The Best American Short Stories 1951 – Part 2

Here’s my thoughts on the last half of the stories in The Best American Short Stories 1951. There’s a reason this series is called “The Best”. All of these stories are very good and there are no surprises in the sense of “What? This is considered best”? Of course some resonated with me more than others but that’s no different than any collection of short stories.

The Mother’s Story by Josephine W. Johnons – A young girl at the turn of the 20th century is stood up by a man who has promised to marry her. What makes it interesting is that its told from the point of view of – you guessed it – the girl’s mother.

Fru Holm by Ilona Karmel – The reader isn’t sure of the relationship between Fru Holm and Froken Annalisa until the very end. Then there isn’t really a doubt.

Old Century’s River by Oliver La Farge – Reminds me of Hemingway not necessarily in style but content and theme. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” without Paris.

Old Turkey Neck by George Lanning – Similar to “Fru Holm”, in that it consists of an unlikely friendship for an elderly person.

Portrait by Ethel G. Lewis – A servant girl poses naked for her artist mistress. The blending of embarrassment and empowerment is quite startling.

The Glass House by Dorothy Livesay – Not sure where the title comes from for this story. I was looking for some “stone throwing” but couldn’t find any.

The Wishbone by Robie Macauley – A black sheep of the family visits. The kids love her but their mother not so much. In a round-a-bout way, the author shows sympathy for both the black sheep and the mother.

The Prison by Bernard Malamud – One of my favorites of this group of stories. Tommy Castelli’s story is told with brilliant moral ambiguity.

The Butcherbirds by Esther Patt – Another very heartfelt story about an odd friendship.

Death of a Favorite by J. F. Powers – Read this one a while back. Still a good one, though.

The Tabby Cat by Paul Rader – Second story in a row about anthropomorphic cats. Two very different stories.

The Nemesis by Jean Stafford – The more I read of Stafford’s work, the more I like it. This one has the same slightly insecure female stream of consciousness as the other stories of hers that I’ve read. The same humor, too, but this one has a sad side to it.

The Last of the Grizzly Bears by Ray B. West, Jr. – Interesting combination between killing grizzly bears and New York City business cocktail parties.

The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin by Tennessee Williams – Read this one only a few weeks ago.

Here’s the post for Part 1 of these stories.

Here’s the post for my introduction to these stories.

And here are my top five favorites from the entire collection:

5. A Fugitive From the Mind – Peggy Bennett

4. The Prison – Bernard Malamud

3. The Summer People – Shirley Jackson

2. Death of a Favorite – J. F. Powers

1. The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin – Tennessee Williams

 

Anniversary #7!

It’s the seventh anniversary of Mirror With Clouds and as I have been doing the last few years, here are my top ten favorite short stories of 2018 with quotations from each of them. I have no method of rating them – they are just the ones I liked the best. And as happens with many of my top ten lists, the top two could be interchangeable on any given day depending on my mood – both of them are fantastic stories!

10. Lions, Harts, Leaping Does – J. F. Powers

He suffered the piercing white voice of the Apocalypse to echo in his soul: But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth. And St. Bernard, fiery-eyed in a white habit, thundered at him from the twelfth century:”Hell is paved with the bald pates of priests!”

9.  The Little Regiment – Stephen Crane

Ultimately the night deepened to the tone of black velvet. The outlines of the fireless camp were like the faint drawings upon ancient tapestry. The glint of a rifle, the shine of a button, might have been of threads of silver and gold sewn upon the fabric of the night. There was little presented to the vision, but to a sense more subtle there was discernible in the atmosphere something like a pulse; a mystic beating which would have told a stranger of the presence of a giant thing – the slumbering mass of regiments and batteries.

8.  Faith – William Trevor

Afterwards, Bartholomew told himself that what had occurred must surely be no more than a mood of petulance, an eruption from his half-stifled impatience with the embroidery and frills that dressed the simplicity of truth with invasive, sentimental stories that somehow made faith easier, the hymns he hated. For Bartholomew, the mystery that was the source of all spiritual belief, present through catastrophe and plague and evil, was a strength now too, and more than it had ever been. Yet there was disquiet, a stirring in his vocation he had brought upon himself and wished he had not…Bartholomew – not knowing what he should otherwise do – continued to visit the lonely and the sick, to repeat the Te Deum, the Creed, the Litany. He felt he should not and yet he did.

7.  The Virgin’s Gift – William Trevor

He begged that his melancholy might be lifted, that the confusion which had come in the night might be lightened with revelation. These were the days of the year when his spirits were most joyful, when each hour that passed brought closer the celebration of the Saviour’s birth. Why had this honoring of a season been so brutally upset?

6.  Graillis’s Legacy – William Trevor

His safe employment had been taken for granted; in time promotion would mean occupancy of a squat grey landmark in the town, the house above the bank, with railings and a grained hall door. She had married into that; books had never been an interest they shared, had never been, for her, a need.

The woman for whom they were had often been noticed by Graillis about the town, coming out of a shop, getting into her car, not the kind of woman he would ever have known.

5.  Death of a Right Fielder – Stuart Dybek

Finally we saw him; from a distance he resembled the towel we sometimes threw down for second base.

4.  The Reach – Stephen King

“We joined hands, children, and if there were times when we wondered what it was all for, or if there was ary such a thing as love at all, it was only because we had heard the wind and the waters on long winter nights, and we were afraid.

“No, I’ve never felt I needed to leave the island. My life was here. The Reach was wider in those days.”

3.  Resurrection of a Life – William Saroyan

I was this boy and he is dead now, but he will be prowling through the city when my body no longer makes a shadow upon the pavement, and if it is not this boy it will be another, myself again, another boy alive on earth, seeking the essential truth of the scene, seeking the static and precise beneath that which is in motion and which is imprecise.

2.  The School – Donald Barthelme

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

1.  My Son the Murderer – Bernard Malamud

At night I watch the news programs. I watch the war from day to day. It’s a big burning war on a small screen. It rains bombs and the flames go higher. Sometimes I lean over and touch the war with the flat of my hand. I wait for my hand to die.

A Top Ten List…so far

Since we’re at the halfway point of 2018, I thought I would put together a top ten list of my favorite short stories so far. I have no scoring technique. This is based only on my personal likes and dislikes so at any point another story could jump to the top. We’ll see what makes it to the final top ten list in about six months. Here’s where we stand now, though:

10.) A Jury of Her Peers – Susan Glaspell

9.) Blood Burning Moon – Jean Toomer

8.) Evenings at Home – Elizabeth Hardwick

7.) The Gift – Janice Holt Giles

6.) Roses, Rhododendron – Alice Adams

5.) I’d Love You to Want Me – Viet Than Nguyen

4.) The Reach – Stephen King

3.) Death of A Right Fielder – Stuart Dybek

2.) Faith – William Trevor

1.) My Son the Murderer – Bernard Malamud

I guess I also reserve the right to change some of these around if no other stories take their place. I had a difficult time deciding where stories 2, 3 and 4 fell.

Do you rank the stories/books you read? What short stories have been your favorite so far in 2018?

Bernard Malamud: My Son the Murderer (Deal Me In 2018 – Week 3)

5♠ 5♠ 5♠ 5♠ 5♠ 5♠ 5♠ 5♠

At night I watch the news programs. I watch the war from day to day. It’s a big burning war on a small screen. It rains bombs and the flames go higher. Sometimes I lean over and touch the war with the flat of my hand. I wait for my hand to die.

With Bernard Malamud’s short story “My Son the Murderer”, I run into a situation that doesn’t occur very often.

All I really want to say is go find this story and read it!

It doesn’t use the traditional prose that Malamud so skillfully uses in the other stories of his that I’ve read. Instead, he runs the inner thoughts of a mother, father and son between paragraphs and sometimes even within the same paragraphs. No quotation marks are used when one of them is speaking. And in this story, that makes sense. It gives the feel that it’s about an entire family even if the son is the catalyst for the plot and emotions.

Set during the Vietnam War, Malamud also brilliantly presents the struggles of an entire nation in a few pages of intense family drama.

This story is included in my copy of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates. I read it when I selected the Five of Spades for Week 3 of my Deal Me In 2018 short story project. My Deal Me In list can be seen here. Deal Me In is sponsored by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Anniversary #6!

Today is the sixth anniversary of Mirror With Clouds and to celebrate, here are my top ten favorite short stories of 2017!

10.)  Mary, The Cleaning Lady – Scott McClanahan

I enjoyed reading the anthology Degrees of Elevation: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia but this story is the only one that made it into my top ten.

There were good things like ice cream cones, and trying to keep houses clean, and your mother bringing you to Mary’s house wrapped in a blanket, so you could watch cartoons and dream your cartoon dreams.

 

9.)  Snowing in Greenwich Village – John Updike

I’ve enjoyed several of John Updike’s stories over the years, but the subtlety and nuance in this one made it a favorite.

Richard’s suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt.

 

8.) The Snow Image – Nathaniel Hawthorne

I’ve realized that I have never put a Hawthorne story in my top ten so I am including this story the same way some win awards for a body of work – of course, Hawthorne doesn’t really need my approval.

…for all through life she had kept her heart full of childlike simplicity and faith, which was as pure and clear as crystal, and, looking at all matters through this transparent medium, she sometimes saw truths so profound that other people laughed at them as nonsense and absurdity.

 

7.) Poor Visitor – Jamaica Kincaid

A little homesickness or maybe something else makes me want to read more stories by Kincaid.

In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that – entering and leaving over and over again – would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for.

 

6.) The Cafeteria – Isaac Bashevis Singer

Leisurely lunches by people who have experienced some of the worst evils of the 20th century make this a very satisfying story.

I decided not to rest until I knew for certain what had happened to Esther and also to that half writer, half politician I remembered from East Broadway. But I grew busier from day to day. The cafeteria closed. The neighborhood changed. Years have passed and I have never seen Esther again. Yes, corpses do walk on Broadway. But why did Esther choose that particular corpse? She could have got a better bargain even in this world.

 

5.) Rembrandt’s Hat – Bernard Malamud

Not your usual short story relationship makes this story intriguing and one that I continue to think about.

That evening, leaving the building, they tipped hats to each other over small smiles.

 

4.) Yours – Joe Ashby Porter

I loved the wacky bitterness of the jilted narrator in this story and it provided one of my favorite quotations.

I’m off newspapers for the moment and to fill the breakfast time this morning I plotted a graph of my life on a napkin.

 

3.)  Chemistry – Ron Rash

Ron Rash’s short story anthology Something Rich and Strange was one of my favorite reading experiences in 2017 and this was the favorite story. It’s also the only story on my top ten list that was not from my Deal Me In project.

“Your mother believes the holy rollers got me too young, that they raised me to see the world only the way they see it. But she’s wrong about that. There was a time I could understand everything from a single atom to the whole universe with a blackboard and piece of chalk, and it was as beautiful as any hymn the way it all came together.”

 

2.) Absolution – F. Scott Fitzgerald

A great story with a great first line.

There once was a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears.

 

1.)  The Balloon – Donald Barthelme

This is a departure in the type of story I usually choose as a favorite but it was just too unusual, but perfect, in structure, plot and style that I had to put it at the top.

…there were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there – muted grays and browns for the most part, contrasting with walnut and soft yellows.

 

 

 

 

Bernard Malamud: Rembrandt’s Hat (Deal Me In 2017 – Week 52)

6♥ 6♥ 6♥ 6♥ 6♥ 6♥ 6♥ 6♥

That evening, leaving the building, they tipped hats to each other over small smiles.

The beauty of Bernard Malamud’s story “Rembrandt’s Hat” lies in the relationship between the two men around which the story revolves. They are not best friends nor worst enemies; instead, they are colleagues at an art school and could simply be considered acquaintances.

Arkin comments on Rubin’s hat one day and an inner turmoil ensues when he feels he has unintentionally offended Rubin. While the story never mentions loneliness or isolation, it’s not difficult to understand the possibility of these feelings with the two men. At the same time, I feel like this interpretation lacks something. The two men have a community of sorts and the story might be telling us that a community can be made of relationships that, even if they don’t run deep, can still be meaningful.

I read this story when I selected the Six of Hearts for Week 52 of my Deal Me In 2017 short story project. It is included in my copy of Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker edited by David Remnick.  My Deal Me In list can be found here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

This also concludes my Deal Me In 2017 short story project. Look for an upcoming post with my list of short stories for Deal Me In 2018. Also, look for a post about my final Jane Austen novel Northanger Abbey.

 

Bernard Malamud: The German Refugee

Deal Me In – Week 29

6♥  6♥  6♥  6♥  6♥  6♥  6♥  6♥

“I felt like a child, or worse, often like a moron. I am left with myself unexpressed.  What I knew, indeed, what I am, becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs useless.”

Sometimes, a sad story well-told is a beautiful thing.  Bernard Malamud’s “The German Refugee” is a prime example.  I read it this week when I selected the Six of Hearts for my Deal Me In 2015 Short Story Project. My Deal Me In 2015 list can be seenhere. Deal Me In 2015 is sponsored by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

The narrator is a young college tutor who privately teaches English and speech during the late 1930’s in New York City.  Many of his students are prominent Jewish men who have escaped Nazi Germany. His current student, Oskar Gassner, becomes more of a friend to the narrator than just a student. The amazing aspect of this story is how Malamud lets the sadness of Gassner’s situation come through loud and clear in relatively minor details such as the anguish of attempting to talk without an accent when giving lectures – the way Gassner made a living in Germany. The reader gets inside the mind of a man in his mid-fifties who must completely start over in another country because his government wants to kill him and understands the conflict within Gassner’s mind between “I must try to make a go of this” and “why bother”.

There are many great stories that tell various aspects of the Jewish plight in Europe during World War II.  I found “The German Refugee” to be one of the best.  It is included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.

 

Bernard Malamud: A Summer’s Reading

5♦  5♦  5♦  5♦  5♦  5♦  5♦  5♦

It’s week 49 of my Deal Me In 2014 short story project.  Only three more stories to go.  This week I drew the Five of Diamonds and read Bernard Malamud’s story “A Summer’s Reading”.  My Deal Me In 2014 list can be seen here.  DMI is sponsored by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

I tend to assume that authors are avid readers.  “A Summer’s Reading” does not disprove this assumption and I have every reason to believe that Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Malamud was an avid reader; however, Malamud seems very skilled at developing a character that isn’t a reader or at least is a procrastinating reader.

George Stoyonovich drops out of high school and in order to preserve his image promises an elderly neighbor, Mr. Cattanzara, that he is reading a list of 100 books during the summer- to get the kind of education he “really needs”. Impressed, Mr. Cattanzara, spreads the news of George’s endeavor.  One of the more humorous aspects of the story arises from the neighbors continuously giving George knowing smiles as he passes by their doorsteps.  Of course, the smiles make George feel a little guilty for not really reading the books.  At the end of the summer, he finally sits down at his local library.  Do his books get read?  It’s hard to say.

Any story that is set in Brooklyn, New York in the 1930s or 1940’s holds some sort of interest with me.  Something about the neighbors hanging out on the doorstep in the cool of the city night during a hot summer makes for an enjoyable scene. I’ve mentioned before my infatuation with New York City.  I’ve only managed to make it there once and I didn’t make it to Brooklyn – only to Manhattan (Times Square and Central Park area). I didn’t get an I♥NY t-shirt but should have. “A Summer’s Reading” may not be high on plot details but any writing that can take me to another place and time, especially New York City, is worth reading.

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Robert Redford played Roy Hobbs in the 1984 film version of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural.  The very dated edition of the novel that I borrowed from the library had Robert Redford on the cover.  As I began reading, my imagination couldn’t help but make me think of Redford as Hobbs; however, as I continued reading, in my imagination, Redford morphed into Humphrey Bogart. The novel has a film noir feel with many morally ambiguous men, including Hobbs, himself, chasing after women whom I could easily imagine as Lauren Bacall.

As a thirty-five year-old rookie, Hobbs finally sees his dream of playing in the big leagues realized as he signs on with the Knights in Chicago.  Hobbs is an enigmatic character and that mystery and vagueness only work sometimes.  More often than not, I found myself in the role of Max Mercy, the reporter bent on finding out who Hobbs really is.  Answers are very slim – to Mercy and the reader.

The atmosphere and time period are developed well by Malamud giving the reader an idea of a time when Ebbet’s Field was still standing and the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn.  However, the atmosphere wasn’t enough for me to consider this a great novel. Perhaps in the realm of baseball novels, it was good, but I prefer W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe.