★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital + Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I love a great short story, but I don’t read enough of them. I decided to read one every night alongside my other reading. And what better source than this mammoth treasure of short fiction from the New Yorker Magazine’s first hundred years?
There are some well-known stories here that I had read before, and many from authors I knew well, but not their shorter works. Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” still amazes me for how much story can fit into just a handful of pages. And Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” continues to shock and fascinate me no matter how many times I’ve read it.
Out of the remaining 76 stories, there were a few that missed the mark, but most were very good, and some were fantastic. My favorites:
- Vladimir Nabokov, “Symbols and Signs”. An elderly couple searches for meaning in an unthinking, uncaring universe ruled by chance, chaos, and wrong numbers.
- John Updike, “The Happiest I’ve Been”. A coming-of-age story that reminded me so much of Connor’s last years of freedom and happiness.
- Muriel Spark, “The House of the Famous Poet”. A lovely short story set during wartime in Great Britain. A train ride, a visit to a stranger’s flat, some supernatural imaginings mixed in.
- Ann Beattie, “The Burning House”. A woman searching for purpose beyond motherhood, surrounded by five men, each with their worlds collapsing in on them.
- Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From”. The narrator, in rehab for the second time, points out faults with two other drunks, but ultimately realizes he is just as bad off. The title of the story hits home with the final sentence. I loved this one.
- Thom Jones, “The Pugilist at Rest”. A war veteran recounts his horrifying experiences as a soldier, attempting to explain the reasons for war ahead of experimental brain surgery. Haunting.
- T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Chicxulub”. A chilling story about the narrator’s 17-year-old daughter being struck and killed by a car, intermixed with factual accounts of massive end-of-world meteor strikes that have ended life (for some) on earth. The ending, at least for me, was bittersweet.
- Rebecca Curtis, “The Christmas Miracle”. A story about families during holidays and how things can go really, really wrong. Fun and funny and sad.
An aside: I toured the Century of The New Yorker exhibit at the New York Public Library this summer. On display was a 1949 edition of a similar collection of short stories from the New Yorker, owned and annotated by Vladimir Nabokov. Note the letter grades assigned to the stories (including his own!):
