Status Updates From The Art Of The Short Story

James Baldwin's short story, "Sonny's Blues", is absolutely incredible.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Garden of Forking Paths - Interview Questions
Even the questions and answers shot right over my head.
He does consider reading as real an experience as visiting London. "Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side...then you have on the other side imaginary life and fancy that means the arts. I don't think that distinction holds water. I think that everything is a part of life."

James Baldwin - Sonny's Blues - Race and the African-American Writer.

"I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."

"One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."

Margaret Atwood - Happy Endings - On the Canadian Identity
The short story seems very dated to me, but the essay is terrific.

Format = short biography, story, essay on either the story or the telling of a story by the author.

1. Achebe - Dead Men's Path - Modern Africa as the Crossroads of Culture. "I believe two things were in my favor-that curiosity, and the little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth."
2. Sherwood Anderson - Hands - Words not Plot give form to a short story. Like color to a painter.

Henry James - The Real Thing - 3.5⭐️
Ha Jin - Saboteur - 4⭐️
James Joyce - Araby 5⭐️ & The Dead 🤯6/5 ⭐️
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis 5⭐️
DH Lawrence - Odour of Chrysanthemums -4.5/5
The Rocking Horse Winner - 3.5/5

Kafka and Joyce back to back. What a one-two punch! Araby twisted my guts.
The Dead absolutely knocked me off my feet. Incredible.

Hemingway - A Clean, Well-Lighted Place 4/5
ZoraHurston -Sweat 3.5/5
Shirley Jackson - the Lottery 6/5
The Lottery remains my favourite short story of all time. It is incredible. The author’s perspective includes afterward is also spectacular. Speaking of response to the story: judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at”

Gordimer - A Company of Laughing Faces
4/5 ⭐️

Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown - 4/5 ⭐️
Thé Birthmark - 2/5 ⭐️

Gogol - The Overcoat

4/5

Summarized as - living in Russia has always sucked.
OR
Human fulfillment through material desire?

I think every Canadian school kid can identify with how a new winter coat changed your outlook on life.

Ellison and Faulkner!
Powerful southern stories.

Stephen Crane - Thé Open Boat 4.5 ⭐️.
Incredible. Haunting. I loved it.

So many pages left...brrrr

After reading Kafka's "the Metamorphosis": wait, no, I need a minute 😭