Skip to main content

Short stories 251-260

“King Solomon of Kentucky” by James Lane Allen. A tale of unexpected heroism. Recommended.

“Miss Tempy’s Watchers”, by Sarah Orne Jewett. About two women spending a night watching over the corpse of a friend, and the confidences and remembrances such an occasion can bring out.

“A Letter and a Paragraph” by Henry Cuyler Bunner. An epistolatory tale with an unexpected ending.

“Supply and Demand” by O. Henry. A tall tale, full of funny turns of phrase.
“A Dark-Brown Dog” by Stephen Crane. Yet another animal cruelty tale, this one very realistic and giving as much insight into child abuse as it does into cruelty to animals.

“The Lost Phœbe” by Theodore Dreiser. A sad naturalistic tale about old-age dementia. Recommended.

“Sophistication” by Sherwood Anderson. About the coming of age of two young people.
“A Wagner Matinée” by Willa Cather. About a farmer’s wife visiting the city for the first time in 30 years. Recommended.

“A Brown Woman” by James Branch Cabell. About an incident in the life of Alexander Pope.

This was the final story in Great Short Stories of the World.

The next book of short stories is The Penguin Book of English Short Stories. I read some of the stories in that book as part of middle-school English studies, so there are some stories in it that I will not include in the challenge, but I will nevertheless read them all. The page count will now start going up fast, since Great Short Stories... is in a format larger than a trade paperback and with small type, whereas this book is a mass-market paperback.

“An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad. A psychological study of white men in Africa. Recommended.

“At the End of the Passage” by Rudyard Kipling. A psychological study of Englishmen in India.

“Kew Gardens” by Virgina Woolf. A snapshot of an afternoon in Kew Gardens.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more