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Post by callipygias on Dec 19, 2010 14:01:27 GMT -5
#31 A Saucer of Loneliness(1952) Theodore Sturgeon[/center][/color] Sturgeon was one I had to limit to a single spot in the top 50. He's also another one I discovered searching for short stories for this list. One of my favorite discoveries. He also reminds me of Vonnegut more than just about any other writer -- he has the same ability to make every story fluctuate perfectly between hope and despair, or to make us feel both at once. I'm aware Saucer is not considered to be his best, and I'm not really sure why I chose it to represent him above others like Microcosmic God and A World Well Lost (which is #52 on my list, btw). Maybe the fact that it was also one of my favorite episodes of the '80s Twilight Zone helped it, I don't know. If you love Vonnegut and haven't tried Sturgeon, do. If you love Vonnegut and have tried Sturgeon, then shame on you for not recommending him! That's Shelley Duvall with the saucer coming at her in The Twilight Zone ep. Theodore Sturgeon
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Dec 23, 2010 14:38:18 GMT -5
Sturgeon is one of those people who I would probably think would go down as a simple master of short stories, no matter the genre. If he hadn't written sf/fantasy, he'd be in every intro literature textbook in every language. He belongs alongside Flannery O'Connor, Gogol, Poe, and a few others of international stature, imo.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 23, 2010 21:52:08 GMT -5
If he hadn't written sf/fantasy, he'd be in every intro literature textbook in every language. That's a shame. I'm guessing that's what he had in mind when he created Sturgeon's Law? "90% of SF is crud, but then 90% of everything is crud." There are some things I don't think should be taught in school because I think they'd be more rewarding for the average American to discover later in life, but Sturgeon would be perfect for students. There's usually a kind of anti-establishment vibe and a sense of the misfit, and it's always so... energetic, even when it's a downer.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 23, 2010 22:55:20 GMT -5
#30 Flight(1938) John Steinbeck[/center][/color] Pepe is sent to town for medicine, salt, and a candle to burn for his dead papa. It's the first time he's been sent to town alone. Pepe tells mama he is a man now, mama says he is a peanut. She tells him to stay out of trouble and spend then night in town at the house of Mrs. Rodriguez and return early. But Pepe comes home before daybreak and says, "Light the candle Mama, I must go away into the mountains." In town Pepe killed a man with his dead papa's knife. He says, "I am a man now, Mama. The man said names to me I could not allow." From then on it's RUN, PEPE, RUN!! Of all the greatness of Steinbeck, what I love most about him is when he's writing about the land. Only Cormac McCarthy does it as well, in my opinion. The more bleak the landscape the better. I read and re-read things like ...rotten granite tortured and eaten by the winds.... The white light beat on the rocks and reflected from them and rose up quivering from the earth again, and the rocks and bushes seemed to quiver behind the air.... On the other side the hill rose up sharply and at the top the jagged rotten teeth of the mountain showed against the sky. At the bottom of the cut the brush was thick and dark. John Steinbeck
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Post by callipygias on Dec 28, 2010 23:13:51 GMT -5
#29 Dearth(2005) Aimee Bender[/center][/color] I'm pretty well incapable of describing Dearth. Words like surreal, magical, touching, freak-ass-bizarro, and creepy-- intensely creepy--apply, but they could apply to most of Bender's stories. As good as some of her stories are (like Ironhead, #48 on my list), Dearth is on another level, I think. I finally found something about Bender (and specifically, Dearth) online that says kind of what I want to say: Bender is a thought-provoking writer, deceptively simple in both style and theme. Her subjects and characters participate in the contemporary world, yet they are several steps removed from it at the same time. ....the writing tries to put hope aside altogether, and to set whatever is left in its rightful place....
--David Stromberg I don't think I'll ever understand how writers decide what will happen next in a story. Even in simple stories it seems difficult, but with a thing like Dearth it seems just about unpossible. BUT even though how they decide what will happen next baffles me, what actually does happen rarely surprises. I mean, plot twists and stuff surprise, but the actual progression of a story rarely does. Some of Bender's stories are exceptions. But I'm just babbling. Dearth: There's a woman. There's taters. I wish the text was available online. Aimee BenderOne Spooky Chick
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Post by callipygias on Dec 29, 2010 1:14:22 GMT -5
#28 My Dead Brother Comes to America(1934)Alexander Godin[/center] First-person story from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old (Ukrainian?) boy arriving into the chaos of America with his mother and his two sisters, fourteen and nine, to meet up with his father, who'd gone ahead to America eight years before. There's about a half-second it seems it might get sentimental, "She waved, and we followed the sweep of her hand; we strained our eyes. It was father." But the boy is bitter about the death of his younger brother years before, of which the father is unaware. While the boy resents that his father wasn't there, he is also jealously protective of his affection for his dead brother and feels his father doesn't deserve to mourn him. The group is almost denied entry when the father tells the customs officer there are four children and the mother says three. She breaks down as the truth of their dead child dawns on her husband (and on the customs officer, thankfully). Who the hell is Alexander Godin? Is this it? Is this everything that came from such a talent: ONE short story? What a shame if it is. Or is it maybe the case of the most effective pseudonym ever? Here are a few examples of his style conveying their entry to Ellis Island. The tugboats maneuvered noisily about our ship, belched smoke from their chimneys, and sent soot flying up the deck and into our faces. The New World breathed a chill upon us.... Rigid, indifferent, before which we had to cringe and weep, and which would admit us only after it had drained our hearts of all hope. ...The doctors who examined us were as cruel as the power which had set them to the task; they pawed over us gingerly, obscenely, with the conviction in their eyes that we were no longer capable of shame or pain. And when the children put on the hats their father had gotten them as gifts, and seeing him still holding the fourth hat their mother begins to grow hysterical. ...and father gazed at her helplessly and with twitching lips. He wanted to utter her name, but his thin cruel lips would not obey and the words vibrated in his throat, making a curious sound. That's pure awesome. Alexander Godin?
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Post by Mr. Atari on Dec 29, 2010 1:34:34 GMT -5
Loving the list, as always.
We have slightly different tastes in literature. You are a bigger fan of guys like Faulkner and Vonnegut than I. Still, I enjoy the education and influence (and humor) I get from threads like these.
It's nice to see some of my favorites like Chekov or Bierce or Matheson on here. Here's hoping you'll include some Flannery O'Connor, or perhaps some Poe or Melville. Unless you prefer not to.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 29, 2010 2:59:55 GMT -5
It's nice to see some of my favorites like Chekov or Bierce or Matheson on here. Here's hoping you'll include some Flannery O'Connor, or perhaps some Poe or Melville. Unless you prefer not to. That's some fine taste you're showing there! While Matheson only made my top 50 once, he has at least five spots in my top 100. Poe is so great I had to limit him to one entry or I'd have ended up with a dozen--he's the ultimate master of the form. Chekhov made the list despite my irrational antagonism for him, which says a lot about how good he is, I suppose. Melville I can at least tell you is #54-- Tartarus of Maids--but I would prefer to withhold anything further there, as I would regarding the other couple names you mentioned. Getting close to the halfway mark!...
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Dec 30, 2010 11:12:50 GMT -5
If he hadn't written sf/fantasy, he'd be in every intro literature textbook in every language. That's a shame. I'm guessing that's what he had in mind when he created Sturgeon's Law? "90% of SF is crud, but then 90% of everything is crud." There are some things I don't think should be taught in school because I think they'd be more rewarding for the average American to discover later in life, but Sturgeon would be perfect for students. There's usually a kind of anti-establishment vibe and a sense of the misfit, and it's always so... energetic, even when it's a downer. True. I think younger students often get the same kind of thing from Vonnegut when his stories get anthologized. I had a great time teaching "Harrison Bergeron" to ninth graders. They got it and had fun with the cynical satire. But genre dudes like Bradbury or Vonnegut have a reputation that isn't "genre," so they show up in anthologies and textbooks more often. Sturgeon, despite his talent, still gets classified with the pulp paperback writers for the most part, which is a shame. I even once lent one of his collections to a friend who didn't read much sf/fantasy, and he returned it a few weeks later, saying he couldn't get past the cover (there was a dragon on it). Sad. But in that vein, a couple of genre guys you may not have encountered because they're largely out of print. And if you have, my apologies for jumping the gun: R. A. Lafferty. I probably talked about him somewhere earlier on the board. He wrote these amazing "fable"-type short stories (and novels) that have a vibe to them I've never encountered in anything other than Native American folk tales...which fits because, although he wasn't NA, he knew a number of Oklahoma tribes like family. (There's even a non-genre novel about them he wrote called "Okla Hannali.") But he has a collection of stories called Nine Hundred Grandmothers that is, to me, a kick in the head to what short stories can do. The other is Ernest Bramah. He was a British guy whose fame, such as it was, came from writing a series of stories told by a made-up "Mandarin" named Kai Lung. They were all written in this very polite, very mannered, very false (and, I'm sure, today totally un-PC and potentially offensive) English, filled with aphorisms and digressions. But the stories are simply wonderful and capable of a true LOL, which is rare in writing. They were published as "novels," but they aren't; they're short story collections under a frame narrative of Kai Lung telling tales. The Wallet of Kai Lung is the first and, methinks, best. Again, I'd be thrilled if you've encountered these guys before. So few people have, apart from those who love sf/fantasy history. And I know I'm pegging myself as a total geek here by only really commenting on your genre choices. But in the last ten years or so, I've hardly read much of anything else, apart from Renaissance and academic stuff for work. I seem to be the opposite of most people: I read my "serious" fiction before I was 25 and then moved on to aliens and wizards when I grew up. In grad school, I even had the reputation of being the fool who would try to sway conversations away from Updike, Pynchon, and Delillo to Dick, LeGuin, and Lovecraft. I gotta reprazent!
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Post by Mr. Atari on Dec 30, 2010 11:42:36 GMT -5
I seem to be the opposite of most people: I read my "serious" fiction before I was 25 and then moved on to aliens and wizards when I grew up. I'm the same way. A literature undergrad degree and a theology post-grad degree means that I overdosed on all the classics by the age of 25. I'll dabble in them once in a while; but I spend most of my recreational reading in the Discworld universe now.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 30, 2010 19:25:21 GMT -5
Again, I'd be thrilled if you've encountered these guys before. I would be too, because then maybe I'd already have a copy of 900 Grandmothers! I just added The Wallet of Kai Lung to my Kindle for $0.00, so that's good, but from your description (and others I've been reading online) I would LOVE to get my hands on Nine Hundred Grandmothers. (That's one of the stranger things I've said.) It's apparently out of print, like your post suggested, and I'm not paying $80 for someone's ratty old paperback. I called Powell's famous "city of books" and was going to stop by on my way home if they had a copy, but no go. Oh well, it'll give me something to hunt for.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 30, 2010 19:49:40 GMT -5
#27 Paul's Case(1905) Willa Cather[/center][/color] The story starts during a meeting Paul has with his teachers at school following a week-long suspension for "various misdemeanors." Instead of entering with the humility you'd expect, "Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling," and wearing a red carnation in his button hole. He hates school, he hates home; he finds the idea of the average daily grind-type lifestyle, and those who live it, completely repellent. It's only at his job ushering at the performing arts theater Paul is truly in his element. He all but worships the music, the shows, the performers, and he has a proprietary feeling about it all, "It was very much as though this were a great reception and Paul were the host." The turn in his mood after leaving the theater for home is the stuff psychoses are named for. The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spiggots; his father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his nightshirt.... So he sneaks into the basement and spends the night standing, wide awake, relishing morbid fantasies. *SPOILER*After his father forbids Paul any more time near the theater or his theater friends, Paul gets a respectable job where he is trusted with the bank deposits, and if that had been a good idea I probably wouldn't be mentioning it. He takes the cash and lives it up (in his own quiet way) at the Waldorf Astoria in New York until, with the money beginning to run out, he reads the story of his theft in the newspaper and learns that his father has agreed to pay the company back to avoid the prosecution of his son. If Dmitri is your favorite Karamazov brother you might enjoy the ending of this story as much as I did. Paul is kind of a beta version of Dmitri, except that at the end, when it counts, he follows through with things a little better than Dmitri K. Willa Cather
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Post by callipygias on Dec 30, 2010 21:18:14 GMT -5
#26 The Half-Skinned Steer(1997) Annie Proulx[/center][/color] So far I've read only this one story by Proulx, and it's all the way up at #26. Half-Skinned Steer feels more like Flannery O'Connor to me than just about any other modern story I've read, so saying I'm looking forward to reading more of Proulx is an understatement. Mero's brother, Rollo, has died, so Mero decides to drive from his home in Massachusetts to the family farm in Wyoming he left more than sixty years before. The story jumps from the present day of Mero's journey (which he takes with his wealth and overbearing personality--probably all he has) to his fairly bizarre memories of a strange love triangle involving his brother, father, and father's girlfriend that led up to his leaving home. The title comes from the story-within-a-story Mero's father's (and brother's) girlfriend told them way back about a farmer called Tin Head who always left things half finished, "Even his pants was half buttoned." So, for winter food old Tin Head slaughters a steer with an ax. He begins skinning it at the head and works his way down. He also cuts out its tongue--his favorite eatin', apparently. But skinning a steer is hungry work, so Tin Head leaves the tongue laying on the ground and goes in to have him some supper. He eats half his meal and has a nap, and when he goes out to finish skinning the steer it is gone, though the tongue remains. He supposes a neighbor stole it, but the only tracks are cow. Then far to the west... ...he sees something moving stiff and slow, stumbling along. It looks raw and it's got something bunchy and wet hanging down over its hindquarters... it was the steer... just then it stops and it looks back. And all that distance Tin Head can see the raw meat of the head and the shoulder muscles and the empty mouth without no tongue open wide and its red eyes glaring at him. There aren't too many short stories I've read with a character as fascinating as Mero--and I don't mean 'fascinating' in a good way. He's all bluster and insecure arrogance, completely incapable of admitting, even to himself and even to save himself, that he may have made a mistake. Interesting enough for all that, but the point when the character hits that next level is at the very end when he sees a vision of the steer's blazing red eyes glaring at him. It isn't even a memory it comes from, but the memory of a story told by a known liar over sixty years before. Annie Proulx
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Post by callipygias on Dec 30, 2010 23:07:42 GMT -5
Twenty-five down, twenty-five to go. Feels good to hit the halfway mark. Here's a nice 2-page Honorable Mention: A Cargo of Cat, by Ambrose Bierce. Literary genius doesn't get much funner.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 31, 2010 17:27:46 GMT -5
#25 The Overcoat(1842)Nikolai Gogol[/center][/color] Appropriate that the greater half of the countdown should start with one of the few authors many feel could rightfully challenge Poe as the greatest short story writer ever. Another favorite character. If Mero (from #26) is a top five short story character, Akaky Akakievich Bashmatchkin is top three, and for VERY different reasons than Mero. Akaky is a gentle, pathetic soul, under-appreciated and scorned and made fun of at the office, yet fully committed to the importance of his job as copyist to the exclusion of... well, everything else. His health declines, and he believes it is because of his overcoat, which has become so threadbare in places it's see-through. After being repeatedly told by the tailor Petrovich (another fantastic character) the coat is beyond repair, his initial despair eventually turns to purpose as he decides to scrimp and save for a new overcoat. Petrovich will make it for him. There enters a little hope into Akaky Akakievich's little life. It's kind of a beautiful story, strangely. The day his new overcoat is done is quite a whirlwind day for the reserved, lonely little man. Then.... Like Vonnegut and Sturgeon mix hope and despair, Gogol mixes compassion and humor as well as anyone, and The Overcoat is the best example of it I've read. To generate such sympathy for a character whose name, according to the annotations, could be translated Mr. Poop Son of Poop -- that's impressive! Nikolai Gogol And since everybody quotes it I may as well: "We all come out from Gogol's Overcoat" ~ Dostoyevsky
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