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Short Story Appreciation Discussion - May 2024 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-05-24 20:29:48
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2026-06
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Dear Book Club Readers ---

Your comments in our last short story appreciation thread made for fascinating reading. So it would be wonderful to hear what short stories you are enjoying alongside your other reading this month.

Our short story appreciation thread is a place to mindfully check in and share what works of short fiction have resonated with us recently.

The best way to appreciate the magic of short stories is to dive into some great ones and start discussing your insights and impressions with others. So let us know:

What short stories are you appreciating at the moment?

Let us know anything that has resonated with you during your short story excursions:

  • Powerful subtext

  • Compelling themes

  • Resonant passages

  • Your favourite writers

  • Beautifully crafted lines

  • Complex character studies

  • Elements you want to examine

  • Stories you want to recommend

  • Reflections, musings, and insights

  • How the stories inform your wider reading

This is the place to put your short story appreciations and get other readers weighing in on your thoughts!

Short Story News:

Thank you to readers who brought my attention to the sad passing of Alice Munro. I personally believe that she was the greatest short story writer of our generation. She will be dearly missed, and I'm grateful that we were able to appreciate her masterpieces during her lifetime.

Whenever a great writer passes away, I like to return to their works and keep them in my mind to honour them. We have a Munro story below as one of our curated stories and, if you haven't already, you may like to check out some of our lectures on her stories here, here, here, here, and here. You might also like this curation of clips from her interviews, where she discusses her craft.

Curated Short Stories:

I have specially curated three stories for you to enjoy. This is, of course, completely optional. Don't feel like you need to read all three. I recommend sampling the opening lines, or the first few paragraphs, of each one and seeing which one pulls you in. Spend time with the story that most speaks to your heart and make a note of the author you resonates with you.

My aim is to offer you short masterworks that will inform your wider reading. I love these works, and believe that being attentive to the themes, characters, and style of writing will prove to be very rewarding.

The short stories I would like to recommend for you are:

I would love to know what you make of the chosen stories. Which one did you focus on? Why did the style or theme resonate with you? If you read a different short story, let us know your thoughts on it. Or tell us about your favourite story.

All short stories can be found in the anthology That Glimpse of Truth, which makes an excellent collection for deepening your appreciation of the short story form.

Thank you so much for sharing your love of great literature with us.

Happy reading, everybody!

Files

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Comments

Jane

I had a hard time with 'The Wavemaker Falters' by George Saunders I have to say. In fact I didn t finish it just not my cup of tea. However. I promise to have another bash at it.

Judy

Thanks so much for the variety you insert into the experience of the book club, Benjamin. I started on the authors you recommend in your video of favorites, which I watched on YouTube last week. My first was from Borges’ Ficciones (Senderos que se bifurcan), which is a kind of library research mystery set in various places in Argentina, initially irresistible to anybody who has tried to chase down a scent of something we read somewhere. It brought to mind vivid memories of drawers of index cards and the smell of old stacks. If found myself annoyed and losing interest when it got sort of Blavatsky-ish with what I felt was a fake depth. Turgenev’s Bezhin Meadow, in Sportsman’s Notebook is beautifully sensual and nostalgic. Getting lost on a hike in summer, and ending up hanging out with boys trying to scare each other with stories in the darkness while they roast potatoes in their fire is memorable. Next is Kawabata, Palm of the Hand.

Caleb
>>139044040

It took me two attempts to read it...it finally resonated the second time as I made my way through...it is an odd sort of story though.

Thomas Davidson

“The Children Stay” is a remarkable short story, and Munro’s art and technique are on full display here. I read it in the collection “The Love of A Good Woman”, which I gather is not quite the same text as the New Yorker article (which for me was behind a paywall). On hearing of her death, I took down that volume and “The Children Stay” was the first story I returned to. I think of Munro’s story as the “Anatomy of A Runaway”. The story is about the abandonment of a known way of life and its commitments. The character Pauline doesn’t actually focus at all on what might be involved in embracing a new, desired, better way of life, with new commitments and new complexities. Pauline isn’t thinking much at all about the latter, and it appears she simply doesn’t want to. Several times she jettisons thoughts from the narrative that she doesn’t want to look closely at until they return, as they must do, as “a large, bleak fact coming at her”. She is running away from them as well. Pauline no doubt has genuine affection for her husband, for her children, and for Jeffrey, but something is lacking. There is a disconnect. Nowhere in the story are Pauline’s emotions presented in a way that suggests the depth of love, as most of us would think of it. Most of what is written about Brian is how she tolerates him with “good will”. Her children are described mainly in terms of her parental responsibilities to them and the inconveniences they pose. Jeffrey creates a bodily reaction for Pauline, and she describes him in physical, almost glandular terms while acknowledging that, in fact, she knows hardly anything about him that might form a basis for committing to their relationship. We are not surprised when Jeffrey is summed up as someone she only lived with “for a little while”. I suspect that most readers—especially those of us who have the benefit of years lived—from the start have Jeffrey pegged for what he is: a young, self-absorbed, striver whose reach exceeds his grasp. The sex was good, it seems, and “none of this would happen if it wasn’t for sex”, but there’s no connection to love in this. Pauline even asks whether there is a difference between love and sex. Also, Munro gives us no description of any intense frustration or anger that might make an easy, clear motivation or justification for the choices Pauline makes. That’s too well-worn a path. Instead, we’re left to wonder about the various disconnects in Pauline’s feelings thoughts, and plans. How much has she jettisoned from awareness? The disconnect continues to the end. We don’t know what happened to Pauline post-Jeffrey, or the course of her relationship with Brian and her children, except that they remained apart. We do know that if there is any great depth of her emotional response to the subsequent events of her life, it is as closed off from us as it is may be to Pauline herself. This is brilliant.

Patrick All-de Lange

Very interesting. I let myself just follow the story without thinking about -- or catching on to -- any of the points you raise, just seeing where it took me so to speak. I clearly need to work on my interpreting reading.

Jeffrey Jackson

I am on vacation in Banff, Canada. It’s my first visit to Canada, and it is absolutely gorgeous. As I was packing to come here, I decided to pull out Alice Munro’s Carried Away that I bought when Benjamin was doing a deep dive into 3 of her stories in this collection. When I pulled it out I decided to Google search Munro, to maybe get an idea of which stories to read. I was surprised to find Munro had passed less than 24 hours before my search. They should have a national day of mourning not only in Canada but in all English speaking countries. Heck, all countries! My favorite artists from Canada: Neil Young, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Glenn Gould, William Shatner. And of course, Alice Munro! So I just finished the first story in this collection, which I had not read before, Royal Beatings. Just like the other Munro stories I have read, this story demonstrates that she is (was) a master writer, fully worthy of the Nobel Prize. My limited experience with her writing, which is about a dozen or few more short stories, is that with each story, she is able to grab my attention in the first few lines or maybe a few pages, then I am fully under her control. I am then at her mercy, to take me wherever she desires. I am not sure I’ve read a writer of short stories more consistently powerful and beautiful than Alice Munro. She is an artist of the highest order. I highly recommend her work to anyone who hasn’t tried it yet. I plan to finish this entire collection titled Carried Away, The edition is beautiful and well worth whatever I paid for it. Happy reading everyone! Jeff.

Caleb

I did not read any short stories last month. I started Munro this afternoon. My first thought is that I like her sentences. I'm going to try Saunders again this month. Bizarre plots turn me off (like Pynchon) but whichever stories I stick with and finish by Saunders make a deep impression. Also found a collection by Clarice Lispector at our library which I hope to dip into. A short digression: Short stories challenge me. This is because it is difficult for me to enter into any story. My imagination has suffered from years of academic pursuits very far from the imaginative. To explain a bit, I tried reading All the Pretty Horses while writing a dissertation and could barely read a single sentence without feeling exhausted. Now, in part from Ben's advice, I can slowly read and appreciate Literature. I returned to All the Pretty Horses this morning and couldn't believe how I missed it's absolutely beautiful and profound opening. I believe a serious work of imagination requires me to give an initial investment of intense focus and almost meditative detachment from the surrounding world. It requires this in a way that dense, non-fiction works do not. I never had to do this as a child. I have to go through this every time I read a story, however short...so I find them more challenging than even a long novel like East of Eden. But I keep coming back, to novels and stories, because I remember what I felt as a child...that entering into an imaginative landscape where I do not simply get lost, but get in touch with what is truly beautiful and in a sense more real than the outside world.

Ann Lowe
>>139083087

That's such a great observation and I get it. Ben gave us an article on the neuroscience behind reading Jane Austen for pleasure and then again for analysis. 2 different brain networks! So that validates your self-observation. I sometimes have to warm up to a piece of literature, and it feels like work until I connect with it. I agree- it's definitely worth the effort.

Ann Lowe

I have been really enjoying the David Miller selection of short stories. It's great because I feel that I can observe the writer's style and story construction. I've started writing about the stories after I finish my read andI feel that helps me process and observe it better. I read all 3 of the suggested stories. I am such a huge fan of Alice Munro. Her characters have such depth and the stories are unexpected. The Children Stay was her usual masterful self. I loved how she tied in the story of Orphee with the fate of Pauline- a very interesting twist at the end. The Summer of '38 was also good. It seemed a complex story of the inner turmoil of Montse, as opposed to her husband Paco and her first daughter, Rosa, who seem to have a less conflicted view of life. Montse needed a constricted life without surprises, and in that way she has aligned with her husband and found some stability after an almost fatal time in her life. She was unable to meet with her old lover that fathered her first child, but constructed an obtuse meeting in which the lover and the child (Rosa) passed in the night but never met each other. That was as close as she could manage. I had the most difficult time with The Wavemaker Falters: It is supposed to be an amusement park but does it stand for the craziness of this world, the truly bizarre things that come up in the culture and news, the absurd way things are dealt with (e.g., a disbelieving nun tries to kill herself and they give her a free pass to meditate by a fake Spanish trout stream)? One wonders if the Wavemaker is a euphemism for the Creator, who makes mistakes and people die. The narrator is truly a tortured guy who, after having perhaps atoned for his sin, says that it is as low as I go, and maybe things will get better. As some of you have said, I have a more difficult with these more bizarre reads. I also read Conrad's The Lagoon, which I thought was amazing and I need to reread it.

Nancy Fitzpatrick

I plan to wallow in short stories while the club takes on Tales of Genji!

Jane
>>139239765

You seem to have made more sense of the Wavemaker than I did , Ann :)

Elaine

I read White Nights by Dostoevsky and loved it. Beautiful read and pairs so well with the first part of Genji of which I have finished and will wait on the lecture to continue forward.

Hannah

This month I read So Late In the Day by Claire Keegan and found it - as all her works I've read so far - quietly devastating. There's something about how she captures quiet goings on, feelings unspoken. I hope to catch up with the recommended stories and everyone's comments soon!

Abby
>>139517286

I agree! I recently finished White Nights as well, and I absolutely loved it. I think it's one of Dostoyevsky's most underrated short stories even though most of the story is ranting about love and life... actually, that's why I loved it so much!!

Ylva
>>140388628

So great to see Claire Keegan mentioned here, Hannah. There’s a magic to her quiet scenes, as you said. Especially her “Foster” left me raw. And the buildup in So Late in the Day was amazing. “Quietly devastating” is a very good description.