MODERN SHORT STORIES

by Jim Hunter

This collection is a companion to the long-established and highly successful Modern Short Stories One and its essential aims are the same: to offer stories of high literary quality which, though written for adults, can be enjoyed and appreciated by adolescents. The fifteen stories included are by distinguished writers from Africa, America, Australia, India, Ireland, Italy and Great Britain; and within their artistic context several of them deal with the special personal and social concerns of society today.

The collection includes stories by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Maeve Binchy, Garrison Keillor, Peter Carey, Flannery O'Connor and Nadine Gordimer.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

219 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 19, 1974

Reviews

[Karl Drinkwater · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a mixed bunch.

First, the contents, since the book description doesn't include it, and the book is incorrectly merged with other volumes that include stories not in this book:

The Peaches (Dylan Thomas)
The Wedge-Tailed Eagle (Geoffrey Dutton)
Her First Ball (Katherine Mansfield)
Ha'penny (Alan Paton)
The Rain Horse (Ted Hughes)
The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (James Thurber)
The Road (James Hanley)
Growing Up (Joyce Cary)
Lie Thee Down, Oddity! (T.F. Powys)
Samphire (Patrick O'Brian)
Tickets, Please (D.H. Lawrence)
Indian Camp (Ernest Hemingway)
The Ice Palace (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Go Down, Moses (William Faulkner)
The Wharf (Walter de la Mare)

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My first opinions of each story, in order.

Dylan Thomas "The Peaches"
A story of a horrible boy who destroys any sympathy. I've always thought Dylan Thomas was over-rated in terms of fiction and poetry, as well as appearing to be a deeply unpleasant person.

Geoffrey Dutton "The Wedge-Tailed Eagle"
A story about dickhead air force pilots and sheep farmers. The apology is too little, too late.

Katherine Mansfield "Her First Ball"
It captures a mix of feelings and observations. It reminds me of a tip for authors: don't give a lot of the characters similar names, it's confusing at the start.

Ha'penny (Alan Paton)
This just fell a bit flat for me.

Ted Hughes, "The Rain Horse"
Beautiful description of the scene and the natural environment.
Unfortunately, the main character was unsympathetic and dragged the story into the mud.

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (James Thurber)
Obviously a classic in its structure and premise, though the idea has been so over-used in recent years that it is hard to read it with a fresh eye now.

The Road (James Hanley)
This didn't grip me, it was too aloof. Yes, that fits the shell-shocked theme, but it doesn't make the fiction satisfying to read.

Growing Up (Joyce Cary)
This appealed to me with its hint of Lord of the Flies, or The Children (an excellent 2008 British horror film). It was hard to identify with the characters, though.

Lie Thee Down, Oddity! (T.F. Powys)
Too quirky for me, with a bizarre main character who is more a cypher than a person. His obsession with "taming nature" is too nobbish for me to identify with.

Samphire (Patrick O'Brian)
I enjoyed this in the way it captures a scene and an emptiness without needing to overstate things. It stuck in my mind.

Tickets, Please (D.H. Lawrence)
Once it got going I had to read on to find out what would happen - it was interesting that identification with the character occurred while the view was presented from a distance. This worked well.

Indian Camp (Ernest Hemingway)
I'm not sure what to say about this. The writing was effective, but it never satisfied me, more like a snapshot than something complete.

The Ice Palace (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Although I liked some of this, it felt overlong, and that's always a bad sign. If it had been more concise I'd have liked it more.

Go Down, Moses (William Faulkner)
Nothing about this captivated me. Like Hemingway's story, this felt incomplete and distant.

The Wharf (Walter de la Mare)
At the start I thought I'd hate this because of the over-wrought tone, but it captured me and sucked me in, and as it became more understated it made an even stronger connection of sympathy. Like The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but with a happier ending.

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TL;DR - summary of the ones I recommend from this collection.

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (James Thurber)
Growing Up (Joyce Cary)
Samphire (Patrick O'Brian)
Tickets, Please (D.H. Lawrence)
The Wharf (Walter de la Mare)

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The word "Modern" in the title of this anthology seems a touch out of place, given that it was first published in 1964. When Jim Hunter, the headmaster of Weymouth Grammar School, compiled it to be read by his pupils, he probably had no idea it would still be in circulation over half a century later. But given the authors and stories included, the writing itself has proven to have considerable staying power, even though the literary world has moved on considerably since these stories were written.

Dylan Thomas - The Peaches
The story is about a school friend coming to stay with the author and his aunt, uncle and cousin. He leaves in tears after hearing his hosts disparage his mother.
I enjoyed the use of language here and how all the characters were very clearly delineated - the aunt is concerned with domestic finances and trying to impress a well-off guest, and takes offence at the guest declining her tinned peaches; the uncle is reckless and trades pigs to get money to drink - his drunken comments precipitate the boy departing in tears; the cousin Gwilym likes to play at being a priest, with his own little barn church where he gives sermons, takes collections and hears confessions. And Dylan Thomas is unsympathetically aloof from them all, observing everyone's peculiarities but not really entertaining any of them.

Geoffrey Dutton - The Wedge-Tailed Eagle

An unremarkable story of two fighter pilots who come up with a sadistic game to chop an eagle down from the sky.

Katherine Mansfield - Her First Ball

A vivid account of an early twentieth-century young girl's excitement at attending her first ball. Her experience is tarnished somewhat by the cynical comments of a jaded older gentleman who tells her she'll end up like one of the gossipy old women coming to watch her daughter dance.

Alan Paton - Ha'penny

A heart-tugging story of a young 'coloured' orphan, Ha'penny, in South Africa who talks abundantly about his 'family' - his mother and brothers and sisters. When the schoolmaster (first person author) investigates, it turns out this is just a family he witnessed when he was a street vagrant and his desire for family was so strong he mentally adopted them as his own. When his secret was outed he fell sick with TB and the author travelled to convince the 'mother' to soften her stance of ignoring his persistent letters and visit him on his deathbed, where she accepted him as a son.

Ted Hughes - The Rain Horse

A crossover psychological horror story, in which the author returns to a place from his youth and is hunted and harassed through a thicket of trees in the rain by a horse. It is action-packed and engaging, if a little head-scratching. One that raises more questions than answers.

James Thurber - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

One of my favourites of the collection. The name of the story is familiar, having been made into a loosely-related movie quite recently. The story follows Walter Mitty, an ordinary older man prone to daydreaming, as he goes to town to do some chores with his wife. The narrative slips seamlessly into his imagination where he is a fighter pilot, a defense attorney, a highly-skilled surgeon, and finally preparing to face a firing squad. His daydreams all feature him as a person of considerable consequence, whereas in real life there is nothing all that remarkable about him.

James Hanley - The Road

A long enough short story about a sailor who arrives back home for the first time in ten years after the war, full of anticipation at seeing his family and all his siblings grown up. No one comes to greet him, which he finds odd, and there are a number of details in the story that build up the tension of something having happened. Eventually he arrives where his home used to be, but it is now just flattened ground after an aerial bombardment during the war. All his family has died, and no one is there for him to comfort him in his grief - people are oddly reluctant to engage with him at all. Perhaps this betrays the English aloofness - I imagine other places might seek to welcome and comfort the sailor a bit more readily.

Joyce Cary - Growing Up

A man arrives home, expecting to be greeted by his daughters, who are playing listlessly in the garden. They co-opt him into their game, but then become oddly wild and feral, choking him and attacking him, ostensibly in play, but also in a very real way. The man is shocked at their latent wildness, especially when he sees them acting demurely at an adult gathering later in the evening. There is some poetic resonance in the wildness of the garden and the snatches of conversation of another child who upped and stole his mother's car. The story is in a similar vein to The Lord of the Flies.

T. F. Powys - Lie thee down, Oddity!

Probably my favourite story of the whole anthology. It starts out in a very pastoral setting where a gardener is tending to his meticulous garden on the heath. Then apparently on a whim he decides to retire and relocate to a small cottage on the heath, which he then does up. In a succession of whims that become a sort of compulsion to him he ends up traveling to London to see the king, indirectly helping someone commit suicide and finally walking across the path of a falling tower to be with someone facing imminent death. The story is bizarre and utterly unpredictable, but that 'oddity' that would not lie down has stayed with me as a particularly potent idea.

Patrick O'Brian - Samphire

A man and his wife - seemingly newlyweds - are walking along the cliff. He talks enthusiastically about the samphire flowers growing there, and is also very deprecating of her in a chauvinistic way. She is quiet throughout, but one day when they go to the cliff edge she pretends to help him get some samphire but then pushes him over the cliff. He catches himself, but is shocked to his core. They return, their marriage apparently in pieces, with no resolution.

D. H. Lawrence - Tickets, Please

Another long-ish story about people working on the train service. The women are conductors and the men are the drivers and inspectors. One inspector has seduced nearly every woman conductor in the service at some point, except Annie. Eventually she lets herself be seduced, then he dumps her and she rallies all the women to accost him and attack him at an ambush meeting. There is physical violence, but he ultimately walks away and they have to go back to working together.

Ernest Hemingway - Indian Camp

An unpleasant story about a father and son traveling by boat to an Indian camp where a woman has been in painful labour for days. The father is lying on the top bunk, smoking. They help deliver the baby by surgery, then realise the father has slit his throat because he can't take the screaming. I found it deliberately provocative in the way it plays up the man's suffering while dismissing the order of magnitude worse suffering of the mother.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Ice Palace

A young girl from the American South intends to marry a boy from the North - in Pennsylvania. She visits his family and undergoes a terrible culture shock. This culminates in a trip to see an ice palace, a winter tradition in the area. After the official tour the fiancé drags her into the underground maze to show it to her, but he promptly disappears down the corridors. She is trapped and starts hallucinating in terror as she prepares to die. Then she is finally rescued after a few hours. The story ends with her returned to the South and it is not clear if she is still engaged to the boy from the North.

William Faulkner - Go Down Moses

Another tale of the American South, but this time from a Black perspective. A young prisoner on death row is due to be executed. The white representatives of the law and the press confer over how best to handle giving the news to the boy's mother, who believes him to be missing. The title references the prayer chants in the Black expression of faith, in which the missing boy is Benjamin and he has been taken by Pharaoh in Egypt, referring to the white-run system.

Walter de la Mare - The Wharf

A rather forgettable story, probably because nothing much really happens in it. It is more a piece of prose about a woman who had some nervous breakdown and is haunted by a dream in which workers at the wharf are shovelling refuse into a big mound. The mound is actually made of human souls and a bird of prey darts down and grabs one away. She is worried for the wellbeing and salvation of her husband. Back in the real world, she thinks back to a retreat farm as part of her rehabilitation, where out of her window she could see a mound covered in wildflowers, but unsettlingly reminiscent of the one in her dream. We learn toward the end that she is getting better, and the story ends on a positive note.

[Glynis O'halloran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had this book on my shelf for a long time. It has a stamp inside that says it's from a school that I did not attend so I think I must have picked it up from a car boot sale. The short stories are all by well-established authors and, judging from the notes at the end of each story, I think they are supposed to inspire you to read more by the same author. It didn't work for me. The stories are now very dated and pretty miserable. I was not inspired to go running for more books by these authors so it's good that I had already read many of the works of F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and a few others because I would not have read them if I'd been judging them by these stories.

[Sadie Parks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best collections of short stories I've ever read. Particular attention to 'Lie Thee Down, Oddity!' - how this is not more well known I do not know. It is a very interesting story. 'The Rain Horse' has the most perfect scenic description - so good that you are transported to the field on that day almost completely. So many good stories that will stay with me a lifetime. Highly recommend.

[James Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have the 1983 edition with a yellow cover (first edition 1964). There is a mixed bag of stories, some of which have not dated well. Others are time capsules of a different era and work perfectly well like that.
I liked the editor's notes: I don't always pick things up on the first read so I found them helpful. I also liked the biographies of the authors and where to read more of their work.
My favourite three stories were by James Hanley, Joyce Cary and D.H. Lawrence.

[LAnne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great selection of short stories.

[Wendela Rang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed!! The Peaches, The Road, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and The Rain Horse in particular

[Mavis Hewitt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Found most of these rather heavy going. As they're aimed at students, maybe they give meat for discussion, but they did not inspire me to read more of any of the authors' works

[Darrel Hofland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of short stories took me over a year to read. Because these were stand alone short stories I didn't need to rush through this book. However I did want to complete it this year,
Reading short stories was a good change. Made me realise (yet some more) the power of words. And how even a short story can pack a punch. And how good usage of words can carry a story.
Most of the stories here were well written and great to read. I liked the commentary of each story. Got one looking out for themes and writing techniques.

I conclude with the concluding commentary line "...which sends us most grateful, most appreciative, back to life, and this is literature's highest function." totally agreed!

[Clement Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many stories were laborious to read through. The wordiness often got in the way of my attention. And they aren't as meaningful as the classics in the 1800's - I could read those better.

The more enjoyable ones:
The Wedge-Tailed Eagle - Geoffrey Dutton
Her First Ball - Katherine Mansfield
Ha'penny - Alan Paton
Growing Up - Joyce Cary
The Wharf - Walter de la Mare ("Of all the stories in this book this is the one which sends us most grateful, most appreciative, back to life; and this is literature's highest function.")

[Angela Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technically, I already read this book when I was in high school, though I highly doubt I actually read any of it.
There were some stories I loved, some I hated and some I didn't really care about, so this gets three stars from me.

[Risa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Modern Short Stories: Bk. 1 by Jim Hunter (1974)

[Chas Bayfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this at school and remember particularly liking Geoffrey Dutton and Ted Hughes. I need to re-read it.

[Raluca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very nice reading, nothing extraordinary but good enough.