Vheissu

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 16. I’ve already mentioned how Contemporary Fiction was assembled, and I said then that the most voted-for story was Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Well, the second story in that ranking was Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl.” And that’s today’s story. This short piece has been anthologized several times. It was first published in a 1980 edition of The New Yorker , it was chosen for The Best American Short Stories 1981, and it then made it to The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties . You can find it in this anthology from 1994. It became the title story for this book . It’s found probably most conveniently here , as a Word document. If you haven’t read the story, I do suggest you go ahead and click on that link to the Word document and read it now. It’s really short, and I’m going to spoil it in the next few paragraphs. “The Shawl” is a good story, no doubt. From the start, you sense it’ll be gripping and de...

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 1. Let’s start off the month with a story I really enjoyed. It’s called “Raymond’s Run,” by Toni Cade Bambara. One of the tricks here will be to give a sense of what a story is about without fully ruining the plot for anybody who hasn’t read it. I’ll try to find online versions of the stories I comment on, so that people can follow the link and read them if they wish. Mind you, these entries will be short. “Raymond’s Run” has been anthologized quite a few times. (In fact, you can read it here , courtesy of Google Books.) I read it in a really interesting book called Contemporary Fiction: 50 Short Stories Since 1970 , edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone and published by Touchstone in 1999. There’s a second edition out, which really has so many new stories it’s worth having both books. I’ll be picking from Contemporary Fiction a few times during this month. I’ll be reading new stories every day, but I’ll try to stick to the best I...