Graham Greene’s short stories span many genres, from the serious to the farcical. In this comedy, a boy rationalizes his widowed father’s long absences from home by convincing himself that he is a mysterious adventurer. In reality, his father is a restless author whose unlikely death in an Italian “street accident” becomes an embarrassment the lad must carry into adulthood. Things change when he falls in love with a woman who shares a similar concern for the fate of animals. Themes: father-son relationships, perception, the unpredictability of life/death, communicating bad news, fear of ridicule. More…
The Money-Box
Modern readers tend to associate W. W. Jacobs with tales of the macabre, such as his famous The Monkey’s Paw. What few realize is that most of his stories were humorous. His favorite subjects were ships and those who sail in them, and how tricksters take advantage of slow-witted villagers. In this story, two sailors tired of squandering their wages in the first few days ashore trust their pay to a very steady old teetotaler who agrees to give them a moderate amount each day. Needless to say, they soon regret the decision. Themes: money, irresponsibility, temperance, duty. More…
Islands
Set in the 1970s before the breakup of Yugoslavia, this semi-autobiographical story by Alexsander Hemon describes a Bosnian family’s holiday visit to relatives on a Croatian island. The narrator is a nine-year-old boy indoctrinated in communist ideology. He experiences several traumatic events over the week, the most notable of which is his uncle’s account of the brutal mistreatment and torture of children in Stalin’s prison camps. This shatters his view of the world, and challenges his belief in his own government (the Tito regime). Themes include memory, trauma, loss of innocence, self-awareness and identity, disillusionment, birth, death and futility. More…
All About Suicide
Like many Luisa Valenzuela stories, a major theme of All About Suicide is the unchecked violence of daily life in 1960/70s Argentina. The story is notable for its unusual plot structure. It begins with a description of a shooting, travels back to (supposedly) irrelevant events in the distant past, fast forwards to the immediate past, and then re-describes the shooting. Thanks to the way Valenzuela playfully misleads readers with ambiguous possessive adjectives, the true nature of the shooting remains unclear until the last sentence. Other themes include treachery, suppression, guilt, courage, exposure, murder-suicide. More…
Hominids
In this story by Jill McCorkle, a woman hosting a dinner party for a group of her husband’s old friends is disgusted by the way the men joke about the bodies of women they had encountered at a strip club earlier in the day. She muses about modern man’s obsession with breasts, and the contrast between the privileged life of the wives present and the circumstances that might lead other women to take up such work. She confronts the men, along the way cynically threatening to open her own club called “Peckers”. Themes include machismo, sexualization, misogyny, beauty and womanhood. More…