50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Short Stories

Off Topic: Short Story Favorites (Part 2)

August 3, 2018 /

Good morning, class.

After reading Hemingway’s short story collection Men Without Women, I’m revisiting my previous list of favorite short stories and adding some more. Consider this list an addendum, for a total of 13 short stories that I just enjoy, through and through. You’ll notice they’re in chronological order; just my way of having fun.

James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners, featuring both “Araby” and “The Dead.”

  1. “Araby” by James Joyce: Of course James Joyce makes the list again! “Araby” is a short and simple story from Joyce’s collection Dubliners—barely a featurette on a young boy with a first crush. The boy wants to buy a girl something nice at the nearby Araby festival, but his uncle keeps him from getting to the festival in time; he arrives at the festival too late, and he leaves without buying anything, hurt and upset by his uncle’s carelessness and his failure to make the girl happy. The emotions through the story aren’t complicated, but they are pure and childlike, stinging in all the right places—it’s a familiar story, and Joyce tells it amazingly well.
  2. “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka: Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis is the tip of the Kafka-iceberg—“In the Penal Colony” is just as twisted, tense, and tragic as The Metamorphosis. An unnamed traveler visits the execution grounds of a foreign land, where the executioner shows off an extravagant contraption used to kill criminals in the most just way possible (according to the executioner). The traveler knows that the contraption is inhumane, and the methods used to carry out executions are unethical—he debates whether or not to bring up his concerns as a foreigner, while the executioner describes the machine in detail. Once the traveler speaks his mind, though, the executioner makes a final decision about his machine, leading to a disturbing and dreadful climax that I won’t spoil here. It’s one of those stories that chills to the bone, while still being thoughtful and enlightening.
  3. “Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway: I have mixed feelings about Ernest Hemingway (like I mentioned on my Men Without Women post), but this is a Hemingway story I love. “Big Two-Hearted River” didn’t appear in Men Without Women, but it left its mark when I read it the first time six years ago. The main character, Nick Adams—a recurring character in several Hemingway stories—goes on a camping trip, making subtle references to the war he fought in and the trauma he’s suffered. It’s not a very exciting story, but it’s emotional and meaningful in Hemingway’s special way. I don’t see it mentioned often on lists of Hemingway’s best short stories, but I can say for sure that it’s my personal favorite of his.

    Joyce Carol Oates, author of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

  4. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates: Another chill-to-the-bone story, about a girl in a terrifying position with an older man. The girl, Connie, is the youngest in her family and seems to be the disappointing daughter, with flirty behavior and little responsible thinking. But the action of the story builds when a smooth-talking stranger who calls himself Arnold Friend comes to her house, and she’s alone. She carries on a conversation with him but keeps him at bay, until she realizes that things aren’t what they seem with this man at all. Most of the story is this conversation, and Oates writes the story with a kind of narrative science—everything is balanced and thought-out, with a million and one symbols, references, codes, and secrets hidden in the story’s details to fill English-class essays for decades.
  5. “Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon: Speaking of narrative science, “Entropy” is more a scientific narrative—a story that studies and responds to the scientific theories on Pynchon’s mind, specifically that of the heat-death of the universe and the deterioration of everything into chaos. Pynchon focuses us on a party that has been in motion almost two full days by the story’s opening, and won’t be stopping soon. Various scenes take place at this party—discussions on ongoing and ending relationships, games played, songs sung, alcohol abounding, and even an almost-drowning by a girl in a bathtub. People have existential conversations about language and meaninglessness while the party rages out of control, into the chaos the title hints at. It’s experimental and conceptual, and as a work of art always gets to exist beyond itself—breaking and redefining rules like few stories can.

    ZZ Packer, author of “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.”

  6. “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by ZZ Packer: This story doesn’t quite fit in with the rest on my list, if only because it tells a very contemporary story. It focuses on Dina, a new student at college, who is isolated, obstinate, passive-aggressive, and a red flag for every authority figure and potential friend that meets her. She strikes a teetering relationship with a girl named Heidi, which blossoms into a sexual awakening and—as her therapist claims—an identity crisis. Dina is in denial about plenty of things, not just with her sexuality and how it affects her identity, and it makes her one of the most interesting characters in any story. Through the hints and nods ZZ Packer sets up, we get to learn more about Dina than Heidi or her therapist ever could. It helps that this is one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever read—most of my favorites are downers, and this one is no exception, but it’s funny all the way down.

So there’s my list! Next up, you’ll see my review of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Until then,

Prof. Jeffrey

Men Without Women

July 20, 2018 /

Welcome back class.

I haven’t read a lot of Ernest Hemingway’s work—he is well-known for novels like For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, both of which I haven’t read yet. I have read several of his short stories and only one of his novels: The Sun Also Rises. So when I saw Hemingway’s name on the 50-books list, I wasn’t surprised. But when I saw the book of his that was chosen—his short story collection Men Without Women—I was baffled, because I’d never heard of it before.

I typically refer to Hemingway as an author I don’t like, though I can understand why his works are studied and praised. But if I’m honest, Hemingway intimidates me like no other author. His stories are deceptively plain, and a fast reader will breeze past all of the subtleties of his work in search of the story. On the surface, his stories are almost boring; but in the smallest of details he hides the things that make his stories great. This can make a novel like The Sun Also Rises exhausting, because if you read too quickly, you can fly through the whole book having learned nothing at all. But in a four-page short story, once you reach the end and wonder exactly what happened, you have more of an opportunity to go back to the beginning and find what you missed—the small detail that changed everything.

That’s what I discovered with Men Without Women, and I enjoyed reading it much more than I thought I would. I won’t say it was my favorite read, or even close, but I earned something out of it. That’s more than I could have hoped for.

Charles McGraw and William Conrad in a 1946 adaptation of Hemingway’s story “The Killers”

It’s much harder to review a collection of short stories, because there are no broad strokes. Some stories stand out compared to others—“Ten Indians”, the story of a boy’s first heartbreak, is one I’d read before in high school, and things jumped out at me much more this time than 6 years ago. I’ve noticed the story “The Killers” has been turned into a movie several times, and I know why—the story is about two men taking hostages in a restaurant waiting to kill a man on arrival, and so many details are left out that it’s only natural for a variety of filmmakers to fill in the gaps.

Most of the stories are under ten pages, but two of the stories are closer to 30 pages: “The Undefeated,” which opens the book, is a story about an aging bullfighter proving his worth in a new era of the sport; and “Fifty Grand,” taking up the exact middle of the book, is the story of a boxer who fixes his own match to get a payout. I think both of these stories function as a foundation for the other stories—Hemingway’s method of building an interconnecting structure between stories that are otherwise isolated.

Two stories are hardly stories at all, which fits right in with the modernist writings of the era. “Today is Friday” is a script, following a group of Roman soldiers on Good Friday after Jesus is executed, and the cherry on top is that these soldiers speak in colloquial, Hemingway English. Then there’s “Banal Story,” which is either a nonfiction piece or a stream-of-consciousness experiment that lays out storytelling rules and then breaks them, and it ends by throwing in a cameo appearance from the protagonist of “The Undefeated,” dying in a hospital after his bullfighting days are over.

Author Ernest Hemingway

No one story is my favorite, nor would I call any the most shocking or most powerful. Hemingway’s balance as a writer is strong, and from that balance comes the common theme: even though there are technically women in several stories, each story focuses on men separately from women, or Hemingway’s trademark obsession with masculinity.

Hemingway’s stories are about athletes and soldiers (in a time before it was common for women to be either); his stories are about husbands and bachelors, and about boys becoming men; his stories are maybe even about sexuality and its unspeakable deviations; and more than anything, his stories are about how internally, men rarely if ever admit to themselves that there’s something going on under the surface of their stoic, frozen masculinity. Hemingway finds clever and creative ways for his stories to celebrate the masculinity he upheld until his dying day, while also subverting it in the details of those stories, and through that lens, it’s no wonder that Hemingway made the list.

And that explains, too, how Men Without Women made the list over his novels. Hemingway’s novels might have gained more popularity than his short stories over the years, but they are no less masterpieces. What better way to capture Hemingway’s perfect understanding of men, internally, culturally, and broadly, than to include a collection of stories diverse enough to do what a novel can’t?

So even though it had its faults, and it certainly isn’t my favorite, Men Without Women has left a mark where I didn’t imagine it could. Masculinity is not the kind of content I want to focus on; we live in an age of toxic masculinity, where culturally, men are often deservedly—I’ll say it again, DESERVEDLY—the bad guy. Hemingway seems to have known all the sides of masculinity, toxicity included, but he praised it’s healthy parts as well and took masculinity as the social force it is, warts and all. The result is a collection of good stories that I recommend.

There is one other thing I picked up from Hemingway about writing, and it’s one of my favorite metaphors. A good story will act like an iceberg—icebergs hide a silent majority of their mass under water, and less than half of its mass is all that can be seen. A good story shows only a small portion of its content—the rest is hidden under the surface, and though you can’t always see it, the rest of the story is absolutely hiding there, waiting to be discovered.

Next up is Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, just as much a masculinity-infused novel. And just like Hemingway, I have my problems with it, but it’s so well written I can forgive what I don’t like. It’s hard to pull off such an epic story in a mental ward, and Kesey manages just fine.

But more on that next time,

Prof. Jeffrey

Off Topic: Favorite Short Stories

June 28, 2017 /

Good morning, class.

I’ve talked about my favorite poems before (here and here), and today, I’ll do the same with short stories!

This hardly needs explaining—below, I’ve listed some of my personal favorite short stories that I’ve read in literature classes over the years. Some are long enough that they could be considered “novellas,” but that kind of categorization barely matters. What’s listed below are good stories: plain and simple and in chronological order.

  1. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne

    “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Nathaniel Hawthorne is probably better known for The Scarlet Letter, but I like his short stories more, and this one is my favorite. It’s critical of religion while using Christian and Satanic imagery to tell the story of Young Goodman Brown’s walk in the woods, where he encounters the devil, sees all his fellow townspeople worship like heathens, and loses his wife, Faith (not-so-subtly). Then it all disappears like a vision, and he’s left alone and forever changed. The story is layered, terrifying, and much more enjoyable than The Scarlet Letter . . . for what that’s worth.

  2. “The Yellow Wall-paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman: The way this story is written—in small, sudden paragraphs that cause an unnerving itch—is what makes it so terrifying, and so great. The narrator is writing to us, against her husband’s wishes (she must be under constant bed rest, because she “suffers” from things like nervousness, frailty, hysteria . . . by which I mean she has an actual mental illness, but has instead been diagnosed with being a woman).

    Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    She writes about their move to a new house, her marriage, and most importantly, the disgusting yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. I won’t give away what happens—it’s too enjoyable to spoil—but suffice it to say the wallpaper is the last straw on her troubled mind.

  3. “The Wife of His Youth” by Charles W. Chesnutt: Stepping away from horror, this story delves into the politics of post-Civil War America, from the perspective of a leader in a society of more respectable (lighter-skinned) African Americans. Mr. Ryder has worked very hard to gain his reputation and he hides his past carefully—until a less-respectable woman enters his life and disrupts his reputation. It’s a subtle look at racial treatment during the Reconstruction Era, and it makes us aware of the black community of the time, the pride and shame within said community, the masks they still had to wear, and the choices they were faced with.
  4. “The Dead” by James Joyce: Of course James Joyce makes the list! Before he was over-complicating things with Ulysses, he wrote a relatively standard collection of short stories titled Dubliners, my favorite of which is “The Dead.” The protagonist, Gabriel, is tasked with making a toast at a dinner party, and he debates inwardly what words to use and what poets to quote—cluing us into the political ramifications of the Irish-British conflict at the time. In Gabriel’s relationship with his wife, with close friends, with guests and with strangers, he is torn (just like Mr. Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth”) between two cultures—one that seems brighter and more reputable, but that will never accept his inferiority as an Irishman, and another that would feel like a step backwards from success and reputation. It’s an intricate look at Ireland and its people, and it’s beautifully written.
  5. “The Balloon” by Donald Barthelme: This one is only kind of a story—it breaks a lot of the rules of storytelling. A mysterious balloon floats loose through a town for almost a month, and everyone is left curious. They wonder where it came from, and since no one knows, they start speculating and applying their own meaning to it; for example, the narrator attributes the balloon to the time he met his lover underneath it, when she’s returned after a long absence. Ultimately, the balloon is significant because it has no meaning . . . it means whatever it needs to mean to the viewer. It’s such a weird, simple story that’s impressive, wonderful, frustrating, and layered.

  6. Author Ursula K. Le Guin

    “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin: Yet another short story that’s barely a story at all—more like a fictional essay. Omelas is a perfect Utopian town. Its citizens are happy and there is no fear or pain. The narrator describes the glory of the town and consistently asks the reader whether or not they believe such a town is even possible, until she describes one final fact: somewhere in the town is a child, locked away in a room, malnourished and constantly suffering—a scapegoat. Everyone sees this child and understands that it pays the price for their Utopia. There are those who accept the child’s suffering for the town’s ability to thrive, and then there are those who walk away from Omelas, refusing to pay such a price for paradise. It’s a thought-provoking, ethically-twisted story and worth everyone’s time.

  7. Author Jhumpa Lahiri

    “Sexy” by Jhumpa Lahiri: “Sexy” might be the plainest story on this list—it doesn’t feel like high art or challenging literature, but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Miranda is in a relationship with a married Indian man, who once calls her “sexy” . . . the first time she’s ever been called that. The next time she hears the word, it sounds hollow, like it doesn’t mean anything, and she starts to question if her relationship means something, or if it is worth having at all. From a lesser writer, the actions of the story would come off as melodramatic—from Lahiri, the action is poignant and moving, and every word feels like it’s affecting the entire world.

If you can find these stories online, DO IT. Even if you only pick one, any of these are worth reading—some because they’re scary, some because they’re beautiful, all because they’re incredible. And if there’s a list of “50 Short Stories to Read Before You Die” out there, these are either on it, or should be.

Thanks for coming to class! See you next time.

Prof. Jeffrey

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