These are some of my favorites. Many are now hard to find today and not in any particular order:
For Esme—with Love and Squalor, by J.D. Salinger. Then there is A Perfect Day For Banana Fish. It’s really hard to say which of these are better, but they definitely are his best IMHO. If you’re beyond your teens then forget A Catcher in the Rye. These two short stories are much, much better.
Lechery by Jayne Anne Phillips. Told in first person by a 14 year-old female prostitute and heterosexual pedophile. Chilling, realistic. She wrote this after hitching across the US, like many of us did, in the 1970s. This is a great writer.
The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Think of Edith Wharton suffering a psychotic episode. Written during a time when even lives of upper class, educated women were confined to the home and the rearing of children. Incredible and brave writing by an excellent author.
Why I live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty. This is a hilarious first-person narrative told in Welty’s distinctive southern voice.
Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist. This is the story that gave the name to the book of short stories. It is a story told in first person by a precocious ten year old girl with a wagon and a introverted male classmate on a wartime paper drive to win the war for America and Democracy. A mother’s love. An absent father. Strange reading material found in a basement. Not a children’s story at all.
Liquor Makes You Smart, by Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This is a very short story told in the same voice as Lorelei, a 1920s goldigger at a time when society gave women few chances to earn and enjoy wealth on their own. They weren’t exactly welcome on the stock exchange. A girl couldn’t exactly party in Manhattan, live in the Hamptons, and vacation in Cuba or Palm Beach on a nurse’s or teacher’s salary. So, I find amoral Lorelei practical, funny, adorable—excusable. This is a great intro to Loos’ genius and it is one reason why even gentlemen preferred Loos. And this is another.
In the Zoo, by Jean Stafford. This is an excellent and interesting ramble told by two orphaned sisters, a strange foster mother/boarding house operator, a likeable and tragic alcoholic (she actually makes this character believable), a menagerie of monkeys and birds—all within the reminiscences of two middle-aged sisters sitting on a bench watching a polar bear at the zoo. I love Jean Stafford.
I Stand Here Ironing, by Tillie Olsen. I’m a guy who never had children, but this really, really got me for some reason. Maybe it’s because Olsen is such a great writer that she can suck you into anything whether you have any latent interest in it or not. But the target audience, if there is one, is mothers of daughters—and it is haunting.
Revenge of the Lawn, by Richard Brautigan. This is the first of many short stories in the book by the same name. Brautigan was essentially a poet who needed to write prose in order to make a living. So he wrote some of the best short stories in modern American Literature, IMO. Tis one is quite funny, actually. Here are others, but The Revenge of the Lawn is not included. Brautigan was my favorite writer of short stories for a long time through highschool and later in San Francisco where I knew him. He committed suicide while I was in Europe and it broke my heart.
A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor. This is one of the most popular short stories by her—and for good reason—but I have a hard time deciding which is better: A Good Man or Revelation. I’m interested in what our Flutherite Wellesley grad thinks of the latter.
The Swimmer, by John Cheever. You never know if this guy is just a free spirit or having a nervous breakdown till the end, but the story along the way is great Cheever stuff. It also translated to film surprisingly well.
When Everyone Was Pregnant, by John Updike. If you want a good take on what life was like for those young adults who grew up in the Depression, fought WWII, then created the 1950s, this is it. Updike looks back at the ‘50s from his perch in the turbulent ‘70s.
Kneel to the Rising Sun, by Erskine Cauldwell. This is a brutal story of, among other things, the relationship between the landowner and the sharecropper in the 1930s South told by one of America’s greatest southern writers.
Baby in the Icebox, by James M. Caine. I just like this one for no particular reason other than it all happens at a quiet roadside café in rural California valley in the 1940s. I can smell the dirt in the fields and the coffee at the counter.
Hills Like White Elephants, by Ernest Hemmingway. I like this story not because it’s Hemmingway or because of his stoic style, but because this is an oblique dialogue between a man and a woman about abortion in the 1920s, written in the 1920s, to a 1920s audience. I can’t understand how publishing this didn’t torpedo his career. It was real taboo stuff. Took some real balls on Max Perkins part. Maybe Hemmingways readers didn’t understand what this couple was talking about. Americans were quite naïve about those things. That was the joke in Paris, anyway.
The Speech of Polly Baker, by Benjamin Franklin. This took balls to publish in 1747. He was also the author of this. It’s a wonder they let him even be dog catcher, much less US Postmaster General and Ambassador to Britain and France.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
