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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

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...