thoughts, tales and travels
It’s day two after election day, and we still don’t know who will be president. In an effort to avoid obsessive magic wall election coverage, I’ve turned to Exhalation, a short story collection by a master of speculative fiction, Ted Chiang. I found there the first story I had read...
Karen Russell dishes up dark, disturbing stories. Not quite “an axe for the frozen sea within us,” as Kafka would recommend. More like a probe for reflections in our darkest recesses. A water witch for hidden pools of empathy. Russell’s great gift is for creating a fully developed world built...
Review of Black Light: stories by Kimberly King ParsonsNew York: Vintage, Penguin Random House, 2019, 211 pages. Parsons has created a searing collection of characters driven by an id-dominated, desperate pleasure just a slight change-of-expression away from deep realms of pain. Her characters are ravenous, capable of sucking the last...
Review:Grand Union: Stories by Zadie SmithNew York: Penguin Press, 2019, 242 pp. This volume has been bracing to my spirit. Smith gleefully breaks all those rules of story writing I hear so often that it stirs me to rebellion. Show don’t tell? Smith raises the question of whether description should...
Our stories this week represent two of the most acclaimed writers of the midwestern United States, Willa Cather (1873-1947) and Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941). Willa Cather is one of a kind, combining a strong artistic interest and sensibility with a deep love of the landscapes and people of the mid-western United...
I’ve read Stephen Crane’s more famous story, “The Open Boat,” as well as his novel The Red Badge of Courage, but I’ve never read this story before. I’ll be very interested to hear what other readers think. One thing that makes this tale challenging is the Civil War era military...
January 3, 2019: Short Story Discussion Group Reading Happy New Year!This week features Edith Wharton, who writes some of the saddest, most heart-wrenching and searingly honest stories in the English language. One of her more upbeat characters made this comment: There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only...
SHORT STORY DISCUSSION GROUP Our OLLI short story group recently read the brilliantly subversive anti-detective story by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The author has posted an excellent biography on his web site. Reading that story inspired me to pick up Murakami’s novel 1Q84, and I’ve been slowly reading it...
Last session, we discussed “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. You probably either remember reading it sometime in the distant past, or you sort of think you might have read it but you’re not sure because everybody’s heard of it, right? It’s one of the most famous of all...
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. We’re reading the most original and classic American psychological short story thriller of all, Edgar Allan Poe”s “The Tell-Tale Heart. Short story discussion group at OLLI is guaranteed to get weird! Style: Edgar...