Featured Stories
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For me, the most enjoyable aspect of this humorous flash story from Lydia Davis is that it describes an embarrassing situation we have all probably encountered: after going to great lengths to silently pass wind among a group of strangers, the smell gives us away. Do we say nothing, excuse ourselves, or immediately cast a dirty look at the person standing next to us? Here the narrator faces a slightly different dilemma. She tries to think of a polite way to let a guest know that if he didn’t do it, then it wasn’t her but the dog.
In this story by Oscar Wilde, two old college friends discuss a mysterious woman one of them had fallen in love with. The relationship ended when she refused to reveal the secret behind her apparent paranoia about being contacted at home and a clandestine visit to a boarding house. The major themes of the story are love and trust, as evidenced by the narrator’s initial comment: women are meant to be loved, not be understood and his friend’s retort: I cannot love where I cannot trust. Other themes include the allure of mystery, obsession, insecurity, jealousy, privacy, escape.
In this Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen) story, a shipwreck leads to a quest. A sailor rescues the daughter of an art-collecting nobleman from a burning ship. They spend nine days alone in a lifeboat, during which they become lovers. The nobleman pays the sailor to return to sea, and she spends the rest of her life sailing the world, ostensibly seeking a uniquely colored Chinese porcelain jar. The jar, a symbol of the woman’s lost youth and time in the lifeboat, becomes her final resting place. Themes: enduring love, class, aging, beauty in art vs. the beauty of nature.
In this story by Sara Farizan, a bisexual Iranian-American teen makes her grandmother’s day by asking her to teach her to cook Persian food. Her request has an ulterior motive… to introduce the grandmother to her girlfriend. The teen had come out to her parents twelve months earlier, and her girlfriend felt left out by not being included in family dinners with her grandmother. Over dinner, the observant grandmother guesses the true nature of the girls’ relationship. Themes include family, love, sexuality, insecurity, fear of rejection vs. pride in who you are, acceptance.
A major theme of this story by Saul Bellow is work ethic. Times are tough in 1930s Chicago. An intellectual white man starts a much-needed job delivering unclaimed welfare checks to people in a depressed black neighborhood. On his first day his younger supervisor implies that, as a city worker, he isn’t expected to “push too hard”. That’s not the way he works: he wants to do well for doing-well’s sake, and goes above and beyond in a quest to find the elusive Mr. Green. Other themes include poverty, race, suspicion, duty, tenacity, identity.
This short campfire-style horror story by Neil Gaiman sucks you in (no disrespect to Click-Clacks intended) and then at the very end surprises. A young man is spending time with his girlfriend’s much younger brother. The boy asks for a bed-time story that is “a little bit” scary. In describing what he means by this the boy tells the man about Click-Clacks, “the best monsters ever”, that come from the dark when you don’t pay attention. We are left wondering how the narrator is still around to tell the tale. Themes include fear, awareness, manipulation, the power of storytelling.
The Irish writer Oscar Wilde is known for his plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his short stories. He also wrote children’s stories, and this is one of the best known of these. A giant finds that his beautiful garden has become a playground for children. He drives them away and builds a wall around it. The seasons close in and his castle becomes a cold, miserable place. Redemption comes in the form of a small child the giant comes to love. The two main themes of the story are greed vs sharing, and Christian love.
The French writer Guy de Maupassant is said to be one of the fathers of the modern short story. This story is about an old widow who lives in a small village in Southern Italy with her only son and his dog. One evening, the son is murdered. The mother is so saddened by this that she swears a vendetta against the killer. Every day, she sits by the window and wonders how she, a weak old woman with no one to help her, can carry out her promise. Finally, she comes up with an idea and has her revenge.
