Link to Week One.

Link to Week Two.

Link to Week Three.

Still reading from Great American Short Stories. You know in high school when your English teacher made you read short stories and you decided you hated short stories because of it because of all the SYMBOLISM and SERIOUSNESS and IMPORTANT TOPICS THAT NEED TO BE CONSIDERED: this book is entirely like being forced to read dull short stories in stuffy classrooms with poster board on the walls. Perhaps this is a consequence of the book being compiled in the 1950s. Still, I hope my short stories have a bit more life to them than most of these.

In any case, I’m done. I wish I could remember exactly my reasoning for deciding to read a short story per day. Likely just for something to do.

Number $$\iff$$ date.

WEEK FOUR:

28. He by Katherine Anne Porter: It was a hard winter.
27. Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken: For the secret world must, at all costs, be preserved.
26. The Man Who Saw through Heaven by Wilbur Daniel Steele: They’ve hardly started yet — a mere twenty centuries on their way — leaving them something like eight hundred and thirty centuries yet to come before they reach the earth.
25. Unlighted Lamps by Sherwood Anderson: The truth is I may die at any moment. I would not tell you but for one reason — I will leave little money and you must be making plans for the future.
24. The Open Boat by Stephen Crane: This fact was somehow so mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears.
23. Roman Fever by Edith Wharton: And I was wondering ever so respectfully, you understand … wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horce had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.
22. A Municipal Report by O. Henry: It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow-ware with the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels.

Link to Week One.

Link to Week Two.

Number $$\iff$$ date.

WEEK THREE:

21. Mrs Ripley’s Trip by Hamlin Garland: “Ho! Ho! har! Sho! be y’, now? I want to know if y’ be.”.
20. A Village Singer by Mary Wilkins Freeman: She felt faint; the woman next her slipped a peppermint into her hand.
19. The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce: I fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.
18. The Real Thing by Henry James: “It’s very awkard, but we absolutely must do something,” her husband went on.
17. Tennessee’s Partner by Bret Harte: How he met it, how cool he was, how he refused to say anything, how perfect were the arrangements of the committee, were all duly reported, with the addition of a warning moral and example to all future evil doers, in the Red Dog Clarion, by its editor, who was present, and to whose vigorous English I cheerfully refer the reader.
16. Baker’s Bluejay Yarn by Mark Twain: Animals talk to each other, of course.
15. Barleby the Scrivner by Herman Melville: Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

I finished McSweeney’s 32 on the 11th, and moved onto the next multi-author collection on my (unorganized in any fashion) bookshelf: Great American Short Stories, published 1957. Apparently, according to the editors:

…all the practitioners of the short story in English, the greatest ones, with perhaps a half dozen exceptions in 125 years, have been Americans.

Betcha didn’t know that!

The book has the old binding glue smell and the pages are edged in green. There’s a bite on the back cover where either Tesfa or a cat had a nibble. I don’t know where I got this book, but I likely paid the same amount for it as is stamped in the upper right hand side of the cover: fifty cents.

Link to Week One.

Number $$\iff$$ date.

WEEK TWO:

14. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: The writer spoke of acute bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady.
13. Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart.
12. Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving: This story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt.
11. Sky City by Sesshu Foster: The whole yawning proletariat shall one day bust a move in a Bollywood dance number, waving a sea of red flags.
10. The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic by Salvador Plascencia: A breakthrough in quantum mechanics but outside the jurisdiction of tax code.
9. The Netherlands Lives With Water by Jim Shepard: Here we’re safe because we have the knowledge and we’re using that knowledge to find creative solutions.
8. Material Proof of the Failure of Everything by Heidi Julavits: It had.

I’ve decided to pull quotes from the stories instead, so I don’t have to think of intelligent things to say.

Also, I found a few multi-author short story compilations on my shelf I’ve never read. I usually don’t like multi-author compilations (because the style varies too widely for me to enjoy it), but this challenge seemed like a good way to make my way through a couple of these on my shelf. So stories 2 through 7 inclusive are from McSweeney’s 32.

Isn’t it nice that February divides so nicely into four weeks exactly? Anyways, number $$\iff$$ date.

WEEK ONE

7. There Is No Time In Waterloo by Sheila Heti conceived with Margaux Williamson: People who know almost nothing about what they’re talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot.
6. Oblast by J. Erin Sweeney: According to the news reports Niko is encouraged not to read, his father is responsible for the worst massacre the region has endured in this century.
5. The Black Square by Chris Adrian: This is not MERELY a suicide.
4. Eighth Wonder by Chris Bachelder: It was a Fun Trivia that dome engineers claimed they could make it snow.
3. Raw Water by Wells Tower: Then Rodney went downstairs and poured himself some cereal and turned the television on.
2. Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr: He spoke English as if each word were a tiny egg he had to deliver carefully through his teeth.
1. Lying Under The Apple Tree by Alice Munroe: [I]t would put me in the category of such girls. Those who wore women’s oxford shoes and lisle stockings and rolled their hair.