Pass Along Your Shorts

I went into the middle school today to have lunch with a few of my former students (two of them, from the very first class I ever taught). They had come to visit with my best friend and teacher Joanie Bankson, who of course had been their teacher as well. We all came early, during classes, to pitch in, a habit I formed after graduation and continue to this day, volunteering my time when I can to teaching sixth grade students.

Today we read the story The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry to Joanie’s students, which later led to a brief discussion of which stories my former students remembered from their own sixth grade education (seven years ago). We had read Gift then, though they only vaguely remembered it. Neither had forgotten Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, however, which is a story with real staying power.

It spun my wheels a bit, as I’ve been reading a lot of short stories as of late. I bought Stephen King’s new collection, Just After Sunset, which sent me back to King’s earlier stories, and eventually dove into the anthology The Golden Argosy, a collection of the “finest stories in the English language.” Argosy was published in the late forties, and it really is an excellent collection, holding up well even now and showing real foresight as to which stories would last, still being read fifty years later.

I have a special, abiding love for short stories, and I’m a bit of an elitist about it. I don’t hold with a writer who doesn’t write short stories, and doesn’t write them well (the one exception being John Irving…there’s always one, and Irving is a mountain of an exception, Jesus godalmighty). Over the years, I’ve taken particular pleasure in introducing students to exceptional short stories, which is an art in itself, selecting stories which appeal to young people, which grab them and hold them and stick with them long after they’ve left the classroom.

With all this steaming in my brain, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite short stories, and maybe inspire some to share their thoughts about a few of theirs.

In no particular order:

The Emissary by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is my favorite short story writer, and there are dozens upon dozens to choose from, but this is the first story of his I ever read, and it holds a special place for me. I still think it among his best, with the fine sense of mounting horror, the perfect pitch of creeping dread, and that everlasting terror of the “thing on the stairs.” It is found in The October Country, Bradbury’s book of people who “are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts.”

One Trip Across by Ernest Hemingway

This story became the first part of the novel To Have and Have Not, but I always felt everything in that novel after Trip ended was crap. But this story is brilliant, Hemingway at his peak. Hemingway called it “a teenage work devoted to adultery, sodomy, masturbation, rape, mayhem, mass murder, frigidity, alcoholism, prostitution, impotency, anarchy, rum-running, Chink-smuggling, nymphomania and abortion.” It’s a helluva tale.

In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

One of the finest stories ever written by one of Japan’s finest writers. If you haven’t read this, go buy a copy of Rashomon and Other Stories. The ending of this piece lingers long past the turning of the final page, the way only a handful of stories ever do. Akutagawa was apparently inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s story The Moonlit Road, but Akutagawa lifted Bierce’s shifting narrative device to beg the question: what is truth, and does it exist at all?

The Tears of Squonk and What Happened Thereafter by Glen David Gold

Gold’s story of a manic circus elephant who goes wild and murders a man by pinning him down and yanking off his head with its trunk is one of the most original and, yes, heartbreaking stories I’ve ever read. Originality points for the murder scene, but the heartbreak comes later, when the townspeople, in their outrage, demand the elephant be punished for its crime. And that’s not all, because the murder wasn’t a random occurrence…this elephant was out for revenge.

The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane

Crane is often destroyed in high schools across the country by reading his short novel The Red Badge of Courage to weary, sleepy-eyed teenagers. Readily dismissive, most young readers never discover that Crane was one of the great short story writers in American history. This story, about a poker game gone wrong and the bloody fist-fight that ensues, is one of the gems of our literature.

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Terrible Grandmother by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Poor adolescent Erendira doesn’t hear the wind of her misfortune blow through the house where she lives with her grandmother, and woe to her, because that wind knocks down the candle Erendira forgets to put out, and the house burns down. Everything they own is gone, and Erendira’s grandmother holds the young girl entirely responsible for paying back the value of all the family possessions. To do so, her grandmother takes Erendira from town to town all over the country, and sells her as a whore. Out of such a scenario, only Marquez could weave a tale of love.

The Bear by William Faulkner

I am not, to be honest, a big fan of Faulkner, having read a good swath of his work and having yet to fall in love with any of it…save The Bear. If you never read anything else by old Will, read this, and stick to the first three parts of the story, which are where the story really happens, where young Isaac McCaslin hunts for the elusive, mighty and almost supernatural bear his family members have hunted for years and never caught. Part Four deals with the events of Go Down, Moses, the novel in which Faulkner inserted this story. The power of this story is what keeps me coming back to Faulkner, searching for more tales as strong and enduring as this one.

The Night They Missed the Horror Show by Joe R. Lansdale

Lansdale said he set out to write a story “that didn’t blink.” Holy Christ, he did it. He begins with two hillbilly teenagers bored out of their minds. They skip the titular horror show at the local theater to get drunk instead. They come across a dead dog along the roadside, and in grotesque hick fashion they chain it to the bumper of their truck and drag it down the road for kicks. But Lansdale is only getting started, and where fate takes these boys is not for the faint of heart. This story never lets up, never lets go. It’s a bullet train, all the way through.

There are so many stories to share, so very many. I could fill page upon page with lists of my favorite Bradbury stories alone, and here I never mentioned my other beloved short story writers, Richard Matheson, Flannery O’Connor, Ivan Turgenev, Stephen King and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great short work of Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Allan Poe, or the fantastic postmodern work of John Barth and Donald Barthelme, or the unique and shadowy landscape of Paul Bowles. So much. So much.

If you know of a few worth reading, let me know. And what I find, I’ll pass along.