Story-a-Day
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What exactly IS "Story-a-Day"? Well, Story-a-Day (also known as "Story-A-Day") is my goal to read one story every day from Ann Charters' collection "The Story and Its Writer" (5th Ed.), which is quite an amazing collection of short stories from around the world. So here is a list (alphabetical, for that's how they appear in the book) of the stories I've read beginning June 5, 2004. I'll include an excerpt before any comments.
New: Index of writers.
What exactly am I doing now? Story-a-day has come to a momentary end so we can either grieve and wallow in the misery that accompanies an end, or we can look back with a glimmer of hope in our eye at the phenomenon that took place. What better way to do that than with a series of charts and graphs calculating inane and trivial morsels of truth? I say there is none! Otherwise, I'll blather on about a number of other things, too. Watch: here I go.
Stories
Some stories I liked, others I didn't. Some of my comments reveal these feelings, others do not. It is not in my nature to dislike a story or an author; at times I struggle for a reason to loathe a piece I loathe. This is something that doesn't make sense to me or anybody else. But let me take a moment to list just a few (okay, nineteen) of my favorites.
Sherwood
Anderson, "Death in the Woods"
John Barth, "On with the Story" *
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
Raymond Carver, "Cathedral"
Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Pet Dog"
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited"
Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"
Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried"
Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"
D.H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"
Jack London, "To Build a Fire" *
Bobbie Ann Mason, "Shiloh"
Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
Alice Munro, "Meneseteung"
Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People"
Grace Paley, "A Conversation with My Father"
John Steinbeck, "The Chrysanthemums"
Edith Wharton, "Roman Fever" *
Tobias Wolff, "Say Yes" *
* hadn't read before Story-a-Day
Honorable mention...
These are all stories that I had never read before Story-a-Day, and that will hold a special place in my heart/head for a long time to come:
Sherwood
Anderson, "Hands"
Margaret Atwood, "Death by Landscape"
Ann Beattie, "The Burning House"
Italo Calvino, "If on a winter's night a traveler"
Albert Camus, "The Guest"
Julio Cortázar, "A Continuity of Parks"
Charles Johnson, "Menagerie, a Child's Fable"
D.H. Lawrence, "Odour of Chrysanthemums"
Clarice Lispector, "The Smallest Woman in the World"
Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden Party"
Frank O'Connor, "Guests of the Nation"
Salman Rushdie, "The Firebird's Nest"
Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych"
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Harrison Bergeron"
I could make a short list of stories I never want to read again, but what would be its purpose? If I slowly forget about the stories I didn't like (aka despised), then perhaps some day in the future I'll read them again with new eyes and see something I was incapable of seeing before.
Who, When
While reading these stories, I noticed that more of the authors' names were in the beginning of the alphabet, so I undertook the following venture:
I was also curious as to when these stories were written (published, I mean). The age brackets of twenty years are largely arbitrary, but serve some purpose, I think.
What's Next
After a few days off to get my bearings, I will begin reading the short stories of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer I already greatly admire for his novels. I shall return.
I will also comb through the previous entries and correct a few of the many errors...
Irkland home.
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