High on Short Fiction Stories

Chapter IV of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story (though not that short but it's one heck of a story) - Head and Shoulders (for all the chapters click here):

IV
"Horace and Marcia were married early in February. The sensation in academic circles both at Yale and Princeton was tremendous. Horace Tarbox, who at fourteen had been played up in the Sunday magazines sections of metropolitan newspapers, was throwing over his career, his chance of being a world authority on American philosophy, by marrying a chorus girl—they made Marcia a chorus girl. But like all modern stories it was a four-and-ahalf-day wonder.

They took a flat in Harlem. After two weeks’ search, during which his idea of the value of academic knowledge faded unmercifully, Horace took a position as clerk with a South American export company— some one had told him that exporting was the coming thing. Marcia was to stay in her show for a few months—anyway until he got on his feet. He was getting a hundred and twenty-five to start with, and though of course they told him it was only a question of months until he would be earning double that, Marcia refused even to consider giving up the hundred and fifty a week that she was getting at the time.

“We’ll call ourselves Head and Shoulders,
dear,” she said softly, “and the shoulders’ll
have to keep shaking a little longer until the
old head gets started.”

Chapter III of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story (though not that short but it's one heck of a story, indeed, one heck of a story) - Head and Shoulders (for all the chapters click here):

"He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience—down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.

“Silly boy!” she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn’t take her encore.
“What do they expect for a hundred a week—perpetual motion?” she grumbled to herself in the wings.

Chapter II of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story (though not that short but it's one heck of a story) - Head and Shoulders (for all the chapters click here):

II
"On Thursday night Horace Tarbox sat in an aisle seat in the fifth row and witnessed “Home James.” Oddly enough he found that he was enjoying himself. The cynical students near him were annoyed at his audible appreciation of time-honored jokes in the Hammerstein tradition. But Horace was waiting with anxiety for Marcia Meadow singing her song about a Jazz-bound Blundering Blimp. When she did appear, radiant under a floppity flower-faced hat, a warm glow settled over him, and when the song was over he did not join in the storm of applause. He felt somewhat numb.

Chapter I of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story (though not that short) - Head and Shoulders (for all the chapters click here):

I
"In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A—excellent—in Cæsar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry. Two years later, while George M. Cohan was composing “Over There,” Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on “The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form,” and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on “The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists.”

After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of “Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding.” Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window on the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on “German Idealism.” The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts. He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop. “I never feel as though I’m talking to him,” expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. “He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say: ‘Well, I’ll ask myself and find out."

A classic Guy de Maupassant short story which I happen to like very much. Guess why? A Normandy Joke by Guy de Maupassant:

"It was a wedding procession that was coming along the road between the tall trees that bounded the farms and cast their shadow on the road. At the head were the bride and groom, then the family, then the invited guests, and last of all the poor of the neighborhood. The village urchins who hovered about the narrow road like flies ran in and out of the ranks or climbed up the trees to see it better.

The bridegroom was a good-looking young fellow, Jean Patu, the richest farmer in the neighborhood, but he was above all things, an ardent sportsman who seemed to take leave of his senses in order to satisfy that passion, and who spent large sums on his dogs, his keepers, his ferrets and his guns. The bride, Rosalie Roussel, had been courted by all the likely young fellows in the district, for they all thought her handsome and they knew that she would have a good dowry. But she had chosen Patu; partly, perhaps, because she liked him better than she did
the others, but still more, like a careful Normandy girl, because he had more crown pieces.

Niccolo Machiavelli's Belphagor, a demonology-considered-story which you will see, is quite entertaining and philosophical. From wiki:"In demonology, Belphegor (or Beelphegor) is a demon, and one of the seven princes of Hell, who helps people to make discoveries. He seduces people by suggesting to them ingenious inventions that will make them rich. According to some 16th century demonologists, his power is stronger in April. Bishop and witch-hunter Peter Binsfeld believed that Belphegor tempts by means of laziness. Also, according to Peter Binsfeld's Binsfeld's Classification of Demons, Belphegor is the chief demon of the deadly sin known as Sloth in Christian tradition. Belphegor may also represent Vanity."

"We read in the ancient archives of Florence the following account, as it was received from the lips of a very holy man, greatly respected by every one for the sanctity of his manners at the period in which he lived. Happening once to be deeply absorbed in his prayers, such was their efficacy, that he saw an infinite number of condemned souls, belonging to those miserable mortals who had died in their sins, undergoing the punishment due to their offences in the regions below. He remarked that the greater part of them lamented nothing so bitterly as their folly in having taken wives, attributing to them the whole of their misfortunes. Much surprised at this, Minos and Rhadamanthus, with the rest of the infernal judges, unwilling to credit all the abuse heaped upon the female sex, and wearied from day to day with its repetition, agreed to bring the matter before Pluto. It was then resolved that the conclave of infernal princes should form a committee of inquiry, and should adopt such measures as might be deemed most advisable by the court in order to discover the truth or falsehood of the calumnies which they heard.

Mirrors of Chartres Street by William Faulkner from New Orleans Sketches:

"His voice had the hoarseness of vocal cords long dried with alcohol, and he was crippled. I first noticed him when he swung himself across my path with apelike agility and demanded a quarter for bread. His gray thatch and his eyes as wild and soft as a faun's, his neck muscles moving as smooth as an athlete's to the thrust of his crutch, stopped me; his garrulous assurance—"Say, you are a young man now, and you got both legs. But some day you may need a bite of bread and a cup of coffee, just a cup of coffee, to keep the damp out of your bones; and you may stop a gentleman like I'm stopping you, and he may be my son—I was a good one in my day,
fellow." I had prided myself at the time on my appearance; that I did not look even like a prospective bum, wearing then tweeds which came from the Strand; but who knows what life may do to us? Anyway, to have such a breath fondly on one's neck in this nation and time was worth a quarter. Fifteen minutes later I saw him again, handily swinging himself into a movie theater where was one of those million-dollar pictures of dukes and adultery and champagne and lots of girls in mosquito netting and lamp shades.

The short story "A Russian beauty" by russian but multilingual author Vladimir Nabokov (yet i'll put him under the european label):

"Olga, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year 1900, in a wealthy, carefree family of nobles. A pale little girl in a white sailor suit, with a side parting in her chestnut hair and such merry eyes that everyone kissed her there, she was deemed a beauty since childhood. The purity of her profile, the expression of her closed lips, the silkiness of her tresses that reached to the small of her back all this was enchanting indeed. Her childhood passed festively, securely, and gaily, as was the custom in our country since the days of old. A sunbeam falling on the cover of a Bibliotheque Rose volume at the family estate, the classical hoarfrost of the
Saint Petersburg public gardens A supply of memories, such as these, comprised her sole dowry when she left Russia in the spring of 1919.

A small parable by Poe, one of his best: Shadow, A Parable by Edgar Allan Poe:

Yea! though I walk through
the valley of the Shadow.
—Psalm of David

"Ye who read are still still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

It's really not of much use to add anything to Kafka's writings, as you all know, but I would like to mention this fact: it's the 1920s, the political discussions are at rise, the socio-political environment is pending between the immediate struggle for authority in the more and more bureaucratization of institutions. Kafka's stories are one's fight and also play with the irrational that lurks in the most rational way of life - the rational-bureaucratized-state. A Fratricide by Franz Kafka:

"The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed:
Schmar, the murderer, took up his post about nine o'clock one night in clear moonlight by the corner where Wese, his victim, had to turn from the street where his office was into the street he lived in. The night air was shivering cold. Yet Schmar was wearing only a thin blue suit; the
jacket was unbuttoned, too. He felt no cold; besides, he was moving about all the time. His weapon, half a bayonet and half a kitchen knife, he kept firmly in his grasp, quite naked. He looked at the knife against the light of the moon; the blade glittered; not enough for Schmar; he struck it against the bricks of the pavement till the sparks flew; regretted that, perhaps; and to repair the damage drew it like a violin bow across his boot sole while he bent forward, standing on one leg, and listened both to the whetting of the knife on his boot and for any sound out of the fateful side street. Why did Pallas, the private citizen who was watching it all from his window near by in the second story, permit it to happen? Unriddle the mysteries of human nature! With his collar turned up, his dressing gown girt round his portly body, he stood looking down, shaking his head.

A european medieval short story implicating religion (duh, it's the middle ages), a nunnery and The Devil. The Devil in a Nunnery - Francis Oscar Mann:

"Buckingham is as pleasant a shire as a man shall see on a seven days’ journey. Neither was it any less pleasant in the days of our Lord King Edward, the third of that name, he who fought and put the French to shameful discomfiture at Crecy and Poitiers and at many another hard-fought field. May God rest his soul, for he now sleeps in the great Church at Westminster. Buckinghamshire is full of smooth round hills and woodlands of hawthorn and beech, and it is a famous country for its brooks and shaded waterways running through the low hay meadows. Upon its hills feed a thousand sheep, scattered like the remnants of the spring snow, and it was from these that the merchants made themselves fat purses, sending the wool into Flanders in exchange for silver crowns. There were many strong castles there too, and rich abbeys, and the King’s Highway ran through it from North to South, upon which the pilgrims went in crowds to worship at the Shrine of the Blessed Saint Alban.

A good part of the success of his stories derives from the technique that Maugham used. He discussed this in the preface to the first American edition of his collected short stories and compared it with the contrasting techniques of Chekhov and de Maupassant. Chekhov had markedly superior characterisation, he said, but de Maupassant did give his short stories a beginning, a middle and an end–which Maugham approved, and which is the key to his style: ‘My prepossessions in the arts are on the side of law and order. I like a story that fits.’ Such was his answer to critics who had applied the word ‘competent’ to his stories, disparagingly as they thought–and, judging by the stories’ vast and continuing popularity, unwisely. - from the William Heinemann Limited edition introduction.
The Ant and the Grasshopper by William Somerset Maugham:

"When I was a very small boy I was made to learn by heart certain of the fables of La Fontaine, and the moral of each was carefully explained to me. Among those I learnt was The Ant and The Grasshopper which is devised to bring home to the young the useful lesson that in an imperfect world industry is rewarded and giddiness punished. In this admirable fable (I apologize for telling something which everyone is politely, but inexactly, supposed to know) the ant spends a laborious summer gathering its winter store, while the grasshopper sits on a blade of grass singing to the sun. Winter comes and the ant is comfortably provided for, but the grasshopper has an empty larder: he goes to the ant and begs for a little food. Then the ant gives him her classic answer:

A classic Rudyard Kipling short fiction Indian story. The story of Muhammad Din:

Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home, little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying.
—Munichandra, translated by Professor Peterson.

"The polo-ball was an old one, scarred, chipped, and dinted. It stood on the mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Imam Din, khitmatgar, was cleaning for me. "Does the Heaven-born want this ball?" said Imam Din, deferentially. The Heaven-born set no particular store by it; but of what use was a polo-ball to a khitmatgar? "By your Honor's favor, I have a little son. He has seen this ball, and desires it to play with. I do not want it for myself." No one would for an instant accuse portly old Imam Din of wanting to play with polo-balls. He carried out the battered thing into the veranda; and there followed a hurricane of joyful squeaks, a patter of small feet, and the thud-thud-thud of the ball rolling along the ground. Evidently the little son had been waiting outside the door to secure his treasure. But how had he managed to see that
polo-ball?

"Glossolalia" is one of John Barth's most surreal or taste-of-magical-realism short story, also one of his most criticized works, mainly because of it's unnatural and out-of-this-world strangeness. So here's Glossolalia (which I find very interesting and mindf'ing) by John Barth

"Still breathless from fending Phoebus, suddenly I see all- and all in vain. A horse excreting Greeks will devour my city; none will heed her Apollo loved, and endowed with clear sight, and cursed when she gainsaid him. My honor thus costlily purchased will be snatched from me by soldiers. I see Agamemnon, my enslaver, meeting death in Mycenae. No more.

Part 2 of "Doorway Into Time" by American science fiction and fantasy writer C. L. Moore (part 2 because I've grown tired yesterday of putting all of the story from the physical book to this blog). For part I click here.

""That—that thing, Alanna. What was it? How did you—" She gripped her own bare arms harder, and another spasm of shuddering went over her. The blue-green sequins flashed chilly star-points from her gown as she moved. Her voice shook too; her very mind seemed to be shaking behind the blank eyes. But when she spoke the words made approximate sense. And they echoed his own thought. "I'm dreaming all this, you know." Her voice sounded far away. "This isn't really
happening. But—but something took me in its arms back there." She nodded toward the mirrored laboratory on the wall. "And everything whirled, and then-—" A hard shudder seized her. "I don't know...." "Did you see it?" She shook her head. "Maybe I did. I'm not sure. I was so dizzy—I think it went away through the door. Would you call it a door?" Her little breath of laughter was very near hysteria. "I—I felt its feet moving away." "But what was it? What did it look like?" "I don't know, Paul." He closed his lips on the questions that rushed to be asked.
Here in the dream, many things were very alien indeed. Those patterns on the wall, for instance. He thought he could understand how one could look at something and not be sure at all what the something was. And Alanna's heavy spasms of shuddering proved that shock must have blanked her mind protectively to much of what had happened.

"Doorway Into Time" by American science fiction and fantasy writer C. L. Moore For part II click here.

"He came slowly, with long, soft, ponderous strides, along the hallway of his treasure house. The gleanings of many worlds were here around him; he had ransacked space and time for the treasures that filled his palace. The robes that moulded their folds richly against his great rolling limbs as he walked were in themselves as priceless as anything within these walls, gossamer fabric pressed into raised designs that had no meaning, this far from the world upon which they had been created, but—in their beauty—universal. But he was himself more beautiful than anything in all that vast collection. He knew it complacently, a warm contented knowledge deep in the center of his brain. His motion was beautiful, smooth power pouring along his limbs as he walked, his great bulk ponderous and graceful. The precious robes he wore flowed open over his magnificent body. He ran one sensuous palm down his side, enjoying the texture of that strange, embossed delicacy in a fabric thinner than gauze. His eyes were proud and half shut, flashing many-colored under the heavy lids. The eyes were never twice quite the same color, but all the colors were beautiful. He was growing restless again. He knew the feeling well, that familiar quiver of discontent widening and strengthening far back in his mind. It was time to set out once more on the track of something dangerous. In times past, when he had first begun to
stock this treasure house, beauty alone had been enough. It was not enough any longer. Danger had to be there too. His tastes were growing capricious and perhaps a little decadent, for he had lived a very long time. Yes, there must be a risk attending the capture of his next new treasure. He must seek out great beauty and great danger and subdue the one and win the other, and the thought of it made his eyes change color and the blood beat faster in mighty rhythms through his veins. He smoothed his palm again along the embossed designs of the robe that moulded itself to his body. The great, rolling strides carried him noiselessly over the knife-edged patterns of the floor.

When a pair of teeth costing 1000 pounds get lost things are about to get wild. Although it was a pretty poetic/romantic touch to it, especially the end, still we're dealing here with a nice piece of arabian literature, which is so dense and rich I feel I am doing nothing but wrong as I try to write something about it! Jamal Sleem Nuweihed's False Teeth:

"Sana’ drew back the curtains to let in the sunlight and the spring breezes, breathing in the fresh air as if wanting to rid herself of the choking gases she felt filling her chest. Her eyes had a wilted look, her eyelids felt heavy, like those of someone who’d lain awake all night, nursing a secret anxiety and a painful sorrow. Suddenly she heard her father’s voice, speaking to another person behind the trees in the garden. Stunned, as if hit by an electric current, she drew back. As her arm struck the window, she realized what was happening and lay back on her bed, weeping in her despair. She knew who the man was that her father had been talking to. It was that vain old man, fabulously rich, who put on youthful airs and had promised to give her father a thousand pounds1 to help him restore his finances and so revitalize his trading business, which had suffered a sudden setback.

I know, there's just something about Whitman. Even though Walt Whitman's prose is not as popular as his poems, I would like to bring it up a little. The moral consonance derived from it is quite spectacular and I invite you to give it a thought from the view of a 21st century human. "The child’s champion" has a kantian moral imperative attached to it, can you sense it (as Whitman asks the readers himself).

"Just after sunset one evening in summer—that pleasant hour when the air is balmy, the light loses its glare, and all around is imbued with soothing quiet—on the door-step of a house there
sat an elderly woman waiting the arrival of her son. The house was in a straggling village some fifty miles from the great city, whose spires and ceaseless clang rise up, where the Hudson
pours forth its waters. She who sat on the door-step was a widow; her neat white cap covered locks of gray, and her dress though clean, was patched and exceeding homely. Her house, for the tenement she occupied was her own, was very little, and very old. Trees clustered around it so thickly as almost to hide its color—that blackish gray color which belongs to old wooden houses that have never been painted; and to get to it, you had to enter a little ricketty gate, and walk through a short path, bordered by carrot-beds, and beets, and other vegetables. The son whom she was expecting was her only child. About a year before, he had been bound apprentice to a rich farmer in the place, and after finishing his daily tasks, he was in the habit of spending half an hour at his mother’s.

"Towards evening, when the great shadow of the Palladian villa filled the terrace, Count Axel left his library and walked down the wide marble steps among the time flowers. A tall, imperious figure in a black velvet jacket, a gold tie-pin glinting below his George V beard, cane held stiffly in a white-gloved hand, he surveyed the exquisite crystal flowers without emotion, listening to the sounds of his wife's harpsichord, as she played a Mozart rondo in the music room, echo and vibrate through the translucent petals.
The garden of the villa extended for some two hundred yards below the terrace, sloping down to a miniature lake spanned by a white bridge, a slender pavilion on the opposite bank. Axel rarely ventured as far as the lake; most of the time flowers grew in a small grove just below the terrace, sheltered by the high wall which encircled the estate. From the terrace he could see over the wall to the plain beyond, a continuous expanse of open ground that rolled in great swells to the horizon, where it rose slightly before finally dipping from sight. The plain surrounded the house on all sides, its drab emptiness emphasizing the seclusion and mellowed magnificence of the villa. Here, in the garden, the air seemed brighter, the sun warmer, while the plain was always dull and remote.

This is a short story by al-Mazini, an egyptian critic, writer of fiction, poet, and essayist which I fancy very much (full name: Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini). His short fiction is like a combination of fairytales and real event, the mystical feature of his writing would seem to be a big "duh" in the arab world but still, even now after 3/4 of a century he can still surprise us. The way in which he writes makes you wonder if he considers his readers as adults or children, probably a little but of both. Now I leave you with "How I Became a Demon of the Jinn"

"When I was a teenager, I tried my hand at everything, taking any opportunity that came my way. I only used to think about the moment in which I was living, hungry for my share of life, anxious to get my fill of it. One marvelous summer’s night I was wending my way home in the early morning hours—we Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini: How I Became a Demon of the Jinn 99 lived in the Saliba quarter—after a whole night of drinking and listening to music and songs. When I arrived at my threshold, I realized my ninety-year-old grandmother was the only person home and I didn’t have the key with me. I said to myself, “Should I disturb my grandmother? She can only rise with the greatest difficulty, and when she walks anywhere, she moves along the walls so she can prop herself up. I should let her rest and go join up with the rest of my family—my mother and brother—after all, the weather is clear and it will be a refreshing walk.”

Hello dear future readers and commenters. This is what will become a sort of Mecca of fictional short stories, or at least I hope this will be the case, anyhow here I will post my favorite short stories (and believe me, that's a lot). To be free of any copyright issues, I will post most of the time short stories from the 19th and early 20th century, but not limited to, and even more, so that nobody thinks this will be a sort of spam site, I will add next to each short story that I post on the blog a short comment related to it of my own. I am very passionate about short fiction, I've been reading it since I was little, I've read much more short story volumes that I have novels, so if this is the case, I must say that short stories > novel, at least they do for me.

Why Short Fiction? because:
A short story contains infinite amount of information, and it's not rare that novel are made by exploiting and expanding a certain short story.
A short story is like a myth, and very related to it, it's very complex, and by no means but it be considered just a sketch, as do some consider even myths, which in fact are the most complex colective constructions of mankind.

(this idea will be updated gradually)

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