short stories

Review: Tales of the Jazz Age

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Tales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, Open Road Media, 2016 (first published in 1922).

Summary: A collection of eleven short stories, the most famous of which is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

For those who only know F. Scott Fitzgerald, this collection of short stories reveals other sides of the mind of Fitzgerald. Personally, I found this collection uneven. Only one seems to be truly profound, “O Russet Witch!,” a reflection on the choice between safe conventionality, and the risky, unconstrained life.

The most famous in the set was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Fitzgerald turns a thought exercise about being born old and growing backward into a story.

“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is kind of a grown up fantasy in which a school friend is invited to spend a holiday in an off-the-map Shangri-la, complete with an attractive sister, until he learns of the secret of the place, and its sinister impliction.

Two in the collection were amusing. “The Camel’s Back” revolves around a costume party and a camel costume for two. “Porcelain and Pink” is a one act play set in a suds-filled bath-tub.

Then there is the pathetic in “May Day” in which old classmates from Yale meet up, one down on his luck, and full of self-pity. Not an attractive figure, and his friends are no better.

To be honest, the other stories in this collection seemed to me to be caricatures, or just plain strange. The only virtue in some of these stories was that they were short. For those who are Fitzgerald fans, of course you will want to read these. For the rest of us, I felt there were a few good stories and the rest were mere padding.

Review: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

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loneliness of the long distance runner

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Alan Sillitoe. New York: Open Road Media, 2016 (originally published in 1959).

Summary: A collection of nine short stories set in the pre-and post-World War II British working class, characterized by a strong sense of anger, alienation, and desolation.

There was a season in my life where I was into running–anywhere from 5K races to half marathons. This book kept coming up but I never had a chance to read it. It’s probably just as well, because even the title story had far less to do with running than loneliness. It is a book that could have been the inspiration for the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby.” All the lonely people.

The title story is about an adolescent boy from working class origins caught up in petty crime and sentenced to “borstal,” a kind of reform school. He is permitted to train outside the fences for a long distance competition, and much of the story is his private thoughts on those runs, culminating in the struggle between being awarded a light work load if he wins versus not wanting to comply with the borstal administration.

Other stories describe:

  • An upholsterer “Uncle Ernest” abandoned by his wife, exploited by some young girls for food and money in a cafe, yet who become the one bright spot in his life until the police warn him against ever seeing them again, leading him to turn to drink.
  • A religious education teacher who combats the tedium of dealing with unruly boys through fantasizing about the shop girls across the street from his classroom winter, until faced down by one particularly defiant boy.
  • A postman abandoned by his wife after six years of marriage, taking up with a housepainter. Later she begins to visit again, often in need of money, saying the housepainter had died, musing about “The Fishing Boat Picture” until he gives it to her, then finds it in a pawn shop and buys it back. Neither the picture nor the former wife fare well.
  • “Noah’s Ark” is a carnival ride that culminates a day of cadging money by two poor boys whose big thrill is getting on the ride without paying, chased by the ride operator.
  • A man who tries (and fails) to hang himself, persuading a young neighbor boy to help him in “On Saturday Afternoon.”
  • “The Match” is not just about a losing soccer match but how two men return to their wives, one engaging in domestic violence, while his friend overhears the fight in the bliss of being newly-wed.
  • In “The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale” a young neighbor narrates the sad story of mama’s boy Jim, who to prove he is not, marries and divorces in haste, returns to mama, while secretly pursuing a disgraceful life across town.
  • “The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller” is an actual account of Sillitoe’s youth, where he was led in street gang activities by Frankie, a warrior who loved to do battle with a rival gang. Separated by war, their lives take very different courses, Frankie’s downward, Alan’s upward, as he discovers in an encounter years later.

These are not uplifting or “feel good” stories, as you can well see. What they do describe are young men who feel trapped in a banal existence, lashing out in anger, whether through criminal activity, violence against others, or turning that anger inward in self-destructive behavior. It is not unlike the accounts of the rust belt working class in J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Like that book, these stories narrate the reservoir of free floating anger as well as hopelessness or even deep loneliness of people who feel there is no way out of their situation. Sadly, stories like these could be written from characters in most of our cities. “All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?”

Review: The Affair at the Bungalow

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The Affair at the Bungalow

The Affair at the Bungalow, Agatha Christie. New York: Witness Impulse, 2013 (originally published in the anthology Thirteen Problems in 1932).

Summary: Actress Jane Helier tells a story of a mysterious burglary at a bungalow in the town where she is acting in a play, involving a woman impersonating her and an unfortunate young playwright. Miss Marple, professing to be baffled, privately hints at a different story.

Most readers are familiar with Agatha Christie’s full-length mysteries. This is a delightful short story originally part of an anthology titled Thirteen Problems first published in 1932, and now available in e-book form as a stand-alone short story.

Jane Helier, an actress, is with a party of friends including Miss Marple, and turns the conversation to a mysterious event that happened to a “friend” of hers, who is quickly found out to be Jane herself. She was in a town by a river (“Riverbury”) as part of a play company when called upon by the police to confront a young man arrested for burglary. The story gets more interesting when the young man, a playwright, claims he was summoned to a bungalow, the site of the burglary, by Miss Helier. Of course, when he sees Miss Helier, he realizes the other woman was not her. He had called at the bungalow, was introduced by the maid to “Miss Helier,” had a drink, and woke by the side of the road, only to be arrested for burglary. It seems that a case of jewels owned by the mistress of a wealthy city man has been stolen while the house was empty. The mistress was an actress, herself married.

By then it is obvious that the young playwright, Leslie Faulkener, was innocent of the crime. But who stole the jewels? The actress, the maid? The party weights all the angles of the story, and at the end, even Miss Marple professes to be mystified as to the solution, and their ire is further aroused when Jane Helier herself offers no resolution.

As the party is breaking up Miss Marple whispers in Jane’s ear, leaving her startled. Did Miss Marple know more than she let on, that not all was as it seemed? And what did she mean when she said, “What I do realize is that women must stick together–one should, in an emergency, stand by one’s own sex. I think that’s the moral of the story Miss Helier has told us”? What did Miss Marple whisper in her ear?

The one question, which mystifies Miss Helier herself, also mystified me and that is how did Miss Marple know? The resolution of the mystery hinges on information Miss Helier had not told anyone, including Miss Marple, introducing new characters not known to us. How did she know? Was it the vagueness at points in the story? The fact that Miss Helier herself does not know the ending?

In this case, one has only to read twenty-one pages to discover what is going on. But the story demonstrates Christie’s art–to draw one into a crime puzzle–in this case one without a murder, and finish it with a surprise

 

Review: Interpreter of Maladies

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Interpreter of Maladies
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am the first male of all my friends to read this book. Maybe it is just that men often don’t read something other than adventure or detective fiction or stick to non-fiction or sports or don’t read–or maybe I’m just indulging in stereotypes! At any rate, this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories is well worth reading by both men and women because of the exquisitely fine writing and large themes captured in short narratives.

Lahiri is a woman of Bengali Indian descent, born in London, raised in Rhode Island by a mother who valued her Bengali Indian heritage, and educated in Boston. These short stories reflect the complicated challenges of negotiating heritage, immigration to a new country, and the impact these have upon relationships as modernity and traditional cultural values clash.

Jhumpa Lahiri (c) Marco Delogu

Jhumpa Lahiri (c) Marco Delogu

The title story, “Interpreter of Maladies” typifies this clash as a Bengali tour guide for Americans explains that his other job, serving as a translator for a physician opens up an odd intersection of these two worlds with a foreign couple he is serving as guide. In “This Blessed House” we have an Indian couple who buy a house in the US that is filled with the trappings of its previous Christian owners and we have the comical and thought-provoking clash between husband and wife of what to do with all these artifacts of a foreign religion that were part of the home. In “Mrs. Sen’s” we have a traditional Indian wife of a university professor in the US, who supplements the family income by watching children, and who struggles between her traditional role and the pressures of her husband to learn to drive.

There are also stories about the clash of traditional cultural values and modernity in areas of marriage and sexuality. In “A Temporary Matter” we see a struggling arranged marriage that comes to a crucial turning point during a series of power outages. “Sexy” narrates two affairs, including one between a Bengali and an American, who works with a Bengali friend who has just told her about her cousin’s husband’s affair. “The Third and Final Continent” explores the dynamics of arranged marriages and immigration and an unlikely catalyst to real love forming in the person of a 103 year old landlady.

A last category seems to be the ephemerality of relationships, which include the story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” “A Real Durwan”, and “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”.

What it seems all these stories have in common is change. Relationships that grow, and those that die. People that come and go. Ways of living confronted by the circumstance of migrating to a new culture. We long for permanence and hope that in a place, in a person, in a set of values, we can find that. In the world Lahiri describes, we see in these short pieces the large, existential drama of the search for what lasts in a world of change.

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Publishing Trends: The Kindle Single

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One of the publishing trends that I’ve become aware of since I’ve had an e-reader is that of the Kindle Single. This is what we might in the past call a short story or essay or reporting piece. The challenge for these short pieces is that up until now, they have generally not been stand-alone pieces. They appear in anthologies or magazines or sometimes in a collection of pieces by that author. Publishing the piece all by itself just hasn’t generally worked.

The Kindle Single ranges from 5,000 to 30,000 words, can be in one of a number of genres, and either can be an already published work on the Kindle platform or one considered for publication as a Kindle single. Kindle’s editors make selections. Authors, if selected receive 70 % royalties on publications priced between 0.99 and 4.99. Here is Amazon’s Kindle Single Submission Policy.

It seems to me that this opens up a new avenue for authors to get their work published, and known of itself–not lost in a journal or anthology. It also affords publishers the chance to publish authors without the laborious process of writing and editing a full length work, or waiting for there to be a collection of short stories. The site Good E Reader notes that Penguin and Random House are now publishing short stories in this format and that all this may lead to a renewal in this form of publishing.

I’ve not dipped into this area yet. I would be curious if readers have found some good short stories in e-published form? And if any writers come across this, has this been a way to get your writing out, and more importantly, have you seen many sales?