Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
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 like so much must be inferred or interpreted. (After I finish reading the HTR&W short stories, I’m
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
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.
The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling contain much more than the story of the adopted wolf-boy, Mowgli, who is probably the most familiar of Kipling’s characters. Kipling’s Jungle Books are collections of stories about animals and people from around the world. Each story seems to be rooted in traditional facts
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 previously
It’s not Maupassant’s fault, but I have a grudge against him already: his book stinks. The librarian had to retrieve it from The Stacks. The first thing I noticed as she returned was its size. At more than 1300 pages, it thudded on the counter. Then, as she swiped my library card and pushed the
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
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
In How to Read & Why, Bloom doesn’t dwell long on defining the short story in his introduction to the genre. However, he does introduce some ideas of what a short story may be and asks generally how one should read a short story. He bases his comments on other’s definitions. Some of these he
I read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories because I wanted to read this Nobel-prize winning author and also because I remembered the imaginative premise of his magical world and wanted to experience his world as an adult. I very much enjoyed reading them again, although there are some “politically incorrect” stereotypes in them I hadn’t
I’ve been in a short story mood lately. I picked up G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (a collection of 18 of the 49 stories about Father Brown) when I saw it on a display at the library. I’d read somewhere, maybe on a book blog, that one should read Father Brown because it’s the definitive
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