Zybahn's comments (member since Apr 17, 2008)

Zybahn's comments from the Short Story lovers group.

"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is fantastic. Admittedly I haven't read enough Lawrence. I don't remember "Prelude" but I have her complete works & will dig it out. I'll need to get a hold of some William Trevor too, it seems. Any suggestions here?

Others I like are Raymond Carver ("Errand"), Vladimir Nabokov ("The Vane Sisters"), Kafka, F. Scott Fitzgerald & James Joyce. I'm not a fan of Lorrie Moore. To me she's like Amy Hempel, very inconsistent. Will pull off one great story for every ten she writes.

Anyone read Joyce Carol Oates's "Family"? Haunting.

Sadly, Katherine Mansfield is nearly forgotten. "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" is brilliant & can be found online here: http://www.classicreader.com/book/2045/1...

Aside from Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor & Frank O'Connor & the rest, I enjoy some of the more obscure short story writers, like Donald Barthelme, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover. And of course there is the genius madman Nikolai Gogol: http://www.iblist.com/author1917.htm.

So I've thought some about this & admittedly couldn't come up with much. "Moses and Mr. Aiken" by Edward Thompson, "Peasants" and "The Drunkard" by Frank O'Connor (I'm sure he has others in this vein), "The Moon in its Flight" by Gilbert Sorrentino (though some might disagree here), William Saroyan's "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" & other stories from My Name is Aram.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is not among his macabre. It is a later story, not too well known, first published in 1977. I'll think on this more tonight when at home & not procrastinating at work.

Just read the novella The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl, and would recommend it. The other stories in the collection (that I've read so far), TWSoHS and Six More, suit your theme but are not that good. Henry Sugar, about 80 pages long, is worth its light read. I'll try to think of some other uplifting stories but haven't read any recently.

Jennifer's right. The point is that the townspeople no longer know why they are keeping this tradition alive, not unlike many of our current traditions. There is no real purpose to their actions, yet the notion of tradition is deeply rooted in their way of life. The ceremony may have been established by a clearly defined motive, anything from a primitive form of population control to a specific form of punishment. Not just the meaning but the actual details, everything from the selection process to the actual stoning could be merely a perverted version of what actually did occur in the past. What is frightening is not the blind violence the folk instill at the end, but the violence in blindly rejecting reason over tradition.

Two fairly recent ones I've enjoyed are:
Gilbert Sorrentino, The Moon in Its Flight (2002)
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion (2004)