Novelettes

Flight

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Flight: Short story by John Steinbeck The major theme of this story by John Steinbeck is a young man’s quest for manhood. An unsophisticated nineteen-year-old from an isolated farm is given his first task as a “man” when his widowed mother sends him to town alone to buy medicine and other supplies. While staying overnight at the home of a family friend, he gets drunk and stabs a man in an argument. The inexperienced youth flees into the mountains where, in addition to his pursuers, he must face the perils of nature. Other themes: isolation, innocence, lack of composure/self-control, frontier justice, struggle, death.

The Custodian

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The Custodian: Novelette by Deborah Eisenberg In this story by Deborah Eisenberg, two childhood friends from families of different financial means drift apart when the older girl goes to high school. However, they still share a common bond through child-minding jobs for a young woman and her “touchy-feely” college professor husband who live in “their” stone cottage. The story has an unusual structure: beginning at the end, returning to the beginning, then allowing readers to reach their own conclusion as to why the older girl’s family mysteriously whisks her out of town. Themes include friendship, social class, isolation, regret, infatuation, sexual predation/grooming.

The Dead Past

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The Dead Past: Short story by Isaac Asimov In this story by Isaac Asimov a young physicist, indignant at apparent government suppression of research in a fringe area of science, secretly builds a home “chronoscope” that can look back in time up to one hundred and fifty years. Too late, the government learns of this and tries to censor his work, pointing out the potential for his machine to destroy an important aspect of life everyone takes for granted. Themes include scientific curiosity and freedom, government disinformation and control (in this case for the greater good), privacy, guilt.

Things

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Things: Short story by Sinclair Lewis This story by Sinclair Lewis is a biting satire highlighting one of his most prominent themes… the negative effects of capitalism and materialism in the United States. A young woman’s life is turned upside down when her father becomes instantly rich, buys a mansion, and fills it with expensive “things”. The family enters a new social circle, and she finds herself increasingly alienated from the working-class man who was her constant childhood companion. Over time, their mansion and possessions become a metaphorical prison. Themes include materialism and the pursuit of wealth, ostentation, social status, class consciousness.

The Nose

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The Nose: Short story by Nikolai Gogol Nikolai Gogol was a pioneer in absurdist fiction, writing this story almost eighty years before Franz Kafka’s iconic Metamorphosis. Gogol’s absurdism served an important purpose: social criticism. The Nose is a comical account of “Major” Platon Kovaloff, a vain, pompous and narcissistic municipal official who goes looking for his wandering proboscis. Kovaloff is so obsessed with improving and capitalizing on his social position that he feels emasculated without it. The story satirizes three aspects of Russian society: 1) the corrupt government bureaucracy; 2) its fixation on superficial signs of importance; and 3) how different social classes view and treat women.

Bright and Morning Star

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This is the final story in Richard Wright’s hard-hitting collection Uncle Tom’s Children. Set in the American South during the 1920s, a proud African-American woman and her two sons have embraced communism in the hope of overcoming entrenched inequity and persecution. Both sons are organizers of the local communist cell. One son is already in prison and, when the woman and other son refuse to reveal the names of fellow cell members, the town sheriff and a white mob resort to deception, brutality, torture and murder. Themes: racism, racial and political violence, communism, loyalty & betrayal, motherly love, martyrdom.

The Perfect Murder

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The Perfect Murder: Novelette by Jeffrey Archer In this story with an unlikely twist by Jeffrey Archer, a married man strikes his mistress and storms out of her house after catching her with another man. The next day, he learns she died during the night. He has three options: 1) to do nothing and live in fear that the police investigation will connect him to her; 2) to contact the police and claim that her death was an accident; and 3) to frame the other lover for her murder. He chooses the latter, and closely follows the innocent man’s trial. Themes include infidelity, violence, guilt, fear, injustice.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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This F. Scott Fitzgerald story recounts the life of a man who grows “younger” by getting “older”. Themes include identity, social standing, and self-centeredness. The major theme, identity, is explored in the context of chronological age dictating expected behavior (e.g. “young” Benjamin obliges his father by constantly breaking things, whereas his “old” body would rather be smoking cigars). The people around Benjamin care more about protecting their reputations against gossip and scandal than they do about his condition. Finally, Benjamin proves himself as heartless as they are by hiding the problem and luring an unsuspecting woman into a doomed marriage.