I finished McSweeney’s 32 on the 11th, and moved onto the next multi-author collection on my (unorganized in any fashion) bookshelf: Great American Short Stories, published 1957. Apparently, according to the editors:
…all the practitioners of the short story in English, the greatest ones, with perhaps a half dozen exceptions in 125 years, have been Americans.
Betcha didn’t know that!
The book has the old binding glue smell and the pages are edged in green. There’s a bite on the back cover where either Tesfa or a cat had a nibble. I don’t know where I got this book, but I likely paid the same amount for it as is stamped in the upper right hand side of the cover: fifty cents.
Number $$\iff$$ date.
WEEK TWO:
- The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: The writer spoke of acute bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady.
- Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart.
- Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving: This story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt.
- Sky City by Sesshu Foster: The whole yawning proletariat shall one day bust a move in a Bollywood dance number, waving a sea of red flags.
- The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic by Salvador Plascencia: A breakthrough in quantum mechanics but outside the jurisdiction of tax code.
- The Netherlands Lives With Water by Jim Shepard: Here we’re safe because we have the knowledge and we’re using that knowledge to find creative solutions.
- Material Proof of the Failure of Everything by Heidi Julavits: It had.