Vheissu

So it’s over. This self-proclaimed short story month, I mean. I went through with it in probably one of my busiest months this year (there were duties everywhere), but I wanted to keep my word, and thus step in on day one and step out 31 posts later. The posts differed: some referred to a single story, some to a couple, some to a whole anthology or a full issue of a literary magazine. I did my best to keep them interesting, at least, and I hope it worked. The aim was to honor the short story, a post a day. I’ll have to take a couple of days now to, you know, breathe and all, after which I’ll post something like a short retrospective. For now, here were the subjects of posts in English (missing numbers are found in the next list, below): 1. Toni Cade Bambara’s “Raymond’s Run” 2. Daniel Alarcón’s “A Circus at the Center of the World” 3. Joshua Ferris’s “The Valetudinarian” 4. Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” 5. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 7. Aaron G...

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 4. Here is how the book Contemporary Fiction , which I’ve mentioned before , was put together: the editors surveyed over 200 “teaching writers” and asked them to “identify the five examples of contemporary short fiction published since 1970 they most often returned to as readers, writers, and teachers” (“Foreword”, p. 10). It’s a nice idea (even it if may show precisely the bias in the short story industry Stephen King described in a quote you can find here ). Well, the most nominated short story of all was Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” published in 1990 as part of O’Brien’s book of the same name. This is the story I read today. (You can find the full text of the story   here , but be warned: it is a clumsy presentation that was bowdlerized—“f#@k” instead of “fuck,” for instance—and spiced up with war pictures.) The story is good, sure: it’s poignant and well-handled and lush with interesting details. I don’t know if I’d ...