bibliographing

Last week I received a surprise birthday book package that included J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (the serendipity of long-ago-added-to-Amazon-wishlist books). I’d read about half the stories in high school, and remembered liking them—especially “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor.” But on the whole the book is rather different from what I remember. I didn’t remember [...]

“The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”* makes a perfect introduction to Gogol, I think—not that it was actually my introduction, of course. But it has it all, starting with the almost pointillist piling of detail on detail along with the intrusive narrator. It opens:
A fine bekesha Ivan Ivanovich has! A most [...]

I tried starting out by giving a brief summary of the plot of “The Runenberg,” but found that doesn’t quite work. Or at least, it’s very difficult to do properly, because of how wiggly the story is when you get right down to it. But here goes:
Christian, raised in the lowlands to be a gardener, [...]

Even without any prompting, my brilliant readers connected Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” with Spanking the Maid when I described the repetition, with variation, in the novel. But I believe there is an important difference between the two, which wouldn’t have been made clear from my first post, now that I’ve read “The Babysitter.”
In [...]

In Owen Warland, “The Artist of the Beautiful,” Nathaniel Hawthorne has created an almost too-perfect representation of the Romantic artist. Even as a child Owen had no use for the utilitarian, even for faux-utilitarian toys. Only Beauty has ever interested him. Not fit for manual labor, he’s apprenticed to a watchmaker, learns his trade very [...]

I wanted to look at some good, sturdy old American short fiction this week, since I’d even gone slack on my specially designed “easy Friday posts,” and after thinking about some Melville and Hawthorne it was suggested I go all the way back to Washington Irving. So I did. Other than a brief sketch in [...]

Is it actually a thing to say that the world can be divided into Hemingway people and Fitzgerald people, or is it just something I’ve thought long enough that I think it’s a thing? Anyway, I believe this is at least as valid as the Beatles/Elvis bifurcation (or Beatles/Stones). I’ve always fallen on the Hemingway [...]

This week I’m going to move on from the tiny “Up in Michigan” and stretch the short story as far as it can go in the other direction, to what is rightfully a novella, Revenge. Wikipedia tells me Jim Harrison’s work “has been compared to that of Faulkner and Hemingway” and since the Hemingway thought [...]

Didn’t take me long in my story series to get to Hemingway, did it? Well, I won’t pretend I’m surprised. I did post about him earlier this week as well, but in fact, I re-read “Up in Michigan” (1923) because I’d been discussing with the consumption partner the Michigan stories, which he likes best. I [...]

This week was the first anniversary of this blog, and I think that makes it a good time to try out something new. I love short stories, and while I do read short story collections from time to time I feel like I could be reading a lot more individual short stories. So starting now [...]