"The New Melusine" by Johann Goethe

What to do with a wife who is nearly perfect but has the bad habit of occasionally becoming as small as an elf? In this self-contained fairy tale from the unfairy tale Wilhelm Meister's Travels, the narrator discovers that good things sometimes have hidden liabilities. Probably not surprised, are you? Translated from the German by Gertude C. Schwebell. Read by Jonathan Strong. Time 31:12.

Novelist, dramatist, poet, politician, painter, philosopher, scientist... the list goes on and on for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German polymath and iconoclast who lived from 1749 to 1832. Just as varied were the movements Goethe was associated with: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Sturm und Drang, and Empfindsamkeit (Sensibility). His thoughts and his works would go on to influence all the European arts for over a century, and may still be influencing us today. Even Darwin owed him a debt! Imagine all that, cribbed from just the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. We are simply exhausted thinking about everything else we don't have time or space to include here...

"Three-Minute Novel" by Heinrich Mann

Well, three minutes to read on the page, perhaps, but three times that to read aloud. Here we have a complete bildungsroman in just a few pages, with the requisite gambling and fatal romance. Translated by Victor Lange. Read by Jonathan Strong. Time 9:46.

Overshadowed by his much more famous brother Thomas, Heinrich Mann nevertheless had a substantial literary career of his own. Like his younger brother, he ended up in Los Angeles because of the Nazis and continued to write novels which dealt with German society and class differences there. His dates are 1871 to 1950. We wish we could think of something more exciting to say about him here, but we can't. Maybe there was a reason he was the less successful brother.

"The Fall of the Roman Empire" by Haruki Murakami

Is this narrator crazy? you might ask, and we wish we had a ready answer for you. Maybe he's just a little... obsessive, and a little muddled when it comes to mixing up history and the weather and his girlfriend's sexual particularities. And maybe neither his diary nor his memory is telling him the truth. Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum. Read by Scoot. Time 10:35.

We like this little anecdote about the popularity of Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood: A big bestseller in Japan, it was sold in two volumes packaged together, one volume green, the other red. Devoted fans would dress in colors to match their preferred volume. Imagine the streetgang warfare. We saw him give a lecture once in America, and it was supremely boring--he didn't even read any fiction! (But it must be admitted that at that point his English was still pretty uncertain.) Well, we concede that his fiction might be a lot more interesting, and you might want to begin with the stories collected in The Elephant Vanishes (including the one here) or a novel like Kafka on the Shore or Sputnik Sweetheart. At the very least, they're good titles!

"The Angel" by Hans Christian Anderson

Flying to heaven with a recently deceased child in his arms, an angel conveys to the child touching secrets and profound wisdom. A discarded plant is rescued, as well--and all ends happily, we guess--but it's still so depressing! Translated by E. V. Lucas & H. B. Paull. Read by Scoot. Time 6:04.

Maybe we're not supposed to be praising all things Danish these days, and after all he does have that middle name guaranteed to provoke some people, yet this is one writer whose works still live and affect lives. Anderson was the unschooled and unhappy child of desperately poor and alcoholic parents in Odense, Denmark--yet he had the wits and imagination to rise above his surroundings and captivate his countrymen and then the world with his various writings, most especially his original fairy tales which still are read nightly to children everywhere. Despite the fact that 2005 saw great celebrations upon the bicentennial of his birth, there are still very melancholy aspects to this "ugly duckling's" life--which one is welcome read about elsewhere.

"Aeronautics" by Harry Crosby

Surrealism's somewhat heavy hand certainly shows in this stream-of-whacked-out-consciousness escapade from playboy poet Harry Crosby, first published in the famous modernist magazine transition. The litany of bizarre visions all ends, not unsurprisingly for those who know their Crosby, in awe of the mighty power of the sun. Read by Scoot. Time 7:16.

Those who have read Geoffrey Wolfe's bestselling biography of Harry Grew Crosby know already the short, sweet facts of his life: escape from moneyed but straightlaced Boston Brahmins, flight to bohemian paradise with flighty wife, founding of press to publicize his work and that of other American ex-pats, double-suicide with someone not his wife. But Crosby is also an interesting writer if taken in small doses, and his diaries especially reveal the heady excitement and glamour of those far-off halcyon days of Paris in the 1920's. What other dilettante could boast that T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence all endorsed his work? (Well, sure, there were some literary kickbacks via the Black Sun Press.) If we had the money and an opium habit, Harry Crosby would be our role-model, too.

"The Ghosts of August" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Traveling in Italy, a couple and their young children visit a famous writer who lives in a semi-ruined palazzo in the hills, an enormous place with, of course, a secret. Ghosts may indeed walk in the noonday Tuscan sun. Translated by Edith Grossman. Read by Scoot. Time 6:44.

Cien años de soledad has never been one of our favorites here (a little long, isn't it?), but, hey--who are we to argue with so many people who do worship that book? Besides, we really do admire his short stories, especially the ones saddled with that bugaboo description "magic realism." There is no doubt that Garcia Marquez is one of the most famous and important writers in the modern world, a Colombian who helped make Latin American fiction trendy and whose every publication is something of an event. And he's a friend of Fidel! We point you next to his (much better) short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, which you can find over there at Miette's site.

"On the Sidewalk" by John Updike

April Fool? OK--it's not really Jack Kerouac; it's John Updike imitating On the Road, of course, when Updike was very young and Kerouac was still a new sensation. Bet we didn't fool anyone. Read by Scoot. Time 6:34.

John Updike, John Updike, John Updike: prolific, prolix (perhaps), and peculiarly poetic to plenty of people. His short stories tend to get overshadowed by his novels, especially the more lapinate ones, but At the A&P is still deservedly in lots of anthologies out there and many of his humorous or more sardonic pieces (such as this) can be found beyond the pages of the New Yorker, his home away from home for so many years. His territory may be a little north and a little cautious of John Cheever (another writer we have yet to get to here), but it is somewhat similar in its examination of middle-class angst and couples on the brink of divorce or worse. And that's the furthest we're going to examine the many works of Mr. Updike--most of which we haven't read! Just find one of his books, read the jacket flap, and you'll know the rest.

"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!