Status Updates From Complete Shorter Fiction

"Story 4: The Lightning-Rod Man" This parable felt like the best dinner-party andecote you'd leave the evening with, and that's a high compliment. Some truly funny bits, like how the flim-flam man avoided lightning in neurotic and absurd ways ("I avoid pine-trees, high houses, lonely barns, upland pastures, running water, flocks of cattle and sheep, a crowd of men...but of all things, I avoid tall men."

"Story 3: Benito Cereno" - the reveal was positively chilling, and inserting oneself in-between the prejudices of the Americans and Europeans against the play of enslaved revolt was fascinating. Definitely a story which grows more layered as history marches on.

Story 2: Bartleby, the Scrivener - "a man of preferences rather than assumptions!"

Finished: Introduction by John Updike,
"The Piazza"

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

- Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

- Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself.

From Hawthorne and His Mosses