"The Liar" (1981)

Story by Tobias Wolff not available online.

Tobias Wolff is somehow reliably one of the most instantly engaging writers I know, whether he is writing fiction or nonfiction. He seems to be always spinning stories that get their hooks in me. This gem, the last story in the collection edited by Raymond Carver (and the last in this series), is a great example. It features three characters: a woman and her son and their family doctor. It's told first-person by the son, James, who is 16. Mother is a widow—her husband, James's father, died of cancer some years earlier. He died at home when James was there and Mother was out. Since then, a tendency in James to exaggerate has grown into a morbid variety of pathological lying. He intimates to people that family members, or he himself, have contracted deadly diseases. He lies the way any kid starved for attention will do, especially after it has worked a few times. He's obviously in the grip of a compulsion and to address it his mother sends him to their family doctor, Dr. Murphy, who "was our family physician and had no training in psychoanalysis, but he took an interest in 'things of the mind,' as he put it." The story has a kind of dense but rolling way of moving along. James never attempts to justify or explain his lying, he just reports it. He is as puzzled as anyone about it, but also seems to enjoy his antics on the level of a joke. He is amused, if anything, that people believe what he tells them. He writes one friend (in an unmailed letter that Mother finds while snooping in his drawers) that Mother "had been coughing up blood and the doctors weren't sure what was wrong with her, but that we were hoping for the best." At the same time, he knows he shouldn't do this and he does want to stop, or at least is conflicted. Wolff has famously admitted he was a pathological liar himself as a youth and turned those energies to writing fiction. Fair enough. I had my own period of lying and Wolff seems to have a lot of the details right. There's also a remarkable family memory of a trip to Yosemite, with strange vivid details. And there's a wonderful ending, with James on a Greyhound bus pretending to speak Chinese to his seatmate and those around him. Any place is good to start with Wolff. Start here.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"The Use of Force" (1938)

Read story by William Carlos Williams online.

William Carlos Williams is someone I know better as a poet. But he was also a doctor, a pediatrician, and wrote short stories. This very short story, the last in the collection edited by Robert Penn Warren, is about four printed pages, and it often feels terse and abrupt. It's told first-person by a doctor who has been called to examine a sick girl in her home. The story takes place during a diphtheria outbreak, which is the concern of all present, including the girl. But she refuses to cooperate. She's afraid she's seriously sick and irrationally believes if she's not diagnosed she can't be sick, or won't have to endure treatments, or something. The family is poor and they've preferred to believe the girl's story that nothing is wrong. But they know better now and have finally called the doctor. I'm not a parent, but the scene reminds me of what can happen in veterinarian offices. The patients are there for their own good but there's no way to explain that to them. At some point, the use of force may be required. It's always a tricky moment. That's why it's the title of this story. In this case the doctor needs to examine the girl's throat and she refuses to open her mouth. We all know there are ways to force a person's mouth open. It can be done but it requires effort. There's a moment in the contest—say, sticking with what I know, getting a cat actually out of the box in the vet's office—when you realize you are violently imposing your own will on another with brute advantage, and it's momentarily a little sickening. This story is about that moment exactly. Any faults of the parents, any innate goodness of the physician—even the fact that the girl turns out indeed to have diphtheria—do little to eliminate the unpleasantness of the violence we witness. A reader on the Goodreads site (Jenna) captures the essence of this story very well: "Upon first reading this, the doctor seems like he's trying to diagnose a stubborn child with Diphtheria. The second time reading this it seems comparable to a rape. Seriously." This story is as strangely powerful as any of Williams's poetry. Remarkable.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"The Wedding" (1982)

Story by Joy Williams not available online.

This Joy Williams story left me a little cold. It seemed too typical of a certain post-Carver mold, both in terms of its focus on vaguely underclass losers and its self-conscious minimalist aesthetics. The two characters who marry in this story, Elizabeth and Sam, are full-grown adults with previous failed relationships. She is 30 and has a 5-year-old daughter. He seems a little older, in his 40s, married three times. He's also likely an alcoholic. It feels like a marriage they are both settling for, don't exactly want, though Elizabeth campaigns for it and Sam goes along, popping the question not long after his third divorce has become final. Formally the story is on the order of a shattered narrative, with line breaks and new scenes every few paragraphs. The narrator is third-person mostly omniscient, mostly looking from Elizabeth's view. It seems to be about exercising the quixotic nature of the search for love as it existed in the early '80s. Except for certain details of ambience (such as prevailing technology) it could happen 100 years ago or 100 years from now. What seems unique might only be the itinerant nature of so many people's love lives, set free within this still relatively new liberated era of marrying for love and pleasure. In that context, in many ways the story focuses on the trauma of divorce. Both Elizabeth and Sam actively want to be married. That's the primary objective—that sense of security that comes from being cocooned with someone, fortified against the world somehow. But it seems unlikely this marriage will last either. They don't seem to know each other very well. Obviously neither means any harm. They are just two confused people, with a 5-year-old in tow. They feel hollow, without centers. I suspect that's the point. And it might have felt fresh or compelling in the early '80s, but now feels like we've been over the ground a few thousand times, like Vietnam.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"Train" (1972)

Story by Joy Williams not available online.

Like first sentences, single-word titles are a bit of an art form in their own right. In this series, we've seen a few different ways to do it: "Akhnilo" (made-up word), "Cathedral" (portentous image), "Charles" (character), "Departures" (poignant image), "Helping" (multifaceted), "Moonwalk" (historical specific), and so on. Joy Williams's choice, for the last story in the collection edited by Tobias Wolff, is pretty good, more or less in the multifaceted vein. In the first place, the events in this story take place on a train ride from D.C. to Florida. In the second place, adults are modeling behavior for children to learn from. The two main characters are 10-year-old girls, Danica and Jane. Danica has spent the summer with Jane and Jane's family while Danica's mother takes the time to sell her house and prepare for a second marriage. It's September now and the train is bearing them all home—Danica, Jane, and Jane's parents. Danica and Jane are at a stage where they are a little tired of one another, while each still recognizes the other is all she has. The summer is ending and both have trepidations about the immediate future. Meanwhile, Jane's parents are your basic awful couple, full of sarcasm and bile toward one another, which they cheerfully broadcast at will to both girls. Late in the story Danica asks Jane's father, "Do you think Jane and I will be friends forever?" He responds, "Definitely not. Jane will not have friends. Jane will have husbands, enemies, and lawyers." He then goes on, "I'm glad you enjoyed your summer, Dan, and I hope you're enjoying your childhood. When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything's sunny and then this big goddamn wing or something passes overhead." Note the momentary lapse into Salinger in this key passage, perhaps the most important in the story. Jane's father is probably right about Jane's future, as this story is particularly good at etching the characters of the two girls. As for the bickering adult couple, their fighting seemed more comical than sad. Their putdowns are too often too witty, and so is much of their behavior—they have to be entertaining each other at least a little. When Jane's mother passes a note to Danica for Jane's father, for example, he eats it without reading it. They just don't seem that embittered. There's not the feeling of two people clawing each other apart, as seen in fractured family tales elsewhere. I'm saying that like it's a bad thing, I know. It actually feels like relief that there might be some hope for this relationship. I'm just not sure that's what was intended—which maybe dates it some.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

"Daddy Garbage" (1981)

Story by John Edgar Wideman not available online.

John Edgar Wideman's story has a few tricks up its sleeve. It's not clear who the third-person narrator is or what he's up to exactly. He starts with a street scene in hot summer with a woman buying sweet ices for her kids. Then it becomes a kind of reminiscence, which is yet aware of the present. The first trick is Daddy Garbage himself—he's a dog, dead in the story's present, who belonged to Lemuel Strayhorn, the purveyor of ices. In the reminiscence, the dog finds a box in a garbage can. It's the dead of winter. You think this story is going to be about the dog. But inside the box is the corpse of a baby. The story is mostly about what Strayhorn does, which is not that extraordinary. He finds a friend to help him, who analyzes the situation: "If you go to the police they find some reason to put you in jail. Hospital got no room for the sick let alone the dead. Undertaker, he's gon want money from somebody before he touch it. The church. Them church peoples got troubles enough of they own to cry about. And they be asking as many questions as the police." They decide to bury it in a nearby potter's field, and out of respect they decide to bury it six feet deep. With the ground frozen and only a short shovel, it's a lot of work. They spend much of the night at it, and when it's done one of them says some words over the grave. Daddy Garbage hardly figures in the story at all, but perhaps because we know he's dead now he casts a long shadow over these events somehow. I like how simple and straightforward this story seems to be, with its poignant details. I like how so much is supported by these details, such as the dog's name. Or the presumption no one will ever claim the body—that speaks volumes. The lighthearted tone enables enough distance from the events to make them almost bearable. These characters never descend into hysteria, even though we as readers might be tempted to do so because the elements of the story are so painful. In fact, their stoic acceptance of what they encounter almost makes it worse. It conveys what they know, what they live with, and what they do about it in starkest terms. The easygoing banter becomes one of the warmest aspects of the whole thing—a relief. Remarkable story.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

"Why I Live at the P.O." (1941)

Read story by Eudora Welty online.

I struggled some with Eudora Welty's colorful Southern story full of colorful Southern people doing colorful Southern things. Welty was a native of Mississippi so the tone, approach, and subject matter are little surprise. I haven't read much of her—and, I'm sorry to say, I mix her up with Edith Wharton (the initials, no doubt, probably combined with the gender and general "back there" timeframe). This is also one of those stories full of precision Southern dialect. But dialect is often a tough go for me, no matter how precise. Welty was also a photographer and the story in large part is spun out of one of her photos, a picture of a woman ironing in the back of a post office. It's told first-person by a young woman, known as Sister, and the primary plot point, as suggested by the title, is an explanation of why she moved to the post office. The home situation is clannish: there's Stella-Rondo, who is Sister's sister, and Papa-Daddy, their grandfather, and Mama, their mother, and so on. Stella-Rondo has recently moved home again after a short period of being married, and appeared with a 2-year-old no one has ever heard about. Stella-Rondo claims the girl is adopted, but Sister does not believe that. It's a pretty riotous crew all around, with lots of ongoing friction, catcalling, and shenanigans between family members. The weirdest turn for me was when Uncle Rondo, Mama's brother, showed up wearing one of Stella-Rondo's dresses. Everyone thinks it's in poor taste but rolls with it. The story takes place on a 4th of July, underlining the narrator's independence, or something. I understand this is all comical business, but it never seemed very funny. The general dynamic between most family members I would characterize as abusive, but maybe that's just me. I understand it's exaggerated for grotesque effect, but even when you let the air out of it it's still pretty awful. Let's apply good old Occam's razor to Stella-Rondo's situation, given what we know from the story. She probably got pregnant, moved away, and came back two or three years later with a child. The marriage was real enough but short-lived. Now she wants to claim the man she married is not the father. It's ambiguous, but the implications are so rotten it's hard to find much comical about it. I probably need to relax and go with the flow a little bit more on this one.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"Harrison Bergeron" (1961)

Read story by Kurt Vonnegut online.

The premise of Kurt Vonnegut's story is a type of Devastating Wry Dystopic Satire that feels typical to me of its New Frontier times. It riffs on a straw man, an argument I don't think anyone is making or has ever made. Setting that aside, it's a great example of what a sharp and chiseled writer Vonnegut could be. In the future of this story people have gone mad for equality. Society has evolved a counterbalancing system wherein the most gifted are formally handicapped. Strong people are burdened with extra weight. Smart people are fixed with buzzers that sound off in their ears every 20 seconds to interrupt concentration. And so forth. As a view of coming attractions I do think it's unlikely. As a joke, however, Vonnegut has a few good ways to work it. It's a very short story with lots of dialogue, which enables it to establish rhythms that start to work almost musically and can be funny. It's also comical to see such mediocrity as the accepted norm. In this world excellence is an affront of arrogance. George and Hazel Bergeronn are parents of the anti-equality revolutionary Harrison, a Nietzschean superman if ever there was one. George and Hazel are watching a ballet performance on TV. But the dancers are not very good. George and two of the ballerinas have ear buzzers, which are synchronized. George and Hazel have an absent-minded conversation. One of George's best recurring lines is "Um." So the comedy is pretty rich and it's fun to read. But put it down a second and think about it and it starts to be annoying. Perhaps it's the mood I'm in at the moment, but it's hitting me as another privileged indictment of "identity politics." The year this was published the Civil Rights movement was on the rise, and a renewal of feminism just over the horizon. "Harrison Bergeron" can too easily be read as mocking such movements by willfully misunderstanding them. No one who wants to protect civil rights is trying to take anything but unfair opportunity away from anybody. The issue is equality of opportunity and fair treatment, not literal equality. This was originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Make of that what you will. It's still fun to read. Set a timer on a buzzer so you don't have to think about it too long.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

"Dog Heaven" (1989)

Read story by Stephanie Vaughn online.

Stephanie Vaughn's story is more along the lines of a reminiscence, but she makes it work by paradoxical yet resonant language and a fearless use of baldly sentimental figures. It's called "Dog Heaven" because a dog who is dead at the time of writing figures prominently. It's a childhood memory so obviously there are children too. The unnamed first-person narrator remembers 25 years earlier when she was in 7th grade. Her best friend is a boy named Sparky. They learn how to induce fainting as a game. They run for student government positions. It takes place on a military base in the '60s, when nuclear war was a fevered worry. The dog is named Duke and he's a big friendly guy, and smart too. I like the way Vaughn describes his barking, as during one of their fainting games: "Whenever I knocked out, I came to on the grass with the dog barking, yelping, crouching, crying for help. 'Wake up! Wake up!' he seemed to say. 'Do you know your name? Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!'" Vaughn somehow establishes an ironic distance yet indulges things like putting words in the mouths of animals. And somehow it works. My first time reading it I was mostly interested in the dog story, and found the strange locutions more something to push through. "Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again," the story starts. Going back through it again, they became more the points to linger on. We saw in Tess Gallagher's "The Lover of Horses" the idea that destiny chooses us, not the other way round, and there's a similar inside-out take going on here. The narrator is like a dream that her memories have. The memories are real. She is ethereal. Something like that. This works most for me with the dog, where the emotional pull is hardest. But I played a fainting game like she describes when I was in 7th grade too. And I know the sense of chapters in life now disappeared, but whose memories still haunt. I think that's something like what she is getting at here. It's remarkable for me how the story seems to unfold and deepen further every time I go through it.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

"The Christian Roommates" (1964)

Read story by John Updike online.

John Updike's story is a slice of life out of the Harvard freshmen dormitories of approximately the '50s. It's charming and a pleasure to read—published originally in the New Yorker—but just to be clear, it's a slice of life out of the Harvard freshmen dormitories of approximately the '50s. The two main characters are Orson Ziegler, a premed student from South Dakota, and Harry Palamountain, who goes by Hub. They are called the Christian roommates the way other pairs are called the Jewish roommates, the Negro roommates, the writer roommates, and so on. Not all the labels fit these late adolescents perfectly. Ziegler is a conventional rock-ribbed Republican protestant. Hub is interested in religion and philosophy, but he's hardly hemmed in by any one sect or creed, or even Christianity. He practices something he calls "Yoga," and also meditates, prays, and elaborately attempts to stay open to all things. The story was published before hippies, but Hub is in line with certain strains of Thoreau by way of the beats. There are nearly a dozen characters here and the best part of the story is its strong sense for that age of stepping out on your own. Some of these guys—they are all guys—don't even last the first year. Others stay together as roommates all the way. At the end of the story we get little bios of how things turned out, like the end of American Graffiti: "Fitch returned, made up the lost credits, and eventually graduated magna cum in History and Lit. He now teaches in a Quaker prep school. Silverstein is a biochemist, Koshland is a lawyer," etc. I'm a little surprised I haven't read more Updike—his natural chatty style is the kind of thing that can appeal to me (Salinger, Roth, etc.). But then I look at the privilege on display here and I remember. The only way this works is to accept its class-bound terms. The third-person narrator is basically above it, comfortable in the class that intimidates all these boys one way or another. And yet this narrator has little to say about class formally. That would be gauche, I guess. Even within its narrow constraints—the Harvard freshmen dormitories of approximately the '50s—there is easily recognized human behavior in this story, which works to redeem the patronizing superiority at least a little.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"Hunting the Deceitful Turkey" (1906)

Read story by Mark Twain online.

This Mark Twain piece is probably too short and yet discursive to be properly considered a narrative, but those are also the qualities that make it fun to read. At three pages (seven paragraphs) it's more like a quick snapshot reminiscence, or perhaps a tirade. What's best about it I think is how funny it is, as intended. The narrator has a grudge against turkeys. He's not shy about it. He seethes and is unrelenting in his condemnation, out of all proportion. One of Twain's best tricks is exactly this, adopting the tone and telling the little stories, while slipping in obvious but unexpected exaggerations. So the turkey hunt lasts from dawn until after dark, with the bird cleverly playing him, forever eluding him by inches. At one point the narrator tries to explain why he doesn't just shoot it, but it makes no sense, again out of all proportion with everything else: "I never did it, although it was my right, for I did not believe I could hit her; and besides, she always stopped and posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious that she knew about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose myself to her remarks." Twain was 71 when he wrote this piece and it has the easy-rolling tenor of a natural storyteller. Knowing Twain's fiction and travel writing I'm already predisposed to like anything by him that comes my way, though it's hard to guess what someone would make of him if this were the first they read by him. It's so short, and really silly—something that can be read in 15 minutes or less. But it made me laugh. Figuring out the trick the turkey was playing and how it worked. Then that the whole thing goes on so long. And all of his conclusions and suppositions about guns, food, hunters and hunting, and turkeys, enlarging upon them with an air of moral certainty, yet never quite seeming connected to reality. Somehow it comes out funny. I think it's the aggrieved voice, created from certain American characters that are still not hard to recognize today. I hear one of my uncles in this.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

"Master and Man" (1895)

Read story by Leo Tolstoy online.

We've encountered a few severe snowstorms in the stories for this project so far, but Leo Tolstoy's could well be the best, or worst. Again, perhaps the biggest surprise in this project has been discovering how much I enjoy these harsh nature stories. In this one, the master Vasili Andreevich is eager to close a business deal and insists on traveling through a snowstorm that day to do so. He takes along one of his servants, Nikita, who sets up the horse and sledge, and away they go. Goodbye. The horse, of course, soon becomes equal partner among the three, in terms of personality and affect. For better or worse, my heart always goes out to these animals. It's obvious Tolstoy has lived with harsh winter conditions because his descriptions are detailed and telling. For example, the squeaking of the sledge's runners against the snow is a sure indication of extreme cold. The storm is fierce with extremely poor visibility. Even so, Master wants to take a shortcut. Before long they lose the road, and not long after that they are completely lost. The more that the horse and the servant are left to make decisions, the better off they are. They travel in circles and finally arrive at a village, where they are amazed by how far off the track they have traveled. They stop for directions, and to warm up. At that house they are invited to stay for the night, and Nikita is in favor of it, but Master is impatient to conclude his business. Again they lose their way, and then they lose the light. Caught by darkness, they must shelter in place for the night, knowing they are lost. When morning comes it turns out they are not far from shelter, but this story is more about the night, in which two of them die. Only Nikita survives, because of the noble actions of Master, although when it comes to that they are all three deranged by the conditions and hypothermia and it's hard to say with complete confidence that his actions were truly selfless. But the results are, and what counts most in this story are the characters, who are rich and complex. Well, the horse is a horse, but that's all he has to be. Andreevich and Nikita and their relationship turns out to be intricate, beautiful, and not at all predictable, though entirely believable. Great story.

Master and Man and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

"You Could Look It Up" (1941)

Read story by James Thurber online.

The overwhelming point of this amusing baseball anecdote by James Thurber is the dialect, which is almost as charming as it is thick. Some of my favorite locutions here include "the iron eye," "finely," and "all Bethlehem broke loose." I got used to it ("finely") but it was slow going at first. This story was published in 1941 and 10 years later was acted out in reality by St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, who signed small person Eddie Gaedel (3 feet 7 inches) for a one-time appearance as a pinch hitter. You could look it up. Not surprisingly, Gaedel—and the wonderfully named Pearl du Monville in this story—are walked on four consecutive pitches. Well, that's not exactly the way it goes down in this story, but I'll let you get to the details on your own. Veeck claims he was unaware of the story, or at least he said, in conversation with New York Giants manager John McGraw, that he'd had the idea before 1941. This suggests to me that the premise was already part of the oral lore of baseball. Thurber turned it into this story. Veeck made it a one-time stunt in a ballgame. In both instances it was hilariously cited as making a mockery of the game, which is rich. Me, I like baseball anecdotes quite a bit. This is a little more formal, even with the dialect, but still has an appealing air of yarn spinning. It might even be fun to hear it read aloud by someone who can do it justice, although as always the risks for flopping would be great. Oral storytelling necessarily requires some theatrical skill, especially when dialect is involved, which can lead to wincing. If anything, this story might be too long for just an anecdote. The best ones are quick. Joaquin Andujar on how he would pitch to himself: "Fastball down the middle. What do you think, I'd try to get myself out?" Or Don Drysdale's view that an intentional walk was a waste of three pitches. The anecdote of the small pinch hitter here is easily told just by stating the premise, so the story feels a little bloated, and might be annoying if you are not a baseball fan or don't enjoy reading dialect. I have my problems in the latter area, but Thurber's pretty good at it and also at telling a story. Plus it's a classic, you know.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939)

Read story by James Thurber online.

This brief story by James Thurber, told third-person but with majority interior dialogue of its title character, is amusing but not that insightful, though it's among Thurber's most famous. The basic idea is that this Walter Mitty, a mild-mannered middle-aged man, has a head full of heroic fantasies about himself. They range from wartime scenarios (interesting given the publication date six months before Hitler entered Poland) to grave medical emergencies to high-stakes courtroom dramas. He appears to have little clue about the realities of medical treatment in the one fantasy, where he is an expert on "streptothricosis," a real skin disease, discussing "obstreosis of the ductal tract," a completely made-up procedure. The sound effect "pocketa-pocketa" recurs across a few of these fantasies, and occasionally reality intrudes on them in strange ways, a bit like waking in the fog of a dream. The outside scene involves Mitty taking his wife on a shopping trip and he does some shopping himself. That's about it. It has a few moments that might get you a smile—for example, I enjoyed the "pocketa-pocketa" sound effect—and as with anything published in the New Yorker it's at least a pleasure to read (except for those times, which come, when you tire of the urbane metropolitan voice). In terms of a look at the dark corners of a human soul, no, it's not that. I mean, you know what goes on in your own head, so you know right away what's missing if you give it any thought. No sex fantasies, no revenge fantasies, no brooding or seething. That's not the kind of guy Walter Mitty is (or, more realistically, that part of him is buried out of reach of this story. If he's that alienated from himself I don't want to think about it). A recent figure he reminded me of is Ken Bone, who was briefly famous during the debate season the other year with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Walter Mitty is just a guy going about his workaday shopping business and imagining himself in heroic roles as he does so. You get the impression he does a lot of this, but so do we all, right? And really, his are the sanitized versions and not much more. But fun to read the story.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

"A Spinster's Tale" (1940)

Read story by Peter Taylor online.

Peter Taylor's story commits the sin of a man writing first-person as a woman, in this case an adult woman who is remembering incidents from her early adolescence. The fact that she is a spinster—that is, enduring the tragedy of being unmarried—we know only from the title. It's not mentioned in the story. It seems to me, a man, that this is a story about a woman who is adversely affected by the boys and men she grew up around. Her brother (called "Brother"), her father, and her two uncles are all varying shades of drunkard. The formal focus of the story, in fact, is a town drunk named Speed, or "Mr. Speed," as our spinster narrator, Elizabeth, calls him. Her father and his friends call him "Old Speed." Elizabeth develops something of an obsession from her first sight of him: "I beheld Mr. Speed walking like a cripple with one foot on the curb and one in the street. And faintly I could hear him cursing the trees as he passed them, giving each a lick with his heavy walking cane." You get the sense that Mr. Speed represents something larger and more general for her. Perhaps he is the reason she never married—the reason she has decided all men are drunken beasts. She has to take the bad behavior from her family but in the conflict with Speed she is cold, harsh, and condemning. As an interpretation, that might be too easy. Taylor has said he was under some influence of Henry James at the time he wrote this story, so perhaps that accounts for the strange open-ended ambiguities. The title keeps suggesting to me that the story is some kind of explanation—not necessarily for her never marrying, but for some fundamental trait of her personality or her life. Men are brutes and to be treated that way. It seems simplistic, but there's an undeniable rage tucked away in the formally clean language. She ends it on a strange and compelling image: "... my hatred and fear of what [Mr. Speed] had stood for in my eyes has never left me. And ... not a week has passed but that he has been brought to my mind by one thing or another. It was only the other night that I dreamed I was a little girl on Church Street again ... and that there was a drunk horse in our yard."

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"A Red-Letter Day" (1948)

Story by Elizabeth Taylor not available online.

Elizabeth Taylor's story is sharply observed but dated to the extent that some of its plot points likely no longer register the same way. Tory is a young single mother on visiting day at the boarding school her son attends. She sees a maternal woman who is there to visit her multiple sons and resents her—resents, we surmise, the older woman's greater comfort with being a mother, having a successful marriage, or just in general. Tory got pregnant the first time she had sex, married the man, and is now divorced from him. Her feelings about her son Edward are not conventionally maternal. It's not even clear that she cares about him, though it's also not clear that she doesn't. Certainly she has poignant feelings for him, in an abstracted way. They are uncomfortable together and it is a long day for both of them. Most of the time Tory seems to be focused on the maternal woman, Mrs. Hay-Hardy, and dwelling on her "womb": "she looked as if she had what is often called a teeming womb," for example. The contrast is stark if obvious and Mrs. Hay-Hardy recurs throughout the story. Mostly it says inside Tory's head but occasionally we see things from Edward's view. He is 11 and, while not any more comfortable than Tory about the visit, he doesn't seem that needy either. If anything, he seems reasonably happy and adjusted to boarding school life. It's possible he will eventually need therapy or have problems as an adult, but he seems fine now, which in some ways implicitly argues she's doing OK as a mother. But I don't think that's supposed to be the point of this story. This is more along the lines of proto-feminism, underlining the limitations women are subjected to. It's plain Tory never wanted the responsibilities of a child, at least not on these terms. She hates her ex-husband and doesn't react well when Edward tries to bring him up. So she's a person with anger and resentments, and I think the way these feelings confuse her about her own motherhood is intended to be a little shocking. That's mostly what feels dated. We know better now that the life of a single mother is not an easy one, and often leads to bitterness for perfectly understandable reasons. I'm not sure we're intended to like Tory much, but I think it's easier than ever to identify with her now. I think it's even possible this story is about one very bad day—we all have them—and everything worked out fine for her. Or, anyway, as fine as possible for a woman in her time.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"Rules of the Game" (1989)

Read story by Amy Tan online.

It has been a long time since I read Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, which I recall as mostly a single long piece—actually, I remembered it as a memoir. But the real distinction appears to be between novel and collection of stories, in which case I remember it as a novel. But this is in a story anthology and apparently taken as a stand-alone, so OK. It's about a girl who learns at a young age that she has a gift for chess, and how that complicates her relationship with her mother, and her understanding of life as the daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants growing up in San Francisco. I'm not sure how I would take "Rules of the Game" without knowing about The Joy Luck Club, but it felt to me like a fragment from something larger. The bigger point is the girl's relationship with her mother, which is touched on here but more peripherally. The story is told first-person by the daughter as a grown woman, and it's particularly good on the reveries of going deeply into a game. When a person has a knack for something, often the most important things occurring in the head, or the brain, don't translate well verbally. There's a learning process happening, but it's very hard to describe, and almost has to be approached indirectly. Here that is evoked wonderfully in the names of chess strategies she learns from an older Chinese man: the Double Attack From East and West Shores ... Throwing Stones on the Drowning Man ... the Sudden Meeting of the Clan ... the Surprise From the Sleeping General, and more. Tan's language is always clear and propulsive, a pleasure to read. But I recall the relationship with the narrator's mother as infinitely more developed than what's here, and even in stunted form it's by far the most interesting element in this story. But the story also has many other good points. The way Tan renders the mother's dialect is wonderful, sharp and evocative. The narrator's Americanized voice makes a good contrast. There's nothing so new or innovative about the story it tells of the rifts between generations in a family of immigrants. But it's done so well I want more—not least, because I know there is more. My recommendation is that you just go read The Joy Luck Club.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

"Helping" (1987)

Read story by Robert Stone online.

Robert Stone's story is an absurdist and vaguely comical tale of an alcoholic relapse. It's gnawing at something deeper, but I'm not sure I know what that is any better than the two central characters, Chas Elliott and his wife Grace. He is a social worker giving in to burnout. She is a Child Protective Services lawyer. She wants to help but needs the layer of legal formalities to shield her from raw human drama. Chas is also a Vietnam veteran. At this point, I'm tired of Vietnam veterans and recovering alcoholic stories. I appreciate that the focus here is on the relapse, as that is one of the hardest and most mysterious sides of addiction and recovery. But I don't think it has much more to offer than the usual self-dramatizations. There are some exchanges between Chas and Grace that are bitter and caustic, but not particularly believable. They seem too disconnected from their evident rage, too poised and cool and articulate. The drama of alcoholism was popular and widely embraced in the '80s. We saw another example in a story earlier in this collection, Richard Bausch's "All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona," which I didn't find much more convincing than this. Partly it's the literary aspects, so deliberately thought through, such as the many meanings and tones of the one-word title in the Stone story (or the parallel ambiguities of using "in" instead of "to" in the Bausch). Am I saying they're too good to be good? Well, yes, in a way. The drama in "Helping" is strange and hard to understand from the outside looking in, which is where Stone puts us. The attitudes of Chas—you can't understand if you're not a Vietnam veteran and/or recovering alcoholic—are difficult to separate from Stone's, if indeed they are different at all. They probably are. The two novels by Stone that I know—Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise—are very good as I recall. And "Helping" is obviously worked over and thought through to an admirable degree. I'm just not sure that the drama of alcoholism (which more and more seems to me related to narcissistic disorders) offers enough to support the long and artful exercise of this story.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

"Flight" (1938)

Read story by John Steinbeck online.

John Steinbeck's story involves a lot of elements familiar to his work, including a setting in Monterey, California, and a poor Hispanic family, living and working on a farm, eking out an existence. The father is dead and there are three children. The oldest is Pepe, at 19, who seems friendly and open and is described as lazy. He loves the switchblade knife his mother gave him as a keepsake of his father. In the story, she sends him to town for supplies, but when he returns he is in trouble. A confrontation occurred and he has killed someone. Now he must flee into the mountains. But he is ill-prepared for the flight, as the story now veers into man vs. nature business for most of its bulk, good stuff if not much new. It quickly becomes apparent this is going to be a doomed enterprise. There's little social commentary beyond the basic premise of the family's impoverishment. The story supplies concrete details of the trail, the escape, and what happens, as Pepe begins to lose everything piece by piece: the knife, the horse, his hat, the rifle he brought with him, and finally water. He's not prepared for any of it and his end is a sad one, but Steinbeck doesn't spend much time on that. He was a natural storyteller, able to move his narratives with physical description, and this story is a fine example. It's rarely surprising but always vivid and engaging, the kind of thing Jack London was also good at, including making its social points in quietly effective ways. Pepe's troubles have little to do with his ethnicity, but it's also obvious his ethnicity never makes anything easier. Early in the story we learn how his father died, and we meet his younger sister and brother, who are 12 and 14, and it's hard to see rosy futures for any of them, but that is never dwelt on. We are simply privy to this one terrible episode in their lives, reminiscent of the scene in a song by Neil Young, "Powderfinger." It's sad and terrible but feels eternal, like a biblical parable. Your heart can't help but go out to the good nature and stupidity of this typical 19-year-old, who believes he is an adult but is not. So it goes. This is a good one.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"A Country Love Story" (1950)

Story by Jean Stafford not available online.

Jean Stafford's story bears the familiar theme in postwar US of the tragedy of divorce. I use the word "tragedy" a little mockingly because it's so much more common and expected now. But it wasn't then, and if the implied alarms about societal breakdowns now seem overdone, the sadness and bewilderment of divorce is often effectively captured here. But there's also a sense that Stafford is leaning conveniently into the perception of tragedy, at least a little. At least in the biting title. The countryside is where this marriage goes to die, hand in hand with husband Daniel's illness, which first puts him in a sanitarium for a year and then, on doctor's orders (for the good air), to the place in the country he buys with his wife May, an old farmhouse in New England. It sounds like Daniel has tuberculosis, which I admit puts me in mind of The Magic Mountain, though that's probably me. Anyway, setting aside the amazing privilege so taken for granted in their lives, it seems like a good relationship, or has been for five years. It's now being tested by the intrusion of this disease and/or aging into another phase. At first things go well, "like a second honeymoon, for they had moved to a part of the North where they had never been and explored it together." As the first summer ends, however, Daniel turns to a writing project, and soon May feels isolated and abandoned. The relationship breaks down—we know enough to guess a few credible theories for why, but the story is not about explaining it, only charting it. They bicker. They can't make decisions. They talk less and less. The point of view is May's, and she is in pain but apparently helpless to do anything to make it better. This is very familiar to us, nearly 70 years on (a lifetime), though as I say it may have been more of a novelty then. The original source, which is common to so many of the stories in this collection, is the New Yorker. I know Stafford's name but haven't read much of her. This story is nicely put together—the characters are interesting, the language a pleasure. But it seems more of a type (early midcentury divorce American style), at least at this distance. There could well be many more good stories by her.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"Lawns" (1984)

Read story by Mona Simpson online.

Mona Simpson's story turns out to be about a searing topical social issue at least as much as fictional technique, perhaps because the subject matter—incest—is so alarmingly vivid ("prejudicial," they would say in a courtroom). I can't tell from a quick perusal of Simpson's Wikipedia biography how much this might be rooted in real-life events. Not much, I suspect, though it was interesting to find out she and Steve Jobs were full siblings, unknown to anyone until both were full-grown. The first half of "Lawns," in fact, before the reveals start coming big time, is much more like a Carver episode. Jenny, the first-person narrator, is a high-strung chattering college girl, who seems a little neurotic but reasonably normal, even as she opens the story with various tell-tale symptoms. She's a kleptomaniac, working in the student post office part-time, stealing letters, cash, and cookies. It's bad enough that university officials have opened an investigation. Jenny knows she probably won't get caught if she stops now and never admits it to anyone. She is also a high achiever, attending Berkeley and making high marks. Gradually, her strange relationship with her father starts to clarify. It's masked by the chaotic times in her life, leaving home for the first time for college, by her mother's strange character, and more than anything by Jenny's continual minimizing and denying. As the details come out in the second half it's heartbreaking and sickening at once. It looks like an epiphany story but doesn't exactly behave like one, which creates a powerful tension. The plot hinges on her steps to detach permanently from her father, by going public and telling everyone. She loses a boyfriend, though her roommate steps up in significant ways. Her relationship with her mother undergoes the biggest change, in seemingly positive directions. Among other things, the news instantly ends that marriage. But Jenny is only starting to grasp the realities. There's so much we can see that she can't, and most of it hurts. We wouldn't be inclined to attempt to clue her in even if she existed in real life and were a friend. She still has so far to go. So this story is actually very powerful and well done. Yet the Lifetime movie flavor of it—or perhaps just the issue of incest itself—also works to undermine it a little. On one level it feels absurdly easy to reach for it to pump up the drama. On another level the story feels perfectly true to that issue and to reality both. Yet the extremity feels just a little reached for as a matter of effect. Dorothy Allison's "River of Dreams," from earlier in this volume, makes an interesting companion piece perhaps.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff