Traveller's bookshelf: short-fiction en-US Tue, 15 Oct 2024 10:40:52 -0700 60 Traveller's bookshelf: short-fiction 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?]]> 18070641
First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories: O Henry Award Winners (1968), and The Best American Short Stories (1967).

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people¡¯s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything...]]> 20 Joyce Carol Oates Traveller 5 dark, short-fiction
WARNING: light spoilers.

Number 7 from my list of "most disturbing (short) stories ever"

Trigger warning to rape survivors and those who had been victims of psychopaths.


The basic pattern of the events that take place in this story, has happened millions of times before, and probably will happen again, many many times. I know Arnold Friend, I¡¯ve seen him before.

I know there isn¡¯t consensus about exactly what a "psychopath"(/sociopath/malignant narcissist/person with anti-social personality disorder) is, but for purposes of this review, I¡¯m going with James Fallon¡¯s description in his enlightening book The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain, and using the term psychopath since that is the term that most people still know this personality type by.

The problem with this type of manipulative person is that the more intelligent ones almost have a sixth sense of where their potential victim¡¯s frailties lie, and they know exactly how to exploit it.
They tend to have a lot of charisma and a superficial charm that often allows them to get under the potential victim's skin, or at least gives them a foot in the door towards gaining the attention of the potential victim.

They will not hesitate, for example, to use a person¡¯s concern for their loved ones against them. They¡¯ll use anything; your sense of shame, your fear of bodily harm, your innate greed, anything that they can spot after prodding and probing in an effort to figure out where your weak spots lie.

And they do, believe me, they do figure it out, and they use this knowledge to devastating effect. The best one can do is to keep a cool head and place as much distance as you still can between yourself and this person. For some, though, it might be too late by the time they realize what they¡¯re dealing with.

Joyce Carol Oates' depiction of the situation and the personalities involved, is so spot-on, that the effect is chillingly realistic. Absolutely frightening in it's psychological accuracy.

[spoilers removed]]]> 3.96 1966 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/24
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: dark, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer: 10 out of 10

WARNING: light spoilers.

Number 7 from my list of "most disturbing (short) stories ever"

Trigger warning to rape survivors and those who had been victims of psychopaths.


The basic pattern of the events that take place in this story, has happened millions of times before, and probably will happen again, many many times. I know Arnold Friend, I¡¯ve seen him before.

I know there isn¡¯t consensus about exactly what a "psychopath"(/sociopath/malignant narcissist/person with anti-social personality disorder) is, but for purposes of this review, I¡¯m going with James Fallon¡¯s description in his enlightening book The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain, and using the term psychopath since that is the term that most people still know this personality type by.

The problem with this type of manipulative person is that the more intelligent ones almost have a sixth sense of where their potential victim¡¯s frailties lie, and they know exactly how to exploit it.
They tend to have a lot of charisma and a superficial charm that often allows them to get under the potential victim's skin, or at least gives them a foot in the door towards gaining the attention of the potential victim.

They will not hesitate, for example, to use a person¡¯s concern for their loved ones against them. They¡¯ll use anything; your sense of shame, your fear of bodily harm, your innate greed, anything that they can spot after prodding and probing in an effort to figure out where your weak spots lie.

And they do, believe me, they do figure it out, and they use this knowledge to devastating effect. The best one can do is to keep a cool head and place as much distance as you still can between yourself and this person. For some, though, it might be too late by the time they realize what they¡¯re dealing with.

Joyce Carol Oates' depiction of the situation and the personalities involved, is so spot-on, that the effect is chillingly realistic. Absolutely frightening in it's psychological accuracy.

[spoilers removed]
]]> For Esm¨¦¡ªwith Love & Squalor 52266607 26 J.D. Salinger Traveller 4 short-fiction
The reason for my remark about the potential damage that the knowledge of psychology that was available and prevalent at the time, could do, relates to the part of the story that deals with a man who [spoilers removed]

It took a long time for PTSD to be recognized as something that most people sustain from experiencing trauma - people who sustained it in the past tended to be ridiculed as being "sissies" or cowards, and of course, labeling these people as such just made matters worse for them, and made it harder for them to recover from the trauma.

[spoilers removed]
]]> 4.13 1953 For Esm¨¦¡ªwith Love & Squalor
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: short-fiction
review:
The story gives a glimpse into how savagely "off the mark" much of psychology was in the first half of the twentieth century, not that it is a precise science now - the attempted delineation and categorization of a thing as subtle, varied and complex as the human psyche is doomed to fail at least a bit, in the end.

The reason for my remark about the potential damage that the knowledge of psychology that was available and prevalent at the time, could do, relates to the part of the story that deals with a man who [spoilers removed]

It took a long time for PTSD to be recognized as something that most people sustain from experiencing trauma - people who sustained it in the past tended to be ridiculed as being "sissies" or cowards, and of course, labeling these people as such just made matters worse for them, and made it harder for them to recover from the trauma.

[spoilers removed]

]]> Rain 18794066
Harrowing and triumphant, ¡°Rain¡± is indispensable reading, a foundational work for the tradition of short story writing, and one of W. Somerset Maugham¡¯s greatest tales.]]> 62 W. Somerset Maugham 1482554283 Traveller 5 short-fiction
This is the best of his short stories that I have read so far. Unmarred by the complicated niggles of many of his other 'travel' stories, this story has a purity of form that simply elevates it to a classic.]]> 4.06 1921 Rain
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1921
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: short-fiction
review:
To give credit where its due, W. Somerset Maugham is exceedingly good at exposing human foibles and hypocrisy. Here it is the ugliness of misplaced and excessive missionary zeal and the leanings toward cruelty and violence that often accompanies forms of fanaticism, that come under fire.

This is the best of his short stories that I have read so far. Unmarred by the complicated niggles of many of his other 'travel' stories, this story has a purity of form that simply elevates it to a classic.
]]> The Casuarina Tree 887838 320 W. Somerset Maugham 0749306890 Traveller 2
I was, for example, not sure what Maugham was referring to when he kept calling the peoples native of the thinly-disguised Malaysian countries that the stories are set in (why give the countries or states different names ¨C so that it would be less obvious how little Maugham knew about them?) "boy" and "boys", but it sounded like he was referring to servants, of which at least two or three of them must for various reasons have been adults, and the head of these servants, Maugham refers to as "the head boy". Therefore, one can only come to the conclusion that Maugham is not referring to literal children, but that this must surely be an instance of infantilising those whom you seek to subjugate.

The author was obviously set against interracial relationships, and especially against interracial sexual relations, with his reason being the institutional racism of the British, (and this he sometimes describes to the finest details in the most nauseating terms). Besides this, his characters are always bemoaning the lack of company of "other white men", and never do any of the colonial administrators who are the objects of his stories, mix with any of Malaysia's varied ethnicities, it would seem because they're all "boys" and "n***ers" after all. How could such be of any value other than that of a servant?

...but my beef goes deeper than that. The collection is ostensibly about Malaysia, but actually, beyond mentioning that it is lovely, green and sunny, there is extremely little about Malaysia in it. A word or two is said about the geography and weather, but no deeper descriptions, of, for example, the fauna and flora, or anything really about the country, its industry, its culture, its religious practices, its population, or anything that might set any aspect of it apart. It could have been set anywhere; -could have been a British colony on an alien planet, and in fact, the first story actually takes place in England.

Whatever is told about the indigenous peoples and their customs are skin deep and could have been gleaned by anybody visiting the place for a day or two. Where Maugham does refer to a case of a shamanistic "hex" he confuses the Malaysian shamanistic tradition with "voodoo", (he calls it voodoo), the latter which derived from West-Africa and which lives on as "Santeria" in the American South and in the Caribbean, and not, as far as I can tell, in Southeast Asia, though I do stand to be corrected on that.

...but hey, the colonies are the colonies, who cares where they are, Africa, Asia, they're all the same, and all of them "n***ers", as one of the characters in these stories put it.

Pretty much all the stories deal with the ups and downs (mostly downs, literally to the point of insanity and murder) of British Colonials, and their little foibles and snobbishnesses. The fact that these were portrayed rather entertainingly, is what brought my star rating up from a 1 to a 2.

I'd read a lot of Maugham's works when I was very young, and at the time I was impressed enough with them to have counted myself as a Somerset Maugham fan.

However, after having read this collection, I suddenly became very unsure of my opinion of Maugham. I count quite a few oriental people as my friends, and I have visited the Far East, and for me this collection of stories appeared grey and featureless as well as being purely centred on the British presence, complete with the typical colonial outlook that had made Britain so unpopular in its colonies.

I literally felt as if I was watching a 1920's black and white movie in my mind's eye, which contrasts so greatly with my own experiences of the Far East, that I feel I need to do a complete revision of my opinion of Maugham. I have no qualms with the fact that he is an entertaining writer- that he certainly is; but he seems to me in this collection of stories quite solipsistic in his Britishness.

I shall be re-reading many of the books he wrote that are not set in "The West", to see what I think of them now, as my present day self!]]> 4.10 1926 The Casuarina Tree
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1926
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/26
shelves: short-fiction, britain, empire
review:
I almost gave this collection a 1 star because of the casual as well as intentional racism. The stories are written in the third person, which might divest the author of responsibility for the character's attitudes, but then if the narrator uses racist language, one knows this belongs to the author and not to a character.

I was, for example, not sure what Maugham was referring to when he kept calling the peoples native of the thinly-disguised Malaysian countries that the stories are set in (why give the countries or states different names ¨C so that it would be less obvious how little Maugham knew about them?) "boy" and "boys", but it sounded like he was referring to servants, of which at least two or three of them must for various reasons have been adults, and the head of these servants, Maugham refers to as "the head boy". Therefore, one can only come to the conclusion that Maugham is not referring to literal children, but that this must surely be an instance of infantilising those whom you seek to subjugate.

The author was obviously set against interracial relationships, and especially against interracial sexual relations, with his reason being the institutional racism of the British, (and this he sometimes describes to the finest details in the most nauseating terms). Besides this, his characters are always bemoaning the lack of company of "other white men", and never do any of the colonial administrators who are the objects of his stories, mix with any of Malaysia's varied ethnicities, it would seem because they're all "boys" and "n***ers" after all. How could such be of any value other than that of a servant?

...but my beef goes deeper than that. The collection is ostensibly about Malaysia, but actually, beyond mentioning that it is lovely, green and sunny, there is extremely little about Malaysia in it. A word or two is said about the geography and weather, but no deeper descriptions, of, for example, the fauna and flora, or anything really about the country, its industry, its culture, its religious practices, its population, or anything that might set any aspect of it apart. It could have been set anywhere; -could have been a British colony on an alien planet, and in fact, the first story actually takes place in England.

Whatever is told about the indigenous peoples and their customs are skin deep and could have been gleaned by anybody visiting the place for a day or two. Where Maugham does refer to a case of a shamanistic "hex" he confuses the Malaysian shamanistic tradition with "voodoo", (he calls it voodoo), the latter which derived from West-Africa and which lives on as "Santeria" in the American South and in the Caribbean, and not, as far as I can tell, in Southeast Asia, though I do stand to be corrected on that.

...but hey, the colonies are the colonies, who cares where they are, Africa, Asia, they're all the same, and all of them "n***ers", as one of the characters in these stories put it.

Pretty much all the stories deal with the ups and downs (mostly downs, literally to the point of insanity and murder) of British Colonials, and their little foibles and snobbishnesses. The fact that these were portrayed rather entertainingly, is what brought my star rating up from a 1 to a 2.

I'd read a lot of Maugham's works when I was very young, and at the time I was impressed enough with them to have counted myself as a Somerset Maugham fan.

However, after having read this collection, I suddenly became very unsure of my opinion of Maugham. I count quite a few oriental people as my friends, and I have visited the Far East, and for me this collection of stories appeared grey and featureless as well as being purely centred on the British presence, complete with the typical colonial outlook that had made Britain so unpopular in its colonies.

I literally felt as if I was watching a 1920's black and white movie in my mind's eye, which contrasts so greatly with my own experiences of the Far East, that I feel I need to do a complete revision of my opinion of Maugham. I have no qualms with the fact that he is an entertaining writer- that he certainly is; but he seems to me in this collection of stories quite solipsistic in his Britishness.

I shall be re-reading many of the books he wrote that are not set in "The West", to see what I think of them now, as my present day self!
]]> The Wandering Earth 56179352


These 11 stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.]]> 464 Liu Cixin 1250796830 Traveller 0 to-read, sf, short-fiction 4.07 2000 The Wandering Earth
author: Liu Cixin
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: to-read, sf, short-fiction
review:

]]> The Rocking-Horse Winner 591189 22 D.H. Lawrence 1860920071 Traveller 4 short-fiction 3.84 1926 The Rocking-Horse Winner
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1926
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> The Monkey's Paw 8779896 The Monkey¡¯s Paw is a classic horror tale that gives new meaning to the phrase ¡°be careful what you wish for.¡±

One of W.W. Jacob's most memorable works, The Monkey¡¯s Paw has become a classic horror story and has been adapted numerous times, including into episodes of such popular television series as The X-Files, The Twilight Zone, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and Tales from the Crypt.]]> 32 W.W. Jacobs 1583419195 Traveller 3
Number 8 in the "most disturbing short story ever written" series.

Well written short story that delivers on the premise suggested in its opening paragraphs: beware the lure of the monkey's paw, unless you have your wishes very, very well formulated!

The story is a variation on the "genie in a bottle who will grant you three wishes" trope, and if the story falls a little short of 4 or 5 stars, it's in the commonness of the basis that the story was built on, which unfortunately makes it slightly predictable. The first iteration of this story that I know of, is not the djinn, but of King Midas who wished for all he touched to turn to gold.

On the other hand, this particular story is well written, well-paced and atmospheric. Not bad at all for the time it was written (1902).

This might be a slight cop-out, but GR friend Cecily basically took the words out of my mouth and added to them, and since I simply cannot improve on what she said, I defer to her excellent review: /review/show...

For some amusing side remarks about stuffed or shriveled animal body-parts, I also refer to my friend Shovelmonkey's review: /review/show...]]> 3.83 1902 The Monkey's Paw
author: W.W. Jacobs
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1902
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/25
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: dark, short-fiction, three-and-a-half-stars
review:
Disturbometer: Hard to say..... it's blurry, I can't read it...

Number 8 in the "most disturbing short story ever written" series.

Well written short story that delivers on the premise suggested in its opening paragraphs: beware the lure of the monkey's paw, unless you have your wishes very, very well formulated!

The story is a variation on the "genie in a bottle who will grant you three wishes" trope, and if the story falls a little short of 4 or 5 stars, it's in the commonness of the basis that the story was built on, which unfortunately makes it slightly predictable. The first iteration of this story that I know of, is not the djinn, but of King Midas who wished for all he touched to turn to gold.

On the other hand, this particular story is well written, well-paced and atmospheric. Not bad at all for the time it was written (1902).

This might be a slight cop-out, but GR friend Cecily basically took the words out of my mouth and added to them, and since I simply cannot improve on what she said, I defer to her excellent review: /review/show...

For some amusing side remarks about stuffed or shriveled animal body-parts, I also refer to my friend Shovelmonkey's review: /review/show...
]]> The Queen of Spades 279614 52 Alexander Pushkin 1557424373 Traveller 3 short-fiction, russia 3.97 1834 The Queen of Spades
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1834
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves: short-fiction, russia
review:

]]> Of a Promise Kept 210258126 Lafcadio Hearn Traveller 3 short-fiction, japan 3.44 Of a Promise Kept
author: Lafcadio Hearn
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.44
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves: short-fiction, japan
review:

]]> Rashomon and Other Stories 8182462 132 Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa Traveller 4
Something that I definitely did notice, is that quite a bit of the original seems to be lost in translation, which might be partly the fault of the translator, but almost definitely also due to the fact that English and Japanese are two languages that seem to be difficult to translate mutually.

From all accounts that I've heard, it seems that there are some words and expressions that are almost untranslatable from the English to the Japanese, and I daresay vice versa too.

In any case, I do know of cases where certain single words in Japanese have no equivalent in English, and have to be "explained" via entire paragraphs or sentences. That doesn't really lend itself to elegance in the translated work. :(]]> 3.95 1915 Rashomon and Other Stories
author: Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2012/04/02
date added: 2023/06/20
shelves: asia, short-fiction, four-and-a-half-stars, 1001-books, favorites, japan
review:
I think I somehow missed the point of the Yam gruel story. I found the Rashomon story rather cruel and unsympathetic. I think I'll reserve judgment until after we've discussed these in our Brain Pain group.

Something that I definitely did notice, is that quite a bit of the original seems to be lost in translation, which might be partly the fault of the translator, but almost definitely also due to the fact that English and Japanese are two languages that seem to be difficult to translate mutually.

From all accounts that I've heard, it seems that there are some words and expressions that are almost untranslatable from the English to the Japanese, and I daresay vice versa too.

In any case, I do know of cases where certain single words in Japanese have no equivalent in English, and have to be "explained" via entire paragraphs or sentences. That doesn't really lend itself to elegance in the translated work. :(
]]> The Yellow Wallpaper 8217236
In a private journal, the woman records her growing obsession with the ¡°horrid¡± wallpaper. Its strange pattern mutates in the moonlight, revealing what appears to be a human figure in the design. With nothing else to occupy her mind, the woman resolves to unlock the mystery of the wallpaper. Her quest, however, leads not to the truth, but into the darkest depths of madness.

A condemnation of the patriarchy, The Yellow Wallpaper explores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.

First published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

Excerpt:
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.]]> 63 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Traveller 5 One of the entries in my "Most disturbing stories" list.

Since this is already a well-known story that most of my friends have read, I¡¯m not going to worry about spoilers and this will be more a discussion than a ¡°review¡±.

¡®The Yellow Wallpaper¡¯ as a story is certainly disturbing in its own right, but is even more disturbing when viewed within its frame of the ignorance of mental health concerns extant in the late Victorian era. This ignorance, coupled with the systemic subjugation of women (especially the notion that women were too weak to handle any kind of intellectual stimuli or effort) exacerbated the woman in the story¡¯s descent into madness. Tracing the progress of the gradual disintegration of a human mind over time is by itself extremely uncomfortable, but the reasons behind the protagonist¡¯s ¡°madness¡± and her society¡¯s views on mental health adds an additional layer of concern.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman used to be a well-known name in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She was a prominent sociologist and feminist, who had published works on sociology, economics and other subjects ¨C her most famous non-fiction work being Women and Economics. She also wrote the famous ¡°The Herland Trilogy: Moving the Mountain, Herland, with Her in Ourland¡± trilogy of novels in which she argues for a more equal role for women in work and society in general.

But Gilman was a deeply flawed person. Criticized for her racism and her seeming rejection of the maternal role in society, Gilman also suffered from mental illness, possibly something as innocuous as peripartum depression, but at the time (1892), any woman who didn¡¯t conform to societal norms, was diagnosed as having ¡°hysteria¡± or ¡°neurasthenia¡±. (Note that ¡®hysteria¡¯ was a condition reserved exclusively for women. No man was ever pronounced as ¡®hysterical¡¯ ¨C just think of the word, and you immediately assume its origin to be female. )

Gilman had had a particularly difficult childhood. Her father abandoned the family shortly after her birth, an event which severely scarred both herself and her mother. Her mother never stopped longing for her departed husband, and subconsciously punished Charlotte by making a decision never to show her any love or affection, on the surface with the excuse of not wanting her to get used to love, since in the mother¡¯s eyes, love and affection was a thing to be lost later in life, and it was apparently better not to ¡°spoil¡± a child into expecting love or affection in life. Due to a dependency on extended family members, the little family consisting of Gilman, her mother and her brother, lived in poverty and moved often, thereby adding the deprivation of comfort and security to the lack of affection that Gilman already suffered.

The mother¡¯s attempted prophylaxis against ¡°wanting love¡± had not worked on Charlotte, though. Instead it left her even more needy for love, but so scarred that she couldn¡¯t adjust to the idea of having a normal loving family, which was in her worldview as a young woman, the only ¡®ticket¡¯ for love. Love and affection was not attainable if you did not marry and have children, and Charlotte badly needed affection, so she did marry and fell pregnant.

But once Charlotte's daughter Katherine was born, it created severe cognitive dissonance, because wasn¡¯t this the exact-same situation that Charlotte¡¯s mother had gotten herself into ¨C a situation which had destroyed not only the mother¡¯s life, but the life of Charlotte, her child, as well?
Once Charlotte¡¯s mother had given birth to her, their lives fell apart, and due to her mother¡¯s continued love for her father, the father was not seen as the villain in the story, but was doing what (from Charlotte's skewed viewpoint), fathers do when mothers have babies. They leave, and everything falls apart. Pretty confusing for poor Charlotte as a child, and a source of suppressed anxiety and confusion for the now adult Charlotte, triggering anxiety and depression to an unbearable degree.

Eventually Charlotte, just like her father had done with his family, left her first husband, and left her daughter, Katherine, in the care of one of her friends who was later to become her first husband's wife. Yes, I know that's a bit confusing. Basically it was one big mess. Bottom line was that motherhood really didn't agree with Charlotte.

Be that as it may, it¡¯s very likely that Charlotte clinically suffered from peripartum depression after the birth of her daughter Katherine. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about one in seven women experience peripartum depression, which is a condition far worse than just the ¡°baby blues.¡± Baby blues may include crying for no reason, irritability, restlessness, and anxiety, which resolves by itself after a week or two.

Peripartum depression can last for months, and can include symptoms such as: feeling sad or having a depressed mood; loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed; changes in appetite; trouble sleeping or sleeping too much; loss of energy or increased fatigue, increase in purposeless physical activity (e.g., pacing, handwringing) or slowed movements or speech; feeling worthless or guilty; difficulty thinking, concentrating, or making decisions; thoughts of death or suicide; crying for ¡°no reason¡±; lack of interest in the baby, not feeling bonded to the baby, or feeling very anxious about/around the baby; feelings of being a bad mother; fear of harming the baby or oneself, as well as suffering from anxiety.

The real Charlotte, the author, experienced most of these symptoms after having her baby, but was diagnosed as having ¡°neurasthenia¡±. I must say, that before reading any background at all on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, purely while reading the Yellow Wallpaper story, I was already reminded of Virginia Woolf; I had read before how Virginia was treated for her depression and anxiety (also called hysteria and neurasthenia, as in Gilman¡¯s case) with ¡°the rest cure¡±, which seemed awfully similar to what the protagonist in the story was being subjected to by her physician husband.

A note here on the effects of solitary confinement ¨C which is basically what is being done to the protagonist: Over time, the stress of being isolated can cause a range of mental health problems. According to Dr. Sharon Shalev, who authored A Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement in 2008, these problems may include: anxiety and stress, depression and hopelessness, anger, irritability, and hostility. panic attacks, worsened preexisting mental health issues, hypersensitivity to sounds and smells, problems with attention, concentration, and memory, hallucinations that affect all of the senses (like seeing moving and creeping things in wallpaper, when it is the only thing you have to look at, maybe?), paranoia, poor impulse control, social withdrawal, outbursts of violence, psychosis, fear of death, self-harm or suicide. Research indicates that both living alone and feelings of loneliness are strongly associated with suicide attempts and suicidal ideation.

Most studies focus on the psychological effects of solitary confinement. However, psychological trauma and loneliness can also lead to physical health problems. Studies indicate that social isolation increases the likelihood of death by 26¨C32%. According to Dr. Shalev¡¯s book, the recorded physical health effects of solitary confinement include: chronic headaches, eyesight deterioration, digestive problems, dizziness, excessive sweating, fatigue and lethargy, genitourinary problems, heart palpitations, hypersensitivity to light and noise, loss of appetite, muscle and joint pain, sleep problems, trembling hands, weight loss. A lack of physical activity may also make it difficult to manage or prevent certain health conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Not only does the husband subject the woman in the story to restrictions which would harm even a healthy person¡¯s mental health, look at how he treats her mentally and emotionally: Firstly, he speaks to her in a highly patronizing manner - he infantilizes her by speaking to her exactly as if she were a three year old child:

¡°¡­when I came back John was awake. ¡°What is it, little girl?¡± he said. ¡°Don¡¯t go walking about like that ¡ª you¡¯ll get cold.¡±
...and a bit further on: ¡° ¡°Bless her little heart!¡± said he with a big hug, ¡°she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let¡¯s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!¡±
¡­and further on:
¡° ¡°Really dear you are better!¡±
¡°Better in body perhaps¡ª¡± I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.
¡°My darling,¡± said he, ¡°I beg of you, for my sake and for our child¡¯s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?¡±
So of course I said no more on that score, and he went to sleep before long.

Notice also, that the narrator was forcibly placed in a children's nursery with bars on the windows - the husband insisted - just another symbol of how she is forced into a 'child-role'.
Not only does John address his wife, the protagonist, with infantilizing epithets, but whenever she tells him anything, he always contradicts it. When she says she is feeling worse, he contradicts with the assurance that she is getting better. When she says she needs company or stimulation, he assures her that it would be bad for her.

Gilman herself said that she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as an admonishment to the neurologist Dr Silas Weir Mitchell who had recommended the ¡°rest cure¡± and who had:
¡°¡­sent me home with solemn advice to ¡°live as domestic a life as far as possible,¡± to ¡°have but two hours¡¯ intellectual life a day,¡± and ¡°never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again¡± as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist¡¯s advice to the winds and went to work again ¡ª work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite ¡ª ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad¡­¡±

Gilman appears to have been very ¡°service¡±-oriented, and her intention of helping fellow suppressed and repressed women is hinted at in the story in an interesting way: Toward the end of the story, the protagonist starts to have visual hallucinations, and believes that she sees ¡°a woman¡± trapped behind the bars of the wallpaper¡¯s pattern. It¡¯s not hard to deduce that she is seeing herself there, trapped as she is in a room with barred windows. But then, later on, it really becomes disconcerting, but what excellent metaphor the author employs:

¡°The front pattern DOES move ¡ª and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern ¡ª it strangles so; (the strictures of society) I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!¡±

It seems clear to me that at some point an aspect of the wallpaper pattern symbolizes all the restrictions placed upon the woman's freedom and activities. It represents the bars of a metaphorical prison cell, which is of course, why the woman in the story is so keen to pull the wallpaper off. And so Gilman herself pulled and pulled away at those strictures in society to help free the other women also stuck behind the imprisoning pattern of the wallpaper.

After reading up about Charlotte Gilman¡¯s ¡°rest cure¡± I scrounged around in my old Virginia Woolf notes, and found that ¡°the rest cure¡± seemed to have become worse by the time poor Virginia was a recipient of it - and lo and behold, Charlotte's doctor is actually mentioned by name. I quote from a biography of Woolf Virginia Woolf by Hermoine Lee:

Woolf¡¯s doctor (appropriately named ¡®Savage¡¯, ]]> 4.05 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/28
date added: 2023/04/18
shelves: dark, short-fiction, favorites
review:
Disturbometer: 8 out of 10.
One of the entries in my "Most disturbing stories" list.

Since this is already a well-known story that most of my friends have read, I¡¯m not going to worry about spoilers and this will be more a discussion than a ¡°review¡±.

¡®The Yellow Wallpaper¡¯ as a story is certainly disturbing in its own right, but is even more disturbing when viewed within its frame of the ignorance of mental health concerns extant in the late Victorian era. This ignorance, coupled with the systemic subjugation of women (especially the notion that women were too weak to handle any kind of intellectual stimuli or effort) exacerbated the woman in the story¡¯s descent into madness. Tracing the progress of the gradual disintegration of a human mind over time is by itself extremely uncomfortable, but the reasons behind the protagonist¡¯s ¡°madness¡± and her society¡¯s views on mental health adds an additional layer of concern.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman used to be a well-known name in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She was a prominent sociologist and feminist, who had published works on sociology, economics and other subjects ¨C her most famous non-fiction work being Women and Economics. She also wrote the famous ¡°The Herland Trilogy: Moving the Mountain, Herland, with Her in Ourland¡± trilogy of novels in which she argues for a more equal role for women in work and society in general.

But Gilman was a deeply flawed person. Criticized for her racism and her seeming rejection of the maternal role in society, Gilman also suffered from mental illness, possibly something as innocuous as peripartum depression, but at the time (1892), any woman who didn¡¯t conform to societal norms, was diagnosed as having ¡°hysteria¡± or ¡°neurasthenia¡±. (Note that ¡®hysteria¡¯ was a condition reserved exclusively for women. No man was ever pronounced as ¡®hysterical¡¯ ¨C just think of the word, and you immediately assume its origin to be female. )

Gilman had had a particularly difficult childhood. Her father abandoned the family shortly after her birth, an event which severely scarred both herself and her mother. Her mother never stopped longing for her departed husband, and subconsciously punished Charlotte by making a decision never to show her any love or affection, on the surface with the excuse of not wanting her to get used to love, since in the mother¡¯s eyes, love and affection was a thing to be lost later in life, and it was apparently better not to ¡°spoil¡± a child into expecting love or affection in life. Due to a dependency on extended family members, the little family consisting of Gilman, her mother and her brother, lived in poverty and moved often, thereby adding the deprivation of comfort and security to the lack of affection that Gilman already suffered.

The mother¡¯s attempted prophylaxis against ¡°wanting love¡± had not worked on Charlotte, though. Instead it left her even more needy for love, but so scarred that she couldn¡¯t adjust to the idea of having a normal loving family, which was in her worldview as a young woman, the only ¡®ticket¡¯ for love. Love and affection was not attainable if you did not marry and have children, and Charlotte badly needed affection, so she did marry and fell pregnant.

But once Charlotte's daughter Katherine was born, it created severe cognitive dissonance, because wasn¡¯t this the exact-same situation that Charlotte¡¯s mother had gotten herself into ¨C a situation which had destroyed not only the mother¡¯s life, but the life of Charlotte, her child, as well?
Once Charlotte¡¯s mother had given birth to her, their lives fell apart, and due to her mother¡¯s continued love for her father, the father was not seen as the villain in the story, but was doing what (from Charlotte's skewed viewpoint), fathers do when mothers have babies. They leave, and everything falls apart. Pretty confusing for poor Charlotte as a child, and a source of suppressed anxiety and confusion for the now adult Charlotte, triggering anxiety and depression to an unbearable degree.

Eventually Charlotte, just like her father had done with his family, left her first husband, and left her daughter, Katherine, in the care of one of her friends who was later to become her first husband's wife. Yes, I know that's a bit confusing. Basically it was one big mess. Bottom line was that motherhood really didn't agree with Charlotte.

Be that as it may, it¡¯s very likely that Charlotte clinically suffered from peripartum depression after the birth of her daughter Katherine. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about one in seven women experience peripartum depression, which is a condition far worse than just the ¡°baby blues.¡± Baby blues may include crying for no reason, irritability, restlessness, and anxiety, which resolves by itself after a week or two.

Peripartum depression can last for months, and can include symptoms such as: feeling sad or having a depressed mood; loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed; changes in appetite; trouble sleeping or sleeping too much; loss of energy or increased fatigue, increase in purposeless physical activity (e.g., pacing, handwringing) or slowed movements or speech; feeling worthless or guilty; difficulty thinking, concentrating, or making decisions; thoughts of death or suicide; crying for ¡°no reason¡±; lack of interest in the baby, not feeling bonded to the baby, or feeling very anxious about/around the baby; feelings of being a bad mother; fear of harming the baby or oneself, as well as suffering from anxiety.

The real Charlotte, the author, experienced most of these symptoms after having her baby, but was diagnosed as having ¡°neurasthenia¡±. I must say, that before reading any background at all on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, purely while reading the Yellow Wallpaper story, I was already reminded of Virginia Woolf; I had read before how Virginia was treated for her depression and anxiety (also called hysteria and neurasthenia, as in Gilman¡¯s case) with ¡°the rest cure¡±, which seemed awfully similar to what the protagonist in the story was being subjected to by her physician husband.

A note here on the effects of solitary confinement ¨C which is basically what is being done to the protagonist: Over time, the stress of being isolated can cause a range of mental health problems. According to Dr. Sharon Shalev, who authored A Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement in 2008, these problems may include: anxiety and stress, depression and hopelessness, anger, irritability, and hostility. panic attacks, worsened preexisting mental health issues, hypersensitivity to sounds and smells, problems with attention, concentration, and memory, hallucinations that affect all of the senses (like seeing moving and creeping things in wallpaper, when it is the only thing you have to look at, maybe?), paranoia, poor impulse control, social withdrawal, outbursts of violence, psychosis, fear of death, self-harm or suicide. Research indicates that both living alone and feelings of loneliness are strongly associated with suicide attempts and suicidal ideation.

Most studies focus on the psychological effects of solitary confinement. However, psychological trauma and loneliness can also lead to physical health problems. Studies indicate that social isolation increases the likelihood of death by 26¨C32%. According to Dr. Shalev¡¯s book, the recorded physical health effects of solitary confinement include: chronic headaches, eyesight deterioration, digestive problems, dizziness, excessive sweating, fatigue and lethargy, genitourinary problems, heart palpitations, hypersensitivity to light and noise, loss of appetite, muscle and joint pain, sleep problems, trembling hands, weight loss. A lack of physical activity may also make it difficult to manage or prevent certain health conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Not only does the husband subject the woman in the story to restrictions which would harm even a healthy person¡¯s mental health, look at how he treats her mentally and emotionally: Firstly, he speaks to her in a highly patronizing manner - he infantilizes her by speaking to her exactly as if she were a three year old child:

¡°¡­when I came back John was awake. ¡°What is it, little girl?¡± he said. ¡°Don¡¯t go walking about like that ¡ª you¡¯ll get cold.¡±
...and a bit further on: ¡° ¡°Bless her little heart!¡± said he with a big hug, ¡°she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let¡¯s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!¡±
¡­and further on:
¡° ¡°Really dear you are better!¡±
¡°Better in body perhaps¡ª¡± I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.
¡°My darling,¡± said he, ¡°I beg of you, for my sake and for our child¡¯s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?¡±
So of course I said no more on that score, and he went to sleep before long.

Notice also, that the narrator was forcibly placed in a children's nursery with bars on the windows - the husband insisted - just another symbol of how she is forced into a 'child-role'.
Not only does John address his wife, the protagonist, with infantilizing epithets, but whenever she tells him anything, he always contradicts it. When she says she is feeling worse, he contradicts with the assurance that she is getting better. When she says she needs company or stimulation, he assures her that it would be bad for her.

Gilman herself said that she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as an admonishment to the neurologist Dr Silas Weir Mitchell who had recommended the ¡°rest cure¡± and who had:
¡°¡­sent me home with solemn advice to ¡°live as domestic a life as far as possible,¡± to ¡°have but two hours¡¯ intellectual life a day,¡± and ¡°never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again¡± as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist¡¯s advice to the winds and went to work again ¡ª work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite ¡ª ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad¡­¡±

Gilman appears to have been very ¡°service¡±-oriented, and her intention of helping fellow suppressed and repressed women is hinted at in the story in an interesting way: Toward the end of the story, the protagonist starts to have visual hallucinations, and believes that she sees ¡°a woman¡± trapped behind the bars of the wallpaper¡¯s pattern. It¡¯s not hard to deduce that she is seeing herself there, trapped as she is in a room with barred windows. But then, later on, it really becomes disconcerting, but what excellent metaphor the author employs:

¡°The front pattern DOES move ¡ª and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern ¡ª it strangles so; (the strictures of society) I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!¡±

It seems clear to me that at some point an aspect of the wallpaper pattern symbolizes all the restrictions placed upon the woman's freedom and activities. It represents the bars of a metaphorical prison cell, which is of course, why the woman in the story is so keen to pull the wallpaper off. And so Gilman herself pulled and pulled away at those strictures in society to help free the other women also stuck behind the imprisoning pattern of the wallpaper.

After reading up about Charlotte Gilman¡¯s ¡°rest cure¡± I scrounged around in my old Virginia Woolf notes, and found that ¡°the rest cure¡± seemed to have become worse by the time poor Virginia was a recipient of it - and lo and behold, Charlotte's doctor is actually mentioned by name. I quote from a biography of Woolf Virginia Woolf by Hermoine Lee:

Woolf¡¯s doctor (appropriately named ¡®Savage¡¯,
]]> ³¢¡¯±á?³Ù±ð 768019 Albert Camus 319000224X Traveller 5 3.53 1957 ³¢¡¯±á?³Ù±ð
author: Albert Camus
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/04/15
shelves: africa, ethics, fran?ais, existentialism, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth (The Unreal and the Real, #1)]]> 13591878 The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories¡ªas selected by the National Book Award winning author herself¡ªthe reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day.

Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.

Companion volume Outer Space, Inner Lands includes Le Guin's best known nonrealistic stories. Both volumes include new introductions by the author.

This volume includes the stories:

Brothers and Sisters (1976, Orsinia)
A Week in the Country (1976, 2004, Orsinia)
Unlocking the Air (1990, Orsinia)
Imaginary Countries (1973, Orsinia)
The Diary of the Rose (1976)
The Direction of the Road (1974, 2002)
The White Donkey (1980)
Gwilan¡¯s Harp (1977, 2005)
May¡¯s Lion (1983)
Buffalo Gals, Won¡¯t You Come Out Tonight (1987)
Horse Camp (1986)
The Water is Wide (1976, 2004)
The Lost Children (1996)
Texts (1990, Klatsand)
Sleepwalkers (1991, Klatsand)
Hand, Cup, Shell (1989, Klatsand)
Ether, Or (1995)
Half Past Four (1987)]]> 320 Ursula K. Le Guin 1618730347 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.79 2012 The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth (The Unreal and the Real, #1)
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/14
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> Art of the Short Story, The 78223

Part I. Introduction. The art of the short story.-- Part II. Stories [A-J]. Chinua Dead men's path ; Author's perspective, modern Africa as the crossroads of culture -- Sherwood Hands ; Author's perspective, Words not plot give form to a short story -- Margaret Happy endings ; Author's perspective, On the Canadian identity -- James Sonny's blues ; Author's perspective, Race and the African-American writer -- Jorge Luis The garden of forking paths ; Author's perspective, Literature as experience -- Albert The guest ; Author's perspective, Revolution and repression in Algeria -- Raymond Cathedral ; A small, good thing ; Author's perspective, Commonplace but precise language -- Willa Paul's case ; Author's perspective, Art as the process of simplification -- John The swimmer ; Author's perspective, Why I write short stories -- Anton The lady with the pet dog ; Misery ; Author's perspective, Natural description and "The center of gravity" -- Kate The storm ; The story of an hour ; Author's perspective, My writing method -- Sandra Barbie-Q ; Author's perspective, Bilingual style -- Joseph The secret sharer ; Author's perspective, The condition of art -- Stephen The open boat ; Author's perspective, The sinking of the Commodore -- Ralph A party down at the square ; Author's perspective, Race and fiction -- William Barn burning ; A rose for Emily ; Author's perspective, The human heart in conflict with itself -- F. Scott Babylon revisited ; Author's perspective, On his own literary aims -- Gustave A simple heart ; Author's perspective, The labor of style -- Gabriel Garc¨ªa A very old man with enormous wings ; Author's perspective, Garc¨ªa My beginnings as a writer -- Charlotte Perkins The yellow wallpaper ; Author's perspective, Why I wrote "The yellow wallpaper" -- Nikolai The overcoat ; Author's perspective, On realism -- Nadine A company of laughing faces ; Author's perspective, How the short story differs from the novel -- Nathaniel Young Goodman Brown ; The birthmark ; Author's perspective, On the public failure of his early stories -- Ernest A clean, well-lighted place ; Author's perspective, One true sentence -- Zora Neale Sweat ; Author's perspective, Eatonville when you look at it -- Shirley The lottery ; Author's perspective, The public reception of "The lottery" -- Henry The real thing ; Author's perspective, The mirror of a consciousness -- Ha Saboteur ; Author's perspective, Deciding to write in English -- James Joyce : Araby ; The dead ; Author's perspective, Epiphanies. Part II[ Cont.]. Stories [K-W]. Franz Before the law ; The metamorphosis ; Author's perspective, Discussing The metamorphosis -- D.H. Odour of Chrysanthemums ; The rocking-horse winner ; Author's perspective, The novel is the bright book of life -- Ursula K. Le the ones who walk away from Omelas ; Author's perspective, Le On "The ones who walk away from Omelas" -- Doris A woman on a roof ; Author's perspective, My beginnings as a writer -- Jack To build a fire ; Author's perspective, Defending the factuality of "To build a fire" -- Katherine Miss Brill ; The garden-party ; Author's perspective, On "The garden-party" -- Bobbie Ann Shiloh ; Author's perspective, Minimalist fiction -- Guy de The necklace ; Author's perspective, The realist method -- Herman Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street ; Author's perspective, American literature -- Yukio Patriotism ; Author's perspective, Physical courage and death -- Alice How I met my husband ; Author's perspective, How I write short stories -- Joyce Carol where are you going, where have you been? ; Author's perspective, Productivity and the critics -- Flannery O' A good man is hard to find ; Revelation ; Author's perspective, O' The element of suspense in "A good man is hard to find" -- Edgar Allan The fall of the House of Usher ; The Tell-tale heart ; Author's perspective, The tale and its effect -- Katherine Anne Flowering Judas ; Author's perspective, Writing "Flowering Judas" -- Leslie Marmon The man to send rain clouds ; Author's perspective, the basis of "The man to send rain clouds" -- Isaac Bashevis Gimpel the Fool ; Author's perspective, The character of Gimpel -- Leo The death of Ivan Ilych ; Author's perspective, The moral responsibility of art -- John Separating ; Author's perspective, Why write? -- Alice Everyday use ; Author's perspective, The Black woman writer in America -- Eudora Why I live at the P.O. ; Author's perspective, The plot of the short story -- Edith Roman fever ; Author's perspective, The subject of short stories -- Virginia A haunted house ; Author's perspective, Women and fiction. Part III. Writing. The elements of short fiction -- Writing about fiction -- Critical approaches to literature. Formalist Light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" / Michael Clark -- Biographical Chekhov's attitude to romantic love / Virginia Llewellyn Smith -- Historical The Argentine context of Borges's fantastic fiction / John King -- Psychological The father-figure in "The tell-tale heart" / Daniel Hoffman -- Mythological Myth in Faulkner's "Barn Burning" / Edmond Volpe -- "Sociological Money and labor in "The rocking-horse winner" / Daniel P. Watkins -- Gender Gender and pathology in "The yellow wallpaper" / Juliann Fleenor -- Reader-response An Eskimo "A Rose for Emily" / Stanley Fish -- Deconstructionist The death of the author / Roland Barthes -- Cultural What is cultural studies? / Makr Bauerlein. Part IV. Glossary of literary terms.]]> 944 Dana Gioia 0321363639 Traveller 0 4.26 2005 Art of the Short Story, The
author: Dana Gioia
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/14
shelves: currently-reading, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Imagine Africa: Volume 2 (Pirogue)]]> 22551811 256 Mia Couto 0914671189 Traveller 0 4.25 2015 Imagine Africa: Volume 2 (Pirogue)
author: Mia Couto
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/10/04
shelves: to-read, africa, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream]]> 20813135 Ich denke, also bin ich109 Jahre nach dem Ende des Dritten Weltkriegs leben nur noch f¨¹nf Menschen. Sie hausen in unterirdischen Stollen, immer am Rande des Verhungerns, und werden jede Minute ihres Lebens von einem Supercomputer gefoltert, der ein Bewusstsein erlangt hat ¨C und mit ihm unendlichen Hass auf seine Erbauer. Es gibt nur einen einzigen Ausweg f¨¹r die gequ?lten Menschen ¨C doch welcher von ihnen wird stark genug sein, ihn zu w?hlen? Die Kurzgeschichte ?Ich muss schreien und habe keinen Mund¡° erscheint als exklusives E-Book Only bei Heyne und ist zusammen mit weiteren Stories von Harlan Ellison auch in dem Sammelband ?Ich muss schreien und habe keinen Mund¡° enthalten. Sie umfasst ca. 22 Buchseiten.]]> 20 Harlan Ellison Traveller 3
One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.

This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture.

My musing on Prometheus makes me wonder if Ellison didn¡¯t perhaps take some inspiration from the story of Prometheus, and here, I am afraid, I will be adding some SPOILERS, so if you¡¯re fanatical about spoilers, read the story quickly and come back. It¡¯s really an extremely quick read, available on the internet in various places.

In any case, my ponderings about the story¡¯s similarity to the story of Prometheus, are as follows:

1. Prometheus steals some fire from the gods, and gives it to the humans, thereby giving agency and power to the humans, also allowing them to war on one another.

1. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there¡¯s a huge sidenote coming up here:

In the story, a huge computer that had been built for the purposes of war, suddenly becomes sentient, and erm, I guess, since it was programmed to destroy, it destroys the entire human race, just like that, with "killing data", but keeps five humans alive, in order to have some evil fun torturing them into eternity. Apparently this computer can keep running into eternity, and he can also keep organic life such as these five humans alive indefinitely. The narrator, one of those humans, says: ¡°And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he (the computer) had sought revenge.¡±

Wait..-what? So apparently machines are always terribly angry for having been created? That's rather strange logic. I wonder why, if a machine could be upset, why that anger would revolve around the fact of its creation? Ok, whatever, just go with it as a sort of "horror-story" premise. I guess in horror stories, machines are always rageful, evil, etc.

But in actual fact, computers have been around for many years. Abacus-like devices were used in Babylonia as far back as 2400 BC already. So, initially, ¡°computers¡± were used for counting and arithmetic tasks. No records of angry counting machines have ever been found. Fast forward a bit from purely mechanical machines, to the 20th century.

During the first half of the 20th century, increasingly sophisticated non-programmable analog computers were built, to be used used for computation to aid in commerce, record-keeping and science. Fast-forward past the first mainframe computers which used punch-tape and punch cards in the 1940¡¯s and 50¡¯s, to the more powerful machines built after the Korean war - the computers of the late fifties and early sixties, which would be the computers that the author was familiar with. Keep in mind that in those days, the idea of having your own PC was quite inconceivable.

Since the story was written circa 1967, I reckon one would need to look at the machines of the time period to get an idea of where Ellison was coming from, because his idea of what a computer is and what it can do, is obviously quite fantastical ¨C I mean, a computer can¡¯t really swallow living things as the antagonist - the huge computer named AM, does in the story - it somehow internalizes the five people that it tortures, and computers can't really, as in the story, encompass the entire world, (in the 1995 game of the same name, the environment inside the computer consists of simulations, which makes more sense technologically speaking) unless, of course, it¡¯s the internet, and perhaps Ellison¡¯s sentient computer was composed a bit similar to the way that the internet is, since he does hint at "a linkage" when he says:

¡° It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, ¡±

Now, to give you an idea of what the author is talking about ¨C he is actually not really talking about the internet ¨C when he says ¡°They sank the first shafts and began building AM¡±, he means literally a humongous, enormous mainframe. The internet as we know it, in other words, computers being linked to one another remotely, was a project started as the "ARPANET" in 1966, basically at the time that the story was being written, and the first computer linkages only started in 1969, after the story was written and had received it's 1968 Hugo award. So at the time the story was written, the internet was still only ideas on a chalk board.

To give a bit more context on how people from an age gone by viewed computers, the big thing to remember is that computers, due to IT tech still being in its infancy, were large and expensive to build. The first mainframe computer was the Harvard Mark I. Developed starting in the 1930s, the machine was not ready for use until 1943. It weighed five tons, filled an entire room and cost about $200,000 to build ¨C which is something like $3,070,500 in 2021 dollars. It weighed 5 tons! That¡¯s ginormous! And guess what, that huge thing could practically speaking do less than one operation per second, and had no memory or storage in the sense that we think of it today.

So no wonder Ellison thought that a computer of huge dimensions would have to be built in order for it to attain artificial intelligence. We have not managed to build computers yet that are sentient and that has self-consciousness in the same way that humans have it, although AI has come amazingly far. And as for the concentration of computing power, a mid - to top range smartphone today could have launched and managed the first moon landing. As for a comparison of today¡¯s supercomputers compared to the supercomputers available when Ellison wrote the story:

The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes).

On the other hand, a high-performance computer of the mid-1960s, the IBM System/360, could perform 16 million operations per second and had a memory capacity of eight megabytes.
There¡¯s almost no comparison¡­

There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.

So for me one of the big flaws of the story (vs the game), is that I can¡¯t see why the machine should have been angry and vengeful for having been built ¨C perhaps because this specific one ¨C the supercomputer in the story¡¯s name is AM ¨C perhaps AM is angry because he had been built for the purpose of war? That¡¯s almost like saying fire got angry because it was used for the purpose of war ¨C but then fire couldn¡¯t achieve sentience, and AM did. It was ¡°the gods¡± who got angry in the Prometheus story, and it was the instrument of war that got angry in AM¡¯s story.

Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn¡¯t working so well, but there ¨Cis- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn¡¯t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm?

I don¡¯t know, I¡¯m trying to make the story work on some level¡­ I mean, the internet-like feel of when the three supercomputers link up is rather prescient. But the idea that ¡°one day a computer can just wake up and have sentience¡± is not at all how machine learning works. As to the idea that computers can be taught to simulate emotions, that is possible, but WHY would you program a computer that had been built for a practical, logistical purpose to have emotions? Imagine they start selling us microwaves or cars that have emotions!¡­ anyway, best to view this story as pure fantasy rather than anything else.

There were a few things other than the internal logic of the story that bothered me a bit, which is probably partially due to the culture of the time, for example:

I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he¡¯s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he¡¯s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi? ]]> 3.73 1967 I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
author: Harlan Ellison
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/03
date added: 2022/07/26
shelves: dark, sf, short-fiction, cyberpunk
review:
Disturbometer 5 out of 10

One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.

This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture.

My musing on Prometheus makes me wonder if Ellison didn¡¯t perhaps take some inspiration from the story of Prometheus, and here, I am afraid, I will be adding some SPOILERS, so if you¡¯re fanatical about spoilers, read the story quickly and come back. It¡¯s really an extremely quick read, available on the internet in various places.

In any case, my ponderings about the story¡¯s similarity to the story of Prometheus, are as follows:

1. Prometheus steals some fire from the gods, and gives it to the humans, thereby giving agency and power to the humans, also allowing them to war on one another.

1. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there¡¯s a huge sidenote coming up here:

In the story, a huge computer that had been built for the purposes of war, suddenly becomes sentient, and erm, I guess, since it was programmed to destroy, it destroys the entire human race, just like that, with "killing data", but keeps five humans alive, in order to have some evil fun torturing them into eternity. Apparently this computer can keep running into eternity, and he can also keep organic life such as these five humans alive indefinitely. The narrator, one of those humans, says: ¡°And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he (the computer) had sought revenge.¡±

Wait..-what? So apparently machines are always terribly angry for having been created? That's rather strange logic. I wonder why, if a machine could be upset, why that anger would revolve around the fact of its creation? Ok, whatever, just go with it as a sort of "horror-story" premise. I guess in horror stories, machines are always rageful, evil, etc.

But in actual fact, computers have been around for many years. Abacus-like devices were used in Babylonia as far back as 2400 BC already. So, initially, ¡°computers¡± were used for counting and arithmetic tasks. No records of angry counting machines have ever been found. Fast forward a bit from purely mechanical machines, to the 20th century.

During the first half of the 20th century, increasingly sophisticated non-programmable analog computers were built, to be used used for computation to aid in commerce, record-keeping and science. Fast-forward past the first mainframe computers which used punch-tape and punch cards in the 1940¡¯s and 50¡¯s, to the more powerful machines built after the Korean war - the computers of the late fifties and early sixties, which would be the computers that the author was familiar with. Keep in mind that in those days, the idea of having your own PC was quite inconceivable.

Since the story was written circa 1967, I reckon one would need to look at the machines of the time period to get an idea of where Ellison was coming from, because his idea of what a computer is and what it can do, is obviously quite fantastical ¨C I mean, a computer can¡¯t really swallow living things as the antagonist - the huge computer named AM, does in the story - it somehow internalizes the five people that it tortures, and computers can't really, as in the story, encompass the entire world, (in the 1995 game of the same name, the environment inside the computer consists of simulations, which makes more sense technologically speaking) unless, of course, it¡¯s the internet, and perhaps Ellison¡¯s sentient computer was composed a bit similar to the way that the internet is, since he does hint at "a linkage" when he says:

¡° It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, ¡±

Now, to give you an idea of what the author is talking about ¨C he is actually not really talking about the internet ¨C when he says ¡°They sank the first shafts and began building AM¡±, he means literally a humongous, enormous mainframe. The internet as we know it, in other words, computers being linked to one another remotely, was a project started as the "ARPANET" in 1966, basically at the time that the story was being written, and the first computer linkages only started in 1969, after the story was written and had received it's 1968 Hugo award. So at the time the story was written, the internet was still only ideas on a chalk board.

To give a bit more context on how people from an age gone by viewed computers, the big thing to remember is that computers, due to IT tech still being in its infancy, were large and expensive to build. The first mainframe computer was the Harvard Mark I. Developed starting in the 1930s, the machine was not ready for use until 1943. It weighed five tons, filled an entire room and cost about $200,000 to build ¨C which is something like $3,070,500 in 2021 dollars. It weighed 5 tons! That¡¯s ginormous! And guess what, that huge thing could practically speaking do less than one operation per second, and had no memory or storage in the sense that we think of it today.

So no wonder Ellison thought that a computer of huge dimensions would have to be built in order for it to attain artificial intelligence. We have not managed to build computers yet that are sentient and that has self-consciousness in the same way that humans have it, although AI has come amazingly far. And as for the concentration of computing power, a mid - to top range smartphone today could have launched and managed the first moon landing. As for a comparison of today¡¯s supercomputers compared to the supercomputers available when Ellison wrote the story:

The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes).

On the other hand, a high-performance computer of the mid-1960s, the IBM System/360, could perform 16 million operations per second and had a memory capacity of eight megabytes.
There¡¯s almost no comparison¡­

There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.

So for me one of the big flaws of the story (vs the game), is that I can¡¯t see why the machine should have been angry and vengeful for having been built ¨C perhaps because this specific one ¨C the supercomputer in the story¡¯s name is AM ¨C perhaps AM is angry because he had been built for the purpose of war? That¡¯s almost like saying fire got angry because it was used for the purpose of war ¨C but then fire couldn¡¯t achieve sentience, and AM did. It was ¡°the gods¡± who got angry in the Prometheus story, and it was the instrument of war that got angry in AM¡¯s story.

Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn¡¯t working so well, but there ¨Cis- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn¡¯t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm?

I don¡¯t know, I¡¯m trying to make the story work on some level¡­ I mean, the internet-like feel of when the three supercomputers link up is rather prescient. But the idea that ¡°one day a computer can just wake up and have sentience¡± is not at all how machine learning works. As to the idea that computers can be taught to simulate emotions, that is possible, but WHY would you program a computer that had been built for a practical, logistical purpose to have emotions? Imagine they start selling us microwaves or cars that have emotions!¡­ anyway, best to view this story as pure fantasy rather than anything else.

There were a few things other than the internal logic of the story that bothered me a bit, which is probably partially due to the culture of the time, for example:

I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he¡¯s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he¡¯s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi?
]]> Dark Tales 30303793 For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson's scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh

After the publication of her short story "The Lottery" in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the "The Possibility of Evil" and "The Summer People." In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There's something sinister in suburbia.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 195 Shirley Jackson 0241295424 Traveller 5
To give anything away about the story itself, would be a crime, as it is up to the reader to spot the subtle clues of things that "don't quite fit" strewn throughout. There's a lot of play with illusions of all kinds, as well as with the identities of the characters and even of the house itself.

Don't expect a "satisfying" resolution at the end if you like your stories pat and clear. It's as if the entire story is a kind of illusory chimera just just dancing at the edge of being grasped - like a language that you almost understand, a haunting melody that you can almost recognize, but not quite, never fully.

It is definitely a story I'd read again, (and perhaps again) to see if I can unravel anything more about it's mystifying puzzles - but in the end, a bit of mystery left unsolved can also be very satisfying in it's own right.]]> 4.00 2016 Dark Tales
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/23
date added: 2022/04/27
shelves: short-fiction, favorites, what-the
review:
This is a superbly crafted short story which has definitely raised Jackson's ability to create artful short fiction in my esteem. Reads as labyrinthine and playfully mystifying as anything by Borges, but more richly visual. At first glance it is light and beautiful, but also strange and puzzling, with darker tones forming and intruding more and more towards the end.

To give anything away about the story itself, would be a crime, as it is up to the reader to spot the subtle clues of things that "don't quite fit" strewn throughout. There's a lot of play with illusions of all kinds, as well as with the identities of the characters and even of the house itself.

Don't expect a "satisfying" resolution at the end if you like your stories pat and clear. It's as if the entire story is a kind of illusory chimera just just dancing at the edge of being grasped - like a language that you almost understand, a haunting melody that you can almost recognize, but not quite, never fully.

It is definitely a story I'd read again, (and perhaps again) to see if I can unravel anything more about it's mystifying puzzles - but in the end, a bit of mystery left unsolved can also be very satisfying in it's own right.
]]> <![CDATA[So phare away et autres nouvelles]]> 29825295
Trois nouvelles au souffle exceptionnel pour d¨¦couvrir un grand ¨¦crivain contemporain, autre de "La Horde du Contervent".]]> 102 Alain Damasio 2070462218 Traveller 0 3.66 So phare away et autres nouvelles
author: Alain Damasio
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.66
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/23
shelves: to-read, fran?ais, fantasy, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Murders in the Rue Morgue (C. Auguste Dupin, #1)]]> 3301759
Poe's amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin, takes an interest in the murder in Paris of two women. It was terribly brutal but difficult to categorize; there appeared to be no robbery or sexual assault, no obvious reason for the crimes. The newspapers carried sensational headlines. Dupin gets involved because the man arrested for the crimes, Monsieur Le Bon, had previously done him a favour. It becomes a challenge to Dupin.

Get set for a step back in the history of detective fiction that leaves the impression that it was written just a short while ago.

Librarian's note: this entry is for the story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." It is the first of three in the author's Dupin series. Collections of the series, including those under this title, and other stories by the author, are located elsewhere on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. Each of the Dupin stories can be found by searching Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ for "a C. Auguste Dupin Short Story."]]> 38 Edgar Allan Poe 149616640X Traveller 3 short-fiction 3.86 1841 The Murders in the Rue Morgue (C. Auguste Dupin, #1)
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1841
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/23
date added: 2022/01/23
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> The Cask of Amontillado 261240
It is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year (possibly during the eighteenth century) and concerns the revenge taken by the narrator on a friend who he claims has insulted him. Like several of Poe's stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative revolves around the possibility of a person being buried alive or enclosed in a small space with not possibility of escape (aka immurement).

Librarian's note: this entry relates to the story "The Cask of Amontillado." Collections of short stories by the author can be found elsewhere on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ.]]> 24 Edgar Allan Poe 1594561869 Traveller 3 One of the entries in my ¡°list of most disturbing short stories ever¡±, which I am thankfully almost at the end of.
====================


In a way, writers of dark fiction hem themselves in to a large extent. People who are familiar with their work, come to expect horror from them, and so their reputation tends to blunt the effect of the horror they attempt to inflict on their readers. So my disturbometer rating doesn¡¯t mean that nothing awful happens in this story ¨C something awful certainly does happen. And, as with many of Poe¡¯s tales, the biggest horror lies in the twisted mind of the narrator.

EDIT (Dec. 23 2021) : Taking the paragraph above in mind, in the comment section below, GR friend linked to a song on Youtube named The Cask of Amontillado, by The Alan Parsons Project.

That song kind of extracted the bare essence of this story for me: [spoilers removed]
Fortunato might not have been a very nice person himself, and that much the story does make clear, but it needed the song for me to realize the full horror that Fortunato must have experienced at the end, and caused me to up my disturbometer from 7 to 8-9.

Regarding the narrator, one has to ask yourself what kind of person smiles and fusses over a person that they are purposely leading to an extremely unpleasant death? What kind of person feels hatred for another person, but yet expresses friendship and concern towards that person? An extremely twisted and a pretty creepy kind of person, that¡¯s for sure. So once again, as is often found in Poe's works, we have an unsympathetic protagonist.

The story takes place during an Italian carnival, so there are crowds on the streets, wearing costumes and masks while drinking and merrymaking, which adds a lurid, unreal quality to the background setting of the tale.

The story takes a sinister turn when our narrator, on the pretext of judging the quality of a casket of Amontillado*, leads his inebriated friend into the catacombs of the Montresor family mausoleum, where, as was the custom in ye olden days, the bodies of the dead were placed, usually in caskets, into niches made in the walls. But the wood of caskets can get old and rot in the damp, thereby partly or wholly exposing its morbid contents. So it's a suitably macabre setting, with skeletons serving as silent witnesses to the proceedings. Said proceedings being, Montresor taking truly diabolical revenge on his so-called friend, Fortunato. (Read the story to find out exactly how - it's very short.)

As part of my edit after hearing and watching the song on Youtube, I've also reflected on what Montresor was figuratively doing to Fortunato. He was basically removing Fortunato from sight completely, and was in a very literal way, removing him from society, blocking him from stealing Montresor's "shine", and removing him from the scene both literally and figuratively. Did that work out for Montresor? Well, it is hinted at that Montresor might have had his regrets after all, but as with all unreliable narrators, one never knows.

In my first reflections upon this story, I was thinking: ¡°Ha, Poe has set a story of revenge in a land ripe with vengeance, the land that spawned the Mafia, an organization that receives its power from the threat of revenge." But then, revenge is also generally speaking a very Latin thing, isn¡¯t it? The Spanish are culturally very much into revenge as well, and here my mind moved to Gabriel Garcia Marquez¡¯s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a tale about a revenge in defense of an honor system that was so culturally ingrained, that bloody, deadly revenge was the expected thing when the honor of a family was sullied according to the norms of that culture.

¡®Honor¡¯ (which is a culturally contextual thing) was also very popularly 'defended¡¯ by having duels, not just by the Spanish, but by Europeans of all stripes in the early nineteenth, the eighteenth, and earlier centuries, and honor, especially family honor, was a legitimate thing to defend to the death not just in Europe/Russia, but in the Middle-East as well. Ok, so notions of ¡®honor¡¯ and revenge is a pretty universal occurrence, especially in patriarchal settings.

Be that as it may, many writers like to set their tales of ¡°revenge in order to defend the family honor¡± in Italy ¨C as did Shakespeare with his tragic Romeo and Juliet, and Guy de Maupassant with his story ¡°A Vendetta¡±. And so it is with The Casque of Amontillado. We are never explicitly told why the narrator wants to take revenge, beyond hints that personal pride and possibly family honor is involved.

The narrator, a member of the Montresor family, which was once rich and illustrious, but had in the meantime fallen from grace, says to his ¡®friend¡¯ Fortunato : ¡°You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was.¡±
This seems to hint at the idea that the narrator somehow blames Fortunato for his current lack of happiness ¨C whether it be by direct or even only implied insult. But we never get to know the exact nature of this insult, and it is implied that Fortunato, an arrogant big-mouth, already knows the reason, since he never asks why he is being punished, but seems to automatically grasp, finally, at the end, that this is what is happening.

Another hint that this revenge might be inspired by defending family honor, is that the family crest of the Montresors features a foot trampling on a snake which is biting the same foot in the heel, with the motto: No one can harm me unpunished.

I¡¯ve seen suggestions that Poe wrote this tale as a ¡®revenge¡¯ tale against another writer who lampooned Poe and made fun of him. If this were true, it certainly then makes sense that Poe would leave the exact nature of the insult over to the imagination.

However it may be, as usual, Poe doesn¡¯t spoonfeed us on all of the details ¨C he makes subtle hints and leaves the reader to sweat it out as to exactly what is going on. For all we know, this narrator, as seems to be the case with a few of his other narrators, may also be insane. I read the story as a part of a Poe collection named Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and yes, mystery there is aplenty.




*Amontillado is a variety of sherry wine characterized by being darker than fino but lighter than oloroso. It is named after the Montilla region of Spain, where the style originated in the 18th century, although the name "Amontillado" is sometimes used commercially as a simple measure of colour to label any sherry lying between a fino and an oloroso.

Some sources say a 'pipe' of Amontillado, would be a huge round wooden casket of about 130 gallons, or 492 liters containing the wine, other sources say a pipe can vary from 350 to over 600 liters. It seems partly to have varied over time, in the past 200 years or so. I suppose it also varies from region to region. It's one of those big caskets that you tend to see in wine cellars, in any case.]]> 4.09 1846 The Cask of Amontillado
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1846
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/16
date added: 2021/12/23
shelves: dark, short-fiction, three-and-a-half-stars
review:
Disturbometer: 8-9 out of 10
One of the entries in my ¡°list of most disturbing short stories ever¡±, which I am thankfully almost at the end of.
====================


In a way, writers of dark fiction hem themselves in to a large extent. People who are familiar with their work, come to expect horror from them, and so their reputation tends to blunt the effect of the horror they attempt to inflict on their readers. So my disturbometer rating doesn¡¯t mean that nothing awful happens in this story ¨C something awful certainly does happen. And, as with many of Poe¡¯s tales, the biggest horror lies in the twisted mind of the narrator.

EDIT (Dec. 23 2021) : Taking the paragraph above in mind, in the comment section below, GR friend linked to a song on Youtube named The Cask of Amontillado, by The Alan Parsons Project.

That song kind of extracted the bare essence of this story for me: [spoilers removed]
Fortunato might not have been a very nice person himself, and that much the story does make clear, but it needed the song for me to realize the full horror that Fortunato must have experienced at the end, and caused me to up my disturbometer from 7 to 8-9.

Regarding the narrator, one has to ask yourself what kind of person smiles and fusses over a person that they are purposely leading to an extremely unpleasant death? What kind of person feels hatred for another person, but yet expresses friendship and concern towards that person? An extremely twisted and a pretty creepy kind of person, that¡¯s for sure. So once again, as is often found in Poe's works, we have an unsympathetic protagonist.

The story takes place during an Italian carnival, so there are crowds on the streets, wearing costumes and masks while drinking and merrymaking, which adds a lurid, unreal quality to the background setting of the tale.

The story takes a sinister turn when our narrator, on the pretext of judging the quality of a casket of Amontillado*, leads his inebriated friend into the catacombs of the Montresor family mausoleum, where, as was the custom in ye olden days, the bodies of the dead were placed, usually in caskets, into niches made in the walls. But the wood of caskets can get old and rot in the damp, thereby partly or wholly exposing its morbid contents. So it's a suitably macabre setting, with skeletons serving as silent witnesses to the proceedings. Said proceedings being, Montresor taking truly diabolical revenge on his so-called friend, Fortunato. (Read the story to find out exactly how - it's very short.)

As part of my edit after hearing and watching the song on Youtube, I've also reflected on what Montresor was figuratively doing to Fortunato. He was basically removing Fortunato from sight completely, and was in a very literal way, removing him from society, blocking him from stealing Montresor's "shine", and removing him from the scene both literally and figuratively. Did that work out for Montresor? Well, it is hinted at that Montresor might have had his regrets after all, but as with all unreliable narrators, one never knows.

In my first reflections upon this story, I was thinking: ¡°Ha, Poe has set a story of revenge in a land ripe with vengeance, the land that spawned the Mafia, an organization that receives its power from the threat of revenge." But then, revenge is also generally speaking a very Latin thing, isn¡¯t it? The Spanish are culturally very much into revenge as well, and here my mind moved to Gabriel Garcia Marquez¡¯s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a tale about a revenge in defense of an honor system that was so culturally ingrained, that bloody, deadly revenge was the expected thing when the honor of a family was sullied according to the norms of that culture.

¡®Honor¡¯ (which is a culturally contextual thing) was also very popularly 'defended¡¯ by having duels, not just by the Spanish, but by Europeans of all stripes in the early nineteenth, the eighteenth, and earlier centuries, and honor, especially family honor, was a legitimate thing to defend to the death not just in Europe/Russia, but in the Middle-East as well. Ok, so notions of ¡®honor¡¯ and revenge is a pretty universal occurrence, especially in patriarchal settings.

Be that as it may, many writers like to set their tales of ¡°revenge in order to defend the family honor¡± in Italy ¨C as did Shakespeare with his tragic Romeo and Juliet, and Guy de Maupassant with his story ¡°A Vendetta¡±. And so it is with The Casque of Amontillado. We are never explicitly told why the narrator wants to take revenge, beyond hints that personal pride and possibly family honor is involved.

The narrator, a member of the Montresor family, which was once rich and illustrious, but had in the meantime fallen from grace, says to his ¡®friend¡¯ Fortunato : ¡°You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was.¡±
This seems to hint at the idea that the narrator somehow blames Fortunato for his current lack of happiness ¨C whether it be by direct or even only implied insult. But we never get to know the exact nature of this insult, and it is implied that Fortunato, an arrogant big-mouth, already knows the reason, since he never asks why he is being punished, but seems to automatically grasp, finally, at the end, that this is what is happening.

Another hint that this revenge might be inspired by defending family honor, is that the family crest of the Montresors features a foot trampling on a snake which is biting the same foot in the heel, with the motto: No one can harm me unpunished.

I¡¯ve seen suggestions that Poe wrote this tale as a ¡®revenge¡¯ tale against another writer who lampooned Poe and made fun of him. If this were true, it certainly then makes sense that Poe would leave the exact nature of the insult over to the imagination.

However it may be, as usual, Poe doesn¡¯t spoonfeed us on all of the details ¨C he makes subtle hints and leaves the reader to sweat it out as to exactly what is going on. For all we know, this narrator, as seems to be the case with a few of his other narrators, may also be insane. I read the story as a part of a Poe collection named Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and yes, mystery there is aplenty.




*Amontillado is a variety of sherry wine characterized by being darker than fino but lighter than oloroso. It is named after the Montilla region of Spain, where the style originated in the 18th century, although the name "Amontillado" is sometimes used commercially as a simple measure of colour to label any sherry lying between a fino and an oloroso.

Some sources say a 'pipe' of Amontillado, would be a huge round wooden casket of about 130 gallons, or 492 liters containing the wine, other sources say a pipe can vary from 350 to over 600 liters. It seems partly to have varied over time, in the past 200 years or so. I suppose it also varies from region to region. It's one of those big caskets that you tend to see in wine cellars, in any case.
]]> The Black Monk 208623 48 Anton Chekhov 1419154192 Traveller 0 3.99 1894 The Black Monk
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1894
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/16
shelves: to-read, russia, short-fiction
review:

]]> Chess Story 59151
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.

This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.]]> 104 Stefan Zweig 1590171691 Traveller 4 deutschland, short-fiction 4.31 1942 Chess Story
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/16
date added: 2021/12/16
shelves: deutschland, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[¸é²¹²õ³ó¨­³¾´Ç²Ô and Seventeen Other Stories]]> 35206 ¸é²¹²õ³ó¨­³¾´Ç²Ô to his later, more autobiographical writings.

Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan¡¯s foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. ¡®¸é²¹²õ³ó¨­³¾´Ç²Ô¡¯ and ¡®In a Bamboo Grove¡¯ inspired Kurosawa¡¯s magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as ¡®The Nose¡¯, ¡®O-Gin¡¯ and ¡®Loyalty¡¯ paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as ¡®Death Register¡¯, ¡®The Life of a Stupid Man¡¯ and ¡®Spinning Gears¡¯, Akutagawa drew from his own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving impressionistic stories.

A WORLD IN DECAY
- ¸é²¹²õ³ó¨­³¾´Ç²Ô (Sep 1915)
- In a Bamboo Grove (Dec 1921)
- The Nose (Jan 1916)
- Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale (May 1919)
- The Spider Thread (Apr 1918)
- Hell Screen (1918)
UNDER THE SWORD
- Dr. Ogata Ry¨­sai: Memorandum (Dec 7th 1916)
- O-Gin (Aug 1922)
- Loyalty (Feb 1917)
MODERN TRAGICOMEDY
- The Story of a Head That Fell Off (Dec 1917)
- Green Onions (Dec 1919)
- Horse Legs (Jan 1925)
AKUTAGAWA'S OWN STORY
- Daid¨­ji Shinsuke: The Early Years (Dec 9th 1924)
- The Writer's Craft (Mar 1924)
- The Baby's Sickness (Jul 1923)
- Death Register (Sep 1926)
- The Life of a Stupid Man (Jun 1927 posthumous)
- Spinning Gears (Jun 1927 posthumous)

Cover illustration by Yoshihiro Tatsumi]]> 268 Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa 0143039849 Traveller 0 4.15 1927 ¸é²¹²õ³ó¨­³¾´Ç²Ô and Seventeen Other Stories
author: Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/09
shelves: japan, short-fiction, currently-reading
review:

]]> The Bet 2895911 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 48 Anton Chekhov 0895986841 Traveller 0 4.14 1889 The Bet
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1889
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: to-read, russia, short-fiction
review:

]]> Guts 6395833 16 Chuck Palahniuk Traveller 2 dark, short-fiction
Another entry from the ¡°most disturbing story¡± list.

"Guts" is a story out of Chuck Palahnuik's collection-of-stories-in-the-form-of-a-novel, Haunted.

Well. At this point in my exploration of the ¡°most disturbing story ever¡±, I was starting to feel a bit weary of my quest. Many modern writers, it seems, play on yuckiness, gore and extreme and explicit violence to pull readers out of their comfort zone; they try to ride on the coattails of it being ¡°shocking¡± rather than to write a well-crafted story, like most of the older ¡°disturbing¡± stories that I¡¯d read were.

Maybe it¡¯s also a question of that only the well-written stories remain through time, while cheap smut tends to fall by the wayside? Is this story ¡°cheap smut¡±? Weelll, it¡¯s more like stories that modern boys would tell around a campfire. When I started off reading it, I was actually laughing and shaking my head, thinking: ¡°Seriously? Is this supposed to gross me out?¡± It was like one of those ¡°medical stories¡± of ¡°things that went wrong¡± that some popular Youtubers tell. You know the kind? Like: ¡°This woman ate 500 pears. See what happened to her pancreas.¡± or ¡°This man drank 40 beers a day for 3 years. See what it did to his brain.¡± Only, to add to the adolescent boy appeal of this particular story, it was like: ¡°This boy did X to have better orgasms while jacking off. See what happened to his X.¡±

So, I¡¯m not quite sure how much writing skill goes into recounting medical horror stories. But I will tell you this ¨C I¡¯m not sure if the last story at the end was made-up or at least partly based on the truth, but Palahnuik ¨Cdid- manage to make it very realistic. Extremely realistic. TOO realistic! I will own up to feeling, like certain British grandmothers would call it: ¡°a bit queer¡± towards the end. And by that I don¡¯t mean to say anything about my sexuality or that it had anything to do with gayness. In fact, I felt far from gay, I felt gray. I might even have felt a bit dizzy for a moment. I waited a bit before getting up after reading it. Yes, yes, I will admit to that. But I¡¯m still not convinced that it means the entire story is well written. I¡¯ll just say that I found Fight Club far better, and that Fight Club also made me feel less ill.]]> 3.88 2004 Guts
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: dark, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer: 9 - 10 out of 10

Another entry from the ¡°most disturbing story¡± list.

"Guts" is a story out of Chuck Palahnuik's collection-of-stories-in-the-form-of-a-novel, Haunted.

Well. At this point in my exploration of the ¡°most disturbing story ever¡±, I was starting to feel a bit weary of my quest. Many modern writers, it seems, play on yuckiness, gore and extreme and explicit violence to pull readers out of their comfort zone; they try to ride on the coattails of it being ¡°shocking¡± rather than to write a well-crafted story, like most of the older ¡°disturbing¡± stories that I¡¯d read were.

Maybe it¡¯s also a question of that only the well-written stories remain through time, while cheap smut tends to fall by the wayside? Is this story ¡°cheap smut¡±? Weelll, it¡¯s more like stories that modern boys would tell around a campfire. When I started off reading it, I was actually laughing and shaking my head, thinking: ¡°Seriously? Is this supposed to gross me out?¡± It was like one of those ¡°medical stories¡± of ¡°things that went wrong¡± that some popular Youtubers tell. You know the kind? Like: ¡°This woman ate 500 pears. See what happened to her pancreas.¡± or ¡°This man drank 40 beers a day for 3 years. See what it did to his brain.¡± Only, to add to the adolescent boy appeal of this particular story, it was like: ¡°This boy did X to have better orgasms while jacking off. See what happened to his X.¡±

So, I¡¯m not quite sure how much writing skill goes into recounting medical horror stories. But I will tell you this ¨C I¡¯m not sure if the last story at the end was made-up or at least partly based on the truth, but Palahnuik ¨Cdid- manage to make it very realistic. Extremely realistic. TOO realistic! I will own up to feeling, like certain British grandmothers would call it: ¡°a bit queer¡± towards the end. And by that I don¡¯t mean to say anything about my sexuality or that it had anything to do with gayness. In fact, I felt far from gay, I felt gray. I might even have felt a bit dizzy for a moment. I waited a bit before getting up after reading it. Yes, yes, I will admit to that. But I¡¯m still not convinced that it means the entire story is well written. I¡¯ll just say that I found Fight Club far better, and that Fight Club also made me feel less ill.
]]> The Pear Shaped Man 5393010 0 George R.R. Martin Traveller 3 dark, short-fiction
Another one of the titles on my ¡°most disturbing short story list¡±

This time the story is from George RR Martin, the guy that wrote Game of Thrones. At this point in my list, most of the stories had come from earlier than the 1960¡¯s. (That is, with the exception of the Vonnegut and of the Ligotti. But for me Ligotti¡¯s prose feels stiff and stilted and the Vonnegut story was sort of dramatic surrealism).
So when I started reading Martin¡¯s story, I was immediately struck by how modern and natural his prose and his characters felt, and to my surprise, it was actually a relief after the stilted and old-fashioned stuffiness of people who wrote stories long ago. (I¡¯d just finished two volumes of Shirley Jackson stories to boot.)

So even though the story starts off with a fairly mundane scenario, I was kind of enjoying myself. Not for long, though. There was a fly in the ¡°we¡¯ve happily moved to a new apartment¡± ointment. There was a booger in the nose of the story, that just wouldn¡¯t go away, like one of those zits that just get worse when you try to squish them into extinction. It was The Pear-shaped Man.

He was like the dog-crap that you can¡¯t get off your shoe. He was like the bubble-gum you sat on and can¡¯t get off the seat of your pants. He was like an ear-worm of the crappiest song you¡¯d ever heard. He was the floater in the toilet that refused to go down. He was like the fly on Mike Pence¡¯s head. He was like the mosquito that had crept through the mosquito net. He was like that ex who keeps trying to hook up with you again. He was that ink on your fingers that just won¡¯t wash off. He was the spam that keeps coming even after you¡¯ve blocked both the mail and the domain. He was the smell of the garlic that you¡¯d eaten too much of the night before. He was like loud noises in the plumbing when you¡¯re trying to sleep, or the neighbor playing Heavy Metal on full volume at 4 AM in the morning when you have a presentation to give. He was like rats in the roof, like cockroaches under the sink. He was like tinnitus and like indigestion. He was like ants in your sugar, like sleet in the street. He was the loud static on a phone call. He was like a cheese curl that you find in your clean underpants/panties. He was like the persistent smell of vomit after that drunk friend you were so kind to give a lift to, barffed in your car. He was like a scream in the brakes of your car that progresses to a scream in the back of your head. Have you finally got it, dear readers, what The Pear-shaped Man was like?

Only, that¡¯s not all he was. Nooooooo-no-no-no. He was something far worse. But you¡¯d have to read the story to truly know how The Pear-shaped Man is.

All I¡¯ll say further on the matter, is that I felt ill for a while after finishing the story, and that I will never look at cheese curls the same way again; they will always remind me of The Pear-shaped Man. Also, the story did have a Lovecraftian feel to it at the end, but at least those writers from long ago were subtle¡­]]> 3.79 1991 The Pear Shaped Man
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: dark, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer 7 out of 10.

Another one of the titles on my ¡°most disturbing short story list¡±

This time the story is from George RR Martin, the guy that wrote Game of Thrones. At this point in my list, most of the stories had come from earlier than the 1960¡¯s. (That is, with the exception of the Vonnegut and of the Ligotti. But for me Ligotti¡¯s prose feels stiff and stilted and the Vonnegut story was sort of dramatic surrealism).
So when I started reading Martin¡¯s story, I was immediately struck by how modern and natural his prose and his characters felt, and to my surprise, it was actually a relief after the stilted and old-fashioned stuffiness of people who wrote stories long ago. (I¡¯d just finished two volumes of Shirley Jackson stories to boot.)

So even though the story starts off with a fairly mundane scenario, I was kind of enjoying myself. Not for long, though. There was a fly in the ¡°we¡¯ve happily moved to a new apartment¡± ointment. There was a booger in the nose of the story, that just wouldn¡¯t go away, like one of those zits that just get worse when you try to squish them into extinction. It was The Pear-shaped Man.

He was like the dog-crap that you can¡¯t get off your shoe. He was like the bubble-gum you sat on and can¡¯t get off the seat of your pants. He was like an ear-worm of the crappiest song you¡¯d ever heard. He was the floater in the toilet that refused to go down. He was like the fly on Mike Pence¡¯s head. He was like the mosquito that had crept through the mosquito net. He was like that ex who keeps trying to hook up with you again. He was that ink on your fingers that just won¡¯t wash off. He was the spam that keeps coming even after you¡¯ve blocked both the mail and the domain. He was the smell of the garlic that you¡¯d eaten too much of the night before. He was like loud noises in the plumbing when you¡¯re trying to sleep, or the neighbor playing Heavy Metal on full volume at 4 AM in the morning when you have a presentation to give. He was like rats in the roof, like cockroaches under the sink. He was like tinnitus and like indigestion. He was like ants in your sugar, like sleet in the street. He was the loud static on a phone call. He was like a cheese curl that you find in your clean underpants/panties. He was like the persistent smell of vomit after that drunk friend you were so kind to give a lift to, barffed in your car. He was like a scream in the brakes of your car that progresses to a scream in the back of your head. Have you finally got it, dear readers, what The Pear-shaped Man was like?

Only, that¡¯s not all he was. Nooooooo-no-no-no. He was something far worse. But you¡¯d have to read the story to truly know how The Pear-shaped Man is.

All I¡¯ll say further on the matter, is that I felt ill for a while after finishing the story, and that I will never look at cheese curls the same way again; they will always remind me of The Pear-shaped Man. Also, the story did have a Lovecraftian feel to it at the end, but at least those writers from long ago were subtle¡­
]]> <![CDATA[Short Story Writers & Short Stories (Bloom's Literary Criticism)]]> 403698 189 Harold Bloom 0791083675 Traveller 0 3.82 2004 Short Story Writers & Short Stories (Bloom's Literary Criticism)
author: Harold Bloom
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/26
shelves: to-read, lit-crit-literary, short-fiction
review:

]]> A Good Man Is Hard To Find 75090 A Good Man Is Hard to Find is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most often chose for readings or talks to students. It is an unforgettable tale, both riveting and comic, of the confrontation of a family with violence and sudden death. More than anything else O'Connor ever wrote, this story mixes the comedy, violence, and religious concerns that characterize her fiction.

This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of the story itself, comments and letters by O'Connor about the story, critical essays, and a bibliography. The critical essays span more than twenty years of commentary and suggest several approaches to the story--formalistic, thematic, deconstructionist-- all within the grasp of the undergraduate, while the introduction also points interested students toward still other resources. Useful for both beginning and advanced students, this casebook provides an in-depth introduction to one of America's most gifted modern writers.]]> 180 Flannery O'Connor 0813519772 Traveller 4
Number 3 in my ¡°quest to find the most disturbing (short) story¡± effort.

Dear fellow reader and fellow critic/reviewer, I write these passages for you. If nobody reads what I have written, my text has no meaning, and I have wasted my time writing it. I¡¯d like to use the experience of this disturbing text under review and it¡¯s enigmatic, intensely complex writer, to elaborate a little on critical theory. And make no mistake, each and every one of you implicitly believes in a certain ¡°correct¡± way to read fiction, of how to analyze and review a text. I see it in your reviews.

I¡¯ll mention the main groups I most often encounter here. Some of you write a little (or long) pr¨¦cis of the plot of the story, and put that up as your review. I think of these as the ¡°Blurb-writers¡±. Of these reviewers I think: ¡°Well, there goes a person who believes they have just saved me the time of reading this story for myself. You guys are probably closer to ¡°New Criticism¡± than most others, since you look at the text and only the text.
Others close to this ¡®text only' approach, will name salient features of the text and the mood of the text (you¡¯d inform us that there¡¯s beautiful flowing prose, tragicomedy, racism, sexism, etc. etc. in the text). I tend to often incline to the latter myself.

Then there are those of you who write a beautiful historical and/or contextual background about the piece of fiction and often its writer. You guys would tend to fall in the camps of Historical and Biographical criticism, as well as New Historicism and/or Structuralism. I myself often tend toward New Historicism/Structuralism when I have the time for it ¨C because make no mistake, this is a time-consuming mode of critique.

Then we have our often poetic and lyrical ¡°Reader Response¡± reviewers, who tell us about how their personal experience of this text went, and these reviews are often very entertaining, artistic and original pieces of writing, something that I have often wished I could do, but lack the spontaneity to do, since I tend to hide personal emotions and prefer to intellectualize stuff (even when I talk about my emotions I prefer a distance, a remove). It feels safer that way.

With this story, I personally had quite a ¡°reader response¡± experience, then strove to intellectualize it afterwards, but I feel myself breaking my own mold, because¡­ sigh, let me try to explain.
I came into this knowing that Flannery O¡¯Connor was a prominent writer in the Southern Gothic tradition, but knew nothing about her and hadn¡¯t read anything by her, so I came in as a complete virgin, white as the driven snow.

I initially found the story pretty funny ¨C in fact I laughed at the characters¡¯ foibles and mishaps. When the story turned darker, I saw it starting to turn into dark comedy and black humor, with a terribly ironic twist. I mean there¡¯s irony in this story from the start. The grandma is overtly manipulative, and so one never knows whether she sincerely means anything she says, since the writer very successfully gave you a few clues early on already, that this grandma does things ¡®for effect¡¯.

Not knowing that O¡¯ Connor was a devout Catholic, I assumed that the story is a cynical attack on Christianity and that it was meant to point out the folly and futility of believing that God or Jesus will protect you ¨C as well as cynically pointing out how false and hypocritical some Christians can be (something I have personal experience with). I mean, the grandmother is depicted as a relatively unsympathetic character who, for example, sees no pathos in a little black child having no pants, but declares that the status quo is the acceptable way of being ¨C even finds it cute, and wanting to paint a picture of it.

She also manipulates her son in various ways, and most ostensibly, through his children. She is a comic character, who through her own various manipulations and stupidity, gets herself into worse and worse hot water, time and time again, including the climax at the end. If I had left things then and there, I would have given this story 5 stars, with the commentary that the writing was astute and excellent, that the author is obviously an excellent observer of humanity, and even now, nothing about that has changed for me.

Despite what she said to people in interviews and letters, her writing shines on its own and its evocative power cannot be renounced, even by its author. For the author, who by her own insistence was a devout Catholic, and who continually flouted her religion and claimed that it was the raison d¡¯¨ºtre for her writing, stated clearly about this very story, that what for me seemed to be an ironic demonstration of a human being¡¯s utmost folly, was actually intended to portray a moment where an individual is touched by divine grace. She even goes as far as to claim (extraneous to the text) that the character ¡°became Jesus by grace of the Holy Spirit¡±.

After learning of this, I started wishing I had not poked further and that I had taken the New Criticism approach of just letting the text shine for itself. That would have been so much easier. But, to strike a slightly moralistic pose myself, growth and development only comes through conflict and strife. Wars always tended to have improved technology as a result. Perhaps I can grow from this experience.

I find myself grappling with this conflict in myself, of how to report on this text with integrity, given my inner conflict between my personal experience of the text and the intention of the author.
She had meant the story to be a redeeming experience for non-believers, she said that she thought it would bring non-believers closer to Christ. I had read it as being the opposite, in fact, as an attack against religion so able and well executed that I could compare it to the intentions of the Marquis De Sade - I had read his novel Justine, and Justine's story and O' Connor's Grandma's stories are comparable to me.

This question is forcing me to re-appraise my entire personal paradigm of how to approach a text, and fiction in general. I think the answer is already there, deep within myself; - that as much as I would have loved for, and even as a child hoped for and fantasized that reading literature could be a meeting of an author¡¯s mind and mine, I realize now that that is folly. Any ¡°meeting of the minds¡±, any feeling that ¡°this author gets it¡± is pure fantasy and wishful thinking.
There could perhaps be kindred spirits in this world ¨C but don¡¯t take it for granted that they are easy to recognize. In a way this shatters a part of my soul, reminds me of the terrible fear of the black chasm of nothingness and loneliness that I had to deal with when I gave up all illusion of religious faith ¨C that takes a special kind of courage, no matter how pragmatic a person might be, and I do have my fanciful side.

Flannery O¡¯Connor, much as you break my heart with your letters and explanations, knowing therefore that we are not kindred spirits in any way that is easy to conceive of, I still bow to the enormous talent inherent in your art, to your incredible ability to write well.
I was going to give the story five stars, but I think it would be more appropriate to give it four and a half.

If you have read up to here, thank you for your forbearance with this baring of the soul.]]> 3.89 1949 A Good Man Is Hard To Find
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/23
date added: 2021/11/25
shelves: dark, short-fiction, four-and-a-half-stars, southern-gothic
review:
Disturbometer 9-10 out of 10

Number 3 in my ¡°quest to find the most disturbing (short) story¡± effort.

Dear fellow reader and fellow critic/reviewer, I write these passages for you. If nobody reads what I have written, my text has no meaning, and I have wasted my time writing it. I¡¯d like to use the experience of this disturbing text under review and it¡¯s enigmatic, intensely complex writer, to elaborate a little on critical theory. And make no mistake, each and every one of you implicitly believes in a certain ¡°correct¡± way to read fiction, of how to analyze and review a text. I see it in your reviews.

I¡¯ll mention the main groups I most often encounter here. Some of you write a little (or long) pr¨¦cis of the plot of the story, and put that up as your review. I think of these as the ¡°Blurb-writers¡±. Of these reviewers I think: ¡°Well, there goes a person who believes they have just saved me the time of reading this story for myself. You guys are probably closer to ¡°New Criticism¡± than most others, since you look at the text and only the text.
Others close to this ¡®text only' approach, will name salient features of the text and the mood of the text (you¡¯d inform us that there¡¯s beautiful flowing prose, tragicomedy, racism, sexism, etc. etc. in the text). I tend to often incline to the latter myself.

Then there are those of you who write a beautiful historical and/or contextual background about the piece of fiction and often its writer. You guys would tend to fall in the camps of Historical and Biographical criticism, as well as New Historicism and/or Structuralism. I myself often tend toward New Historicism/Structuralism when I have the time for it ¨C because make no mistake, this is a time-consuming mode of critique.

Then we have our often poetic and lyrical ¡°Reader Response¡± reviewers, who tell us about how their personal experience of this text went, and these reviews are often very entertaining, artistic and original pieces of writing, something that I have often wished I could do, but lack the spontaneity to do, since I tend to hide personal emotions and prefer to intellectualize stuff (even when I talk about my emotions I prefer a distance, a remove). It feels safer that way.

With this story, I personally had quite a ¡°reader response¡± experience, then strove to intellectualize it afterwards, but I feel myself breaking my own mold, because¡­ sigh, let me try to explain.
I came into this knowing that Flannery O¡¯Connor was a prominent writer in the Southern Gothic tradition, but knew nothing about her and hadn¡¯t read anything by her, so I came in as a complete virgin, white as the driven snow.

I initially found the story pretty funny ¨C in fact I laughed at the characters¡¯ foibles and mishaps. When the story turned darker, I saw it starting to turn into dark comedy and black humor, with a terribly ironic twist. I mean there¡¯s irony in this story from the start. The grandma is overtly manipulative, and so one never knows whether she sincerely means anything she says, since the writer very successfully gave you a few clues early on already, that this grandma does things ¡®for effect¡¯.

Not knowing that O¡¯ Connor was a devout Catholic, I assumed that the story is a cynical attack on Christianity and that it was meant to point out the folly and futility of believing that God or Jesus will protect you ¨C as well as cynically pointing out how false and hypocritical some Christians can be (something I have personal experience with). I mean, the grandmother is depicted as a relatively unsympathetic character who, for example, sees no pathos in a little black child having no pants, but declares that the status quo is the acceptable way of being ¨C even finds it cute, and wanting to paint a picture of it.

She also manipulates her son in various ways, and most ostensibly, through his children. She is a comic character, who through her own various manipulations and stupidity, gets herself into worse and worse hot water, time and time again, including the climax at the end. If I had left things then and there, I would have given this story 5 stars, with the commentary that the writing was astute and excellent, that the author is obviously an excellent observer of humanity, and even now, nothing about that has changed for me.

Despite what she said to people in interviews and letters, her writing shines on its own and its evocative power cannot be renounced, even by its author. For the author, who by her own insistence was a devout Catholic, and who continually flouted her religion and claimed that it was the raison d¡¯¨ºtre for her writing, stated clearly about this very story, that what for me seemed to be an ironic demonstration of a human being¡¯s utmost folly, was actually intended to portray a moment where an individual is touched by divine grace. She even goes as far as to claim (extraneous to the text) that the character ¡°became Jesus by grace of the Holy Spirit¡±.

After learning of this, I started wishing I had not poked further and that I had taken the New Criticism approach of just letting the text shine for itself. That would have been so much easier. But, to strike a slightly moralistic pose myself, growth and development only comes through conflict and strife. Wars always tended to have improved technology as a result. Perhaps I can grow from this experience.

I find myself grappling with this conflict in myself, of how to report on this text with integrity, given my inner conflict between my personal experience of the text and the intention of the author.
She had meant the story to be a redeeming experience for non-believers, she said that she thought it would bring non-believers closer to Christ. I had read it as being the opposite, in fact, as an attack against religion so able and well executed that I could compare it to the intentions of the Marquis De Sade - I had read his novel Justine, and Justine's story and O' Connor's Grandma's stories are comparable to me.

This question is forcing me to re-appraise my entire personal paradigm of how to approach a text, and fiction in general. I think the answer is already there, deep within myself; - that as much as I would have loved for, and even as a child hoped for and fantasized that reading literature could be a meeting of an author¡¯s mind and mine, I realize now that that is folly. Any ¡°meeting of the minds¡±, any feeling that ¡°this author gets it¡± is pure fantasy and wishful thinking.
There could perhaps be kindred spirits in this world ¨C but don¡¯t take it for granted that they are easy to recognize. In a way this shatters a part of my soul, reminds me of the terrible fear of the black chasm of nothingness and loneliness that I had to deal with when I gave up all illusion of religious faith ¨C that takes a special kind of courage, no matter how pragmatic a person might be, and I do have my fanciful side.

Flannery O¡¯Connor, much as you break my heart with your letters and explanations, knowing therefore that we are not kindred spirits in any way that is easy to conceive of, I still bow to the enormous talent inherent in your art, to your incredible ability to write well.
I was going to give the story five stars, but I think it would be more appropriate to give it four and a half.

If you have read up to here, thank you for your forbearance with this baring of the soul.
]]> The Landlady 19767682 The Landlady is a brilliant gem of a short story from Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail.

In The Landlady, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a young man in need of room meets a most accommodating landlady...

The Landlady is taken from the short story collection Kiss Kiss, which includes ten other devious and shocking stories, featuring the wife who pawns the mink coat from her lover with unexpected results; the priceless piece of furniture that is the subject of a deceitful bargain; a wronged woman taking revenge on her dead husband, and others.]]> 17 Roald Dahl Traveller 4 dark, short-fiction
Number 5 on my ¡°most disturbing story ever" list

Okay, so the landlady [spoilers removed]
Sometimes it¡¯s dangerous to be cute!

Heh, I found the story cute almost more than I found it disturbing. Sure, the implication is most certainly disturbing, but to me it felt almost like a fairy-tale, and pretty fun to read; especially as, despite some foreboding and foreshadowing from the start, you don¡¯t see the specifics of what¡¯s going on until right at the end, [spoilers removed].

Despite the disturbia, a short, fun little read.]]> 3.89 1959 The Landlady
author: Roald Dahl
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/23
date added: 2021/11/24
shelves: dark, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer: 3 - 4 out of 10

Number 5 on my ¡°most disturbing story ever" list

Okay, so the landlady [spoilers removed]
Sometimes it¡¯s dangerous to be cute!

Heh, I found the story cute almost more than I found it disturbing. Sure, the implication is most certainly disturbing, but to me it felt almost like a fairy-tale, and pretty fun to read; especially as, despite some foreboding and foreshadowing from the start, you don¡¯t see the specifics of what¡¯s going on until right at the end, [spoilers removed].

Despite the disturbia, a short, fun little read.
]]> The Frolic 52192497 15 Thomas Ligotti Traveller 2
Number 4 from the ¡°most disturbing story ever¡± list.

Ligotti never really managed to grow on me, I¡¯m not quite sure why. So as expected, I found this an unpleasant, rather boring read, where the ending stood out a mile long before I got to it. I did find it quite disturbing. The whole thing had an unsettling feel to it. The dialogue and the character¡¯s reactions felt unnatural, somehow.

So it¡¯s relatively high on my disturbometer, but not very high on my star rating system.
I¡¯d perhaps even go as low as a 2 and a half, though I suppose that would be a bit stingy.]]> 3.71 The Frolic
author: Thomas Ligotti
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2021/11/23
date added: 2021/11/24
shelves: dark, two-and-a-half-stars, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer : 5-6 out of 10

Number 4 from the ¡°most disturbing story ever¡± list.

Ligotti never really managed to grow on me, I¡¯m not quite sure why. So as expected, I found this an unpleasant, rather boring read, where the ending stood out a mile long before I got to it. I did find it quite disturbing. The whole thing had an unsettling feel to it. The dialogue and the character¡¯s reactions felt unnatural, somehow.

So it¡¯s relatively high on my disturbometer, but not very high on my star rating system.
I¡¯d perhaps even go as low as a 2 and a half, though I suppose that would be a bit stingy.
]]> Harrison Bergeron 10176119 "The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way..."

It is the year 2081. Because of Amendments 211, 212 and 213 to the Constitution, every American is fully equal, meaning that no one is stupider, uglier, weaker, or slower than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced.

One April, fourteen-year-old Harrison Bergeron is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel, by the government and to a place unknown. But what happens in the aftermath will challenge the status quo and inspire his peers about the hidden potential within one's own individuality.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922¨C2007) was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge during WWII, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. The novelist is best known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction, such as 'Slaughterhouse-Five' (1969), 'Cat's Cradle' (1963), and 'Breakfast of Champions' (1973).]]> 9 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Traveller 4 dark, short-fiction
Number 6 from my "most disturbing story ever" list.

Vonnegut tends to be a strong social critic in most of his stories, and this story is no exception. So the disturbing aspect of this story has more to do with politics than with actual physical horror.

Vonnegut is mounting a rather angry, sarcastic protest against the liberal idea of the ¡°forced¡± equalization of the population that had been practiced in the education systems of quite a few countries over the globe, with mediocre and sometimes disastrous results. (For the record, I see myself as a moderate liberal, since I don¡¯t agree with some of the more unpractical and frankly rather hysterical arguments, protests and policies that come from far-leftist ranks. Since where one stands on ¡°communism¡± or ¡°socialism¡± often defines your degree to the left for many people, especially in the US, I guess there I am quite a bit to the left of mainstream Americans, but about in the middle-left for most of Europe. I believe in the practice of socialism in a mixed economy, and I am strongly against global corporatism.)

Now that we have that out of the way, back to the story. In this story, Vonnegut takes this policy of enforced egalitarianism to its logical conclusion. In my personal opinion, in a society where excellence is frowned upon, things actually wouldn¡¯t even be going as well as the futuristic scenario that Vonnegut depicts, because if keeping everything going, including the economy, depended on mediocre, average and less than average people, not much would work very well, and poverty would become widespread. We saw this already in communist countries who took the egalitarian idea further than just the education system. I¡¯m with Vonnegut on this one because although I¡¯m not a raging libertarian, I do believe strongly in the individuality of humans and I do believe in nurturing and harnessing excellence for the good of humankind.

I half enjoyed, was half-irritated by Vonnegut¡¯s hyperbole and over the top silliness, but he does manage to make his point in a short time by using these devices. I thought it was a fun moment when the titular character broke out from his impediments, and almost thought that Vonnegut was going to show us how the rise of feudalism came into being, but Diana Moon Clampers, the Handicapper General, wasn¡¯t taking nonsense of any kind.

The story ends with black humor, after having made its point quite well.]]> 4.15 1961 Harrison Bergeron
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/24
date added: 2021/11/24
shelves: dark, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer : 2 out of 10

Number 6 from my "most disturbing story ever" list.

Vonnegut tends to be a strong social critic in most of his stories, and this story is no exception. So the disturbing aspect of this story has more to do with politics than with actual physical horror.

Vonnegut is mounting a rather angry, sarcastic protest against the liberal idea of the ¡°forced¡± equalization of the population that had been practiced in the education systems of quite a few countries over the globe, with mediocre and sometimes disastrous results. (For the record, I see myself as a moderate liberal, since I don¡¯t agree with some of the more unpractical and frankly rather hysterical arguments, protests and policies that come from far-leftist ranks. Since where one stands on ¡°communism¡± or ¡°socialism¡± often defines your degree to the left for many people, especially in the US, I guess there I am quite a bit to the left of mainstream Americans, but about in the middle-left for most of Europe. I believe in the practice of socialism in a mixed economy, and I am strongly against global corporatism.)

Now that we have that out of the way, back to the story. In this story, Vonnegut takes this policy of enforced egalitarianism to its logical conclusion. In my personal opinion, in a society where excellence is frowned upon, things actually wouldn¡¯t even be going as well as the futuristic scenario that Vonnegut depicts, because if keeping everything going, including the economy, depended on mediocre, average and less than average people, not much would work very well, and poverty would become widespread. We saw this already in communist countries who took the egalitarian idea further than just the education system. I¡¯m with Vonnegut on this one because although I¡¯m not a raging libertarian, I do believe strongly in the individuality of humans and I do believe in nurturing and harnessing excellence for the good of humankind.

I half enjoyed, was half-irritated by Vonnegut¡¯s hyperbole and over the top silliness, but he does manage to make his point in a short time by using these devices. I thought it was a fun moment when the titular character broke out from his impediments, and almost thought that Vonnegut was going to show us how the rise of feudalism came into being, but Diana Moon Clampers, the Handicapper General, wasn¡¯t taking nonsense of any kind.

The story ends with black humor, after having made its point quite well.
]]> The Demon Lover 10591849 224 Elizabeth Bowen Traveller 3 dark, short-fiction
Another one on the "Most disturbing stories ever" list. I personally didn't find it very disturbing, though.

Story about a woman returning to her house in London after it had been closed up with the bombing of London in WWII. All is not as it seems as her past returns to haunt her.

I think that perhaps knowing in advance that a story is supposed to be disturbing removes some of the impact? I saw this one's ending coming as well. Maybe I've read too many short stories with little twists in my life, but there you have it...

Actual rating: 3 and a half stars.]]> 3.57 1941 The Demon Lover
author: Elizabeth Bowen
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1941
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/22
date added: 2021/11/22
shelves: dark, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer: 3 out of 10.

Another one on the "Most disturbing stories ever" list. I personally didn't find it very disturbing, though.

Story about a woman returning to her house in London after it had been closed up with the bombing of London in WWII. All is not as it seems as her past returns to haunt her.

I think that perhaps knowing in advance that a story is supposed to be disturbing removes some of the impact? I saw this one's ending coming as well. Maybe I've read too many short stories with little twists in my life, but there you have it...

Actual rating: 3 and a half stars.
]]> The Veldt 120555 45 Ray Bradbury 0886821088 Traveller 3
I often find writers from the early previous century's take on what the future would look like humorous. It's almost as if they don't take into account what things actually cost and the economics of scale. Nor do they seem to take into account what lies beyond the realms of possibility from a scientific point of view, which often gives the so-called science fiction from the early and mid - 20th century a magicky, fantastical feel.

The story is fun as a window to the past, even though predictable. Too predictable unfortunately to be as scary as it's reputation claims it to be. Read this as part of a "most disturbing stories ever" list that I discovered during Halloween.]]> 4.15 1950 The Veldt
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/22
date added: 2021/11/22
shelves: alternate-world, dark, fantasy, sf-fantasy, short-fiction
review:
Disturbometer : 5 out of 10.

I often find writers from the early previous century's take on what the future would look like humorous. It's almost as if they don't take into account what things actually cost and the economics of scale. Nor do they seem to take into account what lies beyond the realms of possibility from a scientific point of view, which often gives the so-called science fiction from the early and mid - 20th century a magicky, fantastical feel.

The story is fun as a window to the past, even though predictable. Too predictable unfortunately to be as scary as it's reputation claims it to be. Read this as part of a "most disturbing stories ever" list that I discovered during Halloween.
]]> The Tell-Tale Heart 899492 A man confronts himself and an unknown listener with his desire to murder an old man.

In this classic psychological thriller, the reader will find many more questions than answers. Even though this is one of Poe's shortest stories, nevertheless it has become one of his most highest regarded works. It is a profound and, at times, ambiguous investigation of the paranoia that may lie within the depths of one man's mind...]]> 31 Edgar Allan Poe 0871917726 Traveller 5 gothic, horror, short-fiction I'm giving it 5 for the technical mastery of the tale. I also love his economy of style in this story. He manages to pack so much into such a small space! (And, may I say in that respect a great improvement on The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales, an example of his other works that I have most recently read). That is a skill many people who write at all would do well to master...

I'd imagine that this story is one of the forerunners of the "psychological thriller" genre, just as Poe's "Inspector Dupin" was one of the forerunners of detective mysteries which became popular first with Sherlock Holmes and later the detective fiction of Agatha Christie and others. Poe (born 1809) was certainly a hugely influential figure in all kinds of genres that we take for granted these days.

Poe masterfully builds an atmosphere of tension and horror by creating cognitive dissonance in the reader. Cognitive dissonance refers to the mental conflict that occurs when a person's behaviors and beliefs do not align, and causes feelings of unease and tension. People attempt to relieve this discomfort in different ways. In the case of the story, the content of what the narrator tells us, (that he is sane) misaligns with his behavior, which is definitely not that of a sane person, and this creates unease in the reader, but the reader also realizes that the narrator is ill at ease because of the conflict in his own psyche.

From the very first sentence, we are thrown off balance by the tone of the narrator, and we immediately start wondering if this -is- indeed a sane person addressing us. After having read the story, if you circle back to the beginning again, you see how peculiar the narrator¡¯s argument really is. Surely only a madman would talk himself into being seen as guilty of murder which he committed as a sane man, for after all, as a sane man he would be hung, but as a madman would only be confined to an insane institution. It¡¯s seems a delicious riddle on its own, but seen in context of its historicity, it seems that Poe might have been coming at it from a scientific point of view.

Something that people don¡¯t often realize about Edgar Allan Poe, is that he was quite the intellectual who liked to remain in touch with the latest discoveries and fads that took place under the banner of science. His idea of insanity then, would have had some grounding in what the prevailing theories regarding insanity were expounding.

In his essay ¡°Observe how healthily¡ªhow calmly I can tell you the whole story¡±: Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe¡¯s ¡°The Tell-Tale Heart¡±, Paige Matthey Bynum examines these theories, and mentions ¡®father of American psychiatry¡¯, Benjamin Rush¡¯s theory, which ¡°broke with traditional psychiatric theory in declaring that insanity did not necessarily involve a disorder of the intellect, that the moral faculties alone were capable of succumbing to disease. Like Philippe Pinel in France, he realized that a form of insanity might occur which perverted the sense of moral responsibility necessary to deter crime. Thus in a normal individual, an innate moral sense could stave off the passions while the intellect calmly concluded the proper conduct. But if this moral sense, this power to distinguish between good and evil, were momentarily suspended, the opportunity for calm inquiry would be denied, and the individual¡¯s will would become committed to a criminal act before his reason could repudiate it (Rush, 1972, p. 1). He would then become the victim of an ¡°irresistible impulse¡± forced upon the will ¡°through the instrumentality of the passions¡± (Rush, 1830, pp. 262; 355¨C57). In modern terminology, he would be emotionally disturbed or psychopathic, although Poe¡¯s narrator doesn¡¯t snugly fit into a more modern pigeonhole.

However, Rush¡¯s description would seem a pretty good explanation for what ailed the narrator, from the author¡¯s point of view.

Before having read about Rush and his potential influence on Poe, in the first two pages already, I was making judgments on the narrator's state of mental health. For all we know, the old man simply had a cataract over his eye, but it becomes a symbolic focus of terror for the narrator. One of the most oft-occurring fears in paranoid disorders, is the fear of "being watched". I find it rather amazing that Poe, in 1843 already, managed to sketch such a precise description of paranoid delusions. Not only does the narrator have a general fear of "being watched", he also has auditory hallucinations. (Not only does he hear the excessively loud beating of the heart, but in addition "I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.")

There seems to be several layers to the narrator's potential motives: Did he subconsciously covet the old man's wealth? We do not know what relation the old man bears to him - is it a relative (most likely, since he mentions that he "loves" the old man) or, perhaps, an employer?

Did the fact that he coveted the old man's wealth make him feel guilty, did he fear that the "vulture eye" would see into his own impure heart and see his covetousness there?

...and how quickly did the meticulous planner, the self-congratulatory 'master criminal' lose his nerve when his paranoia once more beset him..

I always like to look at a text from various viewpoints of critical theory, and in this particular text, both a Jungian (archetypal) as well as a Freudian interpretation or two, are too good to pass by. It seems obvious to observe that the old man and his eye might be a reference to the one eyed Norse god Odin, who could then (from a Jungian point of view) personify the fear of an all-seeing eye ¨C which could symbolize moral authority, a judgemental god, conscience, or the ¡°parent¡± part of a parent-adult- child personality construct, or, Freud¡¯s super-ego.

Looking especially at Poe¡¯s relationship and history with his foster father, the story can of course also have an Oedipal interpretation, which is quite obvious on the face of it ¨C the son disposes of the father. And indeed, I have seen interpretations that suggest that Edgar is via this story, having revenge on his foster father, Mr John Allan (which accounts for the ¡°Allan¡± in Poe¡¯s name), who abandoned Poe when Allan¡¯s new wife started having children, but as I point out in my id/superego interpretation that follows, it¡¯s the old man who has the last laugh.

So, for a Freudian id/superego interpretation, (in Freud¡¯s model the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part (the ¡®adult¡¯) that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.) the murderous narrator clearly represents the id, which with the help of the ego then ¡®murders¡¯ or kills off the super-ego, or, his conscience. ¡­and yet, his post-murder anxiety shows that it is not so easy to get rid of the superego ¨C and the superego, mounting a counterattack on the ego and id, by causing unbearable levels of anxiety in the narrator, has his revenge in the end.

If you deconstruct the story carefully, also, one cannot help wondering why the narrator goes to the trouble of dismembering the body. He had already smothered and crushed the old man with his own bed (interesting way of killing him?), so why go to the trouble and extra risk of discovery to dismember him?

Musing over this led me to another thought regarding the motive and the method of murder: could the old man be a symbolic external manifestation of the narrator¡¯s own anxiety, which he tries to quell first by domination via secret observation (which seems to work rather well, since he remains calm for the first few nights), but which then flares up again when he realizes that he had been too complacent and self-congratulatory? Of course, his plan doesn¡¯t work in the end, much as he tries to first dominate, then smother, and then even dismember his anxiety. As before in the domination phase, this is only a temporary fix, and under the scrutiny of the police, the heart of terror starts beating again, which results in the downfall of the narrator.

I¡¯ve read a suggestion that the killing of the old man is some sort of private acting out of an inner psycho-drama, which upon discovery by the police would become ¡°public¡± and therefore his angst at the prospect of this new source of shame.

...and that leads to yet another train of thought: A lot of modern psychology deals with the damage that feelings of shame can do to a psyche or personality. So, in yet a slightly different interpretation, one could perhaps posit that the ¡°vulture-eye¡± of the old man, is able to ¡®see¡¯ the narrator¡¯s feelings of shame for whatever his culture has primed him to feel ashamed of. The narrator tries to get rid of his own feelings of shame by disposing of, and even destroying the body of the (imagined) witness to his shame. However, his anxiety boils up yet again, at the fear of the police (symbolic of the other members of his culture) bearing witness to his new source of shame, being his failed attempts at burying his feelings of shame. More proof of the fact that he fears his shame to be seen or to become public, can be found just before he kills the old man, when he says: ¡°And now a new anxiety seized me¡ªthe sound would be heard by a neighbor!¡± So, the beating of the heart seems to be symbolic of his shame and anxiety, and the eye symbolic of discovery and knowledge of that shame.

I imagine that I¡¯ve written enough to show that this short story, barely 5 or 6 pages long, is so sodden with symbolism and subtext that volumes could be written about it. I¡¯ve not even got to the heart yet¡­.

¡­and the most delicious part of the story is, that for all we know this is just a feverish dream being narrated to us in the wild ramblings of a madman¡­ [spoilers removed]

More comments here:/topic/show/...]]> 4.27 1843 The Tell-Tale Heart
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1843
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/30
date added: 2021/11/06
shelves: gothic, horror, short-fiction
review:
WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
I'm giving it 5 for the technical mastery of the tale. I also love his economy of style in this story. He manages to pack so much into such a small space! (And, may I say in that respect a great improvement on The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales, an example of his other works that I have most recently read). That is a skill many people who write at all would do well to master...

I'd imagine that this story is one of the forerunners of the "psychological thriller" genre, just as Poe's "Inspector Dupin" was one of the forerunners of detective mysteries which became popular first with Sherlock Holmes and later the detective fiction of Agatha Christie and others. Poe (born 1809) was certainly a hugely influential figure in all kinds of genres that we take for granted these days.

Poe masterfully builds an atmosphere of tension and horror by creating cognitive dissonance in the reader. Cognitive dissonance refers to the mental conflict that occurs when a person's behaviors and beliefs do not align, and causes feelings of unease and tension. People attempt to relieve this discomfort in different ways. In the case of the story, the content of what the narrator tells us, (that he is sane) misaligns with his behavior, which is definitely not that of a sane person, and this creates unease in the reader, but the reader also realizes that the narrator is ill at ease because of the conflict in his own psyche.

From the very first sentence, we are thrown off balance by the tone of the narrator, and we immediately start wondering if this -is- indeed a sane person addressing us. After having read the story, if you circle back to the beginning again, you see how peculiar the narrator¡¯s argument really is. Surely only a madman would talk himself into being seen as guilty of murder which he committed as a sane man, for after all, as a sane man he would be hung, but as a madman would only be confined to an insane institution. It¡¯s seems a delicious riddle on its own, but seen in context of its historicity, it seems that Poe might have been coming at it from a scientific point of view.

Something that people don¡¯t often realize about Edgar Allan Poe, is that he was quite the intellectual who liked to remain in touch with the latest discoveries and fads that took place under the banner of science. His idea of insanity then, would have had some grounding in what the prevailing theories regarding insanity were expounding.

In his essay ¡°Observe how healthily¡ªhow calmly I can tell you the whole story¡±: Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe¡¯s ¡°The Tell-Tale Heart¡±, Paige Matthey Bynum examines these theories, and mentions ¡®father of American psychiatry¡¯, Benjamin Rush¡¯s theory, which ¡°broke with traditional psychiatric theory in declaring that insanity did not necessarily involve a disorder of the intellect, that the moral faculties alone were capable of succumbing to disease. Like Philippe Pinel in France, he realized that a form of insanity might occur which perverted the sense of moral responsibility necessary to deter crime. Thus in a normal individual, an innate moral sense could stave off the passions while the intellect calmly concluded the proper conduct. But if this moral sense, this power to distinguish between good and evil, were momentarily suspended, the opportunity for calm inquiry would be denied, and the individual¡¯s will would become committed to a criminal act before his reason could repudiate it (Rush, 1972, p. 1). He would then become the victim of an ¡°irresistible impulse¡± forced upon the will ¡°through the instrumentality of the passions¡± (Rush, 1830, pp. 262; 355¨C57). In modern terminology, he would be emotionally disturbed or psychopathic, although Poe¡¯s narrator doesn¡¯t snugly fit into a more modern pigeonhole.

However, Rush¡¯s description would seem a pretty good explanation for what ailed the narrator, from the author¡¯s point of view.

Before having read about Rush and his potential influence on Poe, in the first two pages already, I was making judgments on the narrator's state of mental health. For all we know, the old man simply had a cataract over his eye, but it becomes a symbolic focus of terror for the narrator. One of the most oft-occurring fears in paranoid disorders, is the fear of "being watched". I find it rather amazing that Poe, in 1843 already, managed to sketch such a precise description of paranoid delusions. Not only does the narrator have a general fear of "being watched", he also has auditory hallucinations. (Not only does he hear the excessively loud beating of the heart, but in addition "I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.")

There seems to be several layers to the narrator's potential motives: Did he subconsciously covet the old man's wealth? We do not know what relation the old man bears to him - is it a relative (most likely, since he mentions that he "loves" the old man) or, perhaps, an employer?

Did the fact that he coveted the old man's wealth make him feel guilty, did he fear that the "vulture eye" would see into his own impure heart and see his covetousness there?

...and how quickly did the meticulous planner, the self-congratulatory 'master criminal' lose his nerve when his paranoia once more beset him..

I always like to look at a text from various viewpoints of critical theory, and in this particular text, both a Jungian (archetypal) as well as a Freudian interpretation or two, are too good to pass by. It seems obvious to observe that the old man and his eye might be a reference to the one eyed Norse god Odin, who could then (from a Jungian point of view) personify the fear of an all-seeing eye ¨C which could symbolize moral authority, a judgemental god, conscience, or the ¡°parent¡± part of a parent-adult- child personality construct, or, Freud¡¯s super-ego.

Looking especially at Poe¡¯s relationship and history with his foster father, the story can of course also have an Oedipal interpretation, which is quite obvious on the face of it ¨C the son disposes of the father. And indeed, I have seen interpretations that suggest that Edgar is via this story, having revenge on his foster father, Mr John Allan (which accounts for the ¡°Allan¡± in Poe¡¯s name), who abandoned Poe when Allan¡¯s new wife started having children, but as I point out in my id/superego interpretation that follows, it¡¯s the old man who has the last laugh.

So, for a Freudian id/superego interpretation, (in Freud¡¯s model the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part (the ¡®adult¡¯) that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.) the murderous narrator clearly represents the id, which with the help of the ego then ¡®murders¡¯ or kills off the super-ego, or, his conscience. ¡­and yet, his post-murder anxiety shows that it is not so easy to get rid of the superego ¨C and the superego, mounting a counterattack on the ego and id, by causing unbearable levels of anxiety in the narrator, has his revenge in the end.

If you deconstruct the story carefully, also, one cannot help wondering why the narrator goes to the trouble of dismembering the body. He had already smothered and crushed the old man with his own bed (interesting way of killing him?), so why go to the trouble and extra risk of discovery to dismember him?

Musing over this led me to another thought regarding the motive and the method of murder: could the old man be a symbolic external manifestation of the narrator¡¯s own anxiety, which he tries to quell first by domination via secret observation (which seems to work rather well, since he remains calm for the first few nights), but which then flares up again when he realizes that he had been too complacent and self-congratulatory? Of course, his plan doesn¡¯t work in the end, much as he tries to first dominate, then smother, and then even dismember his anxiety. As before in the domination phase, this is only a temporary fix, and under the scrutiny of the police, the heart of terror starts beating again, which results in the downfall of the narrator.

I¡¯ve read a suggestion that the killing of the old man is some sort of private acting out of an inner psycho-drama, which upon discovery by the police would become ¡°public¡± and therefore his angst at the prospect of this new source of shame.

...and that leads to yet another train of thought: A lot of modern psychology deals with the damage that feelings of shame can do to a psyche or personality. So, in yet a slightly different interpretation, one could perhaps posit that the ¡°vulture-eye¡± of the old man, is able to ¡®see¡¯ the narrator¡¯s feelings of shame for whatever his culture has primed him to feel ashamed of. The narrator tries to get rid of his own feelings of shame by disposing of, and even destroying the body of the (imagined) witness to his shame. However, his anxiety boils up yet again, at the fear of the police (symbolic of the other members of his culture) bearing witness to his new source of shame, being his failed attempts at burying his feelings of shame. More proof of the fact that he fears his shame to be seen or to become public, can be found just before he kills the old man, when he says: ¡°And now a new anxiety seized me¡ªthe sound would be heard by a neighbor!¡± So, the beating of the heart seems to be symbolic of his shame and anxiety, and the eye symbolic of discovery and knowledge of that shame.

I imagine that I¡¯ve written enough to show that this short story, barely 5 or 6 pages long, is so sodden with symbolism and subtext that volumes could be written about it. I¡¯ve not even got to the heart yet¡­.

¡­and the most delicious part of the story is, that for all we know this is just a feverish dream being narrated to us in the wild ramblings of a madman¡­ [spoilers removed]

More comments here:/topic/show/...
]]> Die sch?nsten Erz?hlungen 2255963 =The most beautiful stories 458 Hermann Hesse 3518456385 Traveller 0 3.80 2001 Die sch?nsten Erz?hlungen
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/30
shelves: to-read, deutschland, short-fiction
review:

]]> Collected Fictions 17961 Alternate cover edition of ISBN-13: 978-0140286809, ISBN-10/ASIN: 0140286802

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called ¡°the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century¡± collected in a single volume

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper

For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story¡ªfrom his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare¡¯s Memory¡ªJorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.

Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges¡¯s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master¡¯s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.]]> 565 Jorge Luis Borges Traveller 4 4.57 1998 Collected Fictions
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/10/30
shelves: latin-america, short-fiction, partly-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[First Person Singular: Stories]]> 54614599 A riveting new collection of short stories from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami.

The eight masterful stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator: a lonely man. Some of them (like With the Beatles, Cream and On a Stone Pillow ) are nostalgic looks back at youth. Others are set in adulthood--Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, Carnaval, Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey and the stunning title story. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Haruki himself is present, as in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. The stories all touch beautifully on love and loss, childhood and death . . . all with a signature Murakami twist.']]> 245 Haruki Murakami 0593318072 Traveller 3 short-fiction, japan 3.58 2020 First Person Singular: Stories
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/29
date added: 2021/10/29
shelves: short-fiction, japan
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination]]> 196150 222 Edogawa Rampo 0804803196 Traveller 0 to-read, japan, short-fiction 4.07 1956 Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination
author: Edogawa Rampo
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/23
shelves: to-read, japan, short-fiction
review:

]]> The Complete Stories 6248
In the heretofore unpublished Every Move You Make : bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy--here are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent, from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons in Far North Queensland to bohemian Sydney to Ayres Rock in the Great Victoria Desert. These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.

Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf¡¯s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child¡¯s Play . It is a major literary event.]]> 528 David Malouf 0375424970 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.96 2007 The Complete Stories
author: David Malouf
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/15
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> The Pool 14140135 25 Daphne du Maurier Traveller 4 short-fiction
The story has a lot of mystical and semi-religious undertones. The protagonist plays in her mind with religious concepts and rituals of varied origin - some Christian (Jesus on the cross, etc), some pagan (the sacrifice to the pool, etc), and she is aware of Buddha and (one deduces) at least some of the tenets of Buddhism, but these thoughts are all mish-mashed in a playful, childlike manner.

Du Maurier succeeds with a competent depiction of the troubled young mind of this intelligent and highly imaginative pre-pubescent girl, caught on the cusp between the wild abandon of childhood and the structured world of adults. The girl¡¯s way of thinking is still child-like, yet she is starting to grapple with the existential questions that more mature minds struggle with. She is able to look at certain situations with the maturity of objectivity and compassion, and yet is still very child-like in some of her thought-processes. She seems to realize that Jesus and Buddha have aspects in common with one another and recognizes the vengeful aspect of Jehovah in her grandfather when he crushes a bug.

The pool is at first the symbol of the magical world of childhood, filled with endless possibilities, and unmarred by the routines and rules of adult civilization. As she runs to visit the pool at night in order to escape from her hum-drum reality into this fantasy world, the magical spell is broken upon the revelation that [spoilers removed] Of course a pool of water is also a Freudian symbol of the subconscious, so does its fate in the story also symbolize the adult desire to divorce themselves from the subconscious, to tame it and try to subjugate it?

My main beef with the story is that it runs on a bit excessively in the middle, where the little domestic scenes at her grandparents¡¯ home play out ¨C these quickly become boring with repetition. The story would have been even better if it had a third of this kind of hum-drum filler culled from it. In spite of that, I¡¯m still giving it 4 stars for the beautiful rendering of the wildness of the woods and the pool, and of the depiction of the mind of the child grappling to come to terms with the harsh realities of human existence.]]> 3.64 1959 The Pool
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/13
date added: 2021/10/13
shelves: short-fiction
review:
This short story gives a lyrical depiction of a highly imaginative young girl¡¯s passage from childhood to womanhood. The magical world of childhood, where there are no rules and regulations, is poignantly sketched. There¡¯s quite a lot going on here. At first, the girl¡¯s immersion into the natural world is at the forefront. She is an introvert, always trying to escape the demands of her gregarious young brother. She secretly manages to escape to her own private world in the woods which though wild, is yet sanctified by ritual and an almost spiritual beauty.

The story has a lot of mystical and semi-religious undertones. The protagonist plays in her mind with religious concepts and rituals of varied origin - some Christian (Jesus on the cross, etc), some pagan (the sacrifice to the pool, etc), and she is aware of Buddha and (one deduces) at least some of the tenets of Buddhism, but these thoughts are all mish-mashed in a playful, childlike manner.

Du Maurier succeeds with a competent depiction of the troubled young mind of this intelligent and highly imaginative pre-pubescent girl, caught on the cusp between the wild abandon of childhood and the structured world of adults. The girl¡¯s way of thinking is still child-like, yet she is starting to grapple with the existential questions that more mature minds struggle with. She is able to look at certain situations with the maturity of objectivity and compassion, and yet is still very child-like in some of her thought-processes. She seems to realize that Jesus and Buddha have aspects in common with one another and recognizes the vengeful aspect of Jehovah in her grandfather when he crushes a bug.

The pool is at first the symbol of the magical world of childhood, filled with endless possibilities, and unmarred by the routines and rules of adult civilization. As she runs to visit the pool at night in order to escape from her hum-drum reality into this fantasy world, the magical spell is broken upon the revelation that [spoilers removed] Of course a pool of water is also a Freudian symbol of the subconscious, so does its fate in the story also symbolize the adult desire to divorce themselves from the subconscious, to tame it and try to subjugate it?

My main beef with the story is that it runs on a bit excessively in the middle, where the little domestic scenes at her grandparents¡¯ home play out ¨C these quickly become boring with repetition. The story would have been even better if it had a third of this kind of hum-drum filler culled from it. In spite of that, I¡¯m still giving it 4 stars for the beautiful rendering of the wildness of the woods and the pool, and of the depiction of the mind of the child grappling to come to terms with the harsh realities of human existence.
]]> Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Traveller 0 to-read, asia, short-fiction 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/07
shelves: to-read, asia, short-fiction
review:

]]> Prayer for the Living 53336366 Topical and timely, Booker Prize¨Cwinning author Ben Okri¡¯s new collection of short stories blurs parallel realities and walks the line between darkness and magic.

Playful, frightening, shocking--these stories from a writer at the height of his power will make you think, or make you laugh. Sometimes they¡¯ll make you want to look away, but they will always hold your gaze.

These are stories set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, and in a printer¡¯s shop in Lagos. Characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, three little boys, a prison door, and the author himself.

Each one of these twenty-three stories will make you wonder if what you see in the world can really be all there is . . .]]> 216 Ben Okri 1617758639 Traveller 0 3.44 2019 Prayer for the Living
author: Ben Okri
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves: to-read, africa, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl]]> 130105
Containing all the stories from Roald Dahl's world-famous books ¨C Over to You, Someone Like you, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch ¨C plus eight further tales of the unexpected, this is the definitive collection by one of the great masters of the short story. Macabre, unsettling and deliciously enjoyable, these stories make the perfect bedtime read ¨C but be warned, once you've started reading you won't be able to stop . .]]> 768 Roald Dahl Traveller 4 short-fiction, favorites 4.40 2006 The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl
author: Roald Dahl
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves: short-fiction, favorites
review:

]]> Tales of the Unexpected 394689
In these deliciously nasty stories an internationally acclaimed practitioner of the short narrative works his own brand of black magic: tantalizing, amusing, and sometimes terrifying readers into a new sense of what lurks beneath the ordinary. Included in Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected are such notorious gems of the bizarre as "The Sound Machine," "Lamb to Slaughter," "Neck," and "The Landlady."

Cover illustration by Seth Jaben
Cover design by Heidi North

Contents:
- Taste
- Lamb to the Slaughter
- Man from the South
- My Lady Love, My Dove
- Dip in the Pool
- Galloping Foxley
- Skin
- Neck
- Nunc Dimittis
- The Landlady
- William and Mary
- The Way Up to Heaven
- Parson's Pleasure
- Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat
- Royal Jelly
- Edward the Conqueror
- The Sound Machine
- Georgy Porgy
- The Hitchhiker
- Poison
- The Boy Who Talked with Animals
- The Umbrella Man
- Genesis and Catastrophe
- The Butler]]> 471 Roald Dahl 0679729895 Traveller 4 short-fiction, favorites 4.19 1979 Tales of the Unexpected
author: Roald Dahl
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves: short-fiction, favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov]]> 5693 ?
Considered the greatest short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition. From characteristically brief, evocative early pieces such as ¡°The Huntsman¡± and the tour de force ¡°A Boring Story,¡± to his best-known stories such as ¡°The Lady with the Little Dog¡± and his own personal favorite, ¡°The Student,¡± Chekhov¡¯s short fiction possesses the transcendent power of art to awe and change the reader. This monumental edition, expertly translated, is especially faithful to the meaning of Chekhov¡¯s prose and the unique rhythms of his writing, giving readers an authentic sense of his style and a true understanding of his greatness.]]> 467 Anton Chekhov 0553381008 Traveller 4 4.37 1903 Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1903
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves: classics, short-fiction, favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories]]> 18385 David Goldfarb teaches Polish, Russian, and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University. He has written about Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, Zbigniew Herbert, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol.]]> 400 Leo Tolstoy 1593080697 Traveller 5 4.03 The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves: short-fiction, translated, russia, favorites
review:

]]> The Complete Short Stories 780987 The necklace --
The piece of string --
The story of a farm girl --
In the moonlight --
Madame Tellier's excursion --
Love --
Mademoiselle Fifi --
Monsieur Parent --
Useless beauty --
An affair of state --
Babette --
A cock crowed --
Lilie Lala --
A vagabond --
The mountebanks --
Ugly --
The debt --
A Normandy joke --
The father --
The artist --
False alarm --
That pig of a Morin --
Miss Harriet --
The hole --
The inn --
A family--
Bellflower --
In the wood --
The Marquis de Fumerol --
Saved --
The signal --
The devil --
The Venus of Braniza --
The rabbit --
La Morillonne --
Epiphany --
Simon's papa --
Waiter, a bock! --
The sequel to a divorce --
The clown --
The mad woman --
Mademoiselle --
A bad error --
The port --
Ch?li --
Jeroboam --
Virtue in the ballet --
The double pins --
How he got the Legion of Honor --
A crisis --
Graveyard sirens --
Growing old --
A French Enoch Arden --
Julie Romain --
An unreasonable woman --
Rosalie Prudent --
Hippolyte's claim --
Benoist --
Fecundity --
A way to wealth --
Am I insane? --
Forbidden fruit --
The charm dispelled --
Madame Parisse --
Making a convert --
A little walk --
A wife's confession --
A dead woman's secret --
Love's awakening --
Bed no. 29 --
Marroca --
A philosopher ---
A mistake --
Florentine --
Consideration --
Woman's wiles --
Moonlight --
Doubtful happiness --
Humiliation --
The wedding night --
The noncommissioned officer --
In the courtroom --
A peculiar case --
A practical joke --
A strange fancy --
After death --
On cats --
Room no. 11 --
One phase of love --
Good reasons --
A fair exchange --
The tobacco shop --
A poor girl --
The substitute --
A passion --
Caught --
The orderly --
Joseph --
Regret --
The deaf-mute --
Magnetism --
In various roles --
The false gems --
Countess Satan --
A useful house --
The colonel's ideas --
Two little soldiers --
Ghosts --
Was it a dream? --
The new sensation --
Virtue! --
The thief --
The diary of a madman --
On perfumes --
The will --
In his sweetheart's livery --
An unfortunate likeness --
A night in Whitechapel --
Lost! --
The country excursion --
The relics --
A rupture --
Margot's tapers --
The accent --
Profitable business --
Bertha --
The last step --
A m¨¦salliance --
An honest deal --
The log --
Delilah --
The ill-omened groom --
The Odalisque of Senichou --
Bric-a-brac --
The artist's wife --
In the spring --
The real one and the other --
The carter's wench --
The rendezvous --
Solitude --
The man with the blue eyes --
An artifice --
The specter --
The relic --
The Marquis --
A deer park in the provinces --
An adventure --
The bed --
Under the yoke --
A fashionable woman --
Words of love --
The upstart --
Happiness --
Christmas Eve --
The awakening --
The white lady --
Madame Baptiste --
Revenge --
An old maid --
Complication --
Forgiveness --
The white wolf --
Toine --
An enthusiast --
The traveler's story --
A jolly fellow --
A lively friend --
The blind man --
The impolite sex --
The Corsican bandit --
The duel --
The love of long ago --
The farmer's wife --
Beside a dead man --
A queer night in Paris --
A duel --
The umbrella --
The question of Latin --
Mother and son!!! --
He? --
The avenger --
The conservatory --
Letter found on a corpse --
The little cask --
Poor Andrew --
A fishing excursion --
After --
The spasm --
A meeting --
A New Year's gift --
My Uncle Sosthenes --
All over --
My landlady --
The horrible --
The first snowfall --
The wooden shoes --
Boitelle --
Selfishness --
The watchdog --
The dancers --
Christening --
A costly outing --
The man with the dogs --
A king's son --
Mohammed Fripouli --
"Bell" --
The victim --
The Englishman --
Sentiment --
Francis --
The assassin --
Semillante --
On the river --
Suicides --
A miracle --
The accursed bread --
My twenty-five days --
A lucky burglar --
An odd feast --
Sympathy --
A traveler's tale --
Little Louise Roque.]]> 1071 Guy de Maupassant 8171674313 Traveller 5 4.57 1890 The Complete Short Stories
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1890
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves: translated, short-fiction, favorites
review:

]]> The Little Angel 436428
Between the two Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Leonid Andreyev was without a doubt the foremost writer in Russia. His name was always spoken with veneration, in mysterious whispers, as a grim portentous magician who descended into the ultimate depths of the nether side of life and fathomed the beauty and tragedy of the struggle. Leonid Nickolayevitch was born in the province of Oryol, in 1871, and studied law at the University of Moscow. Those were days of suffering and starvation; he gazed into the abyss of sorrow and despair. In January 1894 he made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself by shooting, and then was forced by the authorities to severe penitence, which augmented the natural morbidness of his temperament. As a lawyer his career was short-lived, and he soon abandoned it for literature, beginning as a police-court reporter on the Moscow Courier. In 1902 he published the short story In the Fog, which for the first time brought him universal recognition. He was imprisoned during the revolution of 1905, together with Maxim Gorky, on political charges. Such are the few significant details of his personal life, for the true Andreyev is entirely in his stories and plays.]]> 280 Leonid Andreyev 0946626421 Traveller 0 3.96 1989 The Little Angel
author: Leonid Andreyev
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/07/18
shelves: to-read, russia, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories]]> 27221110
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken¡¯s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: ¡°The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary¡± (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), ¡°Mono No Aware¡± (Hugo Award winner), ¡°The Waves¡± (Nebula Award finalist), ¡°The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species¡± (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), ¡°All the Flavors¡± (Nebula Award finalist), ¡°The Litigation Master and the Monkey King¡± (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre¡¯s history, ¡°The Paper Menagerie¡± (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.]]> 464 Ken Liu 1481424378 Traveller 5 short-fiction
Incredibly sad... I started crying halfway through and was bawling by the end. It felt so true and I love Liu's voice. I'll definitely be looking out for more Liu in the future.]]> 4.36 2016 The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
author: Ken Liu
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2012/03/04
date added: 2018/04/11
shelves: short-fiction
review:
This is a short story.

Incredibly sad... I started crying halfway through and was bawling by the end. It felt so true and I love Liu's voice. I'll definitely be looking out for more Liu in the future.
]]> Stories 21341058 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Featuring ten stories never before translated, dating from 1878 to 1886 (regarded as Joaquim Machado de Assis¡¯s most radically experimental period), this selection of short fiction by Brazil¡¯s greatest author ranges in tone from elegiac and philosophical to impishly ironic. Including the author¡¯s classic essay on world literature¨Calso appearing in English for the first time¨Cand with pieces chosen from his vast body of work for their playfulness, pathos, and stylistic subversion, this collection is an ideal introduction to one of world literature¡¯s greatest talents. (Brazilian Literature Series)

The Psychiatrist;
The Immortal;
The Dictionary;
The Academies of Siam;
The Priest, or The Metaphysics of Style;
To live!;
Ex Cathedra;
Voyage Around Myself;
A Lady;
Trio in A Minor;
Wedding Song;
A Visit From Alcibiades;
On The Ark: Three (Undiscovered) Chapters from the Book of Genesis.]]> 212 Machado de Assis 1564788997 Traveller 0 4.17 Stories
author: Machado de Assis
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/16
shelves: to-read, latin-america, translated, short-fiction
review:

]]> My Best Stories 6067967 ? is a dazzling selection of stories¡ªseventeen favourites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. The stories are arranged in the order in which they were written, allowing even the most devoted Munro admirer to discover how her work developed. "Royal Beatings" shows us right away how far we are from the romantic world of happy endings. "The Albanian Virgin" smashes the idea that all of her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario's "Alice Munro Country." "A Wilderness Station" breaks short story rules by transporting us back to the 1830s and then jumping forward more than a hundred years. And the final story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which was adapted into the film Away from Her, leads us far beyond the turkey-plucking world of young girls into unflinching old age. Every story in this selection is superb. It is a book to read¡ªand reread¡ªvery slowly, savouring each separate story. This collection of small masterpieces deserves a place in every book lover's home.]]> 576 Alice Munro 0143170392 Traveller 0 4.10 2006 My Best Stories
author: Alice Munro
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/11
shelves: nobel-laureates, short-fiction, partly-read
review:

]]> London's Overthrow 13778819 96 China Mi¨¦ville Traveller 3 speculative, short-fiction 3.69 2012 London's Overthrow
author: China Mi¨¦ville
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/31
date added: 2015/12/31
shelves: speculative, short-fiction
review:

]]> Ficciones 239598 Ficciones is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century. Influenced by writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll, Stevenson and Cervantes, Borges is nevertheless a complete original who can turn dry logical puzzles into enchanting fables. The pieces in this volume represent his most accomplished work.]]> 142 Jorge Luis Borges 1857151666 Traveller 5 4.22 1944 Ficciones
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1944
rating: 5
read at: 2015/12/31
date added: 2015/12/31
shelves: latin-america, short-fiction, translated
review:

]]> Borges and I 12534843 Jorge Luis Borges 1101222441 Traveller 5 latin-america, short-fiction 4.21 1957 Borges and I
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at: 2015/12/31
date added: 2015/12/31
shelves: latin-america, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories]]> 323328 Death in Venice, this volume includes "Mario and the Magician," "Disorder and Early Sorrow," "A Man and His Dog," "Felix Krull," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "Tristan," and "Tonio Kr?ger."

These stories, as direct as Thomas Mann's novels are complex, are perfect illustrations of their author's belief that "a story must tell itself." Varying in theme, in style, in tone, each is in its own way characteristic of Mann's prodigious talents. From the high art of the famous title novella ("A story," Mann said, "of death...of the voluptuousness of doom"), to the irony of "Felix Krull," the early story on which he later based his comic novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, they are stunning testimony to the mastery and virtuosity of a literary giant.

Translated from the German by H.T. Lowe-Porter.]]> 402 Thomas Mann 0679722068 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.90 1936 Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
author: Thomas Mann
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/12/19
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Scribner Classics)]]> 4645 The ideal introduction to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Selected from Winner Take Nothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical "Fathers and Sons," which alludes, for the first time in Hemingway's career, to his father's suicide; "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," a "brilliant fusion of personal observation, hearsay and invention," wrote Hemingway's biographer, Carlos Baker; and the title story itself, of which Hemingway said: "I put all the true stuff in," with enough material, he boasted, to fill four novels. Beautiful in their simplicity, startling in their originality, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America's master storytellers at the top of his form.

]]> 144 Ernest Hemingway 0684862212 Traveller 3 short-fiction, banned-books 3.90 1936 The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Scribner Classics)
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1936
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2015/12/17
shelves: short-fiction, banned-books
review:

]]> The Old Man and the Sea 2165 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

This short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses¡ªspecifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author's Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.]]> 96 Ernest Hemingway 0684830493 Traveller 4 3.81 1952 The Old Man and the Sea
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2005/10/16
date added: 2015/12/17
shelves: short-fiction, 1001-books, banned-books
review:

]]> The Lottery 6219656
¡°The Lottery¡± stands out as one of the most famous short stories in American literary history. Originally published in The New Yorker, the author immediately began receiving letters from readers who demanded an explanation of the story¡¯s meaning. ¡°The Lottery¡± has been adapted for stage, television, radio and film.
]]> 30 Shirley Jackson 1563127873 Traveller 4 4.08 1948 The Lottery
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1948
rating: 4
read at: 2015/12/15
date added: 2015/12/17
shelves: short-fiction, three-and-a-half-stars, banned-books
review:
I think the story, especially at the time of publication, achieved what it set out to do - of course the idea is a bit passe by now, but at the time it must have been something new, fresh and shocking, if public reaction to it is anything to go by.
]]> Revenge 16156006
From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.]]> 162 Y¨­ko Ogawa 1846555027 Traveller 0 3.96 1998 Revenge
author: Y¨­ko Ogawa
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/12/09
shelves: asia, japan, translated, short-fiction, to-read
review:

]]> The Fourth Pig 25378717
Mitchison rewrites well-known stories such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Little Mermaid," and she picks up the tune of a ballad with admiring fidelity to form, as in "Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man." Her experimental approach is encapsulated in the title story, which is a dark departure from "The Three Little Pigs." And in the play "Kate Crackernuts," the author dramatizes in charms and songs a struggle against the subterranean powers of fairies who abduct humans for their pleasure. Marina Warner, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and fiction author, provides an insightful introduction that reveals why Mitchison's writing remains significant.

"The Fourth Pig" is a literary rediscovery, a pleasure that will reawaken interest in a remarkable writer and personality.]]> 246 Naomi Mitchison Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.50 1936 The Fourth Pig
author: Naomi Mitchison
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/12/02
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> The Necklace 420275 48 Guy de Maupassant 1568461933 Traveller 5 short-fiction 3.86 1884 The Necklace
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1884
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/11/13
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> Rhapsody (Library of Wales) 6869919 268 Dorothy Edwards 1905762461 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.14 1927 Rhapsody (Library of Wales)
author: Dorothy Edwards
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/10/27
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> Ghost Stories of an Antiquary 1556093 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary is the first Horror short-story collection by British writer M.R. James (AKA: Montague Rhodes James) published in 1904 (some had previously appeared in magazines). Some later editions under this title contain both the original collection and its successor, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), combined in one volume. This collection features some of M.R. James¡¯ greatest tales of the supernatural world crossing over into our own. In Number 13, an inn that previously belonged to an alchemist changes dimensions in the night. The Mezzotint features a painting of a house reenacting a gruesome scene from the house¡¯s history. In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, an antiquary who has discovered the location of a treasure gets far more than he bargained for.

There are eight classics by great Edwardian scholar and storyteller. "Number Thirteen," "The Mezzotint," "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook," and more. Renowned for their wit, erudition and suspense, these stories are each masterfully constructed and represent a high achievement in the ghost genre. Montague Rhodes James (1862¨C1936) was a medieval scholar; Provost of King's College, Cambridge. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. His stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasize the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions. He is best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature. One of James' most important achievements was to redefine the ghost story for the new century by dispensing with many of the formal gothic trappings of his predecessors, and replacing them with more realistic contemporary settings.]]> 157 M.R. James 0486227588 Traveller 0 4.08 1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
author: M.R. James
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1904
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/10/05
shelves: to-read, gothic, horror, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings]]> 17717
Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges' writing, some forty pieces drawn from various books of his published over the years. The translations are by Harriet de Onis, Anthony Kerrigan, and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography.]]> 260 Jorge Luis Borges 0811200124 Traveller 0 4.48 1962 Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/09/16
shelves: currently-reading, translated, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde]]> 4929904 223 Naomi Lewis 0872260895 Traveller 4 short-fiction 4.20 The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde
author: Naomi Lewis
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/04/12
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> The Grandmothers 400608 Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.]]> 311 Doris Lessing 0007152817 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.55 2003 The Grandmothers
author: Doris Lessing
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/02/19
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> Selected Stories 160313
This collection gathers forty-two of Walser's stories. Encompassing everything from journal entries, notes on literature, and biographical sketches to anecdotes, fables, and visions, it is an ideal introduction to this fascinating writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."

Response to a Request
Flower Days
Trousers
Two Strange Stories
Balloon Journey
Kleist in Thum
The Job Application
The Boat
A Little Ramble
Helbling's Story
The Little Berliner
Nervous
The Walk
So! "I've Got You"
Nothing at All
Kienast
Poests
Frau Wilke
The Street
Snowdrops
Winter
The She-Owl
Knocking
Titus
Vladimir
Parisian Newspapers
The Monkey
Dostoevsky's Idiot
Am I Dreaming?
The Little Tree
Stork and Porcupine
A Contribution to the Celebration of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
A Sort of Speech
A Letter to Therese Breitbach
A Village Tale
The Aviator
The Pimp
Masters and Workers
Essay on Freedom
A Biedermeier Story
The Honeymoon
Thoughts on Cezanne]]> 252 Robert Walser 0940322986 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.22 1982 Selected Stories
author: Robert Walser
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/02/12
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> Night Soul and Other Stories 10337667 304 Joseph McElroy 1564786706 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction, po-mo 0.0 2011 Night Soul and Other Stories
author: Joseph McElroy
name: Traveller
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/01/31
shelves: to-read, short-fiction, po-mo
review:

]]> The Dead 23289 100 James Joyce Traveller 0 4.03 1914 The Dead
author: James Joyce
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1914
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/01/30
shelves: to-read, modernism, short-fiction
review:

]]> Her Smoke Rose Up Forever 748044
These 18 darkly complex short stories and novellas touch upon human nature and perception, metaphysics and epistemology, and gender and sexuality, foreshadowing a world in which biological tendencies bring about the downfall of humankind. Revisions from the author's notes are included, allowing a deeper view into her world and a better understanding of her work. The Nebula Award¨Cwinning short story Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, the Hugo Award¨Cwinning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and the Hugo and Nebula Award¨Cwinning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? are included.


The stories of Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree Jr. (Up the Walls of the World) until her death in 1987, have been heretofore available mostly in out-of-print collections. Thus the 18 accomplished stories here will be welcomed by new readers and old fans. "The Screwfly Solution" describes a chilling, elegant answer to the population problem. In "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," the title tells the tale--species survival insured by imprinted drives--but the story's force is in its exquisite, lyrical prose and its suggestion that personal uniqueness is possible even within biological imperatives. "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is a future boy-meets-girl story with a twist unexpected by the players. "The Women Men Don't See" displays Tiptree's keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary. In Hugo and Nebula award-winning "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", astronauts flying by the sun slip forward 500 years and encounter a culture that successfully questions gender roles in ours.

Contents

Introduction by Michael Swanwick

The Last Flight of Doctor Ain
The Screwfly Solution
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill¡¯s Side
The Girl Who Was Plugged In
The Man Who Walked Home
And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways
The Women Men Don¡¯t See
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!
Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
With Delicate Mad Hands
A Momentary Taste of Being
We Who Stole the Dream
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death
On the Last Afternoon
She Waits for All Men Born
Slow Music
And So On, and So On]]> 520 James Tiptree Jr. 0870541609 Traveller 0 4.22 1990 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
author: James Tiptree Jr.
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/01/17
shelves: to-read, short-fiction, sf-fantasy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Books of Blood: Volume One (Books of Blood, #1)]]> 761023
Never one to shy away from the unimaginable or the unspeakable, Clive Barker breathes life into our deepest, darkest nightmares, creating visions that are at once terrifying, tender, and witty.

The Books of Blood confirm what horror fans everywhere have known for a long time: We will be hearing from Clive Barker for many years to come. This first volume contains the short stories : "The Book of Blood," "The Midnight Meat Train," "The Yattering and Jack," "Sex, Death, and Starshine," and "In the Hills, the Cities."]]> 210 Clive Barker 0425083896 Traveller 2 4.06 1984 Books of Blood: Volume One (Books of Blood, #1)
author: Clive Barker
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1984
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2015/01/16
shelves: short-fiction, macabre, history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best Short Stories of O. Henry]]> 14467 368 O. Henry 0679601228 Traveller 4 short-fiction 4.26 1945 The Best Short Stories of O. Henry
author: O. Henry
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1945
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/01/16
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> In a Grove 8132998
"In a Grove" is an early modernist short story consisting of seven varying accounts of the murder of a samurai, Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose corpse has been found in a bamboo forest near Kyoto. Each section simultaneously clarifies and obfuscates what the reader knows about the murder, eventually creating a complex and contradictory vision of events that brings into question humanity's ability or willingness to perceive and transmit objective truth.

The story is often praised as being among the greatest in Japanese literature.]]> 14 Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa Traveller 5 Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories.

I'm hovering on the brink of giving this particular short story 5 stars, just for the premise alone. ( Having more than one protagonist (or no specific protagonist at all) , and the differing viewpoints that these protagonsists have on the same set of events.)

The translation also came across as a lot more elegant than some of Akutagawa's other stories. I've heard that the film that was partly based on this story, Kurosawa's film "Rashomon", actually improves on the characterizations, and if so, I don't want to give the story top marks if it could conceivably have been even better.

I'll write a proper review once I've had a chance to view the film.

In the meantime, may I once more express my disgruntled irritation that GR doesn't allow for half-stars, in which case I could have slipped out of my predicament by giving this 4 and a half stars.]]> 4.05 1922 In a Grove
author: Ry¨±nosuke Akutagawa
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2012/03/22
date added: 2015/01/16
shelves: short-fiction, review-pending, japan
review:
This story is contained in one or two of the anthologies of Akutagawa's short stories. The easiest to get hold of might be Rashamon and Other Stories or Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories.

I'm hovering on the brink of giving this particular short story 5 stars, just for the premise alone. ( Having more than one protagonist (or no specific protagonist at all) , and the differing viewpoints that these protagonsists have on the same set of events.)

The translation also came across as a lot more elegant than some of Akutagawa's other stories. I've heard that the film that was partly based on this story, Kurosawa's film "Rashomon", actually improves on the characterizations, and if so, I don't want to give the story top marks if it could conceivably have been even better.

I'll write a proper review once I've had a chance to view the film.

In the meantime, may I once more express my disgruntled irritation that GR doesn't allow for half-stars, in which case I could have slipped out of my predicament by giving this 4 and a half stars.
]]> A House of Pomegranates 2298136 "The Young King"
"The Birthday of the Infanta"
"The Fisherman and his Soul"
"The Star-child"
Readers of all ages will be delighted by these fanciful tales.]]> 104 Oscar Wilde 1420927353 Traveller 5 short-fiction 3.85 1888 A House of Pomegranates
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1888
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/01/16
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> Seven Gothic Tales 669305 420 Isak Dinesen 0679736417 Traveller 0 3.96 1934 Seven Gothic Tales
author: Isak Dinesen
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/12/26
shelves: to-read, 2015-year-of-women, short-fiction
review:

]]> Black Tickets: Stories 420183 Black Tickets now stands as a classic.

With an uncanny ability to depict the lives of men and women who rarely register in American literature, Phillips writes stories that lay bare their suffering and joy. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother. These are great American stories that have earned a privileged place in modern literature.

Wedding picture --
Home --
Blind girls --
Lechery --
Mamasita --
Black tickets --
The powder of the angels, and I'm yours --
Stripper --
El Paso --
Under the boardwalk --
Sweethearts --
1934 --
Solo dance --
The heavenly animal --
Happy --
Stars --
The patron --
Strangers in the night --
Souvenir --
What it takes to keep a young girl alive --
Cheers --
Snow --
Satisfaction --
Country --
Slave --
Accidents --
Gemcrack]]> 288 Jayne Anne Phillips 0375727353 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.00 1979 Black Tickets: Stories
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/10/28
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Thousand Years of Good Prayers]]> 253860
¡°Immortality,¡± winner of The Paris Review¡¯s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In ¡°The Princess of Nebraska,¡± a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives.

¡°After a Life¡± illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in ¡°A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,¡± in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.

These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.]]> 220 Yiyun Li 081297333X Traveller 0 to-read, asia, short-fiction 3.94 2005 A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
author: Yiyun Li
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/10/08
shelves: to-read, asia, short-fiction
review:

]]> The Breaking Point: Stories 18869984 255 Daphne du Maurier 0316253596 Traveller 0 short-fiction 3.83 1959 The Breaking Point: Stories
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/06/01
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque Volume 1 (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, #1)]]> 247797
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Volume 1

"Morella"
"Lionizing"
"William Wilson"
"The Man That Was Used Up ¡ª A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign"
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
"The Duc de L'Omelette"
"MS. Found in a Bottle"
"Bon-Bon"
"Shadow ¡ª A Parable"
"The Devil in the Belfry"
"Ligeia"
"King Pest ¡ª A Tale Containing an Allegory"
"The Signora Zenobia"
"The Scythe of Time"]]> 140 Edgar Allan Poe 1419150634 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.89 1839 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque Volume 1 (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, #1)
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1839
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/05/21
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> After the Quake 11299 147 Haruki Murakami Traveller 0 to-read, japan, short-fiction 3.81 2000 After the Quake
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/05/07
shelves: to-read, japan, short-fiction
review:

]]> Year's Best Fantasy 8 2975771 375 David G. Hartwell 1892391767 Traveller 3 fantasy, short-fiction 3.69 2008 Year's Best Fantasy 8
author: David G. Hartwell
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/04/04
shelves: fantasy, short-fiction
review:

]]> Goodbye, Columbus 29744
?1993 Phillip Roth (P)2009]]> 320 Philip Roth 0679601597 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.88 1959 Goodbye, Columbus
author: Philip Roth
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/02/23
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Granta Book of the African Short Story]]> 11039009
Disdaining the narrowly nationalist and political preoccupations of previous generations, these writers are characterized by their engagement with the wider world and the opportunities offered by the internet, the end of apartheid, the end of civil wars and dictatorships, and the possibilities of free movement around the world. Many of them live outside Africa. Their work is inspired by travel and exile. They are liberated, global and expansive. As Dambudzo Marechera wrote: 'If you're a writer for a specific nation or specific race, then f*** you." These are the stories of a new Africa, punchy, self-confident and defiant.
Includes stories by:
Rachida el-Charni; Henrietta Rose-Innes; George Makana Clark; Ivan Vladislavic; Mansoura Ez-Eldin; Fatou Diome; Aminatta Forna; Manuel Rui; Patrice Nganang; Leila Aboulela; Zoe Wicomb; Alaa Al Aswany; Doreen Baingana; E.C. Osondu]]> 344 Helon Habila 1847082475 Traveller 3 short-fiction, translated 3.89 2011 The Granta Book of the African Short Story
author: Helon Habila
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2014/02/13
date added: 2014/02/13
shelves: short-fiction, translated
review:

]]> Secrets of the Gnomes 707243
Poortvliet and Huygen are not invited as mere observers, however, for after a meal of mushrooms and cream-tasting as if were made of "everything that light, air, sun, moon, and earth could produce"-they find that they have been turned into gnomes themselves! The authors take a penetrating look at their subjects: they learn of the tender emotional life of a gnome; they see and diagram the mechanics of the ingenious gnome technology; they observe how gnomes administer justice in the wild; they are told how fairy tales first began (Little Red Riding Hood was actually a gnome). And, best of all, they are allowed to see parts of the magical Secret Book.

Endowed with gnome characteristics (which include exceptional vision and heightened senses of touch, smell taste, and hearing), complete with peaked gnome caps, Poortvliet and Huygen are led from Lapland across the Siberian wilderness by Nicholas, their gruff by kindly guide who teaches them the secrets of survival in the icy north. Because of the gnomes' rapport with living creatures, the three travel in a troika pulled by lemmings, they are borne on a fox's back and on the head of a moose-they are even carried by the abominable snowman!

Lovers of gnomes will celebrate the arrival of this new volume and will delight in the opportunity to know these elusive creatures better. Scores of enchanting illustrations by Dutch artist Rien Poortvliet record the comings and goings of gnomes and the loving interaction with nature for which they are so famous.]]> 200 Wil Huygen 0810916142 Traveller 5 children, short-fiction These little gnomes are quite similar to British gnomes and brownies, however, they are more industrious and helpful.

These are excellent books for children; (and definitely the kind you'd keep into adulthood).

Inbetween little folktales and self-made-up stories about the fey folk, the authors pop in some general knowledge stuff, like for instance botany, biology and geology and little projects of things the gnomes make to try out yourself (especially if you're a children), with snippets of knowledge about all kinds of things, some as far afield as the Egyptian pyramids, and a nice lesson on useful knots. (Yes, as in knots that you tie in a rope.)

So, some useful and interesting stuff in there even if you aren't a children.

All of it demonstrated with cute and appealing illustrations.

EDIT: It has just been brought to my attention, that what I have, is part of the original 28 volume set that was published in the 1980's.

These volumes have been republished (possibly with some of the material excluded) in one large edition, The Complete Gnomes.

Paquita Maria Sanchez wrote a cool, beautifully illustrated review on these interesting li'l creatures:

/review/show...

Paquita Maria has the copy that I accidentally chose to review, thinking it was the same as the 28 volume set, but apparently the single hardcover volume featured here, doesn't contain a lot of the features that would appeal to kids, that are contained in the 28 volume set reviewed above.

I won't remove this review, since there are already comments made in the thread below, but please take note that these are not exactly the same books.

The cuteness and the 5 star rating still applies, nevertheless.]]> 4.27 1981 Secrets of the Gnomes
author: Wil Huygen
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2014/01/31
date added: 2014/01/31
shelves: children, short-fiction
review:

These little gnomes are quite similar to British gnomes and brownies, however, they are more industrious and helpful.

These are excellent books for children; (and definitely the kind you'd keep into adulthood).

Inbetween little folktales and self-made-up stories about the fey folk, the authors pop in some general knowledge stuff, like for instance botany, biology and geology and little projects of things the gnomes make to try out yourself (especially if you're a children), with snippets of knowledge about all kinds of things, some as far afield as the Egyptian pyramids, and a nice lesson on useful knots. (Yes, as in knots that you tie in a rope.)

So, some useful and interesting stuff in there even if you aren't a children.

All of it demonstrated with cute and appealing illustrations.

EDIT: It has just been brought to my attention, that what I have, is part of the original 28 volume set that was published in the 1980's.

These volumes have been republished (possibly with some of the material excluded) in one large edition, The Complete Gnomes.

Paquita Maria Sanchez wrote a cool, beautifully illustrated review on these interesting li'l creatures:

/review/show...

Paquita Maria has the copy that I accidentally chose to review, thinking it was the same as the 28 volume set, but apparently the single hardcover volume featured here, doesn't contain a lot of the features that would appeal to kids, that are contained in the 28 volume set reviewed above.

I won't remove this review, since there are already comments made in the thread below, but please take note that these are not exactly the same books.

The cuteness and the 5 star rating still applies, nevertheless.
]]> The Bridegroom 33566 225 Ha Jin 0099422174 Traveller 0 to-read, asia, short-fiction 3.51 2000 The Bridegroom
author: Ha Jin
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/01/29
shelves: to-read, asia, short-fiction
review:

]]> The Piazza Tales 308644
1."The Piazza"
2."Bartleby the Scrivener" (first published in Putnam's November and December 1853)
3."Benito Cereno" (first published in Putnam's October, November and December 1855)
4."The Lightning-Rod Man" (first published in Putnam's August 1854)
5."The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles" (first published in Putnam's March, April, and May 1854)
6."The Bell-Tower" (first published in Putnam's August 1855)]]> 189 Herman Melville 1603120262 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.95 1856 The Piazza Tales
author: Herman Melville
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1856
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/01/26
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> McSweeney's #45 17707975 ²Ñ³¦³§·É±ð±ð²Ô±ð²â¡¯²õ has won multiple literary awards and has had numerous stories appear in annual ?best of¡± anthologies.]]> 448 Dave Eggers 1938073630 Traveller 0 4.10 2013 McSweeney's #45
author: Dave Eggers
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/01/16
shelves: to-read, short-fiction, speculative
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century]]> 1777785 336 Alexander Kluge 0811217361 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.98 2003 The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century
author: Alexander Kluge
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/11/20
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies]]> 54574 304 Ken Kalfus 0743400755 Traveller 0 3.82 1999 Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies
author: Ken Kalfus
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/11/16
shelves: to-read, short-fiction, russia
review:

]]> Selected Stories 1770418 545 Alice Munro 0679446273 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.15 1985 Selected Stories
author: Alice Munro
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/20
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> In the Fertile Land 3675212 220 Gabriel Josipovici 0856357162 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.14 1987 In the Fertile Land
author: Gabriel Josipovici
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/19
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories]]> 218659 Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.]]> 269 Flannery O'Connor Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.25 1965 Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/10/10
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Works of O. Henry. (200+ Works). Incl: The Ransom of Red Chief, The Cop and the Anthem, The Gift of the Magi, A Retrieved Reformation, After Twenty Years, ... San Rosario & more (Mobi Collected Works)]]> 6326281
List of Works by Genre and Title
List of Works in Alphabetical Order
O. Henry Biography

Short Stories Collections :: Short Stories

Short Stories Collections
Cabbages and Kings (1904)
The Four Million (1906)
Heart of the West (1910)
Options (1909)
Roads of Destiny (1909)
Sixes and Sevens (1911)
Strictly Business (1910)
The Trimmed Lamp (1907)
The Voice of the City (1908)
Waifs and Strays (1917)
Whirligigs (1910)

Short Stories
Gentle Grafter illustrated
Rolling Stones illustrated

232 Stories A-Z

According To Their Lights
The Admiral
The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes
After Twenty Years
An Afternoon Miracle
An Adjustment of Nature
The Assessor of Success
Art and the Bronco
At Arms with Morpheus
Babes in the Jungle
The Badge of Policeman o'Roon
Best-Seller
Between Rounds
A Bird of Bagdad
A Blackjack Bargainer
Blind Man's Holiday
Brickdust Row
The Brief D¨¦but of Tildy
Buried Treasure
The Buyer From Cactus City
By Courier
The Caballero's Way
The Cactus
The Caliph and the Cad
The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock
A Call Loan
The Call of the Tame
Calloway's Code
Caught
The Champion of the Weather
A Chaparral Christmas Gift
A Chaparral Prince
Cherchez la Femme
Christmas by Injunction
The Church with an Overshot-Wheel
The City of Dreadful Night
The Clarion Call
A Comedy in Rubber
The Coming-out of Maggie
The Complete Life of John Hopkins
Compliments of the Season
Confessions of a Humorist
The Cop and the Anthem
A Cosmopolite in a Caf¨¦
The Count and the Wedding Guest
The Country of Elusion
Cupid ¨¤ la Carte
Cupid's Exile Number Two
The Day We Celebrate
The Day Resurgent
The Defeat of the City
A Departmental Case
The Detective Detector
The Diamond of Kali
Dicky
The Discounters of Money
The Dog and the Playlet
The Door of Unrest
A Double-Dyed Deceiver
Dougherty's Eye-Opener
The Duel
The Duplicity of Hargraves
The Easter of the Soul
Elsie in New York
The Emancipation of Billy
The Enchanted Kiss
The Enchanted Profile
Extradited from Bohemia
The Ferry of Unfulfilment
The Fifth Wheel
The Fool-Killer
"Fox-in-the-Morning"
The Flag Paramount
Friends in San Rosario
The Foreign Policy of Company 99
The Fourth in Salvador
From the Cabby's Seat
From Each According to His Ability
The Furnished Room
Georgia's Ruling
A Ghost of a Chance
The Gift of the Magi
"Girl"
The Girl and the Graft
The Girl and the Habit
The Gold That Glittered
The Greater Coney
The Green Door
The Guardian of the Accolade
"The Guilty Party"--an East Side Tragedy
The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss
The Handbook of Hymen
The Harbinger
A Harlem Tragedy
He Also Serves
The Head-Hunter
Hearts and Crosses
Hearts and Hands
The Hiding of Black Bill
The Higher Abdication
The Higher Pragmatism
Holding Up a Train
Hygeia at the Solito
The Hypotheses of Failure
T]]> 2198 O. Henry 1607784114 Traveller 4 short-fiction 4.31 1984 Works of O. Henry. (200+ Works). Incl: The Ransom of Red Chief, The Cop and the Anthem, The Gift of the Magi, A Retrieved Reformation, After Twenty Years, ... San Rosario & more (Mobi Collected Works)
author: O. Henry
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/08/23
shelves: short-fiction
review:

]]> Masters of the Short Story 12212268 So, which stories did we include? Read to find out!]]> Delphi Classics Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 4.50 Masters of the Short Story
author: Delphi Classics
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/02/17
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain]]> 16468643 "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" is Robert Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of lyrical and poignant stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its enduring impact on the Vietnamese. Written in a soaring prose, Butler's haunting and powerful stories blend Vietnamese folklore and contemporary American realities, creating a vibrant panorama that is epic in its scope. This new edition includes two previously uncollected stories--"Missing" and "Salem"--that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam to explore the experiences of a former Vietcong soldier and an American MIA.]]> 288 Robert Olen Butler 0802193897 Traveller 0 to-read, asia, short-fiction 4.00 1992 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
author: Robert Olen Butler
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/02/13
shelves: to-read, asia, short-fiction
review:

]]> Too Much Happiness: Stories 6464937
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers¡ªthe winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the ¡°deep-holes¡± in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy¡¯s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky¡ªa late-nineteenth-century Russian ¨¦migr¨¦ and mathematician¡ªon a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Dimensions --
Fiction --
Wenlock edge --
Deep-holes --
Free radicals --
Face --
Some women --
Child's play --
Wood --
Too much happiness]]> 304 Alice Munro 0307269760 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.87 2009 Too Much Happiness: Stories
author: Alice Munro
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/11/27
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> Delta of Venus 11041
In Delta of Venus Ana?s Nin penned a lush, magical world where the characters of her imagination possess the most universal of desires and exceptional of talents. Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru. Delta of Venus is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from the master of erotic writing.

Part of the Quality Paperback Book Club series with limited-edition art cover. Cover art painted by Monica Elias.]]> 271 Ana?s Nin 1579125743 Traveller 0 to-read, short-fiction 3.67 1977 Delta of Venus
author: Ana?s Nin
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/11/04
shelves: to-read, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Universal History of Iniquity]]> 44045
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 120 Jorge Luis Borges 0142437891 Traveller 0 short-fiction, partly-read 4.03 1935 A Universal History of Iniquity
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1935
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/07/06
shelves: short-fiction, partly-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories]]> 357727 Cold Hand in Mine was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977. The story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal won Aickman the World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.

Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story (Pages from a Young Girl's Journal) but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.

? The Swords
? The Real Road to the Church
? Niemandswasser
? Pages from a Young Girl's Journal
? The Hospice
? The Same Dog
? Meeting Mr. Millar
? The Clock Watcher]]> 215 Robert Aickman 0899684165 Traveller 0 to-read, dark, short-fiction 3.97 1974 Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories
author: Robert Aickman
name: Traveller
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/07/03
shelves: to-read, dark, short-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three (Books of Blood, #1-3)]]> 32626 Books of Blood is a welcome chance to acquire the 16 remarkable horror short stories with which he kicked off his career. For those who already know these tales, the poignant introduction is a window on the creator's mind. Reflecting back after 14 years, Barker writes:

I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore.... We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Reading these stories over, I feel a little of both. Some of the simple energies that made these words flow through my pen--that made the phrases felicitous and the ideas sing--have gone. I lost their maker a long time ago.

These enthusiastic tales are not ashamed of visceral horror, of blood splashing freely across the page: "The Midnight Meat Train," a grisly subway tale that surprises you with one twist after another; "The Yattering and Jack," about a hilarious demon who possesses a Christmas turkey; "In the Hills, the Cities," an unusual example of an original horror premise; "Dread," a harrowing non-supernatural tale about being forced to realize your worst nightmare; "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," about a woman who kills men with her mind. Some of the tales are more successful than others, but all are distinguished by strikingly beautiful images of evil and destruction. No horror library is complete without them. --Fiona Webster

]]> 507 Clive Barker 0425165582 Traveller 0 4.19 1984 Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three (Books of Blood, #1-3)
author: Clive Barker
name: Traveller
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/06/21
shelves: horror, short-fiction, partly-read
review:

]]>