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Post by callipygias on Oct 28, 2010 20:59:13 GMT -5
Except for the remote controls, Coke, and tube of Pringles I thoughtfully moved aside for this pic, my coffee table's looked pretty much like this for the last year: (The bookcases overflowed quite a while ago.) (And keep your hands off my Payday bar.) I haven't read an actual novel in over a year, it's been all short stories. I figure I've now read about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of all published short stories. More than half of the stories on my favorites list were discovered because of it, so it's an understatement to say it's been enjoyable. 11 of my top 20 were discovered because of the list, even. There are also a few in my top 50 that were discovered because of the board. Two things I learned, 1) when it comes to quantity and quality America pretty much rules short storydom, and 2) because of how quick the turnover is with short stories, I guess, some authors' repetitive habits can become pretty annoying after a while; a single word or phrase, repeated often enough, can ruin otherwise good stories. Like 'slag' in apocalyptic sci-fi. I know it's a good word for that kind of story, but jeesh! Philip Dick uses it in three consecutive paragraphs (short paragraphs!) in Autofac. Another example is "...and all," in almost every one of Salinger's short stories. To me that belongs to Holden Caulfield, but it kept popping up in Nine Stories till I had to set it aside... permanently! Every decade is represented from the 1830s to the 2000s except the 1880s. There are over 40 different authors on the list. (Though there were two authors I had to limit to one spot each, otherwise they'd have had too many.) I'll provide a link to the full text when it's available. I'll try to remember SPOILER warnings just in case. Feel free to offer recommendations, opinions, recipes, and Payday bars.
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Post by callipygias on Oct 28, 2010 22:38:54 GMT -5
#50 Twilight (1934) John W. Campbell Wrong forum. I meant the Twilight that made it into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame's "Greatest Sci Fi Stories of All Time" publication: Twilight's full text (About 17 pages.) The story is narrated in then-present-day 1932 by a man named Bart, who re-tells what was told to him by Jim Bendell, who re-tells what was told to him by a man he found lying unconscious on the side of the road at night. The stranger, Ares Sen Kenlin, wakes while Jim is driving him to a doctor, and as they talk Jim discovers the man is a scientist from the year 3059 who experiments with time and space, and who is himself an experiment of his geneticist father, and that he has just returned from a trip seven million years into Earth's future, only he overshot the return by about a thousand years. Jim is all but hypnotized by the man's "magnificence," and though he tries to sound skeptical as he tells Bart about the "nut" from the future, it's easy for Bart to see the experience has him disturbed. The thing I like most about this story is the impressionistic feeling it gives of an extremely distant future. So much sci-fi imagines an apocalyptic end to mankind, or at least to civilization, but Twilight presents a single moment in the span of man's enormous time line when, after apparently accomplishing all we could, we are simply petering out -- "withering in our perfection." While most cities are deserted, including the one Kenlin first enters (which is kept in perfect working order by machines created to care for men though the city hadn't housed a man in three hundred thousand years), Kenlin soon finds a small population in another city. He describes them as kindly, bewildered little misshapen people with huge heads, lonely beyond hope, and he wonders at the perfect machines they created to care for them--that are all that keeps them going, in fact. He wonders that the machines will continue on, repairing themselves when necessary, surviving man until, "When Earth begins to crack and break, those perfect, ceaseless machines will try to repair her." So mankind lives its twilight in what seems uncomprehending luxury and with no lasting interest to sustain him. This might have been higher on my list if not for the kind of forced way Campbell mentions cities of the 31st century with names like Yawk City, Neva'th City, Shkago, Paree, Singpor, San Frisco. Kind of a silly detail that felt tacked on for novelty. John W. Campbell
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Post by callipygias on Oct 30, 2010 15:04:00 GMT -5
#49 Midnight (1946) Jack Snow "Between the hour of eleven and midnight John Ware made ready to perform the ceremony that would climax the years of homage he had paid to the dark powers of evil." John Ware spent his life worshiping evil. He'd purchased or stolen every artifact, studied every tome, performed every ritual--including human sacrifice--all to fulfill his desire to join the forces of evil. And now he had finally found the way: "In John Ware's chamber stood an ancient clock, tall as a human being, and abhorrently fashioned from age-yellowed ivory... a dark and revolting nimbus hung about it and it seemed to exude a loathsome animus from its repellently human form." At midnight he will leave his body and for that hour perform unspeakable evil on men. **SPOILER**He succeeds -- "That which he had summoned had accepted him" -- and he is dragged by his guide from one scene of human horror to another. But... little problem. As his guide's evil shadow settles over each scene, John Ware's consciousness enters the body and mind of the victim. I thought a certain level of horror started with movies like Hostel, but chained to a table in a musty cellar as two men go to work on him with knives, scalpels, pincers, and barbed hooks, and in ten minutes "...reduced the helpless body before them from a screaming human being to a whimpering, senseless thing covered in wounds and rivulets of blood," I realize I was wrong. Every time he dies, his spirit soars away to the next nightmare; he feels the hour will never end. His guide seems elemental and mostly unaware of his presence. Eventually, as he is dragged "on and on, ever westward through the night," Ware realizes with terror he will be "..suffering endless and revolting madness, torture and death through eternity," as the being he is chained to travels west, keeping always within the hour of midnight.
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Oct 30, 2010 19:32:52 GMT -5
Very cool thread. I'll be following along with the stories, if I can. I haven't happened upon either of those yet (though I do like Campbell, and "Who Goes There?" was a great story even aside from its movie adaptations).
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Oct 30, 2010 20:50:45 GMT -5
Sweet. When the time comes, let me regale you with my "There's no such thing as a perfect short story" rant. I use it whenever I meet any of the MFA types on campus. It pisses them off to no end because they all want to talk about "the perfect short story" (and it's always different, although "The Dead" by James Joyce comes up at least half the time).
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Post by callipygias on Oct 31, 2010 15:21:29 GMT -5
I do like Campbell, and "Who Goes There?" was a great story. Perfect, a novella or two or three will be just the thing to help get my attention span back to normal. Twilight came from an anthology (it's all I've read of Campbell), but I looked up Who Goes There? and it sounds good. I was going to look for a copy, but better yet, the full text is apparently available online here. Sweet. "The Dead" by James Joyce comes up at least half the time. James Joyce IS Jane Austen! I'd love The Dead if it started toward the end of the party. The last eight or ten pages are wonderful, but the first thirty or forty kept it from my list. they all want to talk about "the perfect short story" I like the idea of listening to someone tell why a story is perfect for them, but as soon as they state factually why a story (of any length) is just plain "perfect," I figure they're trying to relive their freshman debate team glory days and I ignore them.
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Oct 31, 2010 21:57:21 GMT -5
I was going to look for a copy, but better yet, the full text is apparently available online here. Wow, that link really makes the story look a lot shorter than I remember. I know it's not a full novel or anything, but that looks like you could polish it off in about five minutes. Hopefully it takes a bit longer than that.
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Post by callipygias on Nov 1, 2010 14:37:35 GMT -5
#48 Ironhead (2005) Aimee Bender Same old story: A pumpkinheaded couple have beautiful, healthy pumpkinheaded children and they live happily together. But their third child is born with a large steam iron for its head. Little Ironhead is eyeless, and emits tiny puffs of steam as he breathes. Life for little Ironhead isn't easy. The human-headed children tease him, and one of his sisters--both who are accepted despite their pumpkin-heads because they're good at sports--laughs at him while the other is scared of him. But gentle little Ironhead is deeply loved by his mother and father, who sit up with him nights trying to help him sleep, which Ironhead is unable to ever once do. In the space of eight or nine pages, with an extremely strange, extremely surreal matter-of-fact type delivery, Aimee bender can wrench your heart or deeply horrify you; often she'll do both simultaneously. Her collection Willful Creatures has a few really astonishing stories. Aimee Bender
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Post by callipygias on Nov 2, 2010 0:48:06 GMT -5
#47 The Darling (1898) Anton Chekhov I really began to dislike Chekhov. He comes across as a pompous intellectual and an arrogant ladies' man, I thought. I'm not all that happy to have him on my list, but The Darling, because of its main character, Olga Semyonovna, is a beautiful story that has gotten better and better as it's settled in. It didn't hurt that from the start I pictured sweet, gentle Olenka as someone familiar: And it's very possible that The Darling succeeds despite Chekhov. I'd like to think that. It could easily be that his point was to insult women's dependence on men, as he saw it, but that he took it so far---with Olga recommitting her life absolutely four or fives times to different men, completely lost in between---as to give the story a fairy tale quality, sort of, with Olga ending up a symbol of selfless love. Maybe he meant it that way though, I don't know. When looking for a picture for this post a goofy looking statue kept showing up, so I clicked to see what it was about. It's so perfect that it turns out to be a mocking statue of Chekhov created by the town of Tomsk in response to nasty comments he made about its people. Perfect. Anton Chekhov
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Nov 4, 2010 9:51:13 GMT -5
Gogol gets my vote for Russian short stories, even though I think I like Chekhov more than you. But, hey, we're still in the 40's, aren't we?
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Post by callipygias on Nov 4, 2010 21:48:06 GMT -5
The forties it is! still plenty of time for this "Mr. Google" of yours to appear.
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Post by callipygias on Nov 4, 2010 22:12:42 GMT -5
#46 Captive Market(1955) Philip K. Dick[/center][/color] Mrs. Edna Burthelson, merchant, inheritor or her father's country store, seems like a pretty dull protagonist until you discover her ability to not only "scan ahead" to the future -- apparently to infinite possible futures -- but to also, with the help of her pickup truck and simple concentration, travel to it. Apparently her only criterion is that it have an exploitable populace. Captive Market is mostly set in a future after the "Big Blast" has sizzled the water vapor from the air; birds are all dead, insects seem to be all that thrives. "Beyond the camp began the eternal dead black ash, the charred face of the world, without features, without life." A small pocket of survivors has modified a rocket to serve as spaceship, and they have plotted their way to Venus, where they'll head as soon as they're stocked up with sufficient supplies. Supplies provided by Mrs. Edna Burthelson, country merchant, at exorbitant prices happily paid by the survivors for whom paper money means nothing, and which literally floats around on the breeze. SPOILER!When she learns the group is fully stocked and ready to go, Mrs. Edna Burthelson, unable to persuade them their obligation to her as customers should override all other priorities, including their own survival, becomes furious. She drives off, scanning possible futures until she finds the perfect future "chain" where their modified spaceship has crashed back down, leaving everyone alive and marketable. And leaving the survivors (and us) to wonder if Mrs. Edna Burthelson finds possible futures, or if she unknowingly creates them. If anyone is creating an American pantheon of Gods, I nominate Mrs. Edna Burthelson as the elemental Goddess of Commerce. It would never occur to her to simply take the trillions of dollars in cash laying around the dead future. Philip K. Dick
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Post by callipygias on Nov 7, 2010 15:06:19 GMT -5
#45 How to Win(1975) Rosellen Brown[/center][/color] Rosellen Brown is one of ten authors on Listy I'd never read before. In this case I'd never even heard of her. Also, until I read the story that ended up at #42, this would've gotten my vote for most disturbing. The story is basically a section of journal kept by a wife and mother who is overwhelmed by her hyperactive son, whom she sees as a kind of monster. She even refers to him as "it." Most of what I've since read about How to Win seems to treat the mother sympathetically, as if her behavior is normal for someone in her circumstances---at least before the rise of the great But she creeped me the hell out. She theorizes once (apparently out loud to her husband) that their son has visual dyslexia, "He sees my face and the top of my head, say, at the same time... quivering like a fun-house mirror, swollen, then slowly disappears down to a point." The best thing about How to Win, though, is the way it's told. It has a frantic energy that fits it perfectly. And as creepy as mom is, she also has a very good, fatalistic sense of humor. "No one ever told me I'd grow up to be a shepherdess; and bad at it too -- undone by a single sheep." Then, thinking she sees a familiar desperation deep behind the crossing guard's lively eyes, "...Another shepherdess without a chance. I give her my little salute." Rosellen Brown
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Post by callipygias on Nov 10, 2010 17:42:38 GMT -5
#44 The Thing On the Doorstep(1933) H.P. Lovecraft[/center][/color] Daniel Upton begins the story by explaining that he has shot his best friend, Edward Derby, in the head six times, but that he is not Derby's murderer. He then tells about Derby's precocious genius as a child, "...at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast." This attracted Upton--who confesses "...leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast"--to him despite his being eight years older. In Lovecraft's beautiful, Poe-inspired style Upton describes his and Derby's obsession with the ancient and the dark (brought about by the mouldering, subtly fearsome town in which [they] lived, witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham), and how it led Derby to marry a girl from dreaded Innsmouth -- a girl with protuberant eyes and a fishy smell about her, who marries Derby for a very special reason of her own. You've got to love Innsmouth and its creepy inhabitants. The full-blooded and the hybrids H.P. Lovecraft Special thanks to those of you I read discussing Lovecraft somewhere on the board a few years ago. It's what led me to first read him.
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Post by callipygias on Nov 21, 2010 15:03:37 GMT -5
#43 Loneliness(1919) Sherwood Anderson[/center][/color] Winesburg's young reporter George Willard is the number one factor that ties the short stories of Winesburg, Ohio together tightly enough for the collection to be considered a novel (in fact, it placed #24 on Modern Library's list of the 20th century's greatest novels), but the number two factor might be the book's recurrent theme of loneliness. It was interesting to learn how close the circumstances in the story Loneliness--concerning Enoch Robinson come to the real life ones that led Anderson to write this groundbreaking collection. Both Anderson and his character Enoch Robinson left small town Ohio for big city life, both were artists whose art seemed centered on the small towns they left behind, and both lived in apartments used as gathering places for the local artist community. Enoch Robinson's (tragic? creepy? Anderson would probably call it grotesque) story is told in broad strokes, skipping over huge chunks of his life with barely a mention, indicating their importance to Enoch: "Then Enoch Robinson got married. ...two children were born to the woman he married." He is relieved when he comes into some money, which he immediately gives to his wife, allowing him, with a clear conscience, to leave her and move back to the world inside his mind where he is king. Winesburg seems to be revered as much for its breaking of the O. Henry and the Maupassant "grip" on the short story (as Anderson himself says in his Memoirs) as it is for its actual stories. The reason I picked the cover pic I did is the quote under the title. It's kind of hard to read, but it says, He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing. Praise like that, from William Faulkner himself, is about as good as it gets. I partly added this pic of Anderson's beautiful first wife, Cornelia Lane, because I was surprised to find out he wasn't gay. I don't understand the courage it must take to publish a story like Hands (4 pages) today, much less back in 1919. Winesburg was often burned, and it won Anderson much hate mail, even from former friends. One he had formerly dined with he quoted in his Memoirs as saying, "I do not believe that, having been that close to you, I shall ever again feel clean." Sherwood Anderson
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