The Things They Carried
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 ...