Welcome
Animad! I’m so glad you’re here — the more, the merrier (and the more, the larger my backlog of stories I really want to read)!
I have a a few rereads in this update, so I am making a fairly arbitrary decision about which to count and which not. I already counted a reread of a story I read in last year’s challenge (“Bullet in the Brain”) and of a story I have read many times, most recently about two years ago (“The Lottery”). So this week I reread “St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” which I talked about in the challenge thread just a month or two ago, and it feels too recent to count it, so I won’t. (It was one of the stories in
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft; I was delighted to have the excuse to read it again. It’s a super story.)
Another Shirley Jackson reread this week which I will count (because I haven’t read the story in a couple of years):
51. “Afternoon in Linen,” Shirley Jackson, 1943
I heard this one in the New Yorker fiction podcast, in which writers read work of other writers and discuss it with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Triesman. This was an absolutely great listen — not just for the fantastic Shirley Jackson story, but also because of Triesman’s discussion with Kristen Roupenian (best known as author of “Cat Person,” a story published in the New Yorker a couple of years ago that got a lot of attention). It was exactly the kind of literary discussion I eat up with a spoon, a close reading of a rich, subtle story by people who really know how to read. I loved every second of it and I highly recommend you go and find this episode of the podcast. (There’s also a New Yorker Voice of the Writer podcast in which writers read their own work; there’s no lit-geeky discussion in that one.)
52. “The Shorn Lamb,” Jean Stafford, 1953
Also from the New Yorker fiction podcast, this time a discussion with Garth Greenwell, who is an author I do not know. I love Jean Stafford — she slots right into my passion for midcentury women writers and that New York scene that Jackson and so many others were a part of, and she’s also a deeply intellectual and in her own way an edgy writer, exposing (also like Jackson) some of the horrors and contradictions inherent in being a woman in that time and place. This story (like the Jackson story, by coincidence) is from the perspective of a child, who has been used as a pawn in a battle between her parents, whose marriage is falling apart. It’s heartbreaking and incisive and really terrific stuff. Right up my alley, anyway.
And a couple more from
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, from the chapter on setting.
53. “The Flowers,” Alice Walker, 1973
Extremely brief, extremely shocking story of a girl whose childhood ends when she comes across the decomposing, mutilated body of a lynched man.
54. “A Visit of Charity,” Eudora Welty, 1941
Putting the Gothic in Southern Gothic; a very creepy story about a girl trying to get Campfire Girl points by visiting old people in a nursing home.
54/100 read, 24/50 from the last five years.
