Two short stories

[arbhor]

Would there be any interest in sharing short stories that you enjoyed, would like to discuss or are otherwise worth circulating?

I am a big fan of the format and if I am trying to recommend reading it is a smaller ask than a book. There's a kind of haughty Borges quote that I wouldn't agree with but gets a point across:

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
Jorges Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1942) collected on Wikiquote.

I am always willing to sing the praises of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast but worried that I might have a bit of a reading monoculture that I am finding it really hard to break out of. It would be great to hear some of your favorites.

I will put up "The Falls" by George Saunders which appeared in the New Yorker in 1996 and is collected in Pastoralia (2000). It looks like it has been circulated freely online and is also available in the aforementioned podcast with discussion. This story really gets to me! I really feel caught in the kind of "dilemma" (?) of the ending.

Saunders teaches a class at Syracuse on Russian literature (Will Mackin mentions this in the podcast). The class is condensed into a book, A Swim In the Pond In the Rain (2021), whose title comes from "Gooseberries" (unfortunately that exact phrasing is not in this English translation). Another story that lingered with me. Saunder's discusses the story about one as aesthetics and balancing between having beautiful experiences and acknowledging suffering.

See also, amos' reading thread and Wascie's thread on paintings. For the record, I wasn't that big on Lincoln in the Bardo for which Saunders is well known!! Z.Z. Packer's "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" would have been my second if there wasn't a thread between the two above. Also available on the NYer Fiction podcast (Z.Z. Packer on a different episode reads a haunting story by Lesley Nneka Arimah).

[amos]

I gotta read more short stories, they're fun! I have a collection of Faulkner's I just haven't gotten around to yet. Borges' short stories are mostly pretty good too, though that quote is funny since you could glibly say Borges ends up doing the "five hundred pages for one idea" thing too, he just chops it up into one hundred stories.

I like trawling minor literature[s] for stuff to read every now and again, especially when I'm stuck at work without a book or something else to dig into.

[arbhor]

I hadn't considered reading Faulkner, but after you mentioned having read one of his books I unsuccessfully poked around for an entry point into his works—maybe I could start with his Collected Stories? I assumed, with no absolutely basis, that he was better in the long form.

Anything memorable from minor literature[s]? I am a bit spoiled for choice here.

[AtomicRunner]

When I was a kid I read a compilation of Northwest Smith stories by Catherine Louise Moore. These are pulp (from the actual pulp era, even) stories about a tough space outlaw having adventures in space. Given from the era they are, they tend to go a bit on the cosmic horror side of things, though the atmosphere and tone in them is different. There is a longing, a certain sadness that people like Lovecraft would never go for. I've been going through them really slowly (I read one every time I go back to spain for a trip) and though I did not notice back them the eroticism in them, I still see the imagery that really caught my imagination. Fun fact: I even wrote a fanfic!

I mention this because the last (and shortest one) "Song in a Minor Key" really stuck to me. The story takes like one side of an A4 sheet of paper. And it's more of a mood piece than actual story per se. But it's by far the one I remember the most.

[arbhor]

I can see why it stuck with you, really striking in the way that you describe. I also see the musicality of it too, it feels like there's a conversation between the upper and lower register of the story as well as this kind push/pull between Smith in the present and his youth.

It immediately reminded me of Turgenev's "Death" (in A Sportsman's Sketches II). It was such a clear deployment of pathetic fallacy that really made use of Turgenev's tendency for detail. A friend of mine has been building a reading list on the rural United States and (in the small corpus of materials I know) there's this kind of claim to the sense of land but a really complicated cocktail of nostalgia and pain.

Rambling here, but recording a few (quasi-literary) ideas: the scene in the game, Night in the Woods in Jenny's Field which is filled with sinkholes; the titular ducks in Kate Beaton's memoir comic, Ducks. I feel like I remember LeGuin's Dispossessed doing something with this too? It has been too long since I last read Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, but I feel like it was critical in that book.

It's really weird how time can stretch and shrink here—ah—

[arbhor]

When thinking about this thread, I remember when I first read "The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off" in Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. There's a bit of mapping the human drama into the environment but I just remember it for how kind of nauseatingly strange it was...

[onza]

here are two web sites i like


International Mystic Soccer Night (Playstation 2, 2003)

MMAcevedo

[amos]

I hadn't considered reading Faulkner, but after you mentioned having read one of his books I unsuccessfully poked around for an entry point into his works—maybe I could start with his Collected Stories? I assumed, with no absolutely basis, that he was better in the long form.

Anything memorable from minor literature[s]? I am a bit spoiled for choice here.

I'll try and dig into some of those short stories over my break and let you know if I feel like they're a good showcase, but I do feel like part of what really worked about his style in The Sound and The Fury was that there was a lot of time given to roll around in the prose.

As for ML I don't remember any standouts right now, since they're mostly lil lunchbreak reads for me.

[arbhor]

RE:onza, "MMAcevedo" reminds me of "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" in Chiang's Exhalation but I guess it's just a bit of a shallow connection because they share some themes. In both of your selections the format (guide, wiki article) feels primary to the experience. In conversation, one of my co-workers was thinking about if Virginia Woolf might be easier experienced through audiobook because in reading traditionally, she found herself jumping ahead on the page and losing place between the multiple speakers. One of my friends who is about to start House of Leaves recalled reading Infinite Jest with a finger holding open the endnotes. I guess similarly, as a website guide or wiki article I approach the narrative in a completely novel way and I think using this formats is really under-explored. House of Leaves is like the only mass-market wildly non-traditional book I feel like I could name (outside of children's books). At the same time though, I can adapt habits formed from comparable formats (skimming articles, full-text searching a guide) that I feel guilty impede my sense of the narrative. Were the images extant when you encountered the site or is that part of the fiction?

RE:amos, I'd be grateful, thanks! The Sound and the Fury is part of a series? Should one start with Sartoris?

[amos]

RE:amos, I'd be grateful, thanks! The Sound and the Fury is part of a series? Should one start with Sartoris?

I've never heard of it being part of a series tbh! I read it as a standalone work.