Recently Read Short Stories

[Daniel del Real]

We have a thread to comment finished books, which mostly consists in novels; there is also a thread for Poetry, where we can actually post the poems we enjoy.
Then I thought we should have one about short stories. It happens that sometimes we come across just one short story of certain author, in the internet, a magazine, an anthology. Or simply we decide to re-read just that short story.
The deal here would be to list the short stories we read, and if they're short enough post it here or the link.
Hope you like this idea guys.

I'll start with a couple of short stories I read this week.

Jorge Luis Borges - The South (El Sur) re-read
What can I say about Borges. For me one of the top three short story teller of all time. This story contained in the Fictions volume deals with the topics of death and will, taking fate in our hands to the last minute. Amazing piece of fiction with a delightful style.

Franz Kafka - Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk
A cryptic story of a female mouse who is a singer in a population of mice that are not able to fully appreciate art themselves. However she is totally sure of her gift and thinks she is a great singer although the narrator tells us that she squeals equally than the rest of mice. At the beggining I thought it was an allegory of god, later I thought government. Then I read it was all about human voice at the time Kafka was losing it due to illness.
Someone else's interpretaion would be great to help out.

[Amoxcalli]

Ooh, I've read quite a bunch of short stories lately (read: today):

Josep M. Fonalleras, Noir in Five Parts and an Epilogue
An author I know next to nothing about, but this short story was featured in the anthology Best European Fiction 2010. I thought it was very good. I can't say too much about it, without spoilers, so I won't. Suffice to say that it was well worth the read.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Zidane's Melancholy
Slightly disturbing but rather funny short story about Zidane's headbutt in his last match for the French equipe nationale. Was a worthwhile read, but I can't imagine it to be representative of Toussaint's other works, since I imagine the style in which it was written doesn't lend itself very well to lengthier works. This short story is also part of Best European Fiction 2010.

Orna N? Choile?in, Camino
Worthwhile read, but nothing brilliant. I've never read anything by Orna N? Choile?in, but I'm not motivated to pick up anything by her any time soon. This short story is well-written, but the plot was a bit too familiar. I saw the end coming way before the last paragraph, which I found disappointing. Also part of the anthology.

Franz Kafka, The Judgment
A master of the short story and although I had read it before, I still found it a very amusing, tragicomic short story. Sadly read in translation, since I don't have a copy of his collected works in German, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. I do think it's not as funny as Metamorphosis or In the Penal Colony though.

Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, The trail of your blood in the snowSomehow felt like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in 31 pages. The ending of this novel almost retold with as much skill. I thought it was a very good read with lovely characters and a strong style. I can definitely recommend this one.

[Daniel del Real]

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Zidane's Melancholy
Slightly disturbing but rather funny short story about Zidane's headbutt in his last match for the French equipe nationale. Was a worthwhile read, but I can't imagine it to be representative of Toussaint's other works, since I imagine the style in which it was written doesn't lend itself very well to lengthier works. This short story is also part of Best European Fiction 2010.

This sounds like a really funny short story. I'd be curious to know how it develops. I think it goes through Zidane's head after the moment. Could be interesting.

The trail of your blood in the snow, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez
Somehow felt like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in 31 pages. The ending of this novel almost retold with as much skill. I thought it was a very good read with lovely characters and a strong style. I can definitely recommend this one.

Rastro de tu Sangre en la Nieve, a beautiful title in Spanish as in English. I read it for the first time when I was 15 and I just can't forget the tales of Nina Daconte. Definitely my favourite Garc?a Marquez short story.

[Amoxcalli]

This sounds like a really funny short story. I'd be curious to know how it develops. I think it goes through Zidane's head after the moment. Could be interesting.

It is. Toussaint manages to blend a century of philosophy, the entire history of football and a good deal of classic literature, as well as his own work into a mighty 5-page epic. It really is quite fascinating. Looking at the title, I thought football and literature were two great things that were destined never to meet in quality, but the contrary has been proven. Recommended, should you come across it.

Rastro de tu Sangre en la Nieve, a beautiful title in Spanish as in English. I read it for the first time when I was 15 and I just can't forget the tales of Nina Daconte. Definitely my favourite Garc?a Marquez short story.

I'm afraid I have to admit it's the only one I've read by him so far, but yes, lovely title. In Dutch too.

[Daniel del Real]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
As many people I had seen the movie before without knowing it was based in a Fitzgerald's short story. I loved the movie, and know that I read it, I can tell that it outstands the movie. So much philosophy about life's ages and their own characteristics without the common mistake of falling into cliche. The movie is way more melodramatic, but the story is full of wisdom since the first word to the last one. Excellent in any meaning.

[waalkwriter]

It's a Good Life By Jerome Bixby, great science fiction story, really cool, and eeire, turned into a famous episode of The Twilight Zone, which later became one of the four sections used for the 1984 movie The Twilight Zone.

and

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, a great short story, which later became A.I. In some ways A.I. is superior, in other ways the short story is. I can't help but wonder if the movie as a whole might have been if Kubrick had not died before finishing the project, this coming from someone who is not a major fan of Kubrick's work, in fact I hated The Shining, hated A Clockwork Orange, and the only part of 2001: A Space Odyessy was the section dealing with monkeys. Eyes Wide Shut was a really good movie though...

I don't know, there is something peculiar and amazing about the short story, if only the fact that I wrote one with almost the exact same background before I ever read the short story.

[Bottle Rocket]

Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle -- I've often been impatient with HJ's longueurs and prissiness, but this rueful story of a man and a woman over many years distills essence de James into just a few pages. I reread this fairly regularly.

Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad -- pick a story, any story. Lem was a Pole now most famous for Solaris, but I really prefer this collection of thoughtful, often very funny almost-fables about "Trurl and Klapaucius ... brilliant robot engineers ... best friends and rivals." (Wikipedia)

John Cheever: O Youth and Beauty -- this is the kind of drop-dead story you only get to read once, so pay attention. A vision of life in the American suburbs in the Fifties, I think this breathtaking piece is one of his finest.



BRocket

[Manuel76]

Some by Flannery O'Connor. She is great and I loved them, but sometimes I'm not sure I fully understand her. Some stories left me completely lost about their real meaning.

[Daniel del Real]

Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle -- I've often been impatient with HJ's longueurs and prissiness, but this rueful story of a man and a woman over many years distills essence de James into just a few pages. I reread this fairly regularly.

I'm currently reading The Lesson of the Master by James. It goes great so far, however I'm reading it slowly because I've had trouble before following Jame's ideas. I guess I'll finish it tomorrow, so I'll let you know my final thoughts.
You seem to be an expert on American literature, so please tell me which one is your favorite James short story.

[Bottle Rocket]

Some by Flannery O'Connor. She is great and I loved them, but sometimes I'm not sure I fully understand her. Some stories left me completely lost about their real meaning.

Not for attribution or nuthin, but I think she's just plain weird. I find her stuff by turns fey and both disturbed and disturbing, which may be exactly what her many fans admire but doesn't really do much for me.

My favorite Southern weirdo is John Kennedy Toole, whose Confederacy of Dunces is insanely funny but quite sad in the end, especially as the author had despaired of getting it published and killed himself; his grieving mother found a publisher and it was (deservedly) a huge bestseller.


BRocket

[Bottle Rocket]

You seem to be an expert on American literature, so please tell me which one is your favorite James short story.

No expert, a gifted amateur at best
(but thanks )

Well, that's it: The Beast in the Jungle.

I've read most of James over the years and I understand why he is regarded as a master. As with Proust or Thomas Mann (in Magic Mountain anyhow) all of them insist on resetting our sense of time and replacing it with theirs. Precise and measured but oh so orotund, James will make you insane if you can't adopt the rhythm of Gilded Age or Edwardian elites; my mother despised Proust and commented acidly that he spent all his time "bleeding to death on the page." I don't share her view but I can certainly see why one might feel that way. And the whole sanitorium regimen and the lulled sense of enchantment in Magic Mountain requires that the reader, like Hans Castorp, be suspended in time. But Mann and the reader know what the characters do not: that while they doze away, a gigantic war is about to sweep their whole world away.

I hated it until I started getting fascinated by learning the trick of wrapping your blanket when you take the sun on your balcony every afternoon. After that I was along for the whole ride.

Well ... I don't know how I got so quickly from short stories to vast and ponderous masterworks. Books are like that, I have found.


BRocket

["James Kirker"]

Hello,

Recently I read the short story "The Tourmaline" by Adalbert Stifter; a very strange, sad, and "dark" tale...like the Kaspar Hauser legend recounted by Walter De La Mare or some such. Evocative of Grillparzer's "Der arme Spielmann" also.

A curious structural shift in the narrative mid-way through also, which struck me as odd, but not problematic.

[JTolle]

John Cheever: O Youth and Beauty -- this is the kind of drop-dead story you only get to read once, so pay attention. A vision of life in the American suburbs in the Fifties, I think this breathtaking piece is one of his finest.

Cheever is the man! The Swimmer is one of my favorite short-stories and I've been meaning to read The Wapshot Chronicles for a while now.

Just Read:
Robert Coover's The Babysitter--Twisted post-modern beauty. The half-fantasized night of a party and a babysitter told from a plethora of perspectives. A genuinely strange and at times disquieting read. Very perceptive and unembarrassed.

[Bottle Rocket]

Just Read:
Robert Coover's The Babysitter--Twisted post-modern beauty. The half-fantasized night of a party and a babysitter told from a plethora of perspectives. A genuinely strange and at times disquieting read. Very perceptive and unembarrassed.

I have only ever read Coover's Gerald's Party, which my boss wanted to publish so as to get some pomo cred; I found it very disorienting, and have never quite made up my mind whether its gathering incoherence was meant to mimic the upward creep of everybody's blood alcohol level or was just random incoherence. But it didn't make me want to drop everything to immerse myself in Coover, although I have some very bright friends who swear by him.


BRocket

[kpjayan]

The short story collection of James Kelman ( Not Not while the Giro) .. ..

The story 'Nice to be Nice" , about 7or 8 pages took me four hours to finish... It was written in the dialect (scottish?) as it is spoken.. first two pages were extreamely difficult to get through.. it became easy towards the end.. naturally, I had to re-read the story again with my new found confidence!

[JTolle]

I found it very disorienting, and have never quite made up my mind whether its gathering incoherence was meant to mimic the upward creep of everybody's blood alcohol level or was just random incoherence.

I saw something in The Babysitter very similar to your 'incoherence' as the story neared its end, but the prose and application must have been tighter here because I was in love with Coover's strange sputtering style. To me the 'incoherence' in The Babysitter felt like the growing power of fantasy and wishes over the narration as its characters slipped more into their own minds. (There was also a good amount of alcohol in this story).

[Daniel del Real]

Henry James, The Lesson of the Master:
The story of two writers, a young man named Paul Overt who is trying to meet a middle-aged writer who he admires. In between the relationship a young lady who Overt gets in love with and the discussions between Overt and St John of what it is to be a true artist and how to become one. A story that analyze what it is more important: to write (be an artist), or to exploit life to its maximum. Good short story or novella, starting a little slow, but setting the ambient little by little to have and extraordinary finale.

[Mirabell]

I have only ever read Coover's Gerald's Party, which my boss wanted to publish so as to get some pomo cred; I found it very disorienting, and have never quite made up my mind whether its gathering incoherence was meant to mimic the upward creep of everybody's blood alcohol level or was just random incoherence. But it didn't make me want to drop everything to immerse myself in Coover, although I have some very bright friends who swear by him.


BRocket

We have a thread on that one, you know. Input?
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...lds-party.html

=)

[Jayaprakash]

The Hound by HP Lovecraft, which is a wonderful piece of sustained literary excess. Also, an earlier story, The Statement Of Randolph Carter which has interesting parallels with The Hound and some notable examples of Lovecraft's use of seemingly oxymoronic statements to evoke the sublime or uncanny.

[Jayaprakash]

The Author Of The Acacia Seeds, subtitled And other extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguists, by Ursula K. Le Guin. An incredibly imaginative, evocative and thought-provoking little piece, it consists of three excerpts from a putative journal for academics who interpret animal and insect languages. The first piece looks at the poetry 'written' on a series of acacia seeds by a renegade worker ant who leaves her tribe to be a hermit. The second deals with strides in interpreting penguin language, with ballet dancers producing renditions of pieces from the penguins' language of gesture. The piece ends with a suggestion that researchers have focussed too much on the more overt language of the smaller, more active penguins and suggests that the relatively quiescent Emperor penguin may have a far more subtle and rich language-world. Finally, the head of the Association imagines new areas of study altogether - the language of plants, of lichen, and finally of minerals.

But my summary does this story no justice. It's a fascinating study of our ideas of communication and art, where one shades into another, and where behaviour or even just existence shade into language. Le Guin has gone on record describing Philip K Dick as America's own home-grown Borges, a title she herself can lay claim to with tales like this.