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

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Reading in Reykjavík

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