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The Leaning Tower And Other Stories
The classic 1944 collection of ten short stories by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and journalist
Incomparable in their dramatic clarity and emotional force, the ten gems in this collection affirm Katherine Anne Porter’s genius for writing stories, as Eudora Welty observed, “with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.”
The collection includes The Old Order, a sequence of short stories that paints a devastating portrait of the racial inequities that plague life in the American South, as well as other selected stories such as “The Leaning Tower” and “The Downward Path to Wisdom”.
Incomparable in their dramatic clarity and emotional force, the ten gems in this collection affirm Katherine Anne Porter’s genius for writing stories, as Eudora Welty observed, “with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.”
The collection includes The Old Order, a sequence of short stories that paints a devastating portrait of the racial inequities that plague life in the American South, as well as other selected stories such as “The Leaning Tower” and “The Downward Path to Wisdom”.
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1944
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About the author
Katherine Anne Porter
154 books351 followersKatherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherin...
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherin...
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
July 1, 2011
As I was finishing Katherine Anne Porter’s remarkable story, “Holiday,” I wondered about the deforming illness that one of the characters, “Ottilie,” was suffering from. By accident I bumped into a 1995 New York Times essay on Porter, my novelist Mary Gordon (see link below). I still haven’t found out what happened to Ottilie, but the provocatively titled essay by Gordon, “The Angel of Malignity: The Cold Beauty of Katherine Anne Porter,” captured many of my quickly coalescing thoughts on Porter. Gordon’s view of Porter is a bit sunnier than mine (but not by much), but we both agree on the “coldness,” and “malignity.” Of all our major American writers, Porter (who is also probably the least read), is perhaps our most morbid. I’m not talking about the gothic shadows of Poe, or the haunted woods of Hawthorne, but something deeper, like a long running bass note that underscores everything. The bass note is the Fear of Death. Not death itself, which is a concrete event that comes and goes in the cycle of life, but something more manic, that often seems to be on the verge of breaking out into a kind of hysteria. Porter knew Hemingway’s “Clean, Well Lighted Place” well. Papa could show Porter nothing she didn’t already know about death.
In The Leaning Tower’s first story (a novella), “The Old Order,” Porter’s recurring alter-ego, “Miranda,” nearly loses it at the circus while watching (appropriately) a high wire act:
The flaring lights burned through her lids, a roar of laughter like rage drowned out the steady raging of the drums and horns. She opened her eyes. . . A creature in a blousy white overall with ruffles at the neck and ankles, with bone white skull and chalk white face, with tufted eyebrows far apart in the middle of its forehead, the lids in a black sharp angle, a long scarlet mouth back into sunken cheeks, turned up in a perpetual bitter grimace of pain, astonishment, not smiling, pranced along a wire stretched down the center of the ring, balancing a long thin pole with little wheels at the end. Miranda thought at first he was walking on air, or flying, and this did not surprise her; but when she saw the wire, she was terrified. High above their heads the inhuman figure pranced, spinning the little wheels. He paused, slipped, the flapping white leg waved in space; he staggered, wobbled, slipped sideways, plunged, and caught the wire with frantic knee, hanging there upside down, the other leg waving like a feeler above his leg; slipped once more, caught by one frenzied heel, and swung back and forth like a scarf. . . The crowd roared with savage delight, shrieks of dreadful laughter like devils in delicious torment. . .Miranda shrieked too, with real pain, clutching at her stomach with her knees drawn up . . .The man on the wire, hanging by his foot, turned his head like a seal from side to side and blew sneering kisses from his cruel mouth. . .
The above is probably my favorite passage from my favorite story in the book. The precision of the writing is a thing to behold, and boy, is it freighted with dread. In one instance magic is transformed into a nightmare, with the fragile wire of life now seen, the demonic figure dancing above, and then hanging upside down – like a figure from a Tarot deck -- all to the sound of laughter. Welcome to Hell to little girl. There is of course more to the “story,” though structurally it reminds me more of Tolstoy or Chekhov’s seemingly artless rambles. But like those two great writers, Porter weaves a complex, interrelated number of symbols throughout the course of the narrative. The bizarre conclusion, that has Miranda and her brother, after an afternoon of hunting and crawling in and out of emptied graves, poking at a flayed rabbit that was ready to give birth, underscores in bold Porter’s morbidity. It’s a scene that might have shocked Poe.
The following stories (there are only five in the collection) are for the most part excellent, excepting perhaps “A Day’s Work,” which I felt slight in comparison to the rest. It’s about an arguing Irish couple in the city. He’s a drunk, she’s a scold. The story hinted at something darker, and then closed with the comic. I was disappointed, but even with Porter’s weak stories, there are those sentences, descriptions, that have you going back and re-reading pages again and again.
One outstanding story, and one of Porter’s very best, is “Holiday.” Evidently it took Porter – always the perfectionist -- thirty years to finish. (Gordon, in her essay, notes that Porter was not prolific, and if one were to break down her literary output per year of her life, it averaged about ten pages a year.) It’s about an unnamed woman who, needing a sabbatical, goes to live with a German family out in the sticks of Texas back country. What follows are the woman’s observations of life with the family. Increasingly these observations center on a crippled servant girl who, as it turns out, is also a member of the family.
The collection’s final story, “The Leaning Tower,” I was only OK with, maybe because I was still in the “Wow” zone after reading “Holiday.” It’s good, even necessary, if you’re in to pre-World War 2 literature, and works as an excellent complement to Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Part of my problem is that I got the sense that Porter was using this story as a model for her later novel, Ship of Fools. The “Leaning Tower,” in its own way, with its varied cast of characters, is a ship of fools in miniature.
Gordon essay link:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/16/boo...
In The Leaning Tower’s first story (a novella), “The Old Order,” Porter’s recurring alter-ego, “Miranda,” nearly loses it at the circus while watching (appropriately) a high wire act:
The flaring lights burned through her lids, a roar of laughter like rage drowned out the steady raging of the drums and horns. She opened her eyes. . . A creature in a blousy white overall with ruffles at the neck and ankles, with bone white skull and chalk white face, with tufted eyebrows far apart in the middle of its forehead, the lids in a black sharp angle, a long scarlet mouth back into sunken cheeks, turned up in a perpetual bitter grimace of pain, astonishment, not smiling, pranced along a wire stretched down the center of the ring, balancing a long thin pole with little wheels at the end. Miranda thought at first he was walking on air, or flying, and this did not surprise her; but when she saw the wire, she was terrified. High above their heads the inhuman figure pranced, spinning the little wheels. He paused, slipped, the flapping white leg waved in space; he staggered, wobbled, slipped sideways, plunged, and caught the wire with frantic knee, hanging there upside down, the other leg waving like a feeler above his leg; slipped once more, caught by one frenzied heel, and swung back and forth like a scarf. . . The crowd roared with savage delight, shrieks of dreadful laughter like devils in delicious torment. . .Miranda shrieked too, with real pain, clutching at her stomach with her knees drawn up . . .The man on the wire, hanging by his foot, turned his head like a seal from side to side and blew sneering kisses from his cruel mouth. . .
The above is probably my favorite passage from my favorite story in the book. The precision of the writing is a thing to behold, and boy, is it freighted with dread. In one instance magic is transformed into a nightmare, with the fragile wire of life now seen, the demonic figure dancing above, and then hanging upside down – like a figure from a Tarot deck -- all to the sound of laughter. Welcome to Hell to little girl. There is of course more to the “story,” though structurally it reminds me more of Tolstoy or Chekhov’s seemingly artless rambles. But like those two great writers, Porter weaves a complex, interrelated number of symbols throughout the course of the narrative. The bizarre conclusion, that has Miranda and her brother, after an afternoon of hunting and crawling in and out of emptied graves, poking at a flayed rabbit that was ready to give birth, underscores in bold Porter’s morbidity. It’s a scene that might have shocked Poe.
The following stories (there are only five in the collection) are for the most part excellent, excepting perhaps “A Day’s Work,” which I felt slight in comparison to the rest. It’s about an arguing Irish couple in the city. He’s a drunk, she’s a scold. The story hinted at something darker, and then closed with the comic. I was disappointed, but even with Porter’s weak stories, there are those sentences, descriptions, that have you going back and re-reading pages again and again.
One outstanding story, and one of Porter’s very best, is “Holiday.” Evidently it took Porter – always the perfectionist -- thirty years to finish. (Gordon, in her essay, notes that Porter was not prolific, and if one were to break down her literary output per year of her life, it averaged about ten pages a year.) It’s about an unnamed woman who, needing a sabbatical, goes to live with a German family out in the sticks of Texas back country. What follows are the woman’s observations of life with the family. Increasingly these observations center on a crippled servant girl who, as it turns out, is also a member of the family.
The collection’s final story, “The Leaning Tower,” I was only OK with, maybe because I was still in the “Wow” zone after reading “Holiday.” It’s good, even necessary, if you’re in to pre-World War 2 literature, and works as an excellent complement to Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Part of my problem is that I got the sense that Porter was using this story as a model for her later novel, Ship of Fools. The “Leaning Tower,” in its own way, with its varied cast of characters, is a ship of fools in miniature.
Gordon essay link:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/16/boo...
September 4, 2018
خیلی چرند بود. نمیدونم شاید بخاطر این بود که من نسخه ی کتاب شب که پخش رادیویی بود گوش دادم اینقدر بد بود.
May 2, 2021
I have to admit that with short stories I somewhat counterintuitively have less patience than with novels. I don't want a slice of life showing me how it was for certain people who lived at a particular time in a particular place. Or, I don't want only that. I want plot, story, incident, consequence. Not alot of that here. I can't fault the writing at all, and there was only one story I disliked. So Porter can capture the milieu of poor whites and blacks in the south when there is still a memory of slavery, or the indefinable tension in the air in 1931 Berlin among several young men, variously German, Polish, and American. But none of the stories wowed me, none will I reread. I just needed more stuff to actually happen. In college a professor could have probably swayed me that some of these are great, but I'm older now and swayed less easily.
October 7, 2014
احساس مي كرد سرخوشي اش به يك درد شباهت دارد،وزنه اي سنگين بر تنش، و حال اگرچه نمي تواند به روشني
فكر كند، چيزي را احساس مي كند كه پيش تر هرگز ان را نشناخته است:تباهي جهنمي جان را، سرما و اگاهي از مرگ را در
درون خويش
فكر كند، چيزي را احساس مي كند كه پيش تر هرگز ان را نشناخته است:تباهي جهنمي جان را، سرما و اگاهي از مرگ را در
درون خويش
May 22, 2017
فلاكت...
October 16, 2015
اسم برج کج کاترین آن پورتر را زیاد شنیده بودم، کنجکاو بودم ببینم چیست. اولین کتابی بود که از آن پورتر میخواندم. خوب بود، یعنی نمیتوانی بگویی کتابی بدی است یا ارزش خواندن ندارد. برج کج پیزا در داستان یک نماد است و بیانگر چیزی یا جایی است که آرزوی دیدنش و دستیابی به آن را داری اما وقتی آن را پیدا میکنی، نقص و عیوبش تازه بر تو آشکار میشود. چارلز آپتون نقاشی آمریکایی است که به دلیل سفارشهای دوست اکنون مرده دوران کودکی اش مبنی بر دیدن برلین یک بار هم که در زندگی اش شده؛ به آلمان می آید. اما برلینی که میابد با برلینی که دوستش کونو توصیف کرده فرق دارد: برلین پس از جنگ، اقتصاد در هم شکسته شده، آدمهایی فقیر و مغازه دارانی چنان درمانده که اگر جنسشان را بهشان پس بدهی اشک در چشمانشان حلقه میزند. کتاب کمی مرا یاد کتاب "آمریکا" نوشته فرانتس کافکا می انداخت
June 24, 2013
خوش خوان و سرراسته و لحظات مفرح خیلی زیاد توش پیدا میشه. ولی موضوع هویت ملی و مقایسه اروپا و آمریکا یکم کهنه و بیمزه است و گاهی تو ذوق میزنه ـ شاید به دلیل این که هفتاد سال از نوشته شدن کتاب میگذره و اوضاع دنیا عوض شده! ترجمه مجتبی ویسی هم مثل کتاب قبلی که ازش خوندم به نظرم خیلی خوبه، با کمی ویرایش بیشتر و کمی ممیزی کمتر عالیتر هم میشد.
July 1, 2008
I may not have read every single story, but I read the title one, and a few more––enough to know it's a solid 4. Very spare prose, not so gothic for being southern, but then again she moved to nyc relatively young...
August 15, 2022
These stories often foreground the continuity of daily chores, relationships, and sufferings as social change and private tragedy wash over people.
June 4, 2011
I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. Porter's nine stories focus on very different people in very diverse settings, including former slaves in rural post-bellum south, an urban Irish husband and wife, and a young American artist in Wiemar Berlin. Poverty, strife, and suffering are recurring themes.
Porter's book is especially interesting to me because so much of the world she describes is gone. Reading these short stories engaged my imagination and lifted me out of 2011.
Although this is a short book, one can't read it quickly---or at least I couldn't. The sentences often are long and the descriptions are rich; Porter also drops the reader into a scene, and to understand what's going on requires the reader to take time to consider the words.
Porter's book is especially interesting to me because so much of the world she describes is gone. Reading these short stories engaged my imagination and lifted me out of 2011.
Although this is a short book, one can't read it quickly---or at least I couldn't. The sentences often are long and the descriptions are rich; Porter also drops the reader into a scene, and to understand what's going on requires the reader to take time to consider the words.
October 12, 2015
What I said on fb is what I stand by. She reminds me of a weirdo mix between Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. But without the full-on gothicness of JCO. I think the best one of this collection is The Leaning Tower as it captures the tensions between the two wars in Germany. I liked the Grave in college, bur it's less wow now. Might read more of hers, but later. Her terseness kind of bothers me. Which is hardly surprsing. Probably wait on Amer. Lit books for a bit. Think I had to read her in grad. school, but I've forgotten which ones and that info may have been lost in a previous move.
November 26, 2015
This is the second book of Porter's stories I have read. Her style is fine but I don't enjoy most of her plots. However I especially liked Old Order, the series of short vignettes set in the South straddling before and after Emancipation. I think she was able to capture a bit of the surprise white southerners felt when they realized that their black "Mammy" did not perhaps really love them as much as they thought they did.
June 7, 2013
I enjoyed these short stories. The first few were about the same family over a number of years.
May 13, 2018
یه کتاب کم حجم که نثر گیرایی داره
October 2, 2025
That Tree by Katherine Anne Porter
Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
This account is about a poet.
Well, not such a fabulous one, according to his own and his wife's assessments.
It is also the tale of a couple with an interesting dynamic.
The man is a poet.
That is, in the first place.
And in his own view, for his lover is not thrilled by the poems he writes.
He would like nevertheless to lay under That Tree, which gives the title and write, dream, meditate and relax.
Miriam is fascinated in the beginning by the prospect of joining and marrying this man.
Down in Mexico.
Life can be so dull in the US and she complains about it in her letters.
She is thrilled be their plan and wants to live with the artists and painters.
They wait for three years.
A period in which she makes money as a teacher and then she will come south of the border.
Meanwhile, the hero has a relationship with an Indian girl.
She was a model for some his friends, who do not pay her.
But they manage alright, she takes care of the house, sits in for the painters and even has a baby after a while.
Before the bride to be arrives, this girl moves on rather too cheerfully, after the gets the furniture as a dowry.
When Miriam first sets foot in her future home, it is evident that she is overwhelmed.
It is funny in a way that she insisted that life was boring in her town and she wants so desperately to have all this excitement within the artistic world.
Once she could live in this paradise with flowering bougainvilleas, she was more than disappointed.
I would refer here to the classic Stumbling Upon Happiness by Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert.
He explains how we experience hedonic adaptation, which may be the case with Miriam.
She thought her husband was a virgin before marriage, just like her.
Her judgement was correct in regard to the friends, Carlos, Juan and another one.
One married a rich woman, another started making pictures as instructed by the authorities.
They gave up on all that High Art, pure ideals and freedom of thought.
It would be rewarding to read this narrative and find out what happens at the end.
August 17, 2025
Katherine Anne Porter demonstrates both her uncommon mastery of the short story form, and the idiom in which Americans speak, in this collection. This group was first published in 1944; the stories are at that date timely, topical, thought-provoking, and deep. She tackles childhood physical and psychological trauma, family dynamics, and international relations in crisis. Additionally she covers race issues in America, Depression-era political corruption, and rampant xenophobia in 1930s Europe.
This is truly a wide-ranging collection, and it benefits from Porter’s wise and all-encompassing treatment of the issues involved. Two stories stand out in this sampling. The title story features a bootless young American man who has traveled from the U.S. to interbellum Berlin on an ill-advised search for culture, or maybe a muse to move him. He finds a small group of men his age, but each individual signifies the frozen, even ossified, position of European countries caught in the grip of the prior war’s waste and economic ruin.
Another story, “Holiday,” has a full and vivid description of a close-knit Texas farming family from the viewpoint of a visiting woman on holiday. It cites the patriarch’s worldview, strongly influenced by Das Kapital, and his decision to lend out money at less than market rates, so that young people can get started with a farm of their own. But principally, the visitor watches the family from up close; the climactic drama, with its outsider’s charity and its reverberant observations, is worth the price of admission by itself.
This brief five-story collection shows great depth and vivid storytelling. Highly recommended.
https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2...
This is truly a wide-ranging collection, and it benefits from Porter’s wise and all-encompassing treatment of the issues involved. Two stories stand out in this sampling. The title story features a bootless young American man who has traveled from the U.S. to interbellum Berlin on an ill-advised search for culture, or maybe a muse to move him. He finds a small group of men his age, but each individual signifies the frozen, even ossified, position of European countries caught in the grip of the prior war’s waste and economic ruin.
Another story, “Holiday,” has a full and vivid description of a close-knit Texas farming family from the viewpoint of a visiting woman on holiday. It cites the patriarch’s worldview, strongly influenced by Das Kapital, and his decision to lend out money at less than market rates, so that young people can get started with a farm of their own. But principally, the visitor watches the family from up close; the climactic drama, with its outsider’s charity and its reverberant observations, is worth the price of admission by itself.
This brief five-story collection shows great depth and vivid storytelling. Highly recommended.
https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2...
February 29, 2024
حالت چهرهی هانس در این لحظه به نظر چارلز بسیار اسرارآمیز آمد. حالتی بود کاملا مشهود، مانند بازی نور، آهسته و ژرف، بدون حرکت محسوس پلکها یا عضلات صورت. اینحالت از درونش نشات میگرفت. جایی اسرارآمیز که زندگی واقعی هاتس در آنجا جریان داشت. مکانی مالامال از نخونی حیرتآور، لذت، بطالتی غیرقابلوصف و احساس رضایت از خود. آنجا دراز کشیده بود، بی هیچ حرکتی و حالت مذکور بز دریای متلاطم شخصیت واقعی او شکل گرفت، به اوج خود رسید، در ادامه راه افول را پیمود و سرانجام نشانی از آن برجا نماند.
#برج_کج #کانرین_آن_پورتر #مجتبی_ویسی #نشر_ثالث
Over his face spread an expression very puzzling to Charles. It was there like a change of light, slow and deep, with no perceptible movement of eyelids or face muscles. It rose from within in the mysterious place where Hans really lived, and it was amazing arrogance, pleasure, inexpressible vanity and selfsatisfaction. He lay entirely motionless and this look came, grew, faded and disappeared on the tidal movement of his true character.
#the_leaning_tower #katherine_ann_porter
*بعد از اتاق خارج شد، ولی تا چند ثانیه پس از رفتنش،هنوز غوغای حرکات و وجودش در آنجا احساس میشد.
#برج_کج #کانرین_آن_پورتر #مجتبی_ویسی #نشر_ثالث
Over his face spread an expression very puzzling to Charles. It was there like a change of light, slow and deep, with no perceptible movement of eyelids or face muscles. It rose from within in the mysterious place where Hans really lived, and it was amazing arrogance, pleasure, inexpressible vanity and selfsatisfaction. He lay entirely motionless and this look came, grew, faded and disappeared on the tidal movement of his true character.
#the_leaning_tower #katherine_ann_porter
*بعد از اتاق خارج شد، ولی تا چند ثانیه پس از رفتنش،هنوز غوغای حرکات و وجودش در آنجا احساس میشد.
December 30, 2020
This was a work of a genius. Nothing that is written today comes close to this nuanced subtle and fascinating writing. This is my first book I’ve read by her. I’m surprised I’ve waited this long. I look forward to reading everything else she’s written. At the end of the book is a short biography of her. What a life. She really did live and for that time period, she was truly remarkable.
December 8, 2024
Cinco cuentos, aunque el primero podría ser una novela corta. Todos están contados de una forma, o al menos así lo sentí, melancólica y nostálgica. Después de leerlos, me quedé con ganas de que fueran novelas, para conocer más sobre la vida y el destino de los personajes. Muy buen libro.
December 28, 2018
As usual with collections of short stories, this one is a bit of a hit-and-miss. The titular story is worth reading, and while the others had their moments, I did not really enjoy them that much.
August 10, 2019
Conjunto de pequenas histórias muito bem contadas, tradução muito boa. Utilização extensiva da palavra “comissura” :).
November 7, 2020
Interesting snap-shots of a strange time. Her writing reminded me of Hemmingway-- except the female characters were written like people in stead of decorative objects.
June 13, 2021
ما بايد اين نكته را درك كنيم كه دردها و رنج هاي يك مرد به خودش مربوط است و اغلب اين خود اوست كه بايد دست بالا بزند و به شيوه خود حل و فصل شان كند. ما از كجا بدانيم چه عملي خوب است يا بد؟
April 13, 2020
3.5 The parts I enjoyed (e.g. Holiday) I really enjoyed a lot, though it was an admittedly uneven collection. I don't know where she was going with the title story, and was a little frustrated while reading it, though I have to admit something about the ending is staying with me. She's a good writer and I look forward to moving onto "Pale Hore, Pale Rider," (part of my ongoing pursuit of "flu fiction").
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews