"A Far Cry" by Zona Gale

Scene: small-town America, probably somewhere in the midwest circa 1925. Main characters: Mr. and Mrs. Dasher, their 40-year-old unmarried daughter Jerry, and the little son of Mr. Dasher's gravely ill niece. Time: a hot summer night, with the card for the iceman's visit tomorrow morning already in the window. Ready, set--action! Read by Scoot. Time 17:13.

Sigh. Who even remembers Wisconsinite Zona Gale today aside from a few proud midwesterners and a few avid readers with a nostalgic bent? Maybe those readers would know that Gale was born in 1874, published her first novel in 1906 (Romance Island--probably had one of those beautiful Art Nouveau covers of the period), and won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1921 for her adaptation of her novel Miss Lulu Bett. And that she was active as a suffragette, spent most of her life in her hometown of Portage, and died in 1938 shortly before the publication of her last novel (Magna). Well, now you know, too.

"The Drowned Giant" by J. G. Ballard

As a medical student, J. G. Ballard would have had to perform dissection on a human cadaver, and this story shows the influence of that no doubt very formative experience. But here the giant--a colossus from another world? a Greek god? a nightmare?--is given a symbolist treatment which Kafka or Baudelaire would have had to brood long upon. Read by Scoot. Time 25:46.

The Shanghai-raised British author J. G. Ballard became known to most people outside science-fiction circles with the publication and subsequent filming of his childhood autobiography, Empire of the Sun. Those in the know were already familiar with Ballard's upending of sci-fi traditions and practical invention of the dystopian novel in such works as The Drowned World (no relation to this story or the Madonna tour). Things got weirder with Ballard by the late 1960's, with the auto-erotic novel Crash (no, not that movie, but the other movie), the very unsettling Atrocity Exhibition (no wonder Joy Division stole the title!), and our personal favorite, Why I Want to F#*k Ronald Reagan, which sent the 1980 Republican National Convention all atwitter. (Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy is pretty good, too.)

"Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!" by Conrad Aiken

Ah--a shipboard romance: the stuff of Hollywood and of clichés. This one doesn't quite avoid all the conventions, but it does give a certain poignancy and clarity to class and cultural differences of the early twentieth century, as the narrator follows the transatlantic voyage of an Irish working girl whose one wish is unfortunately fulfilled. Read by Scoot. Time 38:04. Maybe the longest story we've posted yet!

We had thought for a long time of including Conrad Aiken's stunning "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" here, but that story is even longer than this one, and with so many people having read it in some anthology or other, it might be superfluous to feature it here. Unfortunately, much of Aiken's prose is shockingly out-of-print, although his poetry remains more accessible. Aiken used to be one of the most famous writers around, but apparently his stock has fallen in this post-postmodern world (well, how many writers born before 1900, if not 1970, haven't see that happen?). However, perhaps still relevant even so, Aiken's grave figures in the popular book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (he was born on the banks of the Savannah River, though after his parents' violent deaths, he was raised in Massachusetts), and he is the father of writer Joan Aiken.

"Lake Ghosts" by Ilse Aichinger

Three ghosts, three histories, one lake in Germany. This is a somewhat enigmatic, impressionistic European travelogue, taking us to a place where few of us might want to fish or swim. Translated from the German by Harry Steinhauer. Read by Scoot. Time 10:37.

In 1996, it says here, Ilse Aichinger signed a declaration for spelling reform in Germany. And about time, we concur! Well, that may be somewhat inconsequential when considering the life of this Austrian writer in general. Like so many other writers, she studied to be a doctor but wound up writing for a living instead. Her books have dealt with Nazi persecution and how the last great war changed the lives of women and Jews in so many ways. Aichinger's first book was published in 1945 and the latest in her long career in 2001--and, who knows, there may yet be more.

"Seen from Paradise" by Dorothy Richardson

At last, she has a place to get away from friends and family--just a cottage in Cornwall, but paradise to one trying to write in peace and solitude. And then friends go and write to say they're coming to invade her privacy with tub-plants and orders to fulfill (after all, it is their place). But, honestly! Read by Scoot. Time 13:57.

Don't you just love authors' bios which begin with the likes of "daughter of an impoverished gentleman"? And then "obliged to earn her own living" and "working as a secretary-assistant to a dental practice"? We mean, as if writers were like ordinary people or something! Not that we're not sorry to hear of Dorothy Richardson's mother's suicide in 1895, but we're more interested in learning how she beat James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and practically everyone else to the punch when it came to inventing stream-of-consciousness prose. It's nice to know, too, that good old socialist H. G. Wells (really, why have we neglected him for so long?) championed her cause and that she was fairly successful as a journalist in a day when such things were not so common. But a bit daunting, we admit, to be reminded that her massive novel series, Pilgrimage, took over her life after 1912. Only one of us here has read all thirteen (admit it--just a bit tedious!) books, but now at least another of us can say that he has read at least this one story, first collected in 1989 in Journey to Paradise.

"The White Paper" by Jean Cocteau

Dockside at Toulon, sailors come and go, whistling boleros. One besotted admirer falls in with a tattooed brute fresh from the brig and sadly in need of a "fetish chain." Ooh--kinky! Read by Scoot. Time 9:14.

Film-maker, artist, novelist, dramatist, boxing manager, provocateur, and above all, poet: Parisian Jean Cocteau was one of the most important figures in the history of the arts of the twentieth century. Another one of those people who knew everyone and influenced them all. (Yes, even you, Ernest Hemingway!) Actually, this story is only "attributed to Jean Cocteau," though his indelible stamp is upon it and there is no question that he illustrated the collected "confessions" from which it comes. Where to begin with M. Cocteau? Well, you could start with his days of opium addiction and the novel Les Enfants Terribles. Or look at his surrealist masterpiece, Blood of the Poet. Maybe read the play he wrote for Edith Piaf between hot affairs with Princess Nathalie Paley and actor Jean Marais. Or just skip right on to his resplendent 1946 film, Beauty and the Beast. Obviously, we all have a lot of work cut out for us.

"Showing Off" by Rose Macaulay

We're cheating here a little, because this is not technically a short story, even if it is a type of fiction in the form of a Ruth Draper-ish monologue in Rose Macaulay's delicious collection of Personal Pleasures, and we want to include it because we love this author and wanted to include her on this site somehow. Here, we meet someone we've all met at one time or the other, someone who's done and seen everything but doesn't have the sense to stop straining credibility and our ears. Read by Scoot. Time 5:22.

Among Rose Macaulay's thirty-five books one may find much to amuse oneself, particularly works such as Dangerous Ages, about three generations of women dealing with the thoroughly modern 1920's, and especially The Towers of Trebizond, which aside from having a curiously ambiguous narrator, is a marvel of wit and wisdom. She really did deserve being made a Dame of the British Empire, but should have been awarded it long before her death in 1958 at the age of seventy-seven. We are thankful for the fact that she pursued literature instead of becoming the historian she had once intended to become. She might have been unhappy in love, but at least that allowed her to laugh both at herself and the world.

"Nightmare" by Shirley Jackson

Whether this story is maddeningly funny or maddeningly frightening we leave to the listener to decide. It's a fine spring day in New York City and Miss Toni Morgan has a package to deliver for her boss, but somehow the world around her is not cooperating, or maybe she's just feeling a little paranoid. Read by Scoot. Time 33:09.

Most people (including ourselves) know Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" and her novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle or The Haunting of Hill House, but perhaps not much more of her ouevre, although it includes a great many more stories and books she wrote before her untimely death in 1965. She was married to the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she had four children. Somehow we suspect it wasn't the easiest thing in the world, being married to a critic with four kids while trying to write modern gothic tales, because the two memoirs she wrote about her family life were titled Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Perhaps she felt a bit persecuted.

"Potiphar's Wife" by Brion Gysin

You might remember the story of Joseph the shepherd and Potiphar his rich employer from the Old Testament; well, this isn't exactly that, though there are some parallels, obviously. Set in corrupt, smuggler-ridden post-World War II Morocco, which will be familar to readers of Paul Bowles, this is the tale of innocent Yussef and married Zuleika--who may just not be all that good for each other. Read by Scoot. Time 24:08.

Standing in the shadows and hidden in the indices of many mid-twentieth-century accounts of the Beats and other dharma bums is Brion Gysin, a true Renaissance man, inventor of the "cut-up" and the Dream Machine, painter, collagist, historian, jazz musician, shipyard welder, poet, novelist, "Sufi maverick," and anarchist of sorts. Although he described himself as "the man from nowhere," he was English, Canadian, American, and French, in that order. Maybe it was just the drugs, but he obviously wanted people to experience some kind of otherworldly, perhaps divine, experience through his work. Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Atlas Mountains, might be able to tell you more...

"The Tuesday Night Club" by Agatha Christie

...in which we are introduced to the author's greatest character and perhaps most unlikely detective, sweet old Miss Jane Marple. No surprise that this story contains both arsenic and a little bit of old lace, for it's the first time the public will meet Raymond West's aunt in the quaint little village which seems to have more than its share of mysteries and those quaint souls intent on solving them. Read by Scoot. Time 23:45.

Go, you--there are plenty of places where you can find out more about Miss Agatha Christie, far better places than this. (Though we will hint here at the story of her kidnapping, which we've always loved, whether it was a hoax or not; it just seems so fitting.) Surely the bookstore or library nearest you will have a whole shelf or two fitted out with some of the many mysteries of Dame Agatha. So, if this story is the kind of thing you like, stop reading this and get to those volumes as soon as you can!

"Game" by Donald Barthelme

Two people locked in a bunker deep underground act as some sort of sentinels guarding a mysterious console which may be attached to some sort of doomsday device. One plays jacks, the other doesn't. We don't know what it means, either. Read by Scoot. Time 12:11.

People say Donald Barthelme did more than just about anyone to change the face of the American short story during the 1960's and '70's, despite of or perhaps because of appearing regularly in the generally conservative New Yorker magazine. His wildy experimental, careening and erratic, always unpredictable prose had affinities with pop art and the revolutionary spirit of the times. He wrote a great many short stories, and a few novels as well, and he won some prizes and made some money, and then he died in 1989. Oh, well.

"Untitled" ("The Shower Curtain") by Marcel Cohen

Could this be our shortest reading yet? In an enigmatic little snippet of fiction, a shower curtain may be an important clue--oh, come on, it has to be! Read by Scoot. Time 1:52.

Who is or was Marcel Cohen? We don't know, but will have to find out. We do know this comes from a collection of similarly short pieces called The Emperor Peacock Moth. Nice title. Ah--here's something from the Burning Deck website, publisher of Mr. Cohen: "Marcel Cohen was born in 1937 in Asnieres and works as a journalist in Paris. He has written two novels, Galpa (1969) and Voyage a Waizata (1976), stories, and several volumes of very short stories whose admirable density brings them close to being poems, Miroirs (1981), je ne sais pas le nom (1986) and Le grand paon-de-nuit of 1990. He has also published a volume of interviews with Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book (which has been published in English by Station Hill Press)." That enough for you?

"The Art of Vietnam" by Dallas Wiebe

Out of the blue, a Vietnam war veteran receives a summons from an old war buddy who asks his friend to come see himself and the wife he met in that country. What follows is disturbingly indicative of how battle scars can influence one's perspective on the world and on one's ability to tell a straight story. Read by Scoot. Time 10:13.

We don't know if Dallas Wiebe was ever in Vietnam himself, but we do know that he is from Kansas and has taught extensively in the Midwest. As his publisher's website says, "Burning Deck has published three volumes of short stories: The Transparent Eye-Ball, Going to the Mountain, and Skyblue’s Essays. His most recent book is Our Asian Journey (MLR Editions Canada), a fictionalized account of the great Mennonite trek to Central Asia in the 1880s and a study of the impact of language (Biblical) on a community. He has received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize, a Pushcart Prize (1979), an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship, and the Ohio Governor's Award for the Arts." Thanks to author and scholar Alan Leibowitz for donating several Burning Deck volumes to our collection!

"The Novel as History" by Harry Matthews

...Or perhaps "History as Novel (more accurately, as Short Story)." From recounting the time he was trapped in a bar during a blizzard in Detroit to the dawn of the Enlightenment, a long-winded raconteur barely leaves his listener enough time to think, "He's full of it!" Read by Scoot. Time 7:38.

At the time of this story's publication in the collection Country Cooking and Other Stories, in 1980 by the Burning Deck Press, the author had already been publishing fiction for nearly twenty years in places such as The Paris Review and Antaeus, and had been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Which is our way of saying we don't really know anything about him except what it says in the book's front matter and really should find out more soon!

"On Trains" by James Alan McPherson

When this story was written, most of the porters on American trains were black. Over thirty years later, not much has changed, and so this story's exploration of black and white relations on a long-distance train ride is still topical and still relevant. Read by Jonathan Strong. Time 12:09.

A professor at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop for a quarter of a century, James Alan McPherson is a Georgia native who studied to be a lawyer at Harvard and Yale but ended up publishing two award-winning collections of short stories, Hue and Cry and Elbow Room and (in 1969 and 1977, respectively). Though he is not a prolific writer (the best kind, usually), since then he has also published Crabcakes and A Region Not Home. John Updike selected his story "The Gold Coast" for his anthology, Best American Short Stories of the Century, so you know he must be good!

"The Unstrung Harp" by Edward Gorey

It is that time again, time for C(lauvius) F(rerdick) Earbrass to begin the doubtful enterprise of embarking on yet another novel, which will seriously disrupt his croquet matches and reading of the Compendium of the Minor Heresies of the Twelfth Century in Asia Minor. In the midst of his anxieties, he receives a mysterious silver-gilt epergne-and-candelabrum hybrid from a mysterious admirer and contemplates a stuffed fantod in a belljar. Read by Scoot. Time 19:20.

You might be as surprised to find Edward Gorey lurking on these pages as we are, since he is more often thought of as an illustrator than fiction-writer--though even if one takes away the idiosyncratic charm of his cross-hatched drawings (something one would never truly wish to do!), one will still have much to appreciate in his droll and acerbic prose. There are legions of his fans, us included, who still miss the tall bearded man in the big strange house on Cape Cod and his sporadic offerings of amusing books--and especially the whimsical musical "entertainments" he specialized in during his later years, sometimes appearing in these plays himself. The cult of Gorey is immortal, and it has already outlasted many of those delightful dust-jackets he designed for Manhattan publishers from the 1950's through the 1980's, which one still sees in used-book stores everywhere. Like Gorey himself, you can spot them at several paces. And want to take them home.

"Alternatives to Sex: An Introduction" by Stephen McCauley

Here's a "Stories to Go" exclusive, offered to our faithful listeners between our regular short stories: Stephen McCauley, author of such novels as True Enough, The Man of the House, and The Object of My Affection, introduces us all to his latest work, the forthcoming Alternatives to Sex. Look below and you'll find Mr. McCauley reading Lorrie Moore, as well as James Thurber some months ago. Now you'll hear his own words in his own voice. We hope you'll enjoy this brief excerpt and the author's commentary--and that you will rush right out to buy the book as soon as it hits your town. Time 6:40.

OK, Steve, what percentage do we get?

Authors, anyone?

We've just become aware that recently a few new people have been taking a peek at this site, and so first of all we want to welcome them--as well as give a hi-howdy to anyone who's dared to venture back here after recent problems with downloading and listening and story selection. We still have a backlog of things we want to accomplish--and must admit it might take a long time or never. What we'd really love is an Author's List so one could navigate to any particular entry with ease, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way for us Bloggers to do that. (Well, we could hand-stitch it, but that would take a very long time.) If anyone out there could show us how to create an index efficiently, please let us know! In the meantime, don't forget that there is one easy way already to find an author or topic, so easy that we've often forgotten it ourselves--just use the "Search This Blog" feature at the top of the page. Of course, if you don't know which authors or stories we've already featured, this might not be too helpful--but if the author or story you're looking for has already been presented, that search feature should lead you right to that page or those pages.

We'll be looking for more ways to improve this site as we go along. Sorry if the pages are getting a little more cluttered with options nowadays (more than we like, actually), but in an effort to "maximize our potential" and cooperate with the many methods of listening on- or offline, it looks like more clutter is the way to go. You might note that we now feature the timing of new entries (and will try to update previous ones, although Blogger updating can be very slow). And in the future we promise to have readers always say "The End," just in case there might still be any confusion. (After all, quite a few stories do have unexpected or abrupt endings.) Any further suggestions?

One other note: all of our entries past and present have been encode to 48 or 56 kbps, in an effort to balance file size with quality. Being that these are only monophonic voice recordings, that seems to work for us, but does it for you? We do wonder when our ISP server space will run out, even if we don't quite understand all these technical things...

Thanks as always for reading these bothersome notes.

Your Humble Editors

"How to Become a Writer" by Lorrie Moore

"How does one become a writer?" authors are probably often asked by acolytes and critics alike. This story might not help much, but it is a cleverly disguised bildungsroman disguised as a guide for would-be fictionists everywhere. Read by Stephen McCauley. Time 16:15.

It is up to the reader to decide how much of this story might really be autobiographical; Marie Lorena Moore the real person grew up surrounded by books and music, the daughter of parents who had both wanted to be writers at one time. By the time she was Lorrie Moore the writer, she had already won a Seventeen magazine contest and was fast on her way to tenure at The New Yorker and teaching college students to write. She is one of those somewhat rare writers known equally as much for her short story collections as her novels. Her fiction, as one might guess, can often be elusive, spurning or parodying convention.

Stephen McCauley's forthcoming novel Alternatives to Sex will be his sixth; he continues to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts despite everything. Look for a special advertising supplement from Mr. McCauley within the next day or so. If he's lucky, as he says, Oprah may mistake this latest novel for a memoir.

"The Man in Pyjamas" by Eugenio Montale

On his way down the corridor of a hotel late at night, a guest overhears another guest's anxious voice on the phone in her room. Immediately the unintentional eavesdropper begins to conjecture all sorts of possible scenarios--all that's possible within the space of a couple of pages, that is. Read by Scoot. Time 4:18.

Let's consider this story absurd, since that's how it's categorized in the anthology from which it came (after having first appeared in London Magazine some month, apparently, in the 1960's). The author himself was not so usually absurd, since he was the rather serious translator into Italian of many writers in English, from Shakespeare to Hawthorne, as well as himself. More importantly, Montale was "the most influential Italian poet of the twentieth century," as it says right here in that anthology, and is said to have transformed modern Italian poetry the same way T. S. Eliot transformed English poetry. Who would have ever guessed that from this little scribble of a story?