National Short Story Month

May 20, 2011 1 Comment

May is National Short Story Month and I, being the chump I am, don’t care. OH SNAP! OK, that’s entirely not true. I mean, I’m doing a POST about it, which is more than I did for April’s National Poetry Month (yeah, how ’bout no?) but I don’t think I can even sit here and give you a list of my favorite short stories because they tend to fade from my memory pretty quickly unfortunately. Sometimes I can vaguely remember the plots, but I can’t remember the titles…or the authors. You can see then how my cup runneth over for short stories yeah? But I figured, maybe I’d give you some short story collections I’d recommend because I tend to be able to remember how a collection made me feel better than any one story. So here they are in no particular order, with links to the ones I’ve reviewed in the past…

1) Steven Millhauser — Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories :: for fans of those who like magical realism or a bit of fantasy in their reality
2) Susan Minot — Lust and Other Stories :: stories of love and loss, each one hinges on a single moment that causes you to re-examine the situation
3) Angela Carter — The Bloody Chamber: and Other Stories :: retellings of classic fairy tales with a feminist slant
4) Ludmilla Petrushevskaya — There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales :: dark fairy tales, this was one of my favorite books last year
5) J.D. Salinger — Nine Stories :: do you like The Catcher in the Rye? No? Try this instead
6) Joyce Carol Oates — The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense :: sometimes bitches really do be trippin’? also I really love the cover, the close up of the not quite human looking face is sufficiently creepy

*cricket*

I would say both Ian McEwan collections (First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets) but I haven’t finished either. I’ve simply read enough short stories from each to add up to one collection. But I do love me some McEwan, and the stories I have read are great.

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Book Review: Nine Stories

February 4, 2011 5 Comments

Title: Nine Stories
Author: J.D. Salinger
Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books | Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: 1953; this edition: 2001
Read: Feb 2011
Purchased: Not sure. Probably Barnes and Noble, 66th and Broadway
Why: I had heard about the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” which piqued my curiosity
Fulfills Challenge? Yes. It is also part of my Salinger Project.
Notes: I bought this back in 2008 and read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Although I enjoyed the story, it was also the main draw of the book for me so I didn’t pick it up again for a while. I later read “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” and more recently, I read “Down at the Dinghy.” So technically speaking I’ve been reading this book for over two years. Not sure what was taking me so long, as I gobbled up the remaining stories over the course of several hours. I also almost gave away this book without finishing it but reconsidered after Salinger died last year and I realized what a mistake it would be to never finish the collection.

Review/Thoughts:
Overall, I found the collection to be strong and to have all the marks of Salinger. By that of course I mean that the stories are very much in his style, his voice, and his trademark subjects: precocious children and broken men and women coming to terms with their lives, with little or no success. I believe it was Nabokov who disliked the reliance on dialogue in fiction (or perhaps that was just for his memoirs?). Salinger is pretty much the opposite of that. His stories rely heavily on long unwieldy dialogues between characters. These conversations don’t always advance the plot (plot? what plot?), and they never quite sound natural, but they are revealing. I suppose the biggest complaint with these stories would be that they don’t really go anywhere, but I don’t really have a problem with this and I enjoyed them nonetheless (basically I’m just warning anyone who may not be familiar with Salinger’s style). I do wish a few had been turned into longer pieces (novels, perhaps?) but alas, it was not meant to be.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is my favorite of the nine but I suspect there’s some bias there. Certainly it is one of the most gut-wrenching stories I’ve ever read. The story opens with Muriel, wife of Seymour Glass (yes, of the famed Glass family) talking on the phone with her mother. During her conversation we learn that Seymour is not well psychologically, that the Army probably discharged him from the hospital too soon. In the next scene, we get to see Seymour, playing on the beach with a little girl named Sybil. He tells her the story of the bananafish, and he seems perfectly normal. This heartfelt scene is followed by a disturbing scene in the elevator, suggesting that something isn’t quite right, but before you’re really able to digest that the story ends with a startling bang. And quite frankly, I don’t think the reader ever recovers from that, much in the same way that Seymour never recovers from the war. I also really liked “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “Down at the Dinghy,” “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” I didn’t like the remaining three quite as much but I didn’t think they were bad stories. “The Laughing Man” is both a story and a story within a story. I was more interested in what was actually going on, and though I recognize the second story was meant to parallel what was happening in the main story, I still wasn’t particularly interested in it. “Teddy” is probably the most spiritual and philosophical of all the stories, and like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” has a rather startling ending, except I still don’t quite know what to make of it.

Final Verdict:

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A Month of J.D. Salinger

February 2, 2011 2 Comments

Many apologies for posting so shortly after my last post, but I know what I’m going to do now and I thought it was worth sharing in a separate post. I’ve just finished reading this article from The Millions, entitled Saving Salinger. First off, I’d like to say that I had no idea these two short stories existed. I did know of some Holden Caulfield stories but I thought they were part of the 22 Uncollected Stories which can be found in various issues of the New Yorker, etc. But apparently there are 2 more “super secret” Salinger stories that are housed at one of Princeton’s libraries.

Anyway, after reading that article, I decided to devote the month of February to J.D. Salinger (the one year anniversary of Salinger’s death just passed [Jan 27] so I am somewhat spurred on by that as well). Now what this month of Salinger will entail is the following:

• re-reading The Catcher in the Rye which I have not read in more than 10 years
• finishing Nine Stories (I’ve read 3 stories)
• reading the 22 uncollected stories (I’ve read 1 or 2)
• reading Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
• reading J.D. Salinger: A Life

If I have time (and if I’m not sick of Salinger by that point), I might re-read Franny and Zooey in its entirety. If I do, I won’t count it toward my book quota simply because I just read it in 2008 (it was one of the few books I managed to finish that year) and I often pick it up and read a passage here and there. What I’m more likely to do is to use Franny and Zooey to kick off reviews of my favorite books, which I plan to give some sort of catchy name, which naturally I haven’t thought of yet. And maybe I’ll finally write that article for The Literary Dilettantes that I planned to devote to Franny Glass (alternately titled, “Franny Glass Is My Homegirl!” or “Franny Glass Is A Badass!” depending on what angle I approach it from)

And perhaps, if I am feeling ambitious, I will take a trip to Princeton and see these two stories for myself. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Let the month of Salinger begin!

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a perfect day for bananafish

January 28, 2010 2 Comments

Franny and Zooey by Lucca Zona Studios

D Salinger died last night, at the age of 91, of natural causes.

I hesitated to make a Salinger post simply because everyone seems to be doing it, and they’re probably doing a better job at it. But I will try anyway.

Around 5 o’clock this afternoon, I signed onto twitter on my phone, only to read tweet after tweet about Salinger’s death. Despite knowing he was in his nineties, I was still in a state of shock. How could he be dead? J.D. Salinger doesn’t die. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t published a single thing in almost fifty years, and that no one was expecting him to anymore. This is still such a great loss to the literary community, and to everyone who has ever read and loved his work.

I first read Salinger in the eighth grade – The Catcher in the Rye of course, the Salinger work of choice for most schools. I enjoyed it certainly, but like so many books I read in junior high school and high school, it was somewhat forgotten over the years. I did not attempt another Salinger work until 2008, when I read Franny and Zooey. I loved it. And despite what seems to be popular opinion, I loved Franny far more than Zooey. I understand where most people are coming from. Zooey is infinitely charming; Franny is not. But it is Franny whom I have always been able to relate to. Franny is out of sync with the world. Discontented and disillusioned. For reasons she can’t quite grasp or understand. I have been there. I am still there.

After reading Franny and Zooey, I bought Nine Stories, for the sole purpose of being able to read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” one of the sweetest and saddest stories I’ve ever read. I still remember the shock of it. Despite knowing Seymour’s history, I was not expecting that ending — a perfect reminder of how difficult it is to know what’s going on inside someone else’s mind.

So here’s to you Salinger, creator of one of the most famous characters in literature, Holden Caulfield, and one of the most charming and well-known families, the Glass family.

Rest In Peace.

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