there are enough variations of it to make it easy to read and just as easy to enjoy.

My personal favorites were "Soulmates" by Marian Keyes, "The Twenty-Eighth Day" by Catherine Barry, and "Thelma, Louise and the Lurve Gods" by Cathy Kelly. Don't get me wrong though, there is not a bad story in the bunch, it's just that I felt compelled to list the ones that stick out in my mind the most.

"Soulmates" is an interesting tale about two 'perfect' people fated to meet and be together because they are, yes, soulmates. Everything is just right when it comes to these two: their meeting, their courtship, and subsequent marriage. But when trouble looms on the horizon, their friends harbor a secret hope that all will unravel, and do so badly. I will leave it for you to read the story to find out what happens.

"The Twenty-Eighth Day" is for anyone who has suffered through PMS – and I just don't mean the woman:

I am being tormented and tortured by some unknown force I cannot touch or feel. It's like somebody else has taken over my body, mind, and soul. There is a demon spirit inside me, telling me to do inappropriate things, prompting me to say hurtful, offensive words, urging me to be the meanest b---- that ever walked the earth.

"Thelma, Louise and the Lurve Gods" initially appears to be a story about a woman who needs a vacation from her boring life, to experience something more exciting than "not having a Chinese takeaway on Friday nights but…shock, horror…having pizza instead." No sooner does the vacation begin than a snag threatens to destroy all her hopes. However she eventually learns that the trip she is on is one of self-discovery, for as she notes, "Although my own world had shifted on its axis after the holiday, in the office nothing had changed." Things around her remained the same, it was she who had changed - who needed to change - so she could see those things, and herself, more clearly.

I am giving this book a 5 star rating as per my system that states a book earns this because I could not put it down. And I couldn't.

Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

2008-11-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

To my delight, many of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories perfectly fit the “gothic” theme of Halloween in a style that I loved. Even though I dislike being “scared,” these stories were again the perfect amount of creepy for me.

One of Hawthorne’s collections of stories is called Twice-Told Tales. As I read, I began to understand why: while many stories are on the surface about Puritans in the early days of America, they aren’t really about Puritans. Hawthorne is telling us a different story. (Links below are to the stories in the public domain.)

For example, in Hawthorne’s probably most well-known story, “Young Goodman Brown,” the titular character is invited by the devil to practice witchcraft one night. To his surprise, the people he sees with the devil are his own religious teachers and leaders. But what we read is only a part of the story. The “tale” is told again when we realize the symbolism: even those striving to lead are hypocrites full of error.

Other stories likewise have a “ghostly,” Halloween-ish feel to them. For example, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the woman is literally poisonous. In “The Snow-Image,” two children make a snow person come alive; I loved this “Frosty the Snowman” precursor. Similarly, in “Feathertop,” a witch brings her scarecrow to life. In”Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” a woman’s coat becomes the carrier of a plague of sorts. In “Ethan Brand,” the titular character has sold his soul to the devil. I think these would be perfect for a ghostly but not scary Halloween read! I think “Feathertop” and “The Snow-Image” would also be appropriate for children.

While not all of Hawthorne’s stories are gothic, all of them have subtle meanings. Some people may not like Hawthorne’s blatant messages in his stories, but I thought his stories were also entertaining stories.

Probably my favorite non-ghostly story is “The Great Stone Face.” In this story, a small rural community is looking for the fulfillment of the legend: a person whose countenance appears the same as the face on the local hillside. This person will bring honor to the community. Over the course of a lifetime, they find the image of the stone face in a rich entrepreneur, a war hero, and a poet, all of whom end up failing the community. I loved the message of this story: that we can make a difference to others without doing something grand, and humility is always better than pride.

Further, in “The Birth-mark,”a husband wants his wonderful wife to undergo his experimental surgery to remove a birthmark from her face that he thinks is the hand print of the devil; but it’s not the hand of devil. A young man enters Boston in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” looking for his relative to help him get started in the world; but his relative doesn’t have time for him. In “The Great Carbuncle” a group of people are searching for a huge, precious jewel, each for their own reasons — to their ultimate downfall. Finally, in “The Wives of the Dead,” two sisters find out on the same day that their husbands have died. I won’t tell you what happens, but it is “touching” in the end.

There were other, well-known stories that I read and didn’t like very much. I think I disliked the slow pace and the lack of engagement I felt with any particular character.

In the end, Hawthorne has a style of his own. He is almost a favorite for me, after Maupassant and Chekhov.

Cross-posted here.

Stories by Flannery O'Connor

2008-11-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

To understand Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is understand the rural South that she was familiar with in the pre-1970s. Her stories focus on aspects character in human, every-day situations all revolving around her South, dealing with race relations, Christianity, rural versus city living, parent-child relationships, etc. She brings the reader into the settings by capturing thought processes, a style I found engaging. I enjoyed reading her stories, although they illustrated a lack of hope in human nature.

Themes

Race and Class

I found the most common theme in Flannery O’Connor’s stories is race and class, looking at conflict between generations. A great example is “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” In this story, a progressive young man must ride the bus with his older mother to the YMCA because she is “afraid” of the blacks on the integrated buses. He wants to teach her a lesson, but in the end he realizes he still needs his mother, as “old-fashioned” as she is.

Race and class often mix in O’Connor’s stories. In “Revelation,” a self-satisfied judgmental woman is baffled when a young girl calls her a rude name; in the end, she (maybe) realizes the folly of her judgments.

Other stories clearly dealing with race and class also include rural versus city conflicts. Some of these stories are “The Artificial Nigger” (a father and son visit Atlanta); “The Displaced Person” (a Jewish refugee family joins the farm); “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” (Grandpa fought in the civil war); and “The Geranium” and “Judgment Day” (an old man, living in New York City with his daughter, longs to return to the South to die; these are essentially the same story, one written at the beginning and one at the end of O’Connor’s career).

Isolated, Lonely People

Some of my favorite stories were about lonely, isolated individuals seeking for a place. In “The Crop,” a lonely woman sits down to write a short story-and forgets where she is. I love this story because I can relate to this writer: she can’t figure out how to get the story from her head to paper. In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” the woman ponders a fortune teller’s message, and the reader, following her thoughts, knows what it is. I loved how clueless she was as I followed her thought process.

While others weren’t favorites, they were also about lonely, isolated people: “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead” (14-year-old must bury his grandfather); “Good Country People” (a lonely girl with a wooden leg finally trusts someone, the good country man selling bibles); “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (mother gets her mute daughter married to a nice, good country man); “A View of the Woods” (a lonely, selfish grandfather idolizes his granddaughter); and “The Enduring Chill” (a lonely, unsuccessful writer returns to Georgia to die).

Christianity (Good versus Evil)

Flannery O’Connor’s stories also deal with Christianity and good versus evil in general. Her view of good and evil in the face of Christianity is intriguing.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is probably the most familiar O’Connor story, but I really don’t like it. Grandma gets her family lost on a side road. They meet a murderer, who Grandma is sure she recognizes as a good man. I think it’s a look at how everyone has good, and yet, we’re all missing good too; we’re all condemned. I find it a bit disturbing.

In other stories, people try to save each other through religion and because of religious training. In “The River,” the boy’s caretaker, Mrs. Conin, wants to “save” him with religion. In “Parker’s Back,” Parker gets one more tattoo that he thinks his religious wife will appreciate. In “The Comforts of Home,” Thomas’s mother thinks she can save a loose woman from corruption. In “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Sheppard thinks he can redeem a criminal boy who shows more promise than his own son.

I sometimes didn’t like the violent shock at the end of each story: but that may be because I was reading all of her short stories in the same week. If you read Flannery O’Connor, read her in installments.

In the end, Flannery O’Connor certainly has a marvelous but morbid story telling ability.

Cross-posted in longer form here.

Stories by Washington Irving

2008-11-03T12:16:00.001-05:00

Washington Irving’s ghost stories are just my type of ghost story: they’re tricky and creepy, but full of twists. Irving’s twists are rather predictable, but I found that even with Irving’s long-winded, wordy, early-1800s prose made his stories delightful to read.

In the introduction to my 1960’s book, Washington Irving is called the “Father of American Literature” and the “First American Man of Letters.” While I don’t know enough about his contemporaries to know if that’s accurate, I do know that many of his stories have a distinct American feel to them, as the setting is clearly the “new world.” The rustic and spacious American setting feels refreshing when I approach Irving’s writing; it’s as if that rural Connecticut community still exists. It also seems Irving’s world has seeped down into our modern culture: how many American communities today have a Sleepy Hollow street, neighborhood, or town somewhere near?

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” probably Irving’s most well-known story, illustrates a quaint, rural, new American community. Sleepy Hollow is “sleepy,” but it does have one claim to fame: the local haunt, the headless horseman. In the story, scrawny Ichabod Crane and burly Brom Bones vie for the attentions of the local beauty, and the headless horseman visits Ichabod Crane late one night. As I said, Irving’s story is predictable, but I still enjoyed it.

“Rip Van Winkle” occurs in a similar community. Rip Van Winkle is a good-for-nothing married to a nagging woman. One night, he meets some gnomes in the wood, who offer him alcoholic refreshment. When he wakes up the next morning, something isn’t quite right. Again, this is a somewhat predictable story, but I still enjoyed it, odd as it was.

“The Specter Bridegroom,” on the other hand, takes place in a castle in Germany, where a bride is awaiting her groom for their wedding. Though he arrives in time, he insists on leaving before the wedding, for he has a date with the grave. I was annoyed with Irving for giving up the ending a few pages too soon; I suspect it would never have been published that way today, and I thought it could have used some reorganization. That said, I still enjoyed the amusing story.

“The Adventure of the German Student” also occured in Europe, this time in creepy Revolutionary Paris, a place with ghosts, apparently.

“The Devil and Tom Walker” returns to the New England setting. This time, another good-for-nothing man married to another nagging wife (seems to be a theme in Irving) happens upon the Devil in the wood and strikes a bargain with him. Lest you might be thinking of doing the same thing, you should read this warning-story! Tom’s ultimate end is quite amusing.

I did read a few other stories, but these were the most entertaining. Irving’s style is not for everyone: as I said before, he is very wordy and tends to detail everything. I liked that, but you might not.

These stories happened to be Irving’s most “gothic.” I don’t normally like ghost stories, but these were just to my liking: a somewhat real feel to them, and yet also a somewhat “fantastic” story behind them.

Cross-posted here.

Months and Seasons - Wendy's Book Review

2008-10-24T13:30:00.001-04:00

These were adults with too much time on their hands. And didn’t they know that the projector, sound system, and speakers were all Japanese? Their dancing shoes were probably from Mexico or China. America’s jobs were going elsewhere and Americans were just dressing up and playing like kids. Gas prices were high. General Motors was going broke and laying off thousands - and these people were dancing. -From Months and Seasons, Dracula Slinks Into the Night, page 14-

Christopher Meeks stories are full of people who push through the obstacles of life and overcome their deepest fears in order to find joy in living. Months and Seasons, Meeks second collection of short stories is a delightful book which introduces the reader to characters who are ordinary, but in their ordinariness remind us of the common threads which bind people together.

In the story Catalina, we meet a man who is traveling to Catalina via a catamaran. He is grieving the loss of his son.

For the full hour-ride, Daunus sat outside, looking rearward into the gray wake. At one point, a white baseball cap landed in the wake. Someone lost it. His chest felt constricted. Breathing was hard. he’d given this country everything, including now his son. -From Months and Seasons, Catalina, page 37-

He meets a woman on the boat who optimistically tells him that Catalina is ‘like a persimmon - unexpected fruit on a naked tree.‘ The man’s discovery that there is still beauty in the world, despite his devastating loss, allows him to go forward into his life. This simple story is an example of the hope which Meeks infuses into all of his stories as his characters confront their fears of aging, mortality and the sometimes insurmountable challenges of relationships.

In some stories, the characters must battle their own inner demons to make sense of the world and their place within it. In A Shoe Falls, Max must evaluate his marriage to Alice - a woman who clutters the house with her shoes. He wakes from a dream about owing a cab driver $150,000 and thinks:

…if the ride was getting so expensive and monotonous, why hadn’t he asked the cab driver to let him off? Why hadn’t he done more than sit there, bouncing in the back seat pondering his sanity? He was a passive man, goddamn it. -From Months and Seasons, A Shoe Falls, page 72-

Max’s inner journey in this story looks at how one man (who could be any of us) examines his “dreams” in the face of his reality. Will he be able to overcome regret for what he has does not have in order to accept what is?

My favorite story of the collection is Breaking Water - which opens with a supermodel awakening from open heart surgery. Merrill appears to have lost everything of importance in her life - her career as a model, her marriage, and her vision of who she is. She must begin again and turns toward art school as a possible answer.

She also couldn’t draw knees well, or a cat’s mysterious stare, or the hope she had had on her wedding day at the Unitarian Church where the minister’s smile had stretched exactly from pupil to pupil - proportions as perfect as Michelangelo. Merrill, however, could draw losing. It was a mere scratch through a face or a line down the middle of one’s chest. -From Months and Seasons, Breaking Water, page 136-

Merrill’s story is one of falling down and getting back up again; of finding hope in the midst of despair. It touched me.

And this is perhaps the strength of the collection - in showing us the lives of these ordinary characters, Meeks exposes what is human in all of us. Who has never felt life was not living up to expectation? Or looked at the years unraveling and wondered if we had the time to do everything we wanted? Or experienced a loss so big that hope seemed irretrievable? Or found our fears so encompassing we felt paralyzed to overcome them? Meeks explores these ideas with humor and sensitivity, and creates a collection hard to put down.

For those readers who love short stories, Months and Seasons is a must read. Highly recommended.

Meeks’ is also the author of a previous collection - The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea.

At the end of Months and Seasons, Meeks includes an excerpt of a new book he is working on…a novel-in-stories titled The Brightest Moon of the Century. I read this excerpt and was hungry for more. Meeks characterization of the title character, Edward, reminded me of John Irving’s Garp. I have added The Brightest Moon of the Century to my watch list!

Blow-Up

2008-10-23T02:48:00.000-04:00

Riding upon the wind’s back in the warmth of an eleven o’clock sun, a part-time photographer makes his way through the streets of Paris to snap, forever in time, the winsome activities of ordinary life.

“In all ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not lose that abrupt and happy rebound of the sun’s rays off an old stone, or the pigtails-flying run of a small girl going home with a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk.”
- From "Blow-Up"

Taking a break from snapping photographs, Roberto Michel raises a match to light his cigarette when the sight of a mismatched couple grabs his attention - a teenage boy with a woman many years his senior. Michel begins to conjecture as to how this couple came to be – a physical woman with a subdued and nervous boy.

“Now the woman had swung around smoothly, putting the young boy between herself and the wall, I saw them almost in profile, and he was taller, though not much taller, and yet she dominated him, it seemed like she was hovering over him, crushing him just by being there, smiling…”
- From "Blow-Up"

He snaps a photograph to capture this peculiar sight, burning a moment of time into his memory that will torment his thoughts as it lingers within his mind. What is it that this picture reveals?

Blow-Up, by Julio Cortázar, is a beautiful, stream-of-consciousness story that embodies the surrealist ideas of embracing the true flow of thought and evoking confusion through unusual juxtaposition. This story could be framed in a museum for its natural beauty – right next to the melting clock’s of Salvador Dalí’s painting, A Persistence of Memory, for they both illustrate how memories can litter the landscape of one’s mind.

If one is looking for a an easy to read story, I suggest, perhaps, "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket," by Yasunari Kawabata, for that story is sparse in text. However, if one enjoys to dive head first into a lake of words, this is the story is for you –the current may push you around but the water feels great. O'CH

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

2008-10-23T02:30:00.000-04:00

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999
A Collection of Short Stories, 198 pages
Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Company

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri’s first book, is a collection of short stories depicting the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants. Some may immediately wonder how they could relate to the stories or characters. You may not to them individually, but what you will find is that the themes are universal thus eliminating such a concern.

“A Temporary Matter” centers on a couple estranged by the loss of a child:

But nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and Shoba had become experts in avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible.

“Sexy” about a woman having an affair with a married man and coming to terms with the choices she’s made:

There was no reason to put it on. Apart from the fitting room at Filene’s she had never worn it, and as long as she was with Dev she knew she never would. She knew they would never go to restaurants, where he would reach across a table and kiss her hand. They would meet in her apartment, on Sundays, he in his sweatpants, she in her jeans.

“Mrs. Sen’s” showing the hardships faced emotionally by someone having to adjust to a new life. One in a country where there is little to connect to on any level as there is no immediate family or a community of those with similar backgrounds to lean upon for support, thus the homesickness felt is as much as any one person can bear:

Mrs. Sen took the aerogram from India out of her purse and studied the front and back. She unfolded it and reread it to herself, sighing every now and then. When she had finished she gazed for some time at the swimmers.

“My sister has had a baby girl. By the time I see her, depending if Mr. Sen gets his tenure, she will be three years old. Her own aunt will be a stranger. If we sit side by side on train she will not know my face.”

There are nine stories in total and in each one there was always some aspect that touched me in some way that I could not picture myself, or anyone I know, caught up within those same circumstances and possibly having the same responses. I can say in truth, that I did not understand every nuance in some of the stories, as understanding the culture would have been helpful. But really, it does not detract from the enjoyment I had in reading this book. In fact, it was the first one I completed when participating in the recent Read-A-Thon.

As I stated in an earlier post, this book has got to be one of the better Pulitzer Prize Winners I have read in some time. In addition, I have not read many Short Story collections this year even though I had planned to.

I am glad I decided that this should change. This was a wonderful book and will be a nice addition to my personal library.

For this reason I am giving it a definite ‘must read’ recommendation.

Wendy's Challenge Plan and List

2008-10-22T13:29:00.000-04:00

January 1 - December 31, 2008

UPDATE October 22, 2008:

I am happy to report I have completed this challenge! I read 8 individual short stories (2 more than my goal) and 3 collections of short stories. What a fun challenge this turned out to be. Thank you, Kate for hosting!

*********************************

Could you resist this button? Come on, be honest. You couldn't. And neither could I...that, and I love the art of the short story.Kate at Kate's Book Blog (and A Curious Singularity) has come up with the 2008 Short Story Challenge. And she's made it flexible and individualized...AND she's given it its own blog. So there you go. I'm in.

I've chosen option #5 - the custom option. And here is my plan:

I. Read six (6) individual short stories by authors I have not read before and which I will choose as I go along.

~~Black Ice, by Cate Kennedy~~ (finished January 21, 2008; rated 3.5/5; read my review)
~~The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol~~ (finished March 1, 2008; rated 4/5; read my review)
Landscape With Flatiron, by Haruki Murakami (finished April 21, 2008; rated 4/5; read my review)
The Kiss, by Anton Chekhov (finished May 14, 2008; rated 5/5; read my review)
Free Radicals, by Alice Munro (finished May 25, 2008; rated 4/5; read my review)
Mr. Bones, by Paul Theroux (finished June 28, 2008; rated 3.5/5; read my review)
~~Natalie, by Anne Enright~~ (finished July 26, 2008; rated 2.5/5; read my review)
~~An Ex-Mas Feast, by Uwem Akpan~~ (finished August 24, 2008; rated 4.5/5; read my review)

II. Read a minimum of three (3) collections chosen from these books:

Springtime on Mars, by Susan Woodring (finished June 28, 2008; rated 5/5; read my review)
~~The View From Castle Rock, by Alice Munro~~ (finished September 26, 2008; rated 4/5; read my review)
~~Months and Seasons, by Christopher Meeks~~ (finished October 22, 2008; rated 4.5/5; read my review)
Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner, by William Faulkner
The Country of Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction, by Sarah Orne Jewett (let it be noted that I have already read The Country of Pointed Firs and won't re-read it, but all the other stories in this collection are up for grabs)
Open Secrets, by Alice Munro
Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle
A Private State, by Charlotte Bacon
Friend of My Youth, by Alice Munro
All Aunt Hager's Children, by Edward P. Jones

"The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket"

2008-10-21T14:38:00.000-04:00

The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket is a short story that begins with an unknown narrator who discovers a cluster of children with colorful lanterns on an insect hunt in the surrounding trees of a university.
“There were about twenty lanterns. Not only were there crimson, pink, indigo, green, purple, and yellow lanterns, but one lantern glowed with five colors at once”.
As he continues to watch the narrator goes in and out of his imagination and reality to complete the scene. At the end the narrator witnesses a special moment among the children they will never know occurred but because he is observing from the outside, he is privileged to experience it.
What I admire most about Kawabata is that he is able to convey such a deep message through two pages of simple words. I would have to agree with Edmund Yeo’s thoughts from the Swifty, Writing blog when he states that Kawabata has a “fine eye for detail: he has an impressionist’s command of light and color paired with a modernist’s appreciation for the strange…” For example, the narrator begins to describe how the lanterns are made it is clear that he is not there and has no idea if that’s how they were made yet he creates this fairytale image of color and joy.
“The bobbing lanterns, the coming together of children on this lonely slope—surely it was a scene from a fairytale?”
It is strange that the narrator is forcing himself to believe he was there, however, at the same time what the narrator imagines is beautiful and believable even to the reader. The message of youth and childhood is present in the story through the images of play and color, and the overall pure tone of Kawabata. Reading this story is similar to looking at a child’s crayon drawing, at first it’s nothing significant but under the scribbles and overlapping colors there is something more. Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” and that is something I find true through this tale.

AC

Canaries

2008-10-20T15:29:00.000-04:00

CANARIES
[1924]

The story that I choose to write about is Canaries because it has some distinct memories or passages that have remained with me from the reading. First of all, the story was written in 1924 by Yasunari Kawabata. Major characters are the author and Madam. Minor characters are the writer’s dead wife and the canaries. The story was taken place at the author’s house. It was a letter that the author sent to his mistress. He said that he could no longer keep the canaries he received from the mistress because his wife was dead. His wife was the only one who took care of those birds. He used to think of the mistress whenever he saw those birds. However, since his wife died, he did not want to keep them. He wanted the memories between him and Madam to die with his wife. I think the writer had felt an internal guilt toward his wife because he was cheating on her. Moreover, the author chose to write this letter because of his guilt. That guilt tormented his heart so that he wanted to kill the canaries and bury them in his wife’s grave. The passage that affected me was “Perhaps it’s odd to give living creatures as a souvenir, but our memories, too, are alive. Someday the canaries will die. And, when the time comes, that the memories between us must die, let them die” I think that after his wife died, the writer finally realized what a real love he used to have with her. Since she died, everything died.

Nguyen

The Fly

2008-10-20T14:38:00.000-04:00

"Canaries"

2008-10-20T14:30:00.001-04:00

Pa's Darling

2008-10-19T08:01:00.000-04:00

As I have already suggested, I was always supposed to be Pa's favorite daughter. He made a good deal of me, particularly before company; he like to show me off --- he was proud of my good looks, of what he called my "pale-faced, raven-haired beauty." But he was like a financial magnate showing off a master painting he has just acquired, inwardly confident that the owner of the picture is superior to both the work and its artist. There was always a distinct vein of sarcasm in his ebullient mirth.

Louis Auchincloss' short story Pa's Darling tells Kate Hemenway's view of her past, "to make a probably vain attempt to get it off my chest." She speaks of the way her father treated life, the arts, his wife, and people in general. She then speaks of her first husband of whom she met through her father and then of her second husband whom she discovers is much like her own father. She draws parallels between these men in her life and compares them to the relationship she saw between her own parents. And following the death of her father, Kate discovers a secret of her parents that she had always suspected. This secret along with her husband's prolonged mourning of the passing of her father leads her to suspect that history is repeating itself.

The world might admire power and money, but it also esteemed the arts. By associating himself with Pa, might he not borrow a few rays of Pa's aura? To Dicky appearance and reality were the same. If he looked as if he had everything, why, then he had everything. It was why he was perfectly happy. I had again been married to my father.

Although the characters were not overly developed, the story was exactly as the author introduced: an assessment of a character's past following the death of her father. Taking an assessment of our past is something we all tend to do when an event changes our course in life. Pa's Darling was an interesting short story that I enjoyed.

"Pa's Darling" by Louis Auchincloss (from The Yale Review) from The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King with Heidi Pitlor

Robertson Davies' High Spirits

2008-10-18T18:37:00.000-04:00

High Spirits / Robertson Davies

Toronto : Penguin, c1982.

Now, here's a short story collection which does challenge ghost story tradition a bit. It's an 18 story collection, each written by Robertson Davies to be read yearly at his college's Gaudy Nights**. He began this habit in 1963 as Master of Massey College (Toronto) and maintained it for the 18 years he was there. The progression shows that each story was written according to yearly occurrences and social conditions.

In his intro he states:

Ghost stories tend to be very serious affairs. Who has ever heard of a ghost cracking a joke? I wanted my ghosts to be light-hearted, if not in themselves, at least as they appeared to my hearers. No new style would suit a ghost story, so it would be necessary to parody the usual style. And the parody would have to be affectionate, for cruel parody is distasteful in itself, and utterly outside the spirit of a party.

And the stories are mostly light and amusing, I would imagine especially so for those in the audiences for which they were written. If in that audience I am sure we would share in the references to mutual acquaintances, the habits of university life and the local settings within Massey College and Toronto. However, many of the stories still hold up for those of us reading them now, separate from all that. The collection is a bit uneven, however; a few are no longer successful, particularly to my mind the offering entitled The Ugly Spectre of Sexism. It was amazingly old-fashioned, sounding more 1920's than 70's. I guess we really do take for granted the attitude shift since the 70's; at least this is a reminder about that kind of thing.

I found that the first three stories were my favourites, lightly ironic about college life and featuring students, researchers and libraries. In the third story, The Great Queen is Amused, the narrator comes across a female researcher (clearly based on someone known to the audience) who has used an old book of Alistair Crowley's to call up the shade of an early Canadian writer in the dusty basement stacks of the college library, in order to clarify some research points with her. It has all gone horribly wrong:

"I suppose you called up a single spirit, and have received a wholesale delivery; Crowley is a most untrustworthy guide."
"But who are they?" said she.
"It is only too clear that they are the ghosts of the Canadian writers whose books are here," said I.
"Then why are they so noisy?" she asked. Every time I think of it, I realize what a wealth of national feeling was compressed into that one enquiry.
"They are clamouring to be reborn,"I explained... "Look, you see those who are floating in that strange, curled-up posture; they have placed themselves in the foetal position, so that, when a child is conceived, they are ready at once to take possession of it in the womb, and come to earth again."
"Whatever for?" said she.
"Perhaps they hope that this time they might be born American authors," said I.

This is an example of the light style he uses, and for the most part it is quite funny. Canadians will find certain jokes still relevant, but you don't have to be Canadian to enjoy this. Some of the stories are still quite entertaining, some are just ok. Still, overall it's a good set of academic-themed, humorous ghost stories, and if you already like Davies you will want to read it.

** An example of Davies existing in another time than we live in now, "Gaudy" derives from the Latin gaudium and Old French gaudie, meaning "merry-making" or "enjoyment". A college gaudy is a dinner; primarily this was an Oxford tradition. Also, when Davies began as first Master of Massey College, it was a male-only college, not admitting women until 1974.

cross-posted at The Indextrious Reader

An Aftermath of Hope and Regret

2008-10-17T17:52:00.001-04:00

“Aftermath”, a short story written by Mary Yukari Waters available in the Laws of Evening, is one of the those rare short stories that can present a timeless theme of change and the consequences that come with it. Just as the country of Japan is struggling with its own national identity after WWII, a mother, Makiko, and her son, Toshi, are struggling with their own identities and how to proceed with their lives. While Makiko is determined to stay true to the ancient Japanese culture which her generation was raised in, Yoshi is beginning to embrace an American culture that Makiko believes not only destroyed her country but killed her husband, Yoshitsune. The idea of choosing between two completely different cultures is a timeless theme and “Aftermath” could be interpreted today and even fifty years in the future. However, Mary Yukari Waters is very careful with the tone her story, though Aftermath deals with the destruction of Japan there is hope that from the ruins something greater could grow. Similar to the song Let It Be by the Beatles, both Let It Be and “Aftermath” have a similar tone of sadness and regret, but an even greater tone of hope. In Let It Be, at first, Paul McCartney is sad that he is reminded of his mother’s tragic death, but at the end of the song, he is rejoicing that his mother has come back to him, “And when the night is cloudy/There is still a light that shines on me/Shine until tomorrow/Let it be/There will be an answer/Let it be.” Compared to “Aftermath”, “Tonight there is a full moon. Earlier, at dusk, it was opaque and insubstantial. Now through shifting moisture in the air, it glows bright and strong, awash with light.” However, perhaps Yukari Waters was making a statement by putting this story in the past Japan rather than many present third world countries that hope is fading for those who are now faced with this difficult choice of cultures. CR

An Aftermath of Hope and Regret

2008-10-17T17:49:00.000-04:00

2008-10-17T13:47:00.000-04:00

Julio Cortaz’s “Blow-up” is the story of one man’s perception. The Story begins with the character talking in the first person and later switches over to himself talking in the third person. At times the story is confusing not knowing what is real and overall if you can trust what the narrator is telling the reader. As the story continues Michel (main character) observes a boy and a woman interacting with each other. He immediately jumps to conclusions without ever actually ever hearing their conversation but telling the viewer what they are talking about and how they ended up at this point. “The boy had come on to the tip of island, seen the woman and thought her marvelous. The woman was there waiting for that because she was there waiting for that.” Michel himself goes into romantic fantasies about the characters as well. “Now the woman had swung around smoothly, putting the young boy between herself and the wall.” Rereading the article I feel as though this romantic aspect of the story is made up by the narrators own mind, never really happening because it all seems so absurd. Later in the story Michel gets a picture of the two and blows it up on his wall where he constantly stares at it and asses the story over and over in his head. He slowly becomes more and more obsessed as he evaluates the situation between these two strange “lovers”.
Chekhov’s “The Kiss” reminds me of some aspects in this story. Riabovich, who is the main character in this story, could be compared to Michel. Both of these characters become overwhelmed with a situation that most people wouldn’t think twice about after it had happened. Both characters are no better off in the end and both characters let their problems consume their lives.
The story also reminded me of Pablo Picasso’s Figures on a Beach. This is because I find this story to not be what it seems just as are many of Picasso’s paintings. In figures on the Beach it is hard to decipher the image because of how jumbled the two figures are.
L.G

The Fly

2008-10-17T05:48:00.000-04:00

“The Fly,” written by Katherine Mansfield, is a short story about a troubled man called “the boss.” We are first introduced to Mr. Woodifield and his familial struggles but eventually, the story takes an unpredictable turn in that we realize the plot focuses around the boss. Woodifield remains not as a minor nor a major character, but remains as a key element of the plot that pushes to the point of the story: the boss’s grief over his son and how he chooses to express his grief. Although Woodifield is already struggling with his own family problems, we find out that his struggle is only an introduction to a far more serious and dramatic situation involving the boss and his son. The story quickly becomes dark when the boss suddenly notices a fly trying to save itself from being drowned in pen ink. He is immediately intrigued by the fly’s determination and bravery but is then somehow engulfed in a sadistic state of violence and murder, ultimately causing the fly to fall into an unfortunate predicament. Once he wakes from his sadistic state, it is as if nothing had happened and he returns to his usual business during the day.

The sadistic characteristics hidden underneath the boss’s exterior reminded me of Vincent Van Gogh’s troubled mind. Van Gogh’s struggle against madness is similar to the boss’s struggle against grief and trauma over his son. Van Gogh’s struggle against madness can be seen through his use of dark colors in his artwork such as “Starry Night” and, while the boss’s struggle against his feelings is expressed through the fly’s doomed predicament.

“The Fly” is similar to Mary Yukari Waters’s “The Aftermath.” Both stories exhibit an adult figure exhibiting negative feelings over the well-being of his or her son. However, the stories are different in the way that the boss in “The Fly” is distraught over his son’s death, while the mother, Makiko, in “The Aftermath” is not distraught but anxious and worrisome over the American influence over her son.

-R.C.

Daddy Wolf Blog

2008-10-17T04:52:00.000-04:00

You aren’t the first person who is curious about “Daddy Wolf” and chose to read this blog. The writer, James Purdy, is a master of human emotion and expression. In this story, he chooses a resident of New York City named Benny as the central character. This Benny is quite the talker and throughout the recap his life in the big city, the reader learns more and more about what his true feelings are. At first, Benny complains so much about the holes in his linoleum that are “so goddam big now – you can go in there and take a look” that at first, you almost miss the point of the story completely when it is first mentioned.

This leads me to say that if this story were a color, it would be dark grey. To explain this conclusion, let’s start with the color black. With our thorough knowledge of the color spectrum, we know that black is a combination of every other color, however, no light reflects off of it so our eyes just register the lack of color thereof. Benny has many emotions and feelings inside, but the reader does not pick up on them at first without further insight into Benny’s character – hence the dark grey comparison. Therefore, when more is learned about Benny throughout “Daddy Wolf”, the reader can put the pieces together come away from the story with a thorough knowledge of his character.

Besides color, “Daddy Wolf” can be compared to the short story “Aftermath” by Mary Yukari Waters. Nothing is ever told in a straight-forward manner in either story. For example, when the mother is the only one left sitting in the stands at her son’s baseball game in “Aftermath”, the writer does not scream out that she does not have a husband to cook dinner for; she simply alludes to the fact.

I recommend “Daddy Wolf” to anyone and everyone with a need to read and a desire to delve into something that is not what it first seems. And if you thought I was going to tell you what is beneath the story’s surface in my blog, think again. ~M.M.

2008-10-17T04:13:00.000-04:00

We have all heard the expression “less is more” and in the story of Canaries by Ysaunari Kawabata from the book, “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories”, he does just this. In forty-two lines he tells the sad story of a man writing a final goodbye letter to his lover. She had purchased a set of canaries for him which his late wife had taken care of until she died. I saw that there was not much depth to the characters but I found that what I thought was a flaw turned out to give the story a venire; a sense of mystery. Questions are brought up like, why was there an affair in the first place? Did the wife die of a broken heart? Why did the man address his lover as “Madam” instead of her name? The list is endless. I do not know if this was intentional of Kawabata but that is where the story is given depth. One of the major ideas in the story is the fact that the man writes “the shopkeeper simply caught a male and female at random and put them in a cage.” suggesting that their relationship had become nothing more than two strangers caged together. This is yet another unanswered idea that Kawabata leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.
This is extremely different from the story Blow-Up by Julio Cortazar. From the very beginning, he over indulges the reader with endless thoughts about his characters and never misses a chance to “fill in the blanks”. It is a story about a man who thinks he took a picture of a young boy, in the park, about to have sex for the first time with a hooker. He becomes so captivated by the photo that he makes an enlargement (a blow-up). He keeps expanding it until he notices a man in the background of the photo and comes to realize his original thought was completely misled. This was a story that took awhile to get going yet Cortazar is able to paint a beautiful picture of the park where the photographer was sitting. His over indulging of language was able to fully enrich the story but at the same time it did not leave any sense of mystery for the reader unlike Kawabata.
Both these stories are great opposites from each other. One is able to let the reader pave their own path about the story where as the other a path has already been laid with a few twists and turns in the road. I wish that these would be packaged in a set together due to their complete opposite formats. They remind me of the boxed set movie(s) “Grindhouse” - two movies, opposite cinematography. The first movie is Death Proof directed by Quentin Terintino where the main focus is the character relationships. There is very little action, which is made up by unique dialogues giving a simplicity to the movie. Contrary to this is the movie “Planet Terror” directed by Robert Rodriguez. There is nothing left out. Each scene is a feast for the eyes while not saying very much for the characters. There is obviously character development but that is not one of the main aspects to the film, the same as “Blow-Up”. There is a plot to follow which ultimately changes, yet there is not much depth to the characters. So let’s hope that Kawabata and Cortazar will release their stories together. Maybe they could call it Caged Thought.

-vk

Short Story Parabolic Mirrors

2008-10-16T21:33:00.000-04:00

Two portrayals of men whose lives have been devastated by tragedy- one whose son has fallen in war, one who relives losing his innocence, are found within The Fly and Blow-up. Katherine Mansfield’s The Fly narrows the reader’s field of vision to the observation of small details. The boss in the story is still distraught, regardless of the six years passed since his son’s death. It’s the petty action, the torturing of the fly, that shows what turmoil the boss still experiences.
He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the blotting paper, and as the fly tried its wings, down came a great heavy blot.
The scale of this torture, a fly, a struggle in a drop of ink, are symbolic of the magnitude of the bosses defeat. He is rendered small, so much so that even his well of anger has been relinquished to an inkpot. This portrayal of a deep wound through a tiny ubiquitous object is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s treatment of blades of grass on the lawn at ‘Oxbridge’ in her essay A Room of One’s Own. Both authors are able to transform innate objects into receptacles of profound emotion, creating literary worry dolls.
Woolf uses internal dialogue to draw a shockingly honest picture of a broken psyche in much the same way that Julio Cortazar does in Blow-up. The parabolic mirror image of the character’s own view of himself is confused, broken by time, doubles back on itself, even to the extent that on seven occasions he refers to himself in the third person. Unlike in Mansfield the reader steps inside the picture with Blow-Up, rather than watching through a window.
… If I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing (clouds, and once in a while a pigeon) or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth…
The characters thoughts become the readers, as that is all she is given. Yet the view is still constrained, in this case by the characters own emotional limitations.
The girls were in Belgium last week having a look at poor Reggie’s grave, and they happened to come across your boys.
The readers view of the boss in Mansfield’s work is framed in finite space, the emotional trigger of one twenty-two word sentence in one tiny moment of time brings forth six years worth of the bosses misery.
Much like Hobbes’ atomist theory, all events can be broken into tiny particles that make up our experiences as humans. Both authors revealed to us that life is lived in what is small; a blade of grass, a single snapshot, a drop of ink, or a sentence uttered by a close friend. Regardless of the scope of the view, life is in the details. -MM

The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket

2008-10-16T12:17:00.000-04:00

In this short story, “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” written by Yasunari Kawabata found in the Palm of the Hand Stories by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman, is told through the eyes of a narrator. Taking place on the slopes of Japan, the narrator watches as children engage on an insect chase at the base of an embankment. Each child with a home made lantern in hand, unique with different colored paper stretched over the sides, and old-fashioned patterns so that from distance you just see a “bobbing cluster of beautiful varicolored lanterns.” Kawabatta goes on about this insect chase as an outsider looking in on these children in a simple yet captivating way that pulls you in yourself. She makes a seemingly insignificant moment like the exchanging on an insect and the way light happens to hit something seem so important. In the end, when the story turns to the thoughts of wisdom of the narrator you learn that this story is not just about a childish insect chase, but how it is a metaphor for something much greater in life. As the narrator seems to speak from experience imparting wisdom we learn about love and hope. That “even is you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world.” And grasshoppers may seem like bell crickets and bell crickets may seem like grasshoppers. However, this story is also about hope, which “should the day come, when it seems to you that the world is full of grasshoppers.” Remember the moments when your beautiful lantern on a girl’s chest writes your name. Much like Chekhov’s, “The Kiss” it is a short story about a moment so ordinary yet can change you forever. And like Bob Marley’s famous Redemption song about “emancipating yourself form mental slavery”, sung with just his voice and an acoustic guitar, this story is simple but you will catch you off guard with a deeper meaning. BS

Glimpses at the Complexity of Life and the Human Condition

2008-10-15T17:50:00.000-04:00

Yasunari Kawabata’s short story Canaries is a forbidden letter to a past lover that babbles and eddies with the narrator’s awkwardness and emotions. The subtext of the letter successfully tackles the complexity of human relationships. Superficially the narrator laments his recently deceased wife and is reminiscent of his long lost lover, Madam. The story is grounded in the relatively trivial fate of a pair of birds he received as a gift from Madam, who instructs him to: “Please remember me with these birds. Perhaps it’s odd to give living creatures as a souvenir, but our memories, too are alive.” As the birds inevitably near the end of their life, he desperately tries to create something out of the memories they are preserving. He habitually returns to clarification phrases such as “I’ll put it plainly” and “I’ll say it again”. When the letter drifts into those serious emotional territories, the narrator returns to the trivial topic of the birds. The letter reads more like a schizophrenic self exploration then genuine correspondence.
James Purdy’s Daddy Wolf (1923) also has a narrator who is dependendent on communication to cope with personal hardships. At times it is unclear which of the narrator’s many strangers is absorbing his burden by putting up with listening. Is it a stranger on the phone, the operator, the stranger in the hall, or myself as the reader of the story? The narrator of this story has taken this situation to a ludicrous degree. “It’s funny talking to you like this, Mister, and as I told the lady I am waiting to get reconnected with on the phone, if I didn’t know any better I would think either one of you was Daddy Wolf on the Trouble Phone”. The man in Kawabata’s story, who seems more in touch with reality is merely trying to cope with his emotions through the postal system, while the narrator in Daddy Wolf is not satisfied with his “Trouble Phone” as an outlet, and franticly unloads his baggage on passersbys and strangers.
The very concept of a relationship that is complex in presentation, and obscured by secrecy, dances at the edge of understanding the human predicament. Like these short stories, it is this polar duality that makes Bob Dylan’s “As I Went Out One Morning” (1967) so magical while remaining so concise. In only 140 words, Dylan paints a picture of the disturbingly unhealthy relationship between “the fairest damsel that ever did walk in chains” and Tom Paine. It is his mastery over the rhetoric of human relationships that allows the complexity of the situation to be subtle and technically unwritten.
WF

Canaries

2008-10-15T14:18:00.000-04:00

Canaries

2008-10-15T13:58:00.000-04:00

A Sunny Place

2008-10-15T04:14:00.000-04:00

When one thinks of sunny places they would normally categorize this with happier thoughts. In Kawabata’s “A Sunny Place”, the happiness of the narrator just isn’t as obvious as a sunny place. Kawabata uses significant narrative skills to express all of the trials and tribulations that the narrator has gone through and how he has developed because of all of this.

Kawabata’s short story begins with the narrator acknowledging his bad habit of staring as he continues to stare at a girl that he just met. Obviously embarrassed by his constant staring, he speaks about his annoying habit, saying “I felt an intense self-hatred every time I realized I was doing it. Maybe this habit came from having spent all my time reading others’ faces once I had lost my parents and my home when I was a child and gone to live with others. Perhaps that is why I have turned out this way.”

As the story progresses, the narrator gains a sudden realization that his bad habit of staring at people’s faces actually came from a different and more significant event. Through spending plenty of time with his blind grandfather, the narrator’s concern for him started to grow as he realized that he could only face one direction. Thus the staring began. Once he grasps all of this, the narrator’s sense of security begins to rise once again as he joyfully realizes that his strange habit of staring at people’s faces did not originate from “base motives”.

In comparison to Julio Cortazar’s “Blow-Up”, I think that this story also expresses realization and recognition just as much as “A Sunny Place” does. The only difference between the two stories is that “Blow-Up” revolves around the realization of a specific event while “A Sunny Place” revolves around the realization of one’s personality. In “Blow-Up”, the protagonist character realizes that things are not as they might seem on the outside. He believes that he is taking pictures of a regular couple when really; there is something deeper and more intense that is going on under the surface.

To a certain extent, “A Sunny Place” is just like escargot. Most people believe that escargot is too strange to eat and they probably wouldn’t even bother trying it. But if you look past it’s bizarreness, you might just have the sudden realization that it isn’t what it seems, just like the narrator’s unfortunate habit of staring.

RR

"The Fly"

2008-10-15T00:48:00.000-04:00

Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” demonstrates the importance of being able to pick yourself up after a tragedy. While visiting a friend named the boss, Mr. Woodifield mentions his friend’s late son. The boss immediately reverts to a place where he must cry and mourn. He laments his loss, “‘My son!’ groaned the boss. But no tears came yet. In the past, in the first few months, and even years after the boy’s death, he had only to say those words to be overcome by such grief...” The fact that he cannot cry anymore is his heart telling him to move on and remember the happy days, but he is determined to fight it.
When the boss saves a drowning fly, and subsequently endangers it, he is amazed at the fly’s ability to save itself. This reflects the boss’ inability to save himself. Since his son’s death, the boss has not been able to get to a peaceful place. The fly’s persistence also reveals how the boss may wish that his son could have saved himself, if he had only demonstrated enough perseverance.
The boss’s entrapment in the past is also a commentary on a flaw of humans. Like many people, the boss is too focused on the past to be able to finish his life happily. In contrast to his human foe, the fly does not dwell on each new drop of ink that hits, it continues to wipe its wings until it is impossible to continue.
I enjoyed reading “The Fly,” because I was surprised by the actions the main character took, and how he could not follow the fly’s example and press forward. Jane Eyre, reminds me of this story because Rochester endures so many hardships and is at the same lost man by the end. He needs someone to pull him up, which everyone needs at some point. The boss could definitely use some assistance.

VG

Blowing Up

2008-10-14T23:25:00.001-04:00

I recently read the short story “Blow-up” by Julio Cortazar. At least I think I did. I think I read it several times. After reading it several times, I realized what was really going on.

So I read it again--for the first time, really.

This vignette seems really dreamlike, with the narrators intense imagery from the littlest details, “...there's wind in Paris, and even less seldom a wind like this that swirled round corners and rose up to whip at old wooden venetian blinds behind which astonished ladies commented variously on how unreliable the weather has been these last three years” so that only in this chaotic environment Cortazar could create a new story to arise within the narrator’s mind.

The narrator’s total obsession over the photograph is comparable to a soldier’s obsession over a faceless woman in Anton Chekov’s “The Kiss” in that each character is obsession over something that they had no control over to begin with, only to find themselves in an orbit of pain and confusion.

This story is reminiscent of the 1979 film The Conversation, where an unknowing bystander is suddenly absorbed into a conflict that eventually destroys his life. Each is interesting--if not frustrating--because only in the end do we realize the damage of their decision to interfere in others’ business.

Totally unique to “Blow-up” is the perspective of the narrator, or what he believes his perspective is. We can never really know what or where the narrator is at the beginning and at the ending of the vignette, all the audience gets is the picture of a blue sky with the occasional pigeon flying past. Such utter loss of reality is the element that makes this story worthy of reading, because one can never really know what happened to the narrator and what photograph was really caught that day.

Andrew Carter's Canaries Blog

2008-10-14T22:45:00.000-04:00

Kawabata’s Canaries is a story of great heartbreak and sadness. At the start of the story, we are immediately introduced to a depressed man who has lost his wife and is dealing with committing infidelity. The story is in letterform, and is being written to the narrator’s mistress. He is explaining to the woman that he is going to give up the canaries that she gave him when they were together. The canaries were originally intended as a love memento, but now, as the birds are in their frail last stage of life, they only remind the narrator of who was once their caretaker: his wife. This makes the narrator start to wonder if it was in fact his wife who brought him memories of his mistress, because she kept the birds alive and took care of them. The conflict the narrator deals with is an interesting inner turmoil, and an ironic one at that; you’d think that if the man cheated on his wife, he wouldn’t want to think about her in the first place, and not only does he do so, but the canaries which are supposed to remind him of his “madam” are reminding him of his wife. Fancy that. It’s also plausible to wonder what the man is really upset about, losing his wife or having the affair? A morose, thought-provoking and even somewhat ominous tale, Canaries evokes, ever so slightly, an aspect of Purdy’s Daddy Wolf. The aspect that both narrator’s have lost their wives and are broken up about it creates a similarity between the two stories. They both deal with a love lost, but the way each main character deals with their emotions is what differs the two. If Canaries were a song, however, it would have to be “Fix You” by Coldplay; the lyrics speak for themselves: “When you lose something you can’t replace; When you were too in love to let it go” and the song sounds like that for the majority of it’s 5 minute running time. AC

"The Fly"

2008-10-14T22:01:00.001-04:00

“The Fly,” by Katherine Mansfield and found in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, can be figuratively compared to jalapeno-spicy salsa. The sorrow of the story can quickly overcome a reader to the point that it brings him or her to tears the way some salsas can do the same. If you put yourself in the main character’s situation, you can easily see how he becomes numb to the world like taste buds become numb after eating spicy salsa; the numbness is so powerful that you can’t even remember how the rest of your food tasted. In a similar way, the boss’ painful memories of his deceased son are so overwhelming that at the end of the story, “for the life of him he could not remember” that he was just lamenting over his boy. Is Mansfield incorporating Freud’s relatively new concept of repression in her story?! They were alive during the same time period, and the fact that The Fly gives us a glimpse into the psychology of someone undergoing the grieving process makes me highly suspect!

Initially, the complexity and underlying mood of The Fly are very subtle, but as you continue to read, the deep confusion and sadness of the main character suddenly spills out at you. Readers are startled by the boss’ interaction with the fly because they have just been told about his depressing past. “Time . . . could make no difference. Other men perhaps might recover, might live their loss down, but not he. How was it possible?” To say the least, when the boss leaves the fly as the painter Joan Miro left his big, white canvases, the reader is “absolutely cowed, stunned.”

The abrupt changes in storyline and mood are as striking as the storyline and mood changes of Julio Cortazar’s Blow-Up. In fact, both of these stories are very much like Quentin Tarantino movies. Each includes a curious action scene that can only be vaguely explained by the numerous flashbacks and/or flash-forwards of the story. As readers go from beginning to end, they are forced to reinvent their thoughts and come up with a new answer as to what the plot is about on more than one occasion. Unfortunately in the end, readers are not left with a definitive answer; they are just left guessing as to the correctness of their conclusions. In addition, both The Fly and Blow-up delve deep into the thought processes of the main characters, the boss and Michel, respectively, as they try to deal with their emotions and rationalize their experiences. Although these characters deal with their emotions and experiences in completely different ways, it is undeniable that both characters will be haunted by their memories again and again. CH

2008-10-14T21:55:00.000-04:00

Everything gets better with time.
This is the statement that everyone tells themselves after something terrible happens in their life. But is this actually a true statement, or simply another one of those that is only said to make individuals feel better during a time of grieving?
The boss in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” is one example of how these statements are contradicted. Six years after his son’s death, he still has not accepted that his only son was killed in war. The boss occupies himself with different aspects of his office, anything he can find to keep his mind from thinking about the devastating truth instead of accepting it. He points out to Mr. Woodifield each week, he has “new carpet…new furniture...and electric heating” in his office.
Acceptance is one necessity to moving on that the boss does not have. He does not realize, nor does he want to realize, the truth regarding his son’s death. When Mr. Woodifield mentions that his wife and daughter saw the son’s grave, the boss’s mind set completely changes. The diction went from “solid satisfaction” and “lovingly” to “firm, heavy steps” and “plumped…terrible shock” afterwards. Also, the boss becomes almost demented when he continues to dip the fly back into the ink to watch it suffer and struggle to survive, and “felt admiration” towards the fly’s courage to stand and clean its ink-soaked body. If only the boss would realize that he too needs to have that same courage to pick himself up and live again. Just before the fly is dipped into the ink bottle for the last time, it is noted that it looks “timid and weak”. I think the boss notices this trait in the fly because it is exactly what he does not want to be seen in him - a sign of weakness. KB

2008-10-14T16:25:00.000-04:00

“Daddy Wolf” by James Purdy is a disturbing key-hole glimpse into the life of a pressured New York citizen in a struggle for survival. Benny, the main character, explains the reason for his prolonged use of the telephone booth by going on a rant about his problems: his wife and child leaving him, his desolate status, the disgusting state of his apartment and the rat infestation problem that he has but cannot convince his landlord to care about. Is his desperate tone a reflection on his life or a metaphorical comment on society from the author?
The narration style of the main character is reminiscent of “Aftermath” by Mary Yukari Waters, a short story about a widow in post-war Japan trying to come to terms with loss of her husband as she fights the enculturation of America while raising their son alone. Both stories revolve around the struggle of endurance, and acceptance. Both Benny and Makiko have lost their spouses and are now feeling entirely alone with an important task upon their shoulders.
The speaking style of Benny is that of an uneducated individual with bad grammar and form which is in contrast to Maiko’s language, which is fluid and graceful, but both characters express their sorrow efficiently. Benny’s speech, while meant to be noticed, doesn’t get in the way of the dialogue. “Daddy Wolf” evoked feelings of repulsion, intrigue and sympathy, much like the movie Citizen Kane, the groundbreaking movie directed by Orson Welles. “Daddy Wolf”, Citizen Kane, and “Aftermath” all weave their stories through memories or glimpses into the past.
The most unsettling part of “Daddy Wolf” was Daddy Wolf, a mysterious man who listens to women’s problems on the phone and attempts to give advice: “…when things got so rough, my wife did call Daddy Wolf…the number is CRack 8-7869…and only ladies can call”. The image that came to mind is of a Little Red Riding Hood type character, a stereotypical fairytale wolf, sitting behind a big mahogany desk, with snarling yellow teeth just waiting for helpless women to call so he can find his next victim. And even though Benny admitted to the fact that Daddy Wolf helped his wife by convincing her to stay faithful to her husband and not use her body to earn money, something still feels instinctually wrong about the situation. This I believe, was the intent of the author, to make the reader feel grimy and concerned simultaneously, both elements which were captured perfectly in this story.

-NS

GOD SEES THE TRUTH BUT WAITS

2008-10-14T09:15:00.000-04:00

by Leo Tolstoy

In "God See The Truth But Waits", a man is imprisoned after he is wrongfully accused of murder. This is a emotional story of acceptance and forgiveness -- acceptance of the failings of yourself and others and the strength to forgive even when understanding is beyond your grasp. All I could think about when I finished this story was something my late Aunt Cathy used to often say. "God always answers your prayers. It's just that sometimes the answer is 'no'."

Read "God Sees The Truth But Waits" here.

This review is also posted at Books 'n Border Collies

Dates from Hell - Various

2008-10-12T14:27:00.001-04:00

A collection of 4 short stories (novella's really as they are all just over 100 pages long) by some of today's most popular paranormal romance and urban fasntasy authors.

Undead in the Garden of Good and Evil - Kim Harrison
This story started off quite confusing as it mixed alive and undead vampires with a confusing mythology that wasn't very well explained. It became a sexy murder mystery tale centred around alive vampire Ivy Tamnwood. To get ahead it looks like she will have to whore herself to her undead vampire boss Art by lettinghim suck her blood. The murder comes in as they are working in the police force and theirpower games get all mixed in. Pretty average, I hope her series is better...

The Claire Switch Project - Lynsay Sands
A fun and sexy tale about scientist Claire who gets hit with a destabiliser ray giving her the power to shapeshift. She uses photos to emulate the shape, clothes and looks of other men and women. It gets more complicated when she finally gets a first date to their high school reunion with long standing crush Karl, but promises his twin sister she will shift into a famous movie star and be her date too! A quick and fun read.

Chaotic - Kelley Armstrong
Half-demon Hope has inherited her father's love of chaos. She works as a journalist covering paranormal stories as well as working as an Agent for the Interracial Council on the side. At least that is what Tristin Robard has told her. Everything falls apart when she meets sexy werewolf Karl Marsten who brings together chaos, desire and the truth in an explosive adventure at a museum gala dinner.

Dead Man Dating - Lori Handeland
Kit goes on a date with a guy she has met over the internet. Things go very wekk until they stop to have sex in an alley, which is very unlike her as she is a virgin waiting until she is married or meets her true love. A strange man calling himself Chavez turns up and shoots her date who leaves no blood or body behind. He claimes to be a rogue demon hunter and here Kit's adventures really begin...

I really liked the Kelley Armstrong story and I am looking forward to reading Personal Demon which has more on Hope. The tales by Lori Handeland and Lynsay Sands were also a lot of fun. The only disappointment was Kim Harrison, but I am planning on reading more by her and not judging her only on this short tale.

Stories by O. Henry

2008-10-11T12:51:00.000-04:00

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I found O. Henry's stories to be refreshingly delightful, poignant, and easy to read. While I didn't find O. Henry's actual writing beautiful in comparison to others, in the end, though, I think everyone should read some of O. Henry's stories: they are enjoyable and worthwhile.

O. Henry's stories are full of irony. His stories focus on the base aspects of human nature: poverty, crime, dying. And yet they focus on self-improvement and the "love your neighbor" aspects of human nature. The characters in O. Henry's stories were mostly loving, and the endings were poignant and "tender."

O. Henry was born William Sidney Porter and became O. Henry after a few years in prison, during which time he turned to his writing. I'm glad he did write because I really enjoyed his stories! My favorites were these (links to public domain etexts):

The Gift of the Magi. $1.87 is all she had on Christmas Eve, and yet she wanted to buy her husband a Christmas gift.

The Cop and the Anthem. A homeless man wants to be arrested so he can be in jail all winter.

The Last Leaf. She knows she will die when the last leaf falls from the vine.

The Ransom of Red Chief. Two criminals need $2,000, so they determine to kidnap the son of the richest man in town and hold him for ransom.

The Writing

O. Henry's writing is perfectly acceptable: it's probably a style issue for me. O. Henry is a down-to-earth writer, and his writing seemed to have a more conversational aspect. For example, in "The Gift of the Magi," the woman begins to cry in the first paragraphs. Then,

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage [sobs] to the second [sniffles], take a look at the home.

Now, there is technically nothing wrong with addressing the reader. But since I recently read James Joyce, who was careful to develop a scene, and Ernest Hemingway, who never would use so many words to describe something, for me it was just a surprising sentence to read.

Also, along the same line, O. Henry told his stories, but none of the characters seemed developed. Even after finishing "The Ransom of Red Chief," for example, I barely know about the two kidnappers and the young boy; they remained stereotypes in a clever story. On the other hand, while Joyce seemed long-winded in some respects and his stories were somewhat depressing, the characters and settings were so beautifully created that I didn't mind reading it.

I read this right after reading Hemingway, so maybe if I'd waited a few days after Hemingway, O. Henry's writing style wouldn't have been as noticeable; I would have just enjoyed the stories.

The bottom line is I really enjoyed O. Henry's stories, and after my disappointment in Hemingway, I really needed something like this.

If you want to read some "tender" (and, yes, I admit, somewhat cheesy) "love your neighbor" stories, you should really give O. Henry a try. Read his stories online in the public domain at Project Gutenberg; most are fairly short.

Cross-posted in slightly different form here.

Snow - Tove Jansson

2008-10-10T15:17:00.001-04:00

Tove Jansson is well known as an extraordinary woman, and writer of children’s stories. Most famous for her stories of the Moomins, Jansson reached more recent acclaim after her death, with the publication of two collections of short stories, The Summer Book and The Winter Book. I remember loving the Moomin stories as a child, and wanted to select one of Jansson’s short stories for this challenge. I selected Snow as I was drawn to the simple title, I knew nothing of the content of any of these stories.

Snow appears to be a simple story. A child and her mother have moved to a strange old house, which is permeated with the memory of the previous family. The mother is relaxed and settled there, finding peace from the outside world. The child however, finds no comfort, becoming obsessed with the falling snow outside, and the prospect of being buried forever in a terrifying snow drift. I said appears to be a simple story. Snow is really about the unfamiliar, about resisting change and the unknown, but about finding hope in family, in companionship. Ali Smith, who selected this collection, described A Winter Book as "Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are pieces of scattered light."

Jansson's writing itself is beautiful. Much of her work is semi-autobiographical, and this is understandable when reading her descriptions of the empty rooms, of the sounds and light, and about a child's reaction to the unknown, the silence, the resignation. You can feel the child's loneliness and confusion, being removed from her own life and deposited in a large, empty, old house.

"If you stood in the furthest room, you could see through all the other rooms and it made you feel sad; it was like a train ready to leave with its lights shining over the platform. The last room was dark like the inside of a tunnel except for a faint glow in the gold frames and the mirror which was hung too high on the wall. All the lamps were soft and misty and made a very tiny circle of light. And when you ran you made no noise."

Since reading Snow, I have read more about Tove Jansson, a fascinating woman of nature, who lived her life in the towns and islands of Finland, living well into old age, and her work is permeated with her life experiences and love of the natural world around her. Reviews of other stories in A Winter Book are heaped with praise, and thus I will certainly be reading the rest of this and other collections. I will however be waiting for the appropriate season for the rest of this wintry collection, as I think the glorious sun beaming down on me while reading about Snow did hamper my enjoyment just a little! Definitely one for being curled up in front of the fire, with snow falling outside.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish - J.D. Salinger

2008-10-10T15:12:00.000-04:00

The first title read for my Short Story Reading Challenge and I may have placed the bar a little high! A Perfect Day for Bananafish was first published in the New Yorker, in 1948, in the aftermath of a World War and at the dawn of American consumerism. It was later published as the first in Salinger's Nine Stories. Bananafish follows a young couple, Seymour Glass and his wife Muriel, on a holiday in Florida.

The first half of the story introduces us to Muriel in her hotel room, making a telephone call to her mother, a conversation that intermittently switches between the topics of Seymour’s emotional instability and fashion. Their discussion alludes to a car accident caused by Seymour’s fragility and distraction, and Muriel’s mother’s fears for her daughter’s safety. The story then takes us to a young girl, Sybil, left to play alone on the beach by her mother. Sybil finds a perfectly cheerful Seymour, who takes her for a swim, telling her the story of the bananafish.

On publication, this short story was highly acclaimed, as an important topic for discussion in the years after the war, dealing with the shell-shocked young men, very like Seymour, who survived, but were forever changed by their experiences.

The reader is not invited too close. Seymour and Muriel are referred to as the young man, or the girl, their names only being spoken by other characters, the telephone operator and Muriel’s mother. This combined with it being a short story allows the reader to keep a distance, although this certainly did not dampen my feelings at the dramatic ending. Muriel’s character appears somewhat cold, and it would be easy for the reader to lay some blame on her for Seymour’s current state.

But what Salinger shows here is that depression cannot always be readily visible, one can be cheerful and go about your day regardless of inner turmoil. That is not to say there are no signs, Muriel’s mother alludes to some of the events where Seymour has lost control. But Muriel seems oblivious to her husband’s struggle, and it is difficult to say whether this is intentional or genuine ignorance. Sybil’s mother too is somewhat detached, leaving her daughter to play alone on the beach, while she returns to the hotel bar for a cocktail. Seymour's encounter with Sybil is endearing and playful, as if he were searching for a way to return to to the ease and simplicity of childhood himself, lost in a moment where there are no responsibilities, no consequences. It is entertaining Sybil and the tale of the bananafish that lead to this “Perfect Day” for Seymour.

I found this story beautifully meaningful, most especially because so many soldiers have returned from war as changed men, haunted by what they have seen and experienced. In telling a simple tale of one poignant day in the life of a married couple, Salinger has conveyed all the sadness and post-war confusion apparent in Seymour’s life. The bananafish is a welcome respite, a moment of amusment and childish fantasy, about which I could have read a entire story! Highly recommended, this short story will stay with you.

Stories by Ernest Hemingway

2008-10-10T12:42:00.000-04:00

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Hemingway's stories are poetry: that is my first and lasting impression of Ernest Hemingway's short stories. In his short stories, Hemingway treats words as sparsely as do poets.

I don't usually understand or enjoy poetry because it feels so much must be inferred or interpreted. While reading Ernest Hemingway's stories, I likewise felt the need to infer and interpret beyond my comfort zone: I didn't "get" them and I certainly didn't enjoy reading the few stories I read. While I've only read a dozen of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, I'm finished.

That, however, doesn't mean you should avoid Hemingway's stories: they may resonate with you, and you may love his writing style. He does a magnificent job of capturing a scene through dialog. Hemingway is worth reading.

Two Stories to Read

While I didn't love any of the stories, there are two I would recommend others read. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" follows an unsuccessful writer as he dies of gangrene in the middle of an African hunting camp, stranded after his vehicle broke down. It is a story with two aspects: one part follows the dialog he has with his wife, and one part follows what he is thinking and all the stories he wished he had written.

The second story I'd recommend is "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which I'd read before and is probably the most well-known of his stories. In that story, a deaf, widowed old man who has recently attempted suicide sits and drinks late into the night in a café. One waiter essentially kicks out the old man because he wants to go home, while the other waiter contemplates on how the café is a nice place to sit, and everyone needs a place.

I like the stories behind these, and I like the summary of them as I write them up now (although I know I did a poor job, since there is lots of symbolism in them that I've missed). What I disliked about Hemingway's stories was the writing style. The stories were dialog driven, and the parts that were not dialog (such as the writer's thoughts in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"), felt like run-on sentences (although all were grammatically correct). His stories also end abruptly, as did James Joyce's stories that I read recently. Hemingway was not a bad writer; he is brilliant at controlling each tight scene. For me, however, the style was irritating: I've decided that Hemingway is just not for me.

Cross-posted in slightly different form here.

The View From Castle Rock, by Alice Munro - Wendy's Review

2008-09-28T15:02:00.001-04:00

These are stories. You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative. With these developments the two streams came close enough together that they seemed to me meant to flow in one channel, as they do in this book. -From The View From Castle Rock, Introduction-

We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life. -From The View From Castle Rock, Epilogue-

The View From Castle Rock is an interesting combination of fiction and truth - Alice Munro delves into her family background, digging up her ancestors and her childhood to create a series of linked stories which explore family connections, poverty, adversity and understanding of ordinary lives as part of a bigger history.

The collection begins deep in the Ettrick Valley, just south of Edinburgh Scotland. Munro visits a cemetery on a cold, rainy day and locates the headstones of her relatives.

Also, among various Laidlaws, a stone bearing the name of Robert Laidlaw, who died at Hopehouse January 29th 1800 aged seventy-two years. Son of Will, brother of Margaret, uncle of James, who probably never knew that he would be remembered by his link to these others, any more than he would know the date of his own death. My great-great-great-great-grandfather. -From The View From Castle Rock, page 6-

In this first story, the reader is introduced posthumously to the characters who will make up future stories in the collection. Each new story moves the reader further into the present. In the title story: ‘The View From Castle Rock‘…Munro gives the reader a glimpse into what prompted the emmigration of her family from Scotland to Canada. A young boy follows his intoxicated father up the steep, uneven stone steps of an ancient castle and onto a roofless tower.

The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in the sunlight and part in the shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.

“So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.” -From The View From Castle Rock, page 30-

Munro’s strength in these early stories is her ability to set place and time for the reader. She writes lush descriptions and peoples her prose with complex characters. When Walter, a young boy aboard a ship bound for America, writes in his journal ‘And this night in the year 1818 we lost sight of Scotland‘ the reader feels the anticipation as well as the sadness of saying good-bye to one’s homeland in search of a better life. Munro uses real documents (such as Walter’s journal) to help piece together the history of her family and there are times when it is difficult to ascertain what is fact and what is fiction.

And I am surely one of the liars the old man talks about, in what I have written about the voyage. Except for Walter’s journal, and the letters, the story is full of my invention.

The sighting of Fife from Castle Rock is related by Hogg, so it must be true. -From The View from Castle Rock, page 84-

Munro completes part I of her collection with the story ‘Working For A Living‘ which recollects of her father’s boyhood in the town of Blyth. Part II introduces Munro herself to the collection in the story ‘Fathers‘ - a painful look at the fine line between discipline and abuse and a girl’s relationship with her father.

‘Lying Under the Apple Tree‘ is about the coming of age of a young girl…the innocence of youth vanquished. The ideas of God, church values (morality) and sin weave themselves through this story. Munro also skillfully introduces nature into her theme of growing up and the recognition of one’s sexuality. Her use of dirt as a symbol is effective in introducing the concept of sex vs. a girl’s fantasies vs. the realities of love.

“Dirt,” my sister whispered to me when I got home. “Dirt on the back of your blouse.”

She watched me take it off in the bathroom, and scrub at it with a hard bar of soap. We didn’t have running hot water except in the winter, so she offered to get me some from the kettle. She didn’t ask me how the dirt had got there, she was only hoping to get rid of the evidence, keep me out of trouble. -From The View From Castle Rock, page 203-

In ‘Hired Girl‘ Munro continues to explore the idea of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. In addition she builds on the idea of place - physical place vs. one’s place in society. This concept of there being barriers between classes, is one of the main themes of Munro’s collection and in ‘Hired Girl‘ she emphasizes this idea.

I did not yet understand that maids didn’t have to find their way anywhere. They stayed put, where the work was. It was the people who made the work who could come and go. -From The View From Castle Rock, page 231-

The final stories of Munro’s collection are dedicated to her early marriage (’The Ticket‘), and her maturation into a woman who is capable of looking at her history and life in the harsh light of reality (’Home‘ and ‘What Do You Want to Know For?‘). Munro’s recollections of her father in his later years and the home where she grew up being modernized, are touching exposes on what it means to finally be an adult and no longer be protected by the innocence of childhood. Munro writes:

The past needs to be approached from a distance. -From The View From Castle Rock, page 332-

The View From Castle Rock does that - in exploring her roots, Munro has succeeded in creating a unique blend of stories which look at one family’s history in the context of a bigger picture of what it means to live on the edge of poverty, connect to family, and create a life with meaning and understanding.

Recommended.

Dubliners by James Joyce

2008-09-13T23:28:00.000-04:00

In Dubliners, his collection of short stories, James Joyce captures Irish life, specifically the lives of Dubliners. Each story is a magnificent sketch of the people, setting, and situations; the entire collection presents a variety of such sketches. At the end of each sketch, I felt the despair that I believe Joyce intended to impart in each normal life situation. While each story captures different characters in a various stages of life, similar despair pervades each of their lives in related settings.

Joyce's ability to capture the world through his words greatly impressed me. Each story is incredibly realistic and amazingly readable. However, I was not impressed with the plots behind each story; Joyce seems to hint at the issues and sometimes I felt too much was left for me to guess at. But while I didn't love the stories themselves, I would highly recommend reading Joyce's stories solely for the beautiful writing and careful character development. Reading the stories in Dubliners is an example to me that plot doesn't necessarily make something I read "great"; good writing makes it great.

Until I picked up his volume of short-stories, I hadn't thought I'd ever read James Joyce. He's always intimidated me. To my surprise, I'd read one story, "Araby," which had been assigned reading in my ninth-grade English class. It remains my favorite of Joyce's stories because, just as at age 14, the main character's frustrations and "unrequited crush" resonated with me. If you choose one of Joyce's stories to read, I'd recommend "Araby." As I said, much in the underlying plot is left to the reader to untangle, and yet, the characters, setting, and emotions are perfectly captured.

Cross posted at Rebecca Reads.

Skin by Roald Dahl

2008-09-07T06:40:00.000-04:00

I read this collection of short stories for the RIP III challenge, the Short Story Reading Challenge and for Short Story September, several of the stories I had read before at some point, but I really enjoyed the collection, it was perfect for picking up whilst dinner was cooking or whilst in the bath. I had included a mini review of some, but not all, of the stories in the collection
WARNING: I have tried to avoid saying what the outcome of each story is, but with short stories this is hard and in some descriptions I come pretty close to the end of the tale.
Skin
"I want you to paint a picture on my skin, on my back. Then I want you to tattoo over what you have painted so that it will be there always."As a young man Drioli admired and loved another man's art, so-much-so that he begged this artist, to tattoo a portrait of his wife on his back. He taught the artist to tattoo, and ended up with his whole back as a portrait of his wife's face.
Years passed, 2 World Wars have caused Drioli's tattooing business to fail, and he is left a poor old man. Walking through the streets of Paris he sees a picture by Soutine in the window of the gallery. Going in to admire the art he ends up revealing an early work by Soutine, his tattoo. A poor man he may be, but he is a walking talking masterpiece, the gallery owner wants a piece of him. Just how far will he go to get it?
The African Story
When the Second World War started a young man joined the RAF as he loved to fly. On his first mission his flight failed and he spent two nights at a lonely, desolate farm. There, lived alone an old man who relished the pilot's company. The old man shared a strange story with the pilot, which the pilot later recorded "not in the old man's words, but in his own words, painting it as a picture."
The old man's tale tells of a relationship with his employee, a man with who gets obsessed by repetitive noises, the noise of his masters dog chewing leads him to kill his masters beloved dog. The man's tale tells his story of revenge.
Galloping Foxely
A regular commuter, used to the routine of his daily commute is suddenly struck with horror when a stranger appears and spoils his daily commute, having the audacity to share his carriage. Not only does this stranger upset the daily commute but he also recognises that face as the school bully who tortured him through his days at (a very stereotypical) boarding school. How does he react?
The Wish
A lovely and very short story about the imagination of a small child trying to make his way across an immense carpet of red hot rocks and black child eating snakes.
The Surgeon
In the surgeon, one mans ordinary day as a surgeon ends up turning his life upside down as he saves the life of the Prince of Saudi Arabia. He is given a rare, rather large diamond as a gift of thanks. With no way to store the diamond safely it is locked away inside the freezer in a bock of ice. He returns to find his house destroyed and the diamond missing, yet it turns up again in a rather strange and unfortunate place.
The Champion of the World
When I saw this title my first thought was Danny, but this has nothing to do with that small boy. I'm sure I've read this story before somewhere, maybe when I was at school. The Champion of the world is about Pheasant poaching, all the ways and means of doing it, slyly without the park keepers catching on.
A pair of men believe they have found the ideal way to poach these birds, and having come up with this method they can't just leave it at poaching a few birds, they go to the extreme and get over a hundred birds. But, as we all know, sinners never win.
Lamb to the Slaughter
The husbands annoying you, home late, expecting dinner on the table, he's got quite boring in his old age, and you just want out. Most people would just walk away, but not this lady. A quick smack to the back of the head and she no longer has a husband to worry about anymore, but she does have the small matter of covering up the murder to deal with. What better way than to ensure the the poilce remove all trace of the crime themselves.

The last one in the challenge for me ...

2008-09-05T19:49:00.000-04:00

I have really enjoyed this challenge - and even though this post is about the final item I read in the list I prepared for it, I'm coming across so many more short stories that I want to read as I see others' comments and the titles they've chosen. So thank you for expanding my short story horizons!

In Sunshine or in Shadow : Stories by Irish Women, edited by Kate Cruise O'Brien, and Mary Maher, is a collection of short stories written by women from Ireland, and those of Irish descent. They are contemporary stories, many of them about women at the time of the referendum to legalize divorce in Ireland in the 1990s. This was my final choice in the Short Story Challenge.

Like any short story collection, there were some stories I liked much more than others. As a whole, the stories are all at least interesting. My particular favorites were "Taximen Are Invisible" by Maeve Binchy, "The Orphan" by Mary Dorcey, and "Bishop's House" by Mary Gordon (who is one of my favorite authors anyway). Many of the themes are universal, but with an Irish sensibility, which added a different aspect to them. I am always interested to read a story or a novel where I can identify with a basic theme or character, but some part of the whole is literally or figuratively foreign to me.

The editors did an excellent job of choosing what stories to include, in my opinion. There was a good balance of the serious, funny, poignant, ironic, and surprising. I would say that it is worth giving at least one or two of the stories a read, and who knows, you may meet some new writers along the way.

Kerfol by Edith Wharton; Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes

2008-09-03T11:44:00.001-04:00

Noyes, Deborah. 2008. The Ghosts of Kerfol.

The Ghosts of Kerfol is an enjoyable short story collection that pays tribute to Edith Wharton's short story "Kerfol". I'd encourage you to take a few minutes (about ten or twenty actually) and read this haunting story about an old-and-creepy manor. The Ghosts of Kerfol is a collection of five short stories: "Hunger Moon," "These Heads Would Speak," "The Figure Under the Sheet," "When I Love You Best," and "The Red of Berries." The first two especially--"Hunger Moon" and "These Heads Would Speak" pay tribute to Wharton's original story. The remaining stories are imaginative what-ifs that bring the story into the modern world.

The original story is a story-within-a-story. Kerfol is the manor in question. The framework of the story is about a person (I don't think it says if it is a man or woman; if it did I missed it) who is considering buying Kerfol. The narrator is there at the estate exploring the grounds and hoping for a closer view of the house itself. But the narrator keeps seeing a handful of dogs around the place. We later realize--along with the narrator--that these dogs are ghosts. That one day a year--on the terrible anniversary--they appear. The guardian and his daughter always leave that day to avoid the creepy factor as much as possible. The narrator then reads an account of the history of Kerfol.

This second story, the inner story, is set in the seventeenth century. It involves an old man and a young woman in a "seemingly" "happy" but childless marriage. Happy if you think such a thing is possible when the woman has no freedom to move about on her own even on her own estate in and about her home, her gardens, etc. Sensing on some level at least her loneliness, he buys her a dog. What happens next isn't pretty. One day he becomes jealous and he strangles her dog. And it only gets worse from there. Believe me. Dog-lovers will be crushed at the cruelty. But the husband does get his comeuppance, he's murdered--and according to his wife's claims--by these dead dogs of hers.

The story isn't pretty. It's melancholy at best. And the stories crafted in The Ghosts of Kerfol are bittersweet and haunting. The first, "Hunger Moon," re-envisions the second story (Yves de Cornault and Anne de Barrigan) as told by a servant girl, a waiting woman. The second story, "These Heads Would Speak," is about a young man visiting the estate. He's there while his mother seeks to straighten out his inheritance. Anyway, this story parallels the frame story of the original in a way.

The remaining stories interconnect with the previous and the original. It was a well-crafted book. The creepiness was perfect. I enjoyed all the stories.

Stories by Guy de Maupassant

2008-08-29T04:46:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia If Guy de Maupassant lived and wrote stories or novels today, his name would appear on The New York Times best-seller lists many weeks out of a year.

As it was, in the late 1800s, his stories were best-sellers from the time the first one, “Boule de Suif,” appeared in a collection with five other previously unknown authors, until he died, mentally ill, at the young age of 42 in 1893.

Maupassant’s stories are beautifully written. Maupassant’s writing style is concise, and he relies on dialogue, so his stories move quickly. He captures the essence of the setting in few words and makes it complete.

But that’s not all that made him a best-seller. Maupassant wrote with under-lying carnal desires in mind. In other words, he wrote about sex, greed, love, misunderstandings, and lying, among other things. The characters in his stories care most about themselves. What makes his stories resonate with the modern reader is the attraction to our own natural wants.

His stories capture greed (a woman wanting to look elegant for a party, no matter the cost; a man in need of money selling his wife; a parent in need of money selling his child; etc.), self-interest (a young man escaping from his pregnant girlfriend; society shunning prostitutes while yet accepting them; a family having the funeral before the loved one died for convenience), desire for power (a man lusting after a woman; a man trying to politically overtake a city), and so forth.

For a specific example, in “The Devil,” Maupassant captures our natural impatience. The son of a dying woman needs to plant his crop, so he hires a peasant woman to sit with his dying mother. But as the hired woman has been hired for a set pay, she doesn’t feel like waiting for the woman to die. I won’t tell you how this is resolved, but I will tell you I laughed out loud, horrid as it was! Humans are impatient by nature, and Maupassant wonderfully captured us.

I’ve now read between 80 and 100 stories (probably about 400 pages, skipping around the huge volume of Maupassant’s complete stories that I have). I think I’ve had a good taste of Maupassant’s great stories. I’m sure there are other great ones out there. Tell me if I missed your favorite! (Links below are to the stories on the web; all are in the public domain.)

Stories I Would Reread

The Necklace: A middle-class woman really wants to look nice at a social gathering so she borrows a diamond necklace from her friend….and loses it.
The Piece of String: A stingy man finds a piece of string in the middle of the town square and stops to pick it up, changing his life.
The False Gems: When his beloved wife dies, the man eventually must sell her cherished-but-false jewels.
The Horla: An invisible creature follows a man, driving him crazy.
Was it a Dream?: A man’s beloved wife died, and he morns over her grave, only to be “haunted.”
The Father: A man abandons his girlfriend once she becomes pregnant; only later does he realize what that meant for him.
The Devil: A peasant woman is hired to sit with a dying woman and gets impatient for her to die.
A Sale: Why did he dump his wife in a barrel of water? The judge wants to know.
Simon’s Papa: Simon doesn’t have a papa, and the boys in the school yard are making fun of him. He is determined to find a papa.
Clair de Lune: A priest hates women because they are only temptresses, and nothing good can come from women. And then he learns something.

An Ex-Mas Feast, by Uwem Akpan - Wendy's Review

2008-08-24T15:23:00.000-04:00

The sun had gone down on Ex-mas evening. Bad weather had stormed the seasons out of order, and Nairobi sat in a low flood, the light December rain droning on our tarpaulin roof. I was sitting on the floor of our shack, which stood on a cement slab at the end of an alley, leaning against the back of an old brick shop. Occasional winds swelled the brown polythene walls, The floor was nested with cushions that I had scavenged from a dump on Biashara Street. At night, we rolled up the edge of the tarpaulin to let in the glow of the shop’s security lights. A board, which served as our door lay by the shop wall. -From An Ex-Mas Feast-

Uwem Akpan released his debut short story collection titled Say You’re One of Them in June 2008. An Ex-Mas Feast is one of the stories in that collection - although I read it as a stand alone story in The New Yorker. Jigana, an eight year old who is the eldest boy of his family, narrates the story. He reveals the horrifying living conditions of a street family who rely on their eldest daughter’s income from prostitution to feed them. Jigana represents hope for his family who want him to go to school and become educated. Most of the story takes place on Christmas Day as the family waits for Maisha to return from her work on the streets. The mother offers her children glue to sniff to stave off hunger and reads aloud the names of relatives in an attempt to celebrate the holiday.

Mama took out our family Bible, which we had inherited from Baba’s father, to begin our Ex-mas worship. The front cover had peeled off, leaving a dirty page full of our relatives’ names, dead and living. She read them out. Baba’s late father had insisted that all the names of our family be included in recognition of the instability of street life. -From An Ex-Mas Feast-

Thematically this short story examines survival, family bonds, and the idea of education as hope to elevate oneself from poverty. It raises questions about global awareness of what is happening to families and children on the streets of Nairobi. When Jigana tells of the rich white men driving a Jaguar who “hire” Maisha for a night of sex, the reader feels stunned by the gap which lies between wealth and poverty.

Akpan’s writing is stark, shocking and painful. The story, narrated by a child, leaves the reader feeling brutalized. Bookmarks Magazine reviewed Akpan’s collection and writes:

Without flinching or lecturing, Akpan shares the almost unimaginable horrors that threaten Africa’s most vulnerable children. A Jesuit priest, he also evokes the love, grace, and other spiritual values that can emerge from the fight for survival. -From Sept/Oct edition (No. 36) of Bookmarks Magazine, page 32-

Although not easy to read, I highly recommend this short story if only to raise awareness of what is happening to children living on the streets in Africa.

Summer, with Twins

2008-08-16T09:09:00.000-04:00

Summer, with Twins by Rebecca Curtis tells the story of four waitress who are trying to make their way in life using the circumstances that each has in their individual lives.

At first Dina earned the most money, but soon the twins were each earning double and triple what Dina and I did. Dina didn't seem to notice; she didn't seem to notice much. She was a better waitress than the twins, but the twins had a secret weapon --- their sameness.

The narrator is spending her summer with twins Jean and Jessica. The twins' father is an investment banker and they dream of finishing college and then follow in his footsteps. Dina is a waitress that they meet at the restaurant where they are working for the summer. She is a middle-aged single mother working hard to make ends meet for her two children, one of whom is in the hospital. The narrator finds herself in the middle: not as easy of a life as the rich, spoiled twins yet not as difficult of a life as the struggling mother trying to makes ends meet with her time and money. The twins seem to have whatever they want and need: a nice home, money for college, nice clothes, good looks, and time to relax on the beach or in front of the TV. Dina seems to have very little: no insurance, large hospital bills, old and stained clothes, huge veins on her legs, and little time for her children. Again, the narrator seems to fall in between.

When an opportunity arises to make some easy money, the narrator passes on the offer knowing that it is not the right thing to do. Everyone seems to agree with her decision, but the lesson has her looking at the waitresses in a different light. Why do some people work with so much ease and receive so much more in return without many worries while others work so hard and receive so little in return with worries that never seem to go away?

Summer, with Twins is a story with much to say about the unequal balance of life's circumstances and rewards that is often observed between people. The descriptions are rich and the observations of the narrator are evident and thoughtful. I enjoyed this short story that left two different impressions on me: first, the simple story of one summer when three young, sassy, inexperienced waitresses meet a seasoned, struggling waitress; and second, the layered story of life and its injustices that sometimes seem so hard to understand.

"Summer, with Twins" by Rebecca Curtis (from Harper's Magazine) from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 edited by Laura Furman

Completed Challenge - Option 1

2008-08-15T06:49:00.000-04:00

Completed the Challenge yesterday by reading my 10th Short story (Option 1).
Have enjoyed reading these stories, and I'm looking forward to reading more short stories in the future ;0)
You can see the stories I read here and you can read their reviews by clicking on the short story challenge label in the side bar.
Will continue reading all your reviews with interest ;0)

Bite - Various

2008-08-14T08:20:00.001-04:00

A collection of short stories by some of the hottest vampire authors around. Most of them have some very steamy sex scenes and a lot of action.

The Girl who was Infatuated with Death - Laurell K Hamilton

An Anita Blake story set between Blue Moon and Obsidian Butterfly. Anita is called in to investigate a case of a 17 year old girl whose mother finds two vampire bite marks at the top of her inner thighs. In this world vampires are citizens but it is illegal to turn someone under 18 which takes 3 bites. The twist is the girl has bone cancer and becomming a vampire will save her from a leg amputation. Anita goes to see her vampire "friend" Jean Claude and gets sidetracked by his sexiness.

One Word Answer - Charlaine Harris

A tale of Sookie Stackhouse. One night a strange black limo turns up with a strange supernatural man inside. He tells her that her cousin was turned into a vampire and then killed in a cemetary in New Orleans trying to raise the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. The plot twists as it emerges who the real killer was.

Biting in Plain Sight - MaryJanice Davidson

De Sophie Tourneau is a vet and a vampire and seems accepted by the twosnfolk of Embarrass, Minnesota. One man in particular, Liam, has accepted her and has been secretly in love with her for years. He decides to finally tell her as a vampire is causing young girls to seeminly kill themselves. The enlist the help of Queen Betsy on their quest to track him down and kill him.

Galahad - Angela Knight

A mixture of Arthurian and Grail legends with vampires, dragons, witches and hot hot sex! Some very silly ideas, but the sex scenes were amazinginly hot.

Blood Lust - Vickie Taylor

Daniel Hart is a microbiologist who has created synthetic blood when a vampire comes along and steals his research, home, woman and car. He tracks down another vampire, Deadre Rue, to turn him so it can be a fair fight. A few twists along the way.

I loved Galahad but more for the sex than the mythology. I also really enjoyed Blood Lust and Biting in Plain Sight. The Girl who was Infatuated with Death was my least favourite. It had a really good premise, but Hamilton seemed to forget it once Anita met up with Jean Claude sadly.

Worlds That Weren't by Harry Turtledove, et al

2008-08-10T13:56:00.000-04:00

Description:

"Alternate history is the branch of speculative fiction that explores what might have happened if history had taken a different turn. The obvious changes, like the Nazis winning World War II, have filled innumerable novels. Fortunately, the anthology Worlds That Weren't avoids the obvious with its four fine new novellas from four superior authors: Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, and Walter Jon Williams.

The collection opens with "The Daimon," written by Harry Turtledove, AH's best-known practitioner. In Turtledove's turning point, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates chooses to accompany General Alkibiades to war instead of remaining in Athens, and sets Alkibiades on a triumphant, terrible new course.

Set in the British India-dominated alternate history of The Peshawar Lancers, S.M. Stirling's novella is a rousing old-fashioned adventure. "Shikari in Galveston" follows a hunting safari through a regressed American frontier that might have given even Daniel Boone pause.

A prequel to her Book of Ash tetralogy, Mary Gentle's novella "The Logistics of Carthage" concerns Christian warriors serving pagan Turks in a North Africa conquered by Visigoths instead of Vandals, and is the strongest story in Worlds That Weren't.

The collection concludes with "The Last Ride of German Freddie," in which Nebula Award winner Walter Jon Williams considers what might have happened if the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had taken himself and his superman theories to the Wild West." -- from the back cover

My thoughts:

Instead of the typical alternate history of a different victor in a war, or a prevention of an assassination, these stories highlighted gradual and subtle changes in history. I especially liked the stories "Shikari in Galveston" featuring an alternate America still within the British Empire and "German Freddy Rides Again" featuring Nietzche at the OK Corral. Finally, I liked the afterwords to each story which explained how history really happened.

Date read: 6/6/2008
Rating: 3*/5 = good
(SS) Yearly count: 4/5

How They Met And Other Stories

2008-08-05T14:30:00.000-04:00

Levithan, David. 2008. How They Met and Other Stories.

How They Met and Other Stories is a short story collection for young adults. The themes? Love and romance, lust and desire, heartache and joy. What may or may not surprise you--depending on how familiar you are with the name David Levithan--is that most of these stories are about same sex couples. Not all of the stories are, there are a handful of stories featuring straight teens, but most aren't. One review says of Levithan that he is, "Best known for his positive, normalizing portrayals of teen relationships --- regardless of sexual orientation --- Levithan's stories focus on those longings that are the common denominators for the human heart." There are eighteen stories in all. And they do vary in quality. For example, he features a handful of stories that he wrote when he was a teen in high school. Obviously, they are not of the same quality and depth as some of his newer works. They do, in fact, show just how far he has come through the years. And I think it was rather brave to publish them. (Goodness knows, time does change things. Even a difference of a few years--the stories and poems I wrote in high school that I thought were so "good" and showed "promise" were excruciatingly cringe-worthy when I read them again just a few years later.) Do I have any favorites? Yes. I enjoyed Starbucks Boy, The Alumni Interview, The Number of People Who Meet On Airplanes, Flirting With Waiters, and What A Song Can Do the most. It's not that the others weren't good. Most of them were, but those five were my favorites. Other reviews: Little Willow, TeenReads.com, Flamingnet.

Do Something

2008-08-03T07:23:00.000-04:00

Yet if asked she will say Jame's death was her 9/11.
"We all have our very own," she'll say. "Don't you agree?"

Kate Walbert's short story Do Something relates the story of Margaret, an older woman who still grieves the death of her son James. Throughout the story she is found wandering off with her camera to the military base in her community. She is often picked up by the soldiers on duty because of the posted laws: no trespassing and no pictures. Each time, her daughter Caroline questions her mother's motives and actions when she has to retrieve Margaret from the base.

"I am just trying to Do Something," Margaret says, though Caroline is busy looking for dinner inspiration, for anything other than pasta. "You don't care to understand. It's like everything. Conversation, for example, is now just approximations of opinions adopted from other opinions that were approximations of opinions, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just trying to be real when everything is an approximation."
But this is not true, exactly. Death is not an approximation. It is completely real; it is unchangeable, forever --- an approximation of nothing. Hadn't she seen it that first time she'd found the base, the barracks, the military galaxy? Where had she been going? She can't remember anymore.

Margaret's character seems to blur from activist to unstable person to protester to grieving mother. There is more to the imagery in this short story than I was able to understand. I did find the Contributor's Notes in the back of the collection to be helpful in this matter. The author used personal experiences in the story. She said, "Writing it felt like shaking my fist at something impossible to name any other way."

You are not responsible, she would say. It is shameful what we've done to you. We should all of us be ashamed.
"You are just like the rest of us," she says. "You are only trying to Do Something."
Does Margaret shout this or whisper? It no longer matters. She is suddenly tired and aware that she should go. She'll return home the way she came, driving back through ye olde et cetera to her rightful place beside Harry: Margaret Morrisey, mother to Caroline and the dead one, James.

Although not one of my favorite stories so far, Do Something was an interesting piece that blended modern day current events with a mother's grief and the need to do something about it.

"Do Something" by Kate Walbert (from Ploughshares) from The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King with Heidi Pitlor

Nam Le's The Boat

2008-07-27T20:09:00.001-04:00

Nam Le’s book of short stories, The Boat, has an incredible range of settings, situations, and types of characters. The first story is the most traditional, the most stereotypical, perhaps (although this is not to say it’s not a good story), with its main character who is a student in the famous Iowa creative writing program. From there, though, we take off to Colombia and read about 14 year old hitmen (hit children?) and then to New York City, Australia, Japan, Iran, and Vietnam. Le writes about each of these places with admirable ease and assurance, describing them as though he knows the places and the people intimately (leading me to speculate about the author’s life, although I generally try to be more sophisticated than that).

The stories are all action-filled, each one centering on some highly dramatic moment, often a violent one. For example, the story set in Iran tells of political protests and arrests through the lens of two estranged friends trying to understand each other, and the Australia story tells of teenage love, jealousy, bullying, and schoolyard fights. The last story is a harrowing account of Vietnamese “boat people” on a journey that lasted much longer than it should have.

But these stories aren’t simply interesting for their plot; they are wonderfully written as well. Le’s sentences beautifully capture the characters’ exterior world as well as their interior landscapes; they often startle you with a brilliant image or an unexpected observation. At times the writing veers toward stream of consciousness as Le takes you deep into a character’s mind. Here’s a passage that shows how Le writes about action and consciousness all at once:

Finally the storm arrived in force. The remaining light drained out of the hold. Wind screamed through the cracks. She felt the panicked limbs, people clawing for direction, sudden slaps of ice-cold water, the banging and shapeless shouts from the deck above. The whole world reeled. Everywhere the stink of vomit. Her stomach forced up, swashed through her throat. So this was what it was like, she thought, the moment before death.

She closed her eyes, swallowed compulsively; tried to close out the crawling blackness, the howl of the wind. She tried to recall her father’s stories — storms at sea, waves ten, fifteen meters high! — but they rang shallow against what she’d just seen: those dense roaring slabs of water, sky lurching overhead like a puddle being mucked with a stick. She was crammed in by a boatload of human bodies, thinking of her father and becoming overwhelmed, slowly, with loneliness. As much loneliness as fear. Concentrate, she told herself. And she did — forcing herself to concentrate, if not — if she was unable to — on the thought of her family, then on the contact of flesh pressed against her on every side, the human warmth, feeling every square inch of skin against her body and through it the shared consciousness of — what? Death? Fear? Surrender? She stayed in that human cocoon, heaving and rolling, concentrating, until it was over.

How can you read this and not want to know what happens next and also not want to know more about this young person caught in horrible circumstances?

The stories have an interesting metafictional element too. The first story about the creative writing student seems highly autobiographical (particularly as the character shares the author’s name), and in it, the character grapples with the question of whether he should write about Vietnam. Ethnic lit., he is told, is incredibly hot right now, and he could exploit that trend with tales about his father, a victim of the war, and with stories about Vietnamese boat people. A friend tactlessly tells him:

You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans — and New York painters with hemorrhoids.

Interestingly enough, most of the stories his friend lists appear in Le’s book (the lesbian vampire story isn’t there, unfortunately). So the whole collection becomes an exploration of writing and identity. What should a person write about? Should a person write about his or her roots, particularly if that’s what people want to read about and if it’s more likely to get published? Should a person instead explore other worlds?

Le does both of these things, writing about the familiar (he himself was a student in the Iowa program) and writing stories about Vietnam (the first story about personal consequences of the Vietnam War and also the closing story about the boat people) and also writing stories about places and situations that seem remote from him. The book seems to argue that a writer can have it all, can write about his experiences and can stray far from them. And why not?

I admire the way Le uses the opening story to prepare the reader for the rest of the book and the way that story gives it a kind of unity, while at the same time the collection as a whole is incredibly diverse. Added to this unity-in-diversity is a self-awareness I admire, a questioning attitude about the relationship of writers to their material. All-in-all, Le has managed to pull off a pretty wonderful feat with this book.

Natalie, by Anne Enright - Wendy's Review

2008-07-26T15:39:00.000-04:00

After reading The Gathering, I was eager to read more work by Anne Enright. So when the 21st Fiction Yahoo group chose Enright’s short story Natalie to read and discuss, I was pleased. I read this story on-line at the New Yorker.

Natalie is narrated by an unnamed teenage protagonist who is laying in bed ruminating on her relationship with her boyfriend (also unnamed), Natalie, Natalie’s boyfriend Billy, and Billy’s mother Mrs. Casey. We learn that the narrator and Natalie have a psuedo-friendship of sorts and that Billy’s mother has ovarian cancer.

Although the title suggests this will be a story about Natalie, instead Natalie becomes the conduit for the narrator to reach a conclusion about life and death, and human connections. Natalie’s view of the world is that people are unconnected - they live or die independent of their relationships with each other. The narrator has a more idealistic view of the world. She resists the idea of ultimately being alone and searches for connections with others. Eventually, Natalies influence seems to shift the narrator’s viewpoint:

We are not connected. Because this is what Natalie is saying, isn’t it? That we are alone. -From Natalie-

Enright is skilled at capturing the voice of her narrator and convincing the reader we are indeed inside the head of a teenager. Despite her adept writing, Enright’s short story did not resonate with me. In the end, I felt a complete disconnect with the characters. Given the underlying theme of the story, perhaps this was Enright’s intention…but it didn’t work for me.

I must admit to needing help to work this short story out…and for that I thank the very astute readers at the 21st Fiction Yahoo group. I’d recommend the story as a thought provoking read which will stimulate group discussion. But, if you are just looking for an enjoyable short story, you could probably skip this one.

Stories by Anton Chekhov

2008-07-21T22:11:00.000-04:00

I loved reading Chekhov's stories. I read a volume of them, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, as well as "The Kiss," which was recommended and unfortunately wasn't included in the volume translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

My favorite stories tended to be the shorter ones that focused on one character or one couple. They each had a sad, poignant ending, and yet I loved the beauty in them. Chekhov didn't try to say too much in each story, and I finished each one with a sigh, wanting to let my emotions simmer before I went on to the next story. Many of them reminded me that life is challenging and full of depressing things, and yet we all still go on day by day. Explaining Chekhov in those words makes his stories sound depressing, and they were in a sense, but overall, they were beautiful at the same time.

My favorites were these:

"The Student." I discussed in my last post how and why the student's transformation from sadness to joy touched me.

"The Kiss." A shy and unpopular army officer receives an unexpected kiss from an unknown woman; his life is transformed by the experience in two ways.

"Peasant Women." The story of a peasant woman inspires other peasant women who feel trapped in their lives.

"The Fidget." A flighty woman marries a renowned doctor and realizes too late that her lifestyle is unfulfilling: her husband's love could have brought her true happiness.

"Anna on the Neck." When her impoverished father marries Anna to a rich man, her family believes their financial trials are over; Anna finds her place in her new life.

"The Lady with the Little Dog." While on holiday, a man instigates an affair; at the end of the holiday, he and she agree to return to their spouses without further contact, but neither can forget the other.

What grabs your attention in Chekhov? Do you have a favorite story I may have missed?

Originally published in slightly different form on Rebecca Reads.

The Student by Anton Chekhov

2008-07-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

Anton Chekhov's "The Student" is the perfect story.

Decide for yourself by reading it at Project Gutenberg (1,500 words) or listening to it at LibriVox (10 minutes). Note that I read a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Here are some elements that make it perfect for me.

It is short

According Edgar Allan Poe, a short story is "read in one sitting." But that's not what I mean when I say "short" makes "The Student" a perfect short story. What I mean by "short" is that "The Student" captures an instant, not a lifetime. It doesn't give too much back story; it doesn't give too many details. It is concise and yet complete. And to me, it's amazing to be able to create something so cohesive and powerful in so few words.

It captures one main character in one moment/subject

Sometimes a short story has two characters that act as one (a couple in a relationship, for example) but I think short stories that try to capture too many characters (as do some of Chekhov's in the volume I'm reading) lack the pleasing organization or the "short and sweet" element that I like in a story. By nature, I think a short story needs to focus on one character/subject in either one moment or in one series of moments that relate (like a couple developing a relationship or a woman learning to respect her husband or a group of peasant women discussing how they will never love their husbands). "The Student" focuses on a young man, Ivan, on one wintery evening.

The character's emotions are foremost

"The Student" follows the young man's emotions as he walks in the wintery night, sits by the fire at the widows' home, and then walks home. While Chekhov describes what happens and what people say, the young man's emotions are the driving factor of the story.

Something happens, emotionally

I am realizing that I approach literature through my emotions. For me, I loved the emotional draw in "The Student." Ivan feels one way at the beginning of the story, has a very simple experience, and walks home at the end of the story feeling differently about his role in the world: past, present, and future. I think it is beautiful. Note that I don't believe all stories necessarily need to have a positive emotional change for a story to be beautiful. But for every story that I like in the Chekhov volume I'm reading, there is some emotional realization at the end, whether that is happy or sad: I finish a story and sigh, wanting to let myself dwell on the emotion for a few moments before beginning the next story.

Originally published in a slightly different form on Rebecca Reads.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke

2008-07-18T16:15:00.000-04:00

A collection of eight short stories by Susanna Clarke with illustrations by Charles Vess. I had read two of them before in some of the Adult Fairy Tale Anthologies collected by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The easiest thing is to go through the stories briefly one by one.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Three ladies, Mrs Fields, Miss Tobais and Miss Cassandra Parbringer forma close friendship and begin using magic. Jonathan Strange is the brother-in-law to Mr Woodhope who hopes to marry Miss Parbringer until Mr Strange discovers her use of magic and arranges for him to be relocated. At one point in the story two of the ladies turn themselves into owls to eat two men who they have turned into mice. A fun story looking at female magicians in the male orientated society of Strange and Norrell.

On Lickerish Hill - Set in East Anglia in the 17th centuary when the distinctions between superstition and science were blurred. Elements of Rumplestiltskin are seen in this tale told by Miranda Sownestron. One of the tales I had read previously.

Mrs Mabb - Venetia is set to marry Captain Fox, but on her return from Manchester she finds him gone to live with the mysterious Mrs Mabb. Venetia goes to her house in a number of different ways to see that he is ok and well. Each time she loses consciousness and wakes up back in her bed with no memory of events and various unexplained injuries. Eventually she bests Mrs Mabb and wins back her love. Echos of Tam Lin with her fighting a fairy woman for her love.

The Duke of Wellington misplaces his horse - Set in the world of Stardust written by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. The Duke of Wellington visits the villiage of Wall and annoys the folk living there so they lure his horse across the border. He follows and finds a beautiful woman sewing scenes from his life as far forward as his death. He is able to change his future by unpicking the stitches and sewing himself a new destiny.

Mr Simonelli or the Fairy Widower - A rendering of "Midwife to the Fairies" found in English, Irish, Scots and Breton variations. Also includes other fairy tale themes of a girl who was stolen away to suckle a fairy baby, the seeing eye, the fairy house in the woods etc. An interesting tale of fairy and magic told in journal and letter form. This was the other tale I had read previously.

Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge was built in Thoresby - A fun tale looking at the friendship between human David Montefore and fairy Tom Brightwind. Also discussed is the relationship between fairy parents and grandparents and their children. The issue of Tom and a human woman having a child together is disguised by him helping the town by building a bridge in Thoresby by fairy magic.

Antickes and Frets - Mary Queen of Scots has been imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth who she is trying to kill and gain her throne. She is trying to use enchanted embriodary to reach her goals. To explain this I noted down a quote: "In the light of the moon and bare winter branches appeared to her now like great, black stitches sewn across the window-like stitches sewn across the castle, across the Queen [Mary] herself. In her terror she thought her eyes were stitched up, her throat closed with black stitches; her fingers were sewn together so that her hands were become useless, ugly flaps."

John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal burner - Bears similarities to other stories where a great ruler is outwitted by one of his humblest subjects. After changing the Charcoal Burners pig into a slamon, the charcoal burner exacts revenge on John Uskglass without knowing who he is by speaking to various saints. John returnes eating his melted cheese and ruining his wood before a saint looses John's tongue forcing him to reveal many secrets that should have remained hidden. Everything is returned to normal by John in apologies to the charcoal burner, he also gives him a second pig and leaves most confused!

I really enjoyed this collection, especially Antickes and Frets and The Ladies of Grace Adieu which were the most interesting stories. Quite a short collection with longer stories than I have read in previous anthologies. It was great to revisit the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and I hope there will be more installments in the future. I also look forward toseeing what she will write next.

Short Stories and Raymond Carver's Cathedral

2008-07-12T10:07:00.000-04:00

I have posted a very brief review of Raymond Carver's Cathedral on my blog 51 Stories, relating this to a brief commentary by Susan Hill on Short Stories: http://51stories.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/short-stories-and-raymond-carvers-cathedral/

Findings & Impressions

2008-07-12T08:17:00.000-04:00

"It's not my business, I suppose, but I thought you were her doctor. I wouldn't have woken you. It said Dr. Sean so I thought we'd better call you."
"Well, I'm her radiologist."
"I see," says Ed, looking puzzled. "Like you take her x-rays?"

Stellar Kim's short story Findings & Impressions begins with an x-ray evaluation and ends with an unlikely friendship. Sean Miller meets Alicia Straninsky when she arrives to pick up the results of her recent mammogram. Sean is taken by surprise that a patient is questioning the results before receiving them from the doctor. Even though Sean has a hard time remembering names and faces, he hasn't forgotten what he wrote in her evaluation: breast cancer. A couple weeks later the couple run into one another as Alicia is leaving the hospital after her first radiation treatment. Sean offers her a ride home and they soon begin a routine of rides home after treatment which includes drives to the harbor, occasional hot dogs, and guarded conversations.

"Don't talk like that," I say, and Alicia looks at me with some expectation. "Don't ever think that again. You're beautiful," I add after a while. The way her face opens up, the way Alicia's eyes become liquid, suddenly make even the possibility of her disappearance unbearable. I think, maybe I've never realized the possible permutations of beauty.

However, Sean has a hard time becoming Alicia's friend due to a past loss of his own. When Nick, Sean's young son, meets Alicia and wants to see more of her, Sean withdraws from the friendship. Alicia says she understands and moves forward in her fight for life. Then one night Sean receives a phone call from Ed. And then one summer afternoon he receives a second call and, later, a special request.

I very much enjoyed the short story Findings & Impressions. Its presentation was unique, the characters seemed very true to life, and the message about the fear of moving on was written in a gentle and realistic manner. Which character to pin my hopes on was a difficult decision and changed often as the story unfolded. And I definitely enjoyed the twist at the end.

"Findings & Impressions" by Stellar Kim (from The Iowa Review) from The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King with Heidi Pitlor

Katha: Short Stories by Indian Women (Short Stories by Women from Around the World)

2008-07-11T08:12:00.000-04:00

Katha: Short Stories by Indian Women (Short Stories by Women from Around the World) edited by Urvashi Butalia.

While this collection of short stories is not the one I've chosen for this challenge - see my list here - I picked it up in my local library to read the other day and have to recommend it to you all.

It's a wonderful collection of stories, reflecting the diverse culture and experiences of Indian women, as well as Indian folk lore. The book spans over half a century, and reflects many languages and cultures.

A lovely collection.

I've now started reading Povidky: Short Stories by Czech Women (Short Stories by Women from Around the World) by Daniela Hodrova, Kveta Legatova, Nancy Hawker, and David Short , another in this collection of Short Stories from Women Around the World.

Thanks to this challenge I've rediscovered my love of short stories. Thanks!

Rebecca's Short Story List

2008-07-09T01:14:00.000-04:00

I am at the beginning of my own little challenge on my blog Rebecca Reads in which I’m going to read the following classic short stories:

Anton Chekhov

“The Kiss”
“The Student”
“The Lady with the Dog”

Guy de Maupassant

“Madame Tellier’s Establishment”
“The Horla”

Ernest Hemingway

“Hills Like White Elephants”
“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
“A Sea Change”

Flannery O’Connor

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
“Good Country People”
“A View of the Woods”

Vladimir Nabokov

“The Vane Sisters”

Jorge Luis Borges

“Tlön, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius”

Tommaso Landolfi

“Gogol’s Wife”

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

While that is only eight writers, I’ll either come here and post about the particular story or about the entire collection (depending on how much I liked those stories, I may or may not read more by the author). I'll try to visit at least ten times before the end of the year!

Anyway, there’s my list, and I’ll be back soon to tell you about Chekhov (so far I’m liking his stories very much!).

Mr. Bones, by Paul Theroux - Wendy's Review

2008-06-30T14:39:00.001-04:00

My father, apparently a simple, cheery soul, was impossible to know. -From Mr. Bones-

Paul Theroux wrote this short story which appeared on line at The New Yorker in September 2007. The narrator is a man remembering his father from many years previous. Right up front, he tells the reader that not only is his father impossible to know, but that family life is full of disorder and tension. The narrator’s father is a rather passive man, married to a domineering and critical woman, and he begins to practice for his role in a minstrel show. He dons the black face - a mask of sorts - and becomes Mr. Bones.

The story has a disturbing undercurrent, touching on racism, marital discord, and a young boy’s confusion about it all. Theroux’s writing is sharp and observant. He captures the uneasy relationships well; and forces the reader to examine the idea of hiding behind our own masks - whether it be in our personal lives or in front of an audience. As the story comes to its conclusion, the reader is left to ponder its true message.

This big event was just a talent show to Louie; and his white-haired father, who worked on the M.T.A. buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had intimidated everyone. He was now someone to fear, saying the things that he normally avoided saying. In his minstrel-show costume, he could be as reckless as he wanted. -From Mr. Bones-

I found this short story stunning in many ways - the writing rich and compelling. But it is not an easy story to understand. Luckily, I read it for the 21st Fiction yahoo discussion group and so I was able to explore its many facets with other readers.

Springtime on Mars: Stories - Wendy's Review

2008-06-29T15:43:00.000-04:00

“For years, people imagined they saw canals dug into the planet’s surface. They called these canals proof of life. They worried what intelligent life on Mars might mean to us earthlings, to our safety. But, it was nothing. An optical illusion a cosmic misprint. There’s no life. There’s nothing.” -From Springtime on Mars, page 112-

Susan Woodring’s wonderful book of short stories is a joy to read. They are linked in theme - women growing older and looking back on their lives; loss and hope; the idea of gravity keeping our feet on the ground; searching for meaning somewhere between science and God. All Woodring’s stories take place among ordinary people and families - but they are at the same time people who are extraordinary without realizing it. They could be any one of us. And that perhaps is where these stories gain their power.

Woodring writes with an eye on the small details of life and explores the every day push and pull of relationships. There is sadness mingled in her characters’ lives, but also a twinkle of hope and meaning. I especially liked her female characters - women who still were looking for their dreams.

I believe: love deep, give marshmallows and other treats to children, and sleep as long and often as you can, but wake early, eat breakfast. I’m sixty-eight years old; I’m not going backward. -From Morning Again, page 27-

Woodring has had her short stories published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. She is also the author of the novel The Traveling Disease. This collection was published by a small press: Press 53. If you only read one collection of short stories this year, I would recommend this one. Beautifully crafted with a deep sense of American life and what it means to be human, Springtime on Mars will captivate you.

My thanks to Susan Woodring for sending me a signed copy of her book.

Highly recommended.

Black Heart, Ivory Bones - Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

2008-06-06T16:40:00.001-04:00

Sadly this is the last in the Adult Fairy Tale series of short stories collected by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windlin. It contains 21 tales and poems by 20 different authors. Below is a full list of the stories and a brief description of what they are about.

Rapunzel - Tanith Lee
A young Prince falls in love with a woman he meets on his way home after a battle. He spins his father a tale of Rapunzel to explain where he has been and why it took him so long to arrive home.

The Crone - Delia Sherman
A poem about the familiar figure of The Crone from many fairy tales.

Big Hair - Esther Friesner
A look at Rapunzel in relation to child Beauty Pagents. The end was quite chilling as her daughter follows in her footsteps and there is an illusion to child abuse.

The King with Three Daughters - Russell Blackford
A look at a troll killer based on the Norse tale The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain. A strange tale about a warrior who has to "rescue" a King's three missing daughters where all is not what it seems.

Boys and Girls Together - Neil Gaiman
A poem covering a variety of fairy tales which looks at boys not wanting to be Princes (any other role is fine!) and girls secretly being Princesses. In their turn they become bad Kings and wicked step mothers, wood-cutters, ancient shepherds, crones and wise-women.

And Still She Sleeps - Greg Costikyan
A look at Sleeping Beauty after the authors marriage collapsed and suffered from depression. It also looks at the romantic notion of love when sleeping girl is dug up. Legends say only her true love can wake her up but it seems he isnot to be found as how can you truely someone from just looking at them, you have to know them first.

Snow in Summer - Jane Yolen
Snow White is better bale to look after herself in this tale by recognising her steo mother when she turns up on her doorstep one day. A bittersweet ending for our heroine.

Briar Rose and Witch - Debra Cash
Two poems with fairy tale themes. Not originally written as a pair but they go beautifully together.

Chanterelle - Brian Stableford
Part based on Hansel and Gretel with elements of the novella "Luscignole" and the play "the Sunken Bell" with illusions to the use of magic mushrooms along the way. Another strange and bittersweet tale.

Bear it Away - Michael Cadnum
A new look at Goldilocks and the Three BEars with talking bears that are chaed away by Goldilocks and a hunter.

Goldilocks Tells All - Scott Bradfield
The second Goldilocks tale in the series which sees Goldilocks cashing in on her tale and dishing the dirt in the media and in her novels of femal empowerment. It takes the stance that Goldilocks was never the innocent one in the tale...

My Life as a Bird - Charles de Lint
Set in Newford (de Lint's made up city) it contains elements of Rumpelstiltskin and The Fisherman and His Wife. Some familiar characters for those who are familiar with de Lint's tales with the addition of a grumpy dwarf.

The Red Boots - Leah Cutter
Based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Red Shoes" the girl in this tale differs by never giving up her desire to outdo everyone else at dancing to the detriment of her personal relationships and love life. She suffers beatings and loses her best friend who she loves as more than a friend along the way.

Rosie's Dance - Emma Hardesty
Based on Cinderella after reading a poem from "Transformations" by Anne Sexton and looking at a painting by Terrin Windling. Filled with poverty and cruelty as one girl leaves behind her inherited family to make a life for herself. Contains many of the original elements of the tale despite the setting being very different from the original tale.

You, Little Match Girl - Joyce Carol Oates
Evoking the horror that happiness is but an illusion. The central character believes that if she loves no one she is free until her last close relative dies and she is in a car accident armed with just a fading flash light.

Dreaming Among Men - Bryn Kanar
A very odd tale where it turns out that the dreamer is an animal and not a human at all.

The Cats of San Martino - Ellen Steiber
Based on an Italian fairy tale found in Italo Calvino's collection. An interesting tale about a woman who runs away from her boyfriend after he cruelly dumps her for another woman he has been sleeping with behind her back. She finds solace in a house with no doors filled with cats that it turns out can talk. They lok after her until she is ready to return to the human world and carry on with her life. Unfortunately her ex-boyfriend is not so lucky...

The Golem - Severna Park
Looking at the parallel between the alienation of Jewish woman within their own culture with the alienation of the Jews in general. A older woman makes a golem to protect her and her friends from a group of men killing all of the Jews in the area. She is able to bring new life in the form of the golem, and in it's death, new life to an otherwise barren land.

Our Mortal Span - Howard Waldrop
A theme park named Story Book Town where one of the automations (a troll) breaks free and starts to smash up the others including Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Perrault among other fairy tale characters. His issue is that the story tellers have lied to us and their dead ideas need to be overthrown.

Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower - Susanne Clarke
In a similar vein to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It is a rendering of "The Midwife to the Fairies" found in English, Irish, Scotish and Breton variations. Many other fairy tale themes are used in this charming tale of a fairy, his servant and the man who tries to trick them to save the life of a mortal woman.

My personal favourite was The Cats of San Martino very closely followed by Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower, My Life as a Bird and The King with Three Daughters. Others that deserve an honourable mention are Big Hair, Boys and Girls Together, Snow in Summer, Briar Rose and Witch, Chanterelle, Goldilocks Tells All, The Red Boots, You Little Match Girl, The Golem and Our Mortal Span. I am really sad this series has ended and I look forward to re-visiting them in the future. I also look forward to reading more anthologies by both women, either together or singly and I higly recommend their collections.

History of the Short Story: A Reading List

2008-06-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

The Encyclopedia Britannica includes an overview of the short story that covers the history of the form, and I gleaned quite a few must-read authors from the article by Arlen J. Hansen. In addition to the writers you would expect to find discussed, such as Poe (shown here), the following writers were important to the short story form, and these are writers that I have not read or read so long ago that they merit re-visiting: Hawthorne, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, Prosper Mérimée, Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, G.W. Cable (an American who is news to me), Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Washington Irving, Charles Nodier, Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Ivan Krylov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Luigi Pirandello (didn't know he wrote anything besides plays), Paul Morand, Katherine Anne Porter (at last a woman), Donald Barthelme . This is the short list, which omits short story writers named in the article but whom I've read in the past few years.

The article surveys not just short stories, but story in its early forms, starting with the earliest Babylonian tales, Egyptian and Indian tales, Hebrew narratives, then stories of the Greeks and Romans, medieval Europeans, and the 16th Century Italians who enthusiastically embraced the short fiction form. I was not aware that Miguel de Cervantes had written short fiction (“Exemplary Novels”, 1613). Some of these works we would call today novellas, rather than short stories, but they all preceded the novel.

Perhaps my short story / short fiction reading list, for years to come, will introduce some other readers to unexplored writers. Recommendations for short story anthologies containing some of these European writers would be most welcome. Any favorite writers among those listed above? Once the Britannica article moved beyond ancient times, non-Western stories are ignored, and I am curious about the development of the short story form outside of Europe and the United States. Suggestions, anyone, of non-Western short fiction writers of, say, the Nineteenth Century, who are available in English translation?

This is cross-posted at Historical / Present, where there is a free link to the Encyclopedia Britannica article on the Short Story.

David Malouf: Every Move You Make

2008-05-31T10:46:00.000-04:00

I have reviewed this wonderful compilation of short stories by Malouf on my blog at 51 Stories. Rather than copying it completely here, why not read it there? It was not actually part of my challenge but I came across David Malouf as part of the Neustadt Challenge, so I have added him. Seachanges

Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?

2008-05-30T10:31:00.000-04:00

He lay in the back seat of the SUV and tried to sleep. Rain pounded on the roof, wind-whipped rain rendered the glass opaque and everything beyond these windows a matter of conjecture. The vodka slept on his chest like a stuffed bear from childhood. It hadn't worked anyway, it might as well have been tap water. Things would not leave him alone, old unheeded voices plagued his ears. Brightly colored images tumbled through his mind. An enormous, stained-glass serpent had shattered inside him and was moving around blindly reassembling itself. ... For here's what happened, or what happened on the surface, here's what imprinted itself on the very ether and went everywhere at once, the news the summer wind whispered in The Jeepster's sleeping ear.

William Gay's short story Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You? begins like a story of revenge but ends with thoughts on how everyone grieves differently, regardless of who you are and what you have done with your life. Full of colorful adjectives that help bring the story to life, the reader feels various levels of emotion for the main character Leonard (The Jeepster) as he deals with his past and present demons. His former girlfriend Aimee arrives to ask a favor. She has made her choices in life as well and now fears for her life. After a tragic turn of events, Leonard is now running wild while trying to deal with what to do next.

I have to keep moving. I never felt like this. I never knew you could feel like this. I can't be still. It's like I can't stand it in my own skin.

Themes of drugs, suicide, murder, and grief are the basis of this short story. Reader beware that the story is somewhat graphic and contains strong language; however, I felt that these details were relevant to the story. Past history and choices play a strong role in the way each theme is revealed. Also, colors and glass are used often for imagery which compliments the rich detail and descriptions used in the telling of the story.

I would kill him if he was worth it but he ain't. A son of a bitch like this just goes through life tearin up stuff, and somebody else has always got to sweep up the glass. He don't know what it is to hurt, he might as well be blind and deaf. He don't feel things the way the rest of us does.

A well written short story, Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You? shows that everyone feels things... in their own way.

"Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?" by William Gay (from Tin House)from The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King with Heidi Pitlor

Free Radicals, by Alice Munro - Wendy's Review

2008-05-27T10:41:00.001-04:00

She hadn't had time to wonder about his being late. He'd died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood in front of the hardware store offering a discount on lawnmowers. -From Free Radicals-

When Nita's 81 year old husband Rich drops dead outside the hardware story, Nita grieves and wonders how she could have outlived him given her terminal diagnosis of cancer. Then an intruder arrives - and Nita's view of life and death changes.

Alice Munro has crafted a short story about grief and moving forward after the death of a loved one. She also explores the creativeness of the human mind, especially when confronted with our own demise. Carefully constructed (although at times feeling a bit contrived), Free Radicals leaves some questions unanswered. I read this story on line at the New Yorker for 21st Fiction Yahoo Group. Not everyone in the group came away from it with the same interpretation of events. This is one thing I enjoy about a well-written short story - the loose ends, the questions that perhaps have several different answers. Free Radicals is a story which appears simple on its face, but has many levels of meaning below the surface.

Recommended;

The Kiss, by Anton Chekhov - Wendy's Review

2008-05-27T10:40:00.000-04:00

The most ill at east of them all was Ryabovitch - a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx's. While some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed to say: I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade!" -From The Kiss-

I read this masterful short story of Chekov's for The Russian Lit Yahoo group, and found it accessible and enjoyable.

Ryabovitch and his officers are billeted in a small town and find themselves invited to tea at a General's home. They go reluctantly, feeling perhaps they have been invited out of obligation and nothing more.

In a house in which two sisters and their children, brothers, and neighbours were gathered together, probably on account of some family festivities, or event, how could the presence of nineteen unknown officers possibly be welcome? -From The Kiss-

But once at the gathering, they begin to enjoy themselves - talking to the ladies, drinking and dancing. All, that is, but Ryabovitch - a shy, naive man who feels uncomfortable in the presence of women. When he leaves the main room and wanders into a darkened library, however, Ryabovitch is astonished when a woman rushes up to him and kisses him on the cheek. Obviously having mistaken him for a secret paramour, the woman leaves without a word - and Ryabovitch is left to wonder who she is as the darkness of the room has prevented him from recognizing her identity.

Chekhov takes this singular event and weaves a story of obsession, expectation and disappointment. Although written in the early part of the twentieth century, The Kiss feels like a modern story of intrigue and romance. Chekhov's skill at creating character and dialogue resonates with the reader.

I read this story as part of a collection from The Essential Tales of Chekhov, edited by Richard Ford - and plan to read the rest of Chekhov's short works before the year is out. I can highly recommend The Kiss to readers - it is a simple story, but one that delights.

Some recent additions to the shelves

2008-05-24T12:50:00.000-04:00

Some recent excellent short story collections added to the shelves (stacks/boxes/piles) around the EWN abode include:

Noy Holland's What begins with bird (FC2, 2005), Daniel Grandbois' Unlucky Lucky Days (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008), Molly McNett's one dog happy (University of Iowa Press, 2008) which is this year's John Simmons Short Fiction Award winner, Jeffery Renard Allen's Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008), and Nicholas Montemarano's if the sky falls (LSU Press, 2005).

I've had the chance to read at least one story from each and am anxious to follow up and read more and more from each of the titles as the single stories were excellent.

All seem well worth your own time if you are searching for a collection to read soon!

(Much of this was cross-posted at my own blog)

A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories by Robin McKinley

2008-05-23T15:38:00.001-04:00

Description:

"Five heroines -- five tales of enchantment. . .

Lily. A woman with powers to heal, but no power of speech. Then she meets a mage -- a man who can hear the words she forms only in her mind. Will he help her find her voice?

Ruen. A princess whose uncle leaves her deep in a cave to die at the hands of the stagman. But when she meets the stagman at last, Ruen discovers fate has a few surprises in store for her.

Erana. As a baby, she was taken by a witch in return for the healing herbs her father stole from the witch's garden. Raised alongside the witch's troll son, Erana learns that love comes in many forms.

Coral. A beautiful young newcomer who caches the eye of an older widowed farmer. He can't believe his good fortune when Coral consents to be his wife. But then the doubts set in -- what is it that draws Coral to Buttercup Hill?

Annabelle. When her family moves the summer before her junior year of high school, Annabelle spends all her time in the attic of her new house -- until she finds the knot in the grain which leads her on a magical mission." -- from the back cover

My thoughts:

I liked these stories of fantasy and discovery. I especially liked the stories of Lily and her search for her voice and Erana who learns where her true home is.

Date read: 4/20/2008
Rating: 3*/5 = good
(SS) Yearly count: 3/5

Two successful reads!

2008-05-13T19:57:00.000-04:00

I'm finally posting about my first two reads for this challenge. I finished both of these during April, but have not had time to write about them until now.

Strange Pilgrims : Stories, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was the first thing I read for this challenge. Actually, I've been reading it for a couple of months - a story here, a story there. I had not been aware of this collection, until I saw it on another person's list for the challenge. I have read some of Garcia Marquez's work and really enjoyed it, so I thought it might be a good thing to delve into for the challenge.

What a great collection of stories! The overall theme is that of South Americans visiting Europe, and how they are strangers there, even though connected by heritage. The edition I read was translated by Edith Grossman, and I can only think that she really knows her stuff, since the writing was beautiful, lyrical, and sad, and made me wish I could meet Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to see if he is as wonderful in person.

I really can't choose a favorite story, but here is one of my very favorite passages in the book, from the first paragraph of the story "Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane":

"She was beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread and eyes like green almonds, and she had straight black hair that reached to her shoulders, and an aura of antiquity that could just as well have been Indonesian as Andean. She was dressed with subtle taste: a lynx jacket, a raw silk blouse with very delicate flowers, natural linen trousers, and shoes with a narrow stripe the color of bougainvillea. 'This is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,' I thought when I saw her pass by with the stealthy stride of a lioness while I waited in the check in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for the plane to New York. She was a supernatural apparition who existed only for a moment and disappeared into the crowd in the terminal."

It only gets better from there. I am so glad I found this collection, and can see myself reading the stories again and again.

"Why I Live at the P.O.," from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. I chose this story because I read it in college, and it is one of my favorite short stories ever. First of all, the title is a great one, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, doesn't it just make you want to read the story??

The narrator tells the story of how things start to head south when her sister Stella-Rondo comes home to stay, leaving her husband and bringing a child who she claims is adopted. The family dynamic changes, as Mama, Papa-Daddy (the grandfather), and Uncle Rondo make a fuss over Stella-Rondo and her daughter, to the point where whatever the narrator says or does is seen as critical of her sister. In the end, she decides that the only way she will get peace and quiet is to move out of the family home to the post office, where she is the postmistress for the small town.

The dialogue is really funny, and Welty makes the narrator someone you understand, and root for against the family and their accusations. I enjoyed this story as much this time around as the first time I read it.

Boyko's Blackouts

2008-05-13T00:06:00.000-04:00

Blackouts / Craig Boyko
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, c2008.

This is the author's first story collection, and I have been looking forward to it, as I've read many of his stories in various literary journals over the last few years. This collection of 11 stories was worth waiting for; all of the stories are good, but a few have that ineffable spark of originality found in a great writer. Highlights for me include OZY, a wonderful story which has just won this year's Journey Prize, a richly deserved reward for this tale of a young boy's summer obsession with a video game. It is absolutely amazing how Boyko can take the quest for the highest score in a game called Ballistic Obliteration and turn it into a meditation on childhood, on self realization, on excellence. It's a stunning story. Here's an excerpt:

Every message is a message to the future. The feverish, grandiloquent billet doux stashed with trembling hand in the coat pocket of the girl you're in love with; the casual note to your wife jotted in haste and posted to the fridge before you leave in the morning; the drunken, desultory jeremiad left on your ex's answering machine -- they will be read or listened to, if they are read or listened to at all, by people of the future. Even the thought scribbled carelessly in the margin of whatever novel you're reading is a variety of time travel. Every mark we make, every trace we leave is a broadcast sent out into forever. We think of our footsteps as receding behind us, but really they are beacons sent out before us.

The last two stories in the book, Black Ink & Past Lives, are also extraordinary. Their quiet searching of memory and of sorrow really affected me, and I found myself copying out some of the lines from these ones as well.

Boyko is from Saskatchewan, and that fact, along with his last name, makes me suspect that there is some Ukrainian in his background. One of the stories in this collection, Nadeshda Pavlovna, is almost certainly set in Ukraine during the Holodomor, or Stalin-induced Great Famine. (and just one picky point -- in many reviews as well as the publisher's own website they state that this story takes place in "Stalinist Russia". No, it does not. It takes place in Stalinist Ukraine, through all circumstantial evidence.) Nearly every Ukrainian writer I know is compelled to face up to this event in some way, and here is Boyko's take. It's a brief tale of an official who is moved by the power of art (represented by gramophone recordings) to question his blind allegiance to a corrupt power regime and his ability to make others suffer. I found it very interesting, especially as it came on the heels of another collection of short stories I've just finished, in the Language Lanterns series. Titled A Hunger Most Cruel: The Human Face of the 1932-1933 Terror-Famine in Soviet Ukraine, it presented literature from Ukraine by 3 authors writing only twenty or thirty years after the events. It was horrifying and yet necessary to read. Boyko's story uses some of the same elements but in a more 'literary' way.

A few of the stories I've seen celebrated in other reviews, such as Assistance (about a man who clones himself in order to escape his miserable life) or The Problem of Pleasure (a young jealous computer geek surreptiously videos his girlfriend in the bedroom), were just okay for me. I mean, they were well constructed, interesting and unique, but didn't speak to me the same way the others did; perhaps because they felt a little cerebral, like a successful exercise rather than an emotionally driven story. Many reviewers have stated that he takes on any voice he pleases in these eleven stories; while I agree that the stories differ in narration and setting (wartime London, a vague futuristic world, small Canadian town, ocean liner), I don't think that they are all equally successful. It is obvious that he CAN do nearly anything, but I'm not convinced each story is being told in his true voice. Still, he is very talented and I will certainly be watching out for more of his work. One difficulty I had was with the title. It confused me a little, as there wasn't a story by that name in the collection, and I couldn't really see the direct tie-in between all the stories. However, here are a few explanations:

(from the Toronto Star) In several stories, the word "blackout" has a literal connection. Two tales take place during the London Blitz in World War II, when Nazi bombers were targeting the city and residents covered their windows with blackout curtains to avoid any leakage of light. But Boyko extends the implications of the term to fascinating psychological territory...In two stories, the protagonists (one an empiricist out to debunk a parapsychologist's ESP experiments, the other a dogmatic Marxist despite his privileged upbringing) are so certain of their worldviews that, in effect, they're wearing blinders – which are, of course, a form of blackout.

(from What's on Winnipeg) Each of the 11 stories shines light upon those moments -- blackouts, perhaps -- when we realize how difficult it is to accept ourselves.

And from the author himself:

“I started out with the rough theme, basically the title, then started brainstorming around that. … Originally, I think I thought that the way to make a book seem more like a cohesive piece would be to write a collection of interconnected short stories. These aren't quite interconnected – but they are, at least, along theme; they have some of the same ideas. If nothing else,” he laughs, “the word ‘black' appears more than in the average book.”

So overall, I'd rate this collection not a blackout, but a knockout. Well worth reading, and if you read literary journals you will probably have the pleasure of reading more of his work before the next book comes to fruition -- because it is evident that this author will be publishing more and more.

**cross-posted at The Indextrious Reader**

Landscape With Flatiron, by Haruki Murakami - Wendy's Review

2008-05-04T23:40:00.000-04:00

“Anyhow, let’s wait till the fire burns out,” Miyake said. “We built it, so we ought to keep it company to the end. Once it goes out, and it turns pitch-dark, then we can die.” -From Landscape with Flatiron-

This short story, part of a group of stories entitled After The Quake, occurs over the course of one night with three friends sitting around a bonfire. Miyake is an older man with an obsession in building the perfect bonfire. He befriends Junko, a young woman who lives with her boyfriend Keisuke and is estranged from her family. Whenever Miyake is going to light a bonfire, he calls Junko to come down and watch it burn; and the two of them have an unusual connection. Junko’s boyfriend, Keisuke, is a musician who lives in the here and now and has difficulty understanding Miyake and Junko’s relationship.

“The trouble is, I don’t have a damn thing to do with anything fifty thousand years ago - or fifty thousand years from now, either. Nothing. Zip. What’s important is now. Who knows when the world is going to end? Who can think about the future? The only thing that matters is whether I can get my stomach full right now and get it up right now. Right?” -From Landscape With Flatiron-

Much of the story revolves around a philosophical discussion between Miyake and Junko. It is important to understand that Murakami wrote this story shortly after the Kobe earthquake; and the themes of death, an uncertain future and the larger meaning of life resonate throughout the prose. I have heard many interesting things about Haruki Murakami’s literary works - but until I picked up this short story on line at Ploughshares, I had not read anything by this writer. Murakami’s prose is full of symbolism and beautiful imagery. Initially the story’s meaning completely eluded me…but I read this for the 21st Fiction Yahoo group and discussing it with the group gave me insights I had missed on my own. My appreciation for the story grew as we discussed the various parts of it.

This is a writer who I am curious to read again. I would recommend this short story with some reservations - for many readers, it may be a frustration in trying to tease out the symbols and understand the underlying messages (which I admit I am still working through). But this is an excellent short story for group discussion, and the writing itself is worth the effort.

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

2008-05-04T19:36:00.001-04:00

I didn't read this collection specifically for this challenge, but it's so awesome that I had to cross-post my review here. :)

I just finished reading J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, and that man could write! Each story evokes a post WWII world where everyone smoked, parents weren't terribly concerned about what their children were doing every minute of every day, people wore their racism on their sleeves, and some of the soldiers who came home weren't quite right anymore. The first story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is probably the most famous; I was planning on writing why I loved it so, but it turns out that Mariel decided to do that today as well! So I'll talk about some of my other favourites. My absolute favourite, even over "Bananafish," was "For Esme-With Love and Squalor." In it, an American GI training in Dover wanders around the town one day and meets thirteen-year-old Esme. Esme is rather what I imagine Anne Shirley would be like if she had been born to a titled British family. She loves big words, and the way Salinger captures her voice is simply magical. The GI is in a cafe when Esme, her little brother, and her nurse come in. Obviously, Esme comes over to talk:

The next thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with enviable poise, beside my table. She was wearing a tartan dress-a Campbell tartan, I believe. It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress for a very young girl to be wearing on a rainy, rainy day. "I thought Americans despied tea," she said.
It wasn't the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she'd care to join me.
"Thank you," she said. "Perhaps for just one fraction of a moment."

The narrator himself was really neat too: he's a writer and a reader, and I think we'd all identify with his priorities:

By three in the afternoon, I'd packed all my belongings into my barrack bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I'd brought over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I'd slipped through a porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the enemy ever did use gas I'd never get the damn thing on in time).

They have a wonderful conversation, and when Esme learns that the narrator is a short story writer, she asks him to write a story for her that's full of squalor ("I'd be extremely flattered if you'd write a story exclusively for me some time. I'm an avid writer.") The second half of the story is the narrator's short story for Esme, but it's still based on the narrator's experiences. I don't want to give away anymore (but I promise it doesn't have an abrupt, depressing ending like some of Salinger's other stories), but it's one of my favourite short stories ever (I really long for a whole novel about Esme). And you can read the whole thing here. Go do it.

Have you read it? Now do you understand my passion? Ok, so we'll go on to a couple of my other favourites. "Down at the Dinghy" focuses on an afternoon at a beach house. It begins with two women talking, but the focus quickly shifts to a young mother:

The swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost hipless girl of twenty-five with styleless, colorless, brittle hair pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was-in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces-a stunning and final girl.

I love how Salinger describes his characters. The heart of the story is a conversation between Boo Boo and her four-year-old son, who has an odd habit of trying to run away. He's just done it again, and he refuses to come out of the familys dinghy, so Boo Boo tries to find out why. Unlike most of Salinger's mothers, she's just wonderful, and I loved watching her interact with her son. In looking up a link to the full story (you can read it here), I learned this is part of Salinger's Glass series. I really need to read Franny and Zooey, even if Boo Boo doesn't play a big part.

This is becoming a long post, and those were my two favourites, so I think I'll leave it at that. I'd highly recommend this collection to everyone: Salinger perfectly captures children and teenagers (I think I understand now why Catcher in the Rye is so popular) and the psychological devestation of war. The stories are quite varied, dealing with everything from a little boy who is something of a guru and believes in reincarnation ("Teddy") to a husband at his wit's end about his wife's roving eye ("Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes") to a teenager convinced by his years in Paris that he is the Next Big Thing in art ("De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"). They're all united in their powerful endings (a very important feature for me in a short story) and distinct voices.

A New Kind of Gravity

2008-05-04T16:26:00.000-04:00

The doorbell chimes at seven in the morning and I don't even need to check the monitors to know what's out there: a husband on the front stoop, fidgeting with his clothes, trying not to eyeball the camera. ... Some of them look like the bottom of the barrel, some look like accountants. But when they walk past you, you get the same feeling, like a smell they give off, like something hot and rotten has been packed inside them, crammed down into a space too small to hold it in.

Charlie, the narrator in the short story A New Kind of Gravity by Andrew Foster Altschul, is one of the armed security officers at Skyer House, a safe house for women and children. He takes his job of security very seriously and wishes he could do more for the residents. He also feels a special need to execute his job because of an old fiancee who was abused by her ex-boyfriend. Charlie's heart breaks every time a husband comes to pick up his wife and kids from the shelter. He knows they will return, often with marks showing that things had never really changed.

But cheap ironies abound at Skyer House and Mattie won't permit you to underestimate the women. "It's mutually assured destruction --- just like the bombs," she once told me. ... You can't stop people from f***ing up their own lives, Mattie said. You can't even really stop them from f***ing up someone else's, if that's what they want to do. All you can do is give them choices, offer them some scaled-down version of freedom, then stand back and cover your ears when they still decide to push the button.

Charlie shares a special friendship with one little girl named Camila. He is allowed to pat her on the head when she passes by to get on her school bus and he helps her with her math homework when she visits his office. On two separate occasions Charlie has a confrontation of sorts with Camila's mother Mariana. Both meetings leave him feeling very uncomfortable about the choices that are being made by Mariana for herself and her daughter. Then one morning Camila's father arrives at Skyer House to pick up his wife and daughter.

A heart-breaking story, A New Kind of Gravity evokes many different feelings while reading it. It is a brief glimpse into Charlie's life and job, but it left me wanting to know a few more details to fill in some gaps about what he does and why. I believe there is more to his character than I grasped. I appreciated reading a male voice as the narrator rather than the story being told by a resident or a counselor. I felt it gave the story a different perspective.

Overall, it was a good short story.

"A New Kind of Gravity" by Andrew Foster Altschul from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 edited by Laura Furman

Yiyun Li's "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" from Spring 2008 issue, Zoetrope: All Story

2008-04-30T12:34:00.000-04:00

Do moments that define our parents lives eventually determine how we will live out our own lives? Yiyun Li's "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" seeks to answer that question with this lonely story between a father and his recently divorced daughter. Little do they understand the similarities in their domestic affairs, but it's clear to the reader that silence is a large problem in all their relationships. Li's story seems to ponder whether or not culture and work play a role in the decisions people make or whether people make choices based on the confines of their own personality regardless of culture, place or time. The story feels universal, and it's that universality that makes the story so haunting to me.

I leave this story wondering where the line of denial and self-sacrifice is, and if sometimes they're not blurred for the sake of self-preservation rather than doing what's best for all concerned.

If you've read Yiyun Li's other stories, this one won't disappoint.

Unaccustomed Earth

2008-04-27T16:35:00.000-04:00

I bought myself a present the other day...Unaccustomed Earth, the latest collection of short stories by Jhunpa Lahiri. Of all the bookstacks I own, you will find only one other short story collection...Interpreter of Maladies,by Jhumpa Lahriri. Any guesses about my favorite short story author? And remember when I didn't even care for short stories? (Before I joined this challenge!)

I read the title story immediately, and it was absolutely gorgeous. It lingered in my mind all day, lingered so powerfully that I occasionally picked the book up as I passed by just to dip in and re-read a paragraph or a page.

While her father was in the shower, she made tea. It was a ritual she liked, a formal recognition of the day turning into evening in spite of the sun not setting. When she was on her own, these hours passed arbitrarily. She was grateful for the opportunity to sit on the porch with her father, with the teapot and the bowl of salted cashews and the plate of Nice biscuits, looking at the lake and listening to the vast breeze work its way through the treetops, a grander version of the way Akash used to sigh when he was a baby, full of contentment, in the depths of sleep. The leaves flickered as if with internal light, shivering though the air was not cold. Akash was asleep, exhausted from playing outdoors all day, and the house was filled with silence.

Unaccustomed Earth tells the story of Ruma, a young mother recently transplanted from New York to Seattle. Her father comes to visit, his first visit since the death of Ruma's mother and he's keeping a secret from Ruma - he's become involved with another woman. Meanwhile, Ruma struggles to find her equilibrium in this new life, trying to reach out to her father, yet not quite knowing how. It's just an equisite story, exploring the connection between parent and child on several levels, and the process of taking root in new ground both emotionally and physically.

Every story in this collection is a masterpiece. As much as I loved The Namesake, Lahiri's novel, she is an absolute master of the short story, and I can see why she returned to the genre for her second book. She may well be this generation's Alice Munroe, the writer who makes a name for herself with an entire oeuvre of short stories. With this collection (as with Interpreter of Maladies) I never for a second felt the sense of incompleteness short stories sometimes lend. Her characters are so complex, her prose so dense and delectable, the reader feels as if they are immersed in a full length novel.

But by far the most riveting of all are the three linked stories that make up Part II of the book. In Hema and Kaushik, we follow the fates of two people who first meet as children when their parents share a house one winter. Their lives separate and intersect in unusual and occasionally painful ways, until destiny brings them together one last time.

From the moment they arrived together at Paola and Edo's, it was assumed, by the other guests, that they were old friends. One of the guests had even assumed they were lovers, asking how long they had been together, how they had met. "Our parents," Kaushik had said lightly, but Hema thought back, saddened by those two simple words. She was aware that he had not corrected the guest's assumption. Aware, too, of the way he looked at her across the table during lunch, surprised by the allure that had come to her late. He looked the same to her, that was the astonishing thing. The sharp faced boy who had stepped reluctantly into her parents home. Only the eyes appeared tired, the skin surrounding them now darker, faintly bruised. She still remembered her first impression of him...remembered the ridiculous attraction she had felt that night when she was thirteen years old, and that she had so secretly nurtured during the weeks they lived together. It was as if no time had passed.

Hema and Kaushik is a brilliant elegy to life and to love, to family relationships and the power of fate, and the ways they interact. It could easily stand alone as a poignant and perfect novella.

As in Interpreter of Maladies, all Lahiri's characters have the common thread of nationality to bind them. But their ethnicity is not necessarily the "unaccustomed earth" to which the title refers. Most of them are traversing new emotional territory, much of it regarding loss - of a parent, a partner, an ideal. Relationships are explored in painstaking detail, as in "Only Goodness," where an older sister tries her best to provide her younger brother with "the perfect childhood," and is so bitterly disappointed when his alcoholism prevents them from having the adult relationship she desires.

Lahiri chose a quotation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's as the epigraph for this collection: "Human nature will not flourish...if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children...shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." This proves to be the perfect metaphor for each of Lahiri's characters, in a volume of elegant, emotionally exquisite stories.

cross posted at Bookstack

Silver Birch, Blood Moon - Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

2008-04-26T16:34:00.000-04:00

Another beautiful collection of fairy tales for adult readers collected by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. There are 21 tales by 21 different authors, some are new to the series and others are old favourites from previous collections.

Kiss Kiss – Tanith Lee
A variation on The Frog Prince. It continues the tale after the frog has changed back into a Prince and they are married. She loses her best friend to her husband after that “hateful betrayal of a kiss”.

Carabosse – Delia Sherman
The author says bad fairies may create problems, but they often offer the young prince and princess they curse the opportunity to become more than they would otherwise have been. They do everybody a favour by stirring things up a bit, and should be given more credit (and sympathy) for their subversive roles. The tale is a look at Sleeping Beauty and the good fairies motivations behind the spell told as a poem.

The Price – Patricia Briggs
A reworking of Rumplestiltskin. A much more human story somehow with some of the gaps from the original tale filled in.

Glass Coffin – Caitlin R Kiernan
A contemporary re-telling inspired by the song “Hardly Wait” by PJ Harvey sung by Juliette Lewis. Salmagundi Desvernine lives in a junkyard with 7 other discarded children waiting for Jimmy Desade to return. While he is away selling drugs she cuts her thumb on some sharp rusty metal and dies. He makes her a glass coffin before leaving the other children for good. Very bleak and desolate.

The Vanishing Virgin – Harvey Jacobs
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Flea and the Professor. Magic, even the most controlled, has a way of spinning out of control and creating magic of its own. This is about escape, a neglected magicians assistant and wife Ms Molly turns left inside the vanishing box during a trick. She is told to try it by the rabbit they use Pooper who turns out to be a man from a magical world she finds when she turns the opposite way in the box.

Clad in Gossamer – Nancy Kress
About court life, it’s pressures and its intrigues. Based on The Emperor’s New Clothes about Prince Jasper, second in line for the throne. He envies his brother and wants his intended bride for himself as well as the throne. Along the way the truth becomes twisted and he is no longer sure what is happening.

Precious – Nalo Hopkinson
She says “I’ve always hated the ending of the fairy tale about the good sister who has jewels and flowers fall from her lips when she speaks. Of course, the prince marries her, supposedly as her reward for being virtuous, but its obvious that the prince sees her more as a boon to the royal coffers and a beautiful sex toy than as a person. “Precious” takes up the thread after the marriage.” Jude beats Isobel to get more and more jewels until she eventually runs away keeping her address and number unlisted. He finally tracks her down and while she is telling him exactly how she feels he becomes buried under an increasing pile of jewels. She coughs up a ruby as big as a human heart which knocks him out. When she calls the police on her intruder she notices nothing leaves her mouth but the sounds she makes.

The Sea Hag – Melissa Lee Shaw
This tale originated as a rebellion against the multitude of strong, sympathetic adult female characters mostly found in Disney films. Most are either adolescent heroines or bumbling grandmothers. Anyone inbetween in age is usually portrayed as the villain in the tale. This story looks at the Sea Hag from The Little Mermaid from a different perspective. Beautiful and sad it sheds a new light on the popular tale.

The Frog Chauffeur – Garry Kilworth
The inspiration for this tale came from wondering whether a traumatic event like a frog being turned into a human would have residual effects. It considers the consequences of a human male as a frog with an active sex drive producing many tadpoles with a mixture of human and frog DNA. This tale tells of what happens when one such offspring becomes human after a traumatic event and marries Isobel Fairfax.

The Dybbuk in the Bottle – Russell William Asplund
Usually the genie who grants wishes is honourable, but this tells the tale of a dybbuk (a demon from Jewish folklore). It teaches the protagonist a few lessons along the way as he tries to trick the dybbuk back into its bottle with the help of Rabbi Meltzer after it takes over his house.

The Shellbox – Karawynn Long
Beautiful story based on various Selkie tales with a little bit of Bluebeard thrown in for good measures. About a woman who marries a man who treats her like dirt. She has a gift from her mother before she disappeared back into the sea, a shellbox that can hold anything she puts in it. During the tale she puts her voice in it singing to keep her husband company while he fishes, but he abuses it using her voice to call fish to him and then tells her he lost it when he disapproves of her friendship with a deaf and mute woman.

Ivory Bones – Susan Wade
Based on Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen. It tells the story from her intended mole-like husband who is a collector of rare oddities. He has in his possession a pearl ring made from Thumbelina’s skull. It contains dark connotations that suggest he had her deliberately turned into pearls so he could keep her with him always.

The Wild Heart – Anne Bishop
The Wild Heart is half of the princess in Sleeping Beauty. It has been travelling making itself strong enough to reunite with it’s other Gentle Heart. A dark look at the tale with a happy ending.

You wandered off like a foolish child to break your heart and mine – Pat York
Written by York after reading the manuscript for Bishops The Wild Heart. It looks at how someone might die by thorns which would be unable to kill someone quickly. A Queen nurses her son who is caught in the briar around the castle. There are 7 men still alive in the thorns which grow every day and try to strangle and kill them. When the prince arrives who is able to reach Sleeping Beauty, the remaining men are all killed when the roots move to let him through.

Arabian Phoenix – India Edghill
A version of “Scheherazde” from the Arabian Nights told in a modern setting. In this tale the reason the new Queens last only a week is due to their marriage contract only being set for that long. Shahrazad works out what happens to them as they are never seen again, the King is selecting the brightest woman and sending them off to university in the Western world. There is even the possibility of them getting married properly in the future.

Toad-Rich – Michael Cadnum
The “other” sister tells the tale of The Fairy Gifts by Charles Perrault. She is the sister who spits frogs, toads, snakes and spiders. After her sister marries the prince jewels become commonplace and it is her insects that become valuable. Her and her mother hope to use them to buy back her sister from the ungrateful prince.

Skin so Green and fine – Wendy Wheeler
A look at Beauty and the Beast. Bruno Bettelheim suggested that this story showed the Beauty could not love the beast until she had transferred her affection for her father to him at it looks at the Oedipal-conflict. The transfers the story to Spain adding in Voodoo and spiritual possession along the way.

The Wilful Child, the Black Dog, and the Beanstalk – Melanie Tam
This tale grew out of the authors duel passions for fairy tales and her job as a social worker. A social worker is teaching a class when someone stays behind at the end to discuss a case she was handling where the young girl killed her adoptive mother shortly before it could be finalised. It turns out she had tried to kill previous mothers-to-be in different fairy tale ways. One had nearly been pushed into an oven, another nearly had her ladder (beanstalk) chopped down and the final one was killed by stabbing her open from throat to sternum like the wolf in the original tales of Little Red Riding Hood.

Locks – Neil Gaiman
A poem inspired by Gaiman reading the story of Goldilocks to his daughter when she was young. It is a dialogue between father and daughter that has the father looking into the future and seeing her loss of innocence and him becoming the father bear checking all the windows and locks.

Marsh-Magic – Robin McKinley
A strange tale about a line of Kings, their mages and the local marsh people. Each King marries one of the marsh woman who produces only one male heir before disappearing. It takes one 22 generations later to break the bind by learning the mage’s true name and unveiling his real identity.

Toad – Patricia A McKillip
Written in response to unanswered questions surrounding the tale of The Frog Prince, especially why any self-respecting frog would want to marry a spoiled brat of a princess!

This is my favourite collection of tales in the series so far. I loved all of the tales and my particular favourites were The Sea Hag by Melissa Lee Shaw, The Wild Heart by Anne Bishop and The Shell Box by Karawynn Long. Other tales I enjoyed immensley were Kiss Kiss by Tanith Lee, Carabosse by Delia Sherman, The Price by Patricia Briggs, Clad in Gossamer by Nancy Kress, The Frog Chauffeur by Garry Kilworth, Ivory Bones by Susan Wade, You Wandered Off by Pat York and Arabian Phoenix by Indian Edgehill.

"Familial Kindness" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

2008-04-23T19:11:00.000-04:00

My copy of One-Story came in the mail about a week ago. I finally got a chance to read Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's "Familial Kindness"

Stoic, reserved characters dominant this slow moving story of familial grief. It's the kind of story that may strike a nerve with some and may strike annoyance with others, depending on how the reader perceives the range of emotional depth the story explores.

There is a sense of emotional containment carried throughout the plot, one that is both heavy like an anchor and undefinable. Alma and her brother-in-law Charlie are both in search of letting that heaviness go and finding meaning beyond their loss. The story ends with a sense of the beginning of a long process of moving forward with their lives, a moment defined by how their familiar relationship with each other has changed.

In the end I loved the pace of the story and where it carried me emotionally. Coming from a partial Scandinavian background, I appreciated the emotional complexity of these characters. There is a lot omitted that I'm able to fill in with my own personal experience, and that really created a fulfilling read for me. I'm typically not a big fan of stories that simmer, but this one grabbed me and held on.

If you're already a fan of Alice Munro, you'll like what this story has to offer.

The Way up to Heaven, by Roald Dahl.

2008-04-23T14:20:00.000-04:00

I have just reviewed 'The Way up to Heaven' by Roald Dahl at A Curious Singularity and crossposted on 51 Stories. I think the title refers to the fact that Mrs. Foster is rid of her annoying husband (so, she's in heaven) and he is literally (one presumes!) on his way to heaven (as he is dead) and she has paved the staircase for him. Is that right?

Seachanges

John Mutford's 10th Short Story Pick: Roald Dahl's "The Way Up To Heaven"

2008-04-21T05:23:00.000-04:00

Short Story Monday

No, I'm not trying to sway the Great Wednesday Compare results. I picked a Dahl story this week because his "The Way Up To Heaven" is this month's pick over at A Curious Singularity.

Most people who mention Dahl usually refer to memories of his children's books. I think a teacher read Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to me at one point, and I saw the movie version of James and the Giant Peach. But for reading Dahl myself, the only thing I recollect is "Lamb To The Slaughter." I read it in junior high and it quickly became one of my favourites.

Like "Lamb to the Slaughter," "The Way Up To Heaven" is also on the dark side. Revolving around a woman who is has obsessive issues with tardiness, and a husband who may or may not like to goad her about it, it begins as a portrait of a slightly dysfunctional, but very believable, couple.

What I found most impressive was how Dahl made me feel Mrs. Foster's stress over getting to the airport on time. Since having kids my punctuality leaves something to be desired, but I don't often worry about it. So how did Dahl manage to make me empathetic for this woman? It wasn't that I related and it wasn't that she was a particularly nice character (I found her slightly annoying). I think Dahl was able to instill my feelings, by trading one tension for another.

Her husband, Eugene Foster, was said to have a timing "so accurate-- just a minute or two late, you understand-- and [a] manner so bland that it was hard to believe he wasn't purposefully inflicting a nasty private little torture of his own on the unhappy lady." The undercurrent of resentment between the two characters, combined with the ambiguity of whether or not the husband was purposefully exacerbating his wife's condition, put me on edge so much that feeling Mrs. Foster's stress about getting out on time seemed natural.

I am a little confused about the title however. I'm not sure if it's meant to be ironic or not. Nor am I clear as to whom was supposed to be on their way. In any case, the story itself was great even if the title was not.

Cross posted at A Curious Singularity and The Book Mine Set.

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

2008-04-17T14:57:00.000-04:00

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov was originally the second in a trilogy of novels. First published in 1952, the novel is in fact two stories or two novellas originally published (separately) in 1945.

Things you should know:

*Foundation was good. Really good. But Foundation and Empire was even better.
*Foundation and Empire is infinitely better than Prelude to Foundation.
*While I would certainly recommend reading Foundation, I think you could pick up Foundation and Empire without having read the other and still appreciate it for the great book that it is. It does in fact include a nice two page summary of the novel Foundation.
*Foundation and Empire has a certain something-special about it that makes it stand apart from Foundation. The writing seems wittier, funnier, more tongue-in-cheek. There's just something about it that makes it pop.

I am still operating under the philosophy of sometimes it is better not to know, BUT at the same time I don't want to be accused of not "reviewing" it properly.

Foundation and Empire roughly picks up about three hundred years after Foundation opens. In the first novella, "The General" the reader learns of the fourth (I believe it's fourth) Seldon crisis. One of the strongest generals of the Empire (what remains of the Empire) is out to destroy the Foundation. Bel Riose is the general's name. Ducem Barr, the son of a man we met briefly in Foundation, is a main character--a character that opposes the Empire even at great risk to his own life and his own family. Lathan Devers, a trader, is also of importance. The plot of "The General" is relatively simple, and this is the shorter of the two stories. In the second novella, "The Mule" the Foundation faces its GREATEST threat so far. It begins simply with the homecoming of a bride and groom. Bayta and Toran. They're visiting Toran's family on the planet of Haven. Haven is a "rat hole" of a planet where traders--mostly retired traders--go to hide out and evade paying taxes to the Foundation. The planet is technically a part of the Foundation. But they're more of a rebellious bunch on Haven. The reader soon learns that not everyone thinks Foundation is perfect when it comes to running the galaxy--or their small part of the galaxy. There is discontent among the ranks of citizens. But even the threat--the small threat--of civil war pales in comparison to the REAL threat of The Mule. I will say no more about the Mule or the rest of the story. I don't care how curious you are! Some things you can't pry out of me.

One Voice, Please

2008-04-17T14:38:00.000-04:00

McBratney, Sam. 2008. One Voice, Please: Favorite Read-Aloud Stories.

One Voice, Please is a delightful gathering of stories--some familiar, some not-so-much--perfect for reading aloud to children of all ages. Family-friendly reading, if you will, that while kid-friendly is not unappealing to adults. Most stories are two to three pages, and could easily be read in a few minutes. This is a good thing. Perfect reading to fill in those gaps during the day when you don't quite have enough time to get settled into a longer book--like a novel or even a traditional picture book.

Originally published in Great Britain in 2005, the collection has recently been published in the U.S. With over fifty stories, there is sure to be something that is just right for your mood. The book would be a great edition to the classroom as well. My personal favorite was "Many Littles Make A Lot."

167

THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED by Elizabeth Berg

2008-04-16T10:04:00.000-04:00

I must begin this review with a full confession: Elizabeth Berg is my aunt. I adore her and I want to be her when I grow up. :-) There. The secret is out.

Beth's new book of short stories, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation, was released yesterday, and I immediately acquired a copy for myself and sat down to read the title story. Anyone who has ever been on a diet will relate to the narrator's defiant act of hookey from her Weight Watcher's meeting. And the giggly elation of eating all day with no boundaries! And, most likely, that final unfulfilled feeling.

Then I moved on to the second story about a middle-aged woman who unexpectedly comes face to face with her first love. Remember all the amazing feelings your first love was able to conjure up? Would you still feel that way now?

I have another confession to make. I have only read three of Beth's books. Why? Because she's so real that it hurts. I love Beth's writing. I always feel like we're having a private conversation when I read her work, and these little stories are no exception. It's like gossiping with a really funny friend. A really funny friend who is acutely aware of what makes us human, aware of the insecurities and tears beneath the laughter. She doesn't always point it out directly, but you know she knows. And you love her for it, because she makes it okay to be imperfect.

I only read the first two stories in this collection, because I want to stretch these little nuggets of fun and real life out for a while. I'm going to laugh out loud, and I know for a fact she's going to make me cry. And I'm going to feel vulnerable, empowered, ridiculous, smart and okay just the way I am. Thanks, Beth!

Lezlie

This review is cross-posted on my blog at http://booksnbordercollies.blogspot.com

2008-04-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

Short Stories – Raymond Carver - cross reviewed here.

Time to update my short story reading. It’s not as if I am totally ignoring this category, not at all. I read short stories like I read a poem, one at a time and from different books and by different authors, not sequentially as in one book full of short stories before going on to another. Recently I’ve read a couple of stories from Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From. The book is always somewhere in reach, on my table in my work room, the bedside table or somewhere around the house. The stories are, according to the blurb ‘masterpieces in American fiction’. And so they are. Nobody said anything is about a day in the life of a teenager whose parents quarrel as he and his brother are still in bed, early in the morning. He fakes illness and his mother allows him to stay home from school. The innuendo of the relationships between the brothers and the mother is subtly evoked and as a reader you are drawn into the world and thoughts of the teenager, the way he thinks and nothing is crystal clear, of course it is not, he’s a teenager and male. Once everyone has gone he gets his fishing tackle and goes out to fish in familiar territory. He comes across another boy and together they land a huge fish. Both want it to show off to their parents and the decision is made to cut if in half. The story comes to its excruciating end when the teenager proudly shows his half of the fish to his parents, back home and quarrelling again. Then he is shouted at and is told by both to take it out and away. He has managed to divert them from their quarrelling, but only because they now both have a go at him.

I’ve read some more in this collection. They’re all subtle, not a word too many, snapshots of life, of a man who has given up smoking and whose son becomes embroiled in a quarrel with friends and their parents about a bike; then there’s the story of a sleepless student’s wife, who desperately tries to keep her husband awake with her but finally loses and when morning finally comes she gets back into bed, and he’s fast asleep.

You read one and close the book and get on with whatever you have to do. It is like reading poetry, it takes time and you want to savour them.

Etgar Keret, "Knockoff Venus"

2008-04-12T11:17:00.000-04:00

Etgar Keret's "Knockoff Venus" (which is online at Nextbook.org and is part of his new collection The Girl On the Fridge) is an oddly affecting little tale which somehow manages to be prosaic and fabulist at the same time. Prosaic in that it involves the lovesick musings of a lonely office worker, and fabulist in that the object of his crush is Venus - yes, the Roman goddess of beauty and love.

How an immortal deity came to work as a lowly copyist in an Israeli office is never explicitly explained, other than her vague reference to having emigrated, with several other gods, from deplorable conditions somewhere else. But other than her beauty - which has narrator quite dazzled - she seems remarkably ordinary: she speaks only bad Hebrew, has questionable taste in men (which is, admittedly, to the narrator's benefit) and only dully goes through the desultory motions of her job, as the narrator describes with Keret's typically deadpan humor:

Venus worked from eight-thirty to six, sometimes later, Xeroxing reams and collating them into neat stacks. Even in that position, sweaty and bent over the machine, wincing against the flashing light, she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to say so, but I couldn’t get up the nerve. In the end, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and left it on her desk. The next morning, the note was waiting for me, along with fifty copies.

Despite the lightness of Keret's touch, the unspoken implications of the narrative are considerably more troubling: the narrator's world is one in which Roman gods, who in antiquity ruled over all of mankind and the natural world, are now forced to work menial jobs in Israel which, while an improvement over the gods' former home, has long been a site of ethnic tensions and violence and thus is far from paradise. The gods scuffle along, working as movers and mechanics and office temps, grateful for their new situations but still far removed from their past glories. They have lost any semblance of the supernatural, and seem all but powerless to change their plight. Our world, Keret seems to say, has declined so much that even the gods are at a loss to do anything about it.

Or maybe that's nothing more than my overwrought interpretation. Maybe Keret didn't mean to imply any of that at all. Maybe he just wrote a quirky story about a mortal and a degraded goddess making the best of their humble situations and falling in love. Or maybe Keret meant to deliver both: a love story with weighty undercurrents. The final line of the story resolves none of the above, and is as charmingly ambiguous as the rest - from the narrator's comment it's unclear whether he thinks the relationship will never last and he'll soon need something else to occupy his time, or if the relationship is the first step toward the domesticity and stability he desires.

Whatever the interpretation, Keret makes the reader think - which is what all good storytellers do. And Keret is certainly one of the good ones.

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The Short Story Reading Challenge

The First Person and Other Stories - Ali Smith

Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman

Elementals - AS Byatt

Nina Berberova, The Tattered Cloak (1943, 1993)

Junot Diaz, The Pura Principle (NewYorker, March 2010)

Mavis Gallant, Across the Bridge (1992)

Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley

Reviving the Short Story Reading Challenge for 2010

The Ebony Hand by Rose Tremain

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke

Murder in Baker Street: New Tales of Sherlock Holmes

Challenge Completed

Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

Two Stories

Other Stories

The Gift Of Years

Irish Girls About Town: Anthology of Short Stories

Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Themes

Race and Class

Isolated, Lonely People

Christianity (Good versus Evil)

Stories by Washington Irving

Months and Seasons - Wendy's Book Review

Blow-Up

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Wendy's Challenge Plan and List

"The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket"

Canaries

The Fly

"Canaries"

Pa's Darling

Robertson Davies' High Spirits

An Aftermath of Hope and Regret

An Aftermath of Hope and Regret

The Fly

Daddy Wolf Blog

Short Story Parabolic Mirrors

The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket

Glimpses at the Complexity of Life and the Human Condition

Canaries

Canaries

A Sunny Place

"The Fly"

Blowing Up

Andrew Carter's Canaries Blog

"The Fly"

GOD SEES THE TRUTH BUT WAITS

Dates from Hell - Various

Stories by O. Henry

The Writing

Snow - Tove Jansson

A Perfect Day for Bananafish - J.D. Salinger

Stories by Ernest Hemingway

Two Stories to Read

The View From Castle Rock, by Alice Munro - Wendy's Review

Dubliners by James Joyce

Skin by Roald Dahl

The last one in the challenge for me ...

Kerfol by Edith Wharton; Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes

Stories by Guy de Maupassant

Stories I Would Reread

Other Good Stories

An Ex-Mas Feast, by Uwem Akpan - Wendy's Review

Summer, with Twins

Completed Challenge - Option 1

Bite - Various

Worlds That Weren't by Harry Turtledove, et al

How They Met And Other Stories

Do Something

Nam Le's The Boat

Natalie, by Anne Enright - Wendy's Review

Stories by Anton Chekhov

The Student by Anton Chekhov

It is short

It captures one main character in one moment/subject

The character's emotions are foremost

Something happens, emotionally