Jan 21 – “The Darling” – Anton Chekhov (1899) [✶✶✶ Olenka (darling) is as a flawed, opinionless, yet gentle woman whose submissive, co-dependent life has been blighted by loss and disappointment. Her love is deep and she lives only for others. An anti-feminist work?]
Jan 26 – “The End of Something” – Ernest Hemingway (1925) [✶✶✶ Nick and Marjorie, night fishing near Horton’s Bay, an abandoned sawmill town, but Nick is ending the relationship, Marjorie knows and leaves, Bill arrives – that’s about it]
Jan 27 – “Cat in the Rain” – Ernest Hemingway (1925) [✶✶✶✶ An American couple on a rainy day on the Italian coast, and the wife wants to rescue a cat from the rain – the cat is a symbol for her unmet desires]
Jan 27 – “Brokeback Mountain” – Annie Proulx (1997) [✶✶✶✶✶ Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist develop a homosexual relationship while guarding sheep one summer on Brokeback Mountain, and despite future marriage and children, their relationship endures over 20 years until Jack is killed and Ennis reflects “If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” (1997 New Yorker version]
Jan 27 – “The Masque of the Red Death” – Edgar Allan Poe (1842) [✶✶✶ A wealthy count Prospero sequesters himself and 1000 guests in his castle to escape the plague (The Red Death), but during a masked ball an unknown guest arrives and “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”]
Feb 4 – “The Sisters” – James Joyce [✶✶✶ Opening story of “The Dubliners” (1914). A young boy reassesses his friendship with a recently deceased Catholic priest (Father James Flynn), looked after by his sisters, in light of half-spoken allusions to the priest’s decline]
Feb 6 – “An Encounter” – James Joyce [✶✶✶ From “The Dubliners” (1914). Two young boys skip school and have an adventure in Dublin, meeting an odd old man in a field – implications abound – a child molester?]
Feb 19 – “Father Milon” – Guy de Maupassant [✶✶✶½ A French farmer resisting Prussian occupation is put to death for killing 16 Uhlars in retribution for members of his family killed in war]
Feb 25 – “The Diamond Necklace” – Guy de Maupassant [✶✶✶✶ A clerk’s wife borrows a friends diamond necklace to attend a ball and loses it in the cab returning home. She and her husband buy a replacement necklace and spend the next decade in poverty paying off the debt]
Feb 25 – “The Black Cat” – Edgar Allen Poe [✶✶✶✶✶ The alcoholic perverse narrator hangs his black cat, and a second black cat drives him to insanity and to the axe murder of his wife]
Mar 15 – “Je ne parle pas français” – Katherine Mansfield (1918) [✶✶✶✶ Raoul Duquette, the narrator, is a young narcissistic introspective sexually-ambiguous Parisian writer (“a fox-terrier, predatory and inquisitive and even tiresome”) who is friend of Dick Harmon, a British man who later returns to Paris with a woman companion, Mouse, who does not speak French]
Mar 19 – “A Country Excursion” – Guy de Maupassant (1880’s) [✶✶✶The Dufour family make a rare trip outside of Paris to a luncheon in the country, where they meet with two boatmen who take Madame Dufour and daughter Henriette for a row on the river. Henri (one of the boatmen) is enamored with Henriette, as they sit together on an island listening to the daytime song of a nightingale. A year later they meet again, at the same spot, Henriette now married. “I too, think of it,” she replied.”]
Mar 20 – “A Simple Soul” – Gustave Flaubert (1877) [✶✶✶✶ (or A Simple Heart) The simple life of kindhearted, dedicated, uneducated Felicite, the servant of widow Madame Aubain for 50 years, and of Loulou her parrot, the symbol of the Holy Ghost. Themes of suffering and loss in a story influenced by Flaubert’s friend, George Sand]
Mar 21 – “A Married Man’s Story” – Katherine Mansfield (1923) [✶✶✶✶ Published posthumously, and unfinished, the married man narrator explores a desolate (“how long shall we continue to live – like – this?”) marriage and reflects on the sadness and isolation of his childhood]
Mar 27 – “Kashtanka” – Anton Chekhov (1887) [✶✶✶✶ Told from the perspective of a dog, lost and taken in by a new owner, a performer who trains a cat, goose, and a pig for his act. Where do the loyalties of Kashtanka (Auntie) lie?]
Apr 2 – “The Capital of the World” – Ernest Hemingway (1936) [✶✶✶ Originally “The Horns of the Bull” tells the story of junior waiter Paco, working in a Madrid pension and dreaming of being a bullfighter, unafraid in the ring as the bull’s horns sweep by]
Apr 18 – “Bliss” – Katherine Mansfield (1918) [✶✶✶ 30 year-old Bertha Young is “overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss”. She and her husband Harry host a dinner party, and Bertha feels a connection with guest Pearl Fulton, only to see that Harry is probably having an affair with her. “…shot through with homoerotic longing and the animalistic nature of sexual desire”]
Apr 22 – “The Woman at the Store” – Katherine Mansfield (1912) [✶✶✶✶ Loneliness and isolation in New Zealand leads to madness in a woman and her artistic daughter who draws the forbidden picture of a woman shooting and burying a man]
Apr 30 – “Fifty Grand” – Ernest Hemingway (1927) [✶✶✶✶ “The best prize-fight story I ever read…a remarkable piece of realism.” “Fifty Grand” tells the story of Jack Brennan as he trains for and boxes in his fight with challenger Jimmy Walcott.]
May 2 – “Indian Camp” – Ernest Hemingway (1924) [✶✶✶✶ Nick Adams’ father, a country doctor, has been summoned at night to an Indian camp to deliver a baby. At the camp, the father saves mother and baby by performing an emergency C-section using a jack-knife. The woman’s husband, lying in the top bunk above her, is discovered dead, having slit his throat during the birth. An initiation of young Nick Adams – a leitmotif of birth and suicide, and father-son conflict, that remained throughout Hemingway’s work.]
May 3 – “Sleepy” – Anton Chekhov (1888) [✶✶✶✶✶ Thirteen year old Varka, a servant girl, struggles to stay awake while rocking the baby at night, works all day meeting the demands of her masters, then repeats the night before – until she discovers the cause that is preventing her sleep, and takes decisive action]
May 11 – “The Conversion of Sam” – Zara Neale Hurston (1922) [✶✶✶½ Vagrant, scruffy Sam falls in love with newcomer waitress Stella, marries her, and turns his life around – not without a massive setback – becoming black middle class]
May 27 – “The Mark on the Wall” – Virginia Woolf (1917) [✶✶✶½ A first-person “stream of consciousness” monologue. The narrator notices a mark on the wall, and muses on what constitutes reality for the artist (external details do not give our lives meaning). Hélène Cixous – “ has suggested there is a feminine writing (écriture feminine) which stands as an alternative to this masculine kind of writing: where male writing is about constructing a reality out of solid, materialist details, feminine writing (and much modernist writing is ‘feminine’ in this way, even that written by male writers such as James Joyce) is about the ‘spiritual’ or psychological aspects of everyday living, the daydreams and gaps, the seemingly ‘unimportant’ moments we experience in our day-to-day lives” – InterestingLiterature.com]
Jun 1 – “Désirée’s Baby” – Kate Chopin (1893) [✶✶✶✶ Very short story set in old French (Creole) Louisiana. Adopted Désirée has a baby who is black, and husband Armand disowns her (as being from slave stock). Désirée disappears. Arnand finds a letter from his mother (to his father) telling that Armand’s mother has slave ancestry. Themes of hypocrisy and gender equality.]
Jun 10 – “Hills Like White Elephants” – Ernest Hemingway (1927) [✶✶✶ An American couple waiting for a train in Spain have a few drinks and discuss an “operation” the women is planning to have in Madrid (presumably an abortion)]
Jun 27 – “Araby” – James Joyce (1914) [✶✶✶ Third story in The Dubliners. First person narration by a young boy is infatuated with a neighbourhood girl. He goes to the Araby bazaar to buy her a gift, but he arrives late, and the bazaar is closing up. The story of a fruitless journey and a reality that does not live up to expectations]
Jun 29 – “Mademoiselle Fifi” – Guy de Mauspassant (1882) [✶✶✶✶ Bored Prussian officers in occupied France, including a sub-lieutenant nicknamed Mademoiselle Fifi, entertain some French prostitutes at their commandeered chateau in Normandy. Mademoiselle Fifi, an evil man, insults the French nation and French woman, and is fatally stabbed in the neck by Rachel, a Jewess, who escapes and hides in the church belltower, protected by the priest]
Jun 29 – “May Day” – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920) [✶✶✶✶ Set on May Day 1919, political theme of class tension, the ‘Smart Set’ of Yale graduates and moneyed ‘flappers’ dance the night away at swanky Delmonico’s while disenfranchised returning soldiers cause a riot at the offices of the socialist New York Trumpet. Abrupt, suicidal ending. Long short-story, or short novella]
Jul 29 – “Before the Law” – Franz Kafka (1915) [✶✶✶✶ A parable contained within the novel The Trial . “A perfectly Kafkaesque scenario in less than a page of text. Multiple interpretations are possible, but …“The scripture is unalterable, and the opinions are often merely an expression of despair on the part of the commentators” (from The Trial, p.243)]
Jul 29 – “A Country Doctor” – Franz Kafka (1917) [✶✶✶ “Kafka’s short story is filled with dreamlike, supernatural, unreal events, and is more of a nightmare than a peaceful dream.” Freudian. “Ich war in grosser verlegenheit.”]
Jul 30 – “Boys” – Anton Chekhov (1887) [✶✶✶ Two school friends, home for Christmas holiday, plan an adventurous escape to America]
Aug 4 – “Eveline” – James Joyce (1904) [✶✶✶✶✶ The fourth story in The Dubliners. 19 year-old Eveline sees a new future in front of her as she plans to leave Ireland with sailor boyfriend, Frank, and live with him in South America. But as the night boat is leaving she changes her mind, and without emotion gives up on her chance “to live” and have happiness]
Aug 25 – “The Three Day Blow” – Ernest Hemingway (1925) [✶✶✶ Nick Adams and friend Bill get into the whiskey and talk baseball, books, fathers, and Nick’s broken romance (engagement?) with Marjorie. “Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost.” Linked thematically to “The End of Something” (read on Jan 26/21)]
Aug 25 – “Old Man at the Bridge” – Ernest Hemingway (1938) [✶✶✶✶✶ The fascists advance on the Ebro during the Spanish Civil War, and the narrator meets a tired old man who has been forced to abandon his animals during air raids. The cat will be okay, but he worries about the goat and pigeons. He is too exhausted to continue and sits by the side of the road, with military conflict approaching]
Aug 28 – “Family Furnishings” – Alice Munro (2001) [✶✶✶✶ The unnamed female narrator, a self-centered writer, reflects back on the rituals of family gatherings in rural Ontario and her father’s cousin Alfrida, with whom, it is revealed, he fathered a child as a teenager. Is it right for a writer to use someone else’s story to create fiction?]
Aug 31 – “A Vendetta” – Guy de Maupassant (1883) [✶✶✶½ A Corsican widow’s adult son is murdered and she seeks revenge by training her dog to attack a man’s throat on command]
Aug 31 – “The Necklace (La Parure)” – Guy de Maupassant (1888) [✶✶✶✶ See Feb 25 summary. This was the Marjorie Laurie translation (1934)]
Sep 3 – “After the Race” – James Joyce [✶✶✶ From “The Dubliners” (1914). Jimmy Doyle, son of a working class but affluent and status-seeking Irishman, spends the evening celebrating, partying, and gambling with a small group of French, Hungarian, and English men the evening following car racing in Dublin. Jimmy loses big and knows he will regret tomorrow, but dawn has already arrived]
Sep 3 – “Two Gallants” – James Joyce [✶✶✶✶ From “The Dubliners” (1914). The “two gallants” are Lenehan and Corley, both morally ambiguous users. Corley heads off to seduce a woman he knows and Lenehan eats a small meal at a pub. Meeting later, Corley shows Lenehan a gold coin. Many unknowns and symbols throughout – moving into modernist style]
Sep 19 – “The Garden Party” – Katherine Mansfield (1922) [✶✶✶✶ An afternoon garden party at the Sheridans, but daughter Laura feels it should be called off on account of an accidental death of a laborer living nearby. After the party she takes leftover food to the laborer’s widow and witnesses both grief and the peacefulness of the corpse. Class consciousness, illusion vs. reality, insensitivity, death and the meaning of life]
Oct 7 – “I Used to Live Here Once” – Jean Rhys [✶✶✶✶✶ One-page short story. The woman/girl crosses over stepping stones in a river to reach the house where she used to live. The two children playing feel only a chill in the air. “That was the first time she knew.”]
Oct 7 – “The Doll’s House” – Katherine Mansfield (1922) [✶✶✶ The Burnell girls receive a gift of a large doll house and show it off to their school pals, to the exclusion of the two Kelvey girls who are shunned because they are children of a washerwoman. The youngest Burnell quietly shows the Kelvey’s the doll house, but all are soundly scolded by Aunt Beryl. Class consciousness, schoolyard cruelty, kindness displayed, and the toy lamp as a symbol of hope.]
Oct 10 – ”The Cloak” (“The Overcoat”) – Nikolai Gogol (1842) [✶✶✶✶ Government clerk, a copyist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is an introverted nobody with no life outside to work. His old worn cloak needs to be replaced, so he saves his money and has a new overcoat made. This process of anticipation changes his outlook and he becomes much happier and more outgoing. Leaving a party to celebrate his new overcoat he is attacked by two ruffians who steal the overcoat. A meeting with a senior official yields no help and Akaky Akakievich falls into a fever and dies. His ghost returns to St. Petersburg stealing people’s overcoats, until at least the ghost takes the overcoat from the unhelpful official and then disappears forever.]
Oct 14 – “In a Season of Calm Weather” (“The Picasso Summer”) – Ray Bradbury (1957) [✶✶✶✶✶ George and Alice Smith are on summer vacation in Biarritz. George is a lover of Picasso, and sees the artist walking alone on the beach in the evening, drawing a long frieze in the sand with an ice-cream stick. George wishes he could preserve the art, but the sun sets and the light fades. At dinner at the hotel, George hears “Just the tide, coming in.”]
Oct 14 – “Kleist in Thun” – Robert Walser (1913) [✶✶✶✶ A story about the breakdown of a writer in the mountains in Switzerland. Poet Kleist (Walser-Heinrich von Kleist) takes rooms in Thun, at the entrance to the Berner Oberland. His loneliness and inability to write successfully (“his creations miscarry”) lead to self-loathing and a feeling that he is disconnected from the real world around him. He becomes ill, and his sister arrives to take him back to Potsdam. Beautiful writing. Anguish and deeply-felt beauty are interlinked (Christopher Middleton translation – online). A good review – here]
Oct 14 – “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” – Edgar Allan Poe (1845) [✶✶✶ A mesmerist puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death, and he remains in a suspended state for seven months, before awakening is attempted and the body dissolves immediately into putridity. 1845 readers believed this was a work of nonfiction]
Oct 16 – “In the Penal Colony” – Franz Kafka (1919) [✶✶✶ A disturbing nightmare of torture and execution, but probably a religious metaphor, with the dissolution of the old regime (Old Testament) and the coming of Christ (New Testament).. “The ‘translation’ of image and symbol are so simple: salvation through suffering, and enlightenment through feeling one’s ‘sin’ ‘on one’s own body.’”]
Oct 16 – “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula K. Le Guin (1973) [✶✶✶✶✶ Described by Le Guin as a “psychomyth”. In the utopian city of Omelas, all prosperity and happiness depends on the eternal misery and squalor of a single captive child. Some citizens walk away, unable to accept this morally indefensible situation (?). But are the ones who walk away defined not by their refusal to be cruel but by their refusal to do anything about it? See William James (The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov). PDF and Summary.]
Oct 26 – “Big Two-Hearted River” – Ernest Hemingway (1925) [✶✶✶✶ Two-part short story. Nick Adams, returning from the war, to a burned town in Michigan, walks to a riverside camp and spends the next day fishing on the river. Minute details of camping and fishing, but underneath, the recovery in nature of a man wounded mentally and physically in the war.]
Oct 29 – “The Other Side of Death” – Gabriel García Márquez (1948) [✶✶✶✶ One of a pair of twins dies, but which one? And which one is smelling formaldehyde and thinking about death. The dream narrative moves between first and third person. As the corpse is shaved it becomes the reflection of the living twin – “the separation of the two bodies in space was just appearance, while in reality the two of them had a single, total nature”.]
Oct 29 – “The Country of the Blind” – H.G. Wells (1904) [✶✶✶✶ A mountaineer, Nunez, falls into the Country of the Blind, a hidden Andean Valley where for generations all the inhabitants have been blind, and no nothing of sight or of the outside world. His dreams of sovereignty, based on his ability to see, are soon shattered.]
Oct 30 – “A Respectable Woman” – Kate Chopin (1894) [✶✶✶½ Mrs. Baroda is both attracted to her husband Gaston’s visiting friend, Gouvernail, and unsettled by that attraction. Morally ambiguous for the time.]
Oct 30 – “The Pit and the Pendulum” – Edgar Allan Poe (1842) [✶✶½ The narrator is subjected to psychological torture by the Inquisition in a darkened dungeon with a central deep pit and a swinging pendulum overhead. No supernatural elements (unlike other Poe stories). Often disturbing and unpleasant]
Nov 8 – “England, My England” – D.H. Lawrence (1922) [✶✶✶ Very “Lawrence”, the first half somewhat resembling “The Rainbow”, with a description of the marriage and family life of Egbert and his wife Winifred. They have three little girls, one of whom is crippled after an injury to her knee. The couple drifts apart, and then WWI begins and Egbert, despite an indifference and moral repugnance for war, finally enlists, and the story ends with his death in Flanders. Mark Kinkead-Weekes describes England, My England as “one of the most hurtful examples of his (Lawrence’s) ruthlessness in using scenes and people ‘from life’”, as it is closely modelled on the lives of the Lucas family.]
Nov 10 – “The Black Monk” – Anton Chekhov (1894) [✶✶✶✶✶ Genius scholar Kovrin returns to the country to stay with the family in which he grew up, Yegor, a successful gardener, and his daughter Tanya. He begins having visions/hallucinations of a black monk who convinces Kovrin that he is a genius who will save the world from mediocrity. Kovrin marries Tanya but is felt to be psychiatrically ill and undergoes treatment. Without his madness, his world and marriage disintegrates. He dies of TB with one last visit from the black monk.]
Nov 10 – “Waiter, A Bock!” – Guy de Maupassant [✶✶✶✶ A man meets an unrecognizable old school friend in a beer hall. This Count Jean des Barrets has spent every day of the past decade in this beer hall. He recounts a childhood trauma that ruined his life, depriving it of any meaning.]
Nov 13 – “The Judgement” (Das Urteil) – Franz Kafka (1913) [✶✶✶✶Georg Bendemann is writing a letter to his friend living in Russia. Bendemann is engaged to be married. He talks with his widowed father, Georg’s business partner with whom he lives. The father at first denies the existence of the friend, then claims to know him well (“oscillating truth”). The father, aging and seemingly somewhat confused, accuses Georg of being “a devilish human being” and “sentences” Georg to death by drowning. Georg goes down to the river and throws himself off a bridge. A chaotic mix of paradoxes Considered (and by Kafka himself) as Kafka’s first great work.]
Nov 15 – “A Report to an Academy” – Franz Kafka (1917) [✶✶✶ A chimpanzee, Rotpeter, captured on the Gold Coast is shipped back to Europe and begins to mimic humans, and indeed “become” human and is a lecturer and celebrity in Europe]
Nov 18 – “Where I’m Calling From” – Raymond Carver (1982) [✶✶✶✶ My first Raymond Carver short story. An unnamed narrator is living at Frank Martin’s residential treatment center for alcoholics. The story revolves around his listening to the life story of a fellow resident, Joe Penny (or J.P.) and his wife Roxy, and also tells of the narrator’s own broken relationships. Hemingway-like simple sentences and clipped dialogue. The story explores the physiological and psychological effects of alcoholism, loss of identity, alienation and loneliness.]
Nov 18 – “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” – Joyce Carol Oates (1966) [✶✶✶✶✶ Very creepy. 15-year-old Connie sees a man (Arnold Friend) in a parking lot, and later he arrives at her house to take her for a drive. But he is scary, weird, older and clearly this is leading to abduction, rape, and perhaps murder. The story was inspired by three Tucson, Arizona murders committed by Charles Schmid]Nov 20 – “Cathedral” – Raymond Carver (1983) [✶✶✶✶ Self-absorbed narrator whose wife invites a former employer and mentor, Robert, to visit at their home. Robert is blind and the narrator is very ignorant and prejudiced, but allows the visit. As the evening progresses, the wife falls asleep, and the narrator and Robert are left alone drinking whisky and smoking marijuana. Watching a documentary on TV, the narrator is trying, unsuccessfully, to describe a cathedral to Robert. Finally Robert asks him to draw a cathedral, and follows the drawing by closing his hand over the narrator’s hand. The narrator finishes his drawing with his eyes closed, and bridges the gap between seeing and understanding. “The sighted man changes. He puts himself in the blind man’s place. The story affirms something.” – Raymond Carver]