Rebecca Reads

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After reading, in the past months, the short stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce, and Hemingway, I found O. Henry’s stories to be remarkably different. They were refreshingly delightful, poignant, and easy to read, and yet, I was struck by the inferiority of O. Henry’s actual writing in comparison to the [...]

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Hemingway’s stories are poetry: that is my first and lasting impression of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. In his short stories, Hemingway treats words as sparsely as do poets.
I don’t usually understand or enjoy poetry because it feels so much must be inferred or interpreted. (After I finish reading the HTR&W short stories, [...]

In Dubliners, his collection of short stories, James Joyce captures Irish life, specifically the lives of Dubliners. Each story is a magnificent sketch of the people, setting, and situations; the entire collection presents a variety of such sketches. At the end of each sketch, I felt the despair that I believe Joyce intended to impart [...]

Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at age 46, when his youngest daughter was just 3 months old. As a well-known computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he was a world leader in virtual reality training. But the focus of his last lecture to the university is not about programming a computer: It’s [...]

As I mentioned, Maupassant was a best-seller in his day. What makes his stories resonate with the modern reader is the attention to our own natural wants.

If Guy de Maupassant lived and wrote stories or novels today, his name would appear on The New York Times best-seller lists many weeks out of a year.
As it was, in the late 1800s, his stories were best-sellers from the time the first one, “Boule de Suif,” appeared in a collection with five other [...]

I loved reading Chekhov’s stories. I read a volume of them, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, as well as “The Kiss,” which was recommended by Bloom and unfortunately wasn’t included in the volume translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
My favorite stories tended to be the shorter ones that focused on one character or one [...]

Anton Chekhov’s “The Student” is the perfect story.
Decide for yourself by reading it at Project Gutenberg (1,500 words) or listening to it at LibriVox (10 minutes). Note that I read a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Here are some elements that make it perfect for me.

At Harold Bloom’s suggestion in HTR&W, I tackled “Bezhin Lea” and “Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands” by Ivan Turgenev. I say “tackled” because, unfortunately, these stories were evidence to me that I am accustomed to reading quickly and easily; reading them was a “difficult pleasure.” I expect not all of the stories on Bloom’s reading [...]