The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

by Katherine Anne Porter

Franklin Library edition of The Collected Stories of Catherine Anne Porter.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, American, Literary Fiction, Southern

495 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherin...

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very skilled short story writer, Katherine Anne Porter brings to life her characters and, primarily through character development, takes you deep into their world with a minimum of words. Not once did I feel that a story ended prematurely or that I wanted or expected more than I got.

She tackles a variety of experiences that might feel very familiar to most of us. In The Rope a husband and wife engage in an argument over a piece of rope that made me chuckle with recognition. I think if you are or have ever been married, you will see yourself and your spouse at some moment in this story. In fact, all you really need to have is a sibling or a friend and you might still relate easily to what transpires.

He is another excellent story that deals with a mother and her mentally handicapped son. I confess to feeling that we might, as a society, find ourselves in this one as well. It was a kind of tragic tale for me.

My favorite of the stories was The Cracked Looking Glass. This story of a May/December marriage struck me as particularly poignant. I could understand the feelings of the protagonist so well and loved seeing how her view changed over time.

Old Mortality, Noon Wine, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider are three novellas which were published originally under the collective name Pale Horse, Pale Rider. I was completely riveted to each of these stories, which are dark and disturbing in many ways. The first seems to pose the question of how much can we know about a person who is gone by listening to those who knew her? The second is a tale of the difference a hired man makes to the life of a farmer who employs him. The third, which ties back to the first by incorporating a character from that story, deals with fate and the precarious nature of life and death during WWI and the flu epidemic. All excellently written.

What was easy to realize, but surprising in its way, was the completely contemporary feel of all of these stories. We think our lives have changed substantially, but perhaps only the outer shell is different. The cell phones and newer fashions and quickie food preparation, and even the changes in the status of women in both the workplace and home, hasn’t changed the basic inner conflicts much at all.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life was very hard for the Whipples. It was hard to feed all the hungry mouths, it was hard to keep the children in flannels during the winter

The Collected Stories of Katherine Porter won the Pulitzer in 1965 and the National Book Award in 1966.

Once in a while there is a writer whose stories are so relatable that upon reading his or her work I feel like I’ve discovered a kindred spirit. Reading this book was that kind of experience for me. Despite the fact that all of these stories were written so long ago and most take place in Texas or Mexico, places I’ve never lived.

There are twenty short stories in this book and nine of them are some of the best I’ve ever read.

1. Maria Concepcion
2. Virgin Violetta
3. He
4. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
5. The Cracked Looking Glass
6. Hacienda
7. Noon Wine
8. The Old Order
9. The Downward Path to Wisdom

There is a fair amount of introspection that takes place in each of these stories and there is usually an inter-generational theme or familial theme. Many, perhaps most, of the central characters are not likable and some are often bitter or resentful. Yet they are so convincing. The interactions that they have with other characters are all so realistic.

Porter said her stories were "true in the way that a work of fiction should be true, created out of all the scattered particles of life I was able to absorb and combine and shape into new being."

5 stars. Recommended for anyone who likes short stories — Porter is an absolute master.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow, though I was a literature major, I had never read more than a couple of Porter's stories before something recently triggered my decision to check this collection out of the library. Huge thanks to that something, for I enjoyed the reading thoroughly.

Porter has a poet's ability to describe a gesture, a way of moving, or a scene with similes that make your jaw drop, so precise & unexpected & moving they are. "She watched not the boy, but his shadow, fallen like a dark garment against the fountain rim, trailing in the water" (from "Flowering Judas"). If I had had the foresight I would have jotted down lots more before returning the book.

There is a recurring character, Miranda, whom we meet sometimes as a child & sometimes as a young or youngish woman. There are recurring settings--Mexico, Texas, Kentucky, nameless big U.S. cities.

I particularly loved "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," set in 1918 as young U.S. men are heading off to the Great War & great swaths of the urban population are being mowed down by the flu (influenza) epidemic. I felt very much transplanted into that time & place, & into the life of Miranda.

"The Leaning Tower" isn't as emotionally engaging, but it's similarly fascinating historically: a young American artist spends a few months in Berlin in 1931--what a precarious time, & how aware of that the characters seem to be as they discuss national identities.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say about KA Porter, now that I've sufficiently hemmed and hawed about it for several days after finishing this book?

She's not for everybody. But her work will appeal to readers who appreciate a more luxurious style of writing, for that's what she usually employs. Not always - occasionally there are stories here that are in line with straight, unshowy narrative; but those are the less-interesting stories.

Porter is at her best when she allows language to run away with her. Generally, it's not her storylines that attract attention but the way she tells her stories. Any number of times throughout, I found myself stopping to re-read sentences or full paragraphs because of the way Porter had orchestrated them and elevated them to art.

This would be particularly true in sequences which can only be described as hallucinatory, i.e., when a character is close to natural death (as in 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall') and caught in a vortex blending past, present and future, or when another character (in 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider') is in the throes of influenza and is resisting the pull of where the illness wants to take her:

"I have left something unfinished."

Overall, these are very much character-based tales, traversing the inner lives and thought-processes of the often-marginalized inhabitants.

But Porter also shows herself capable of the unexpected, as is found in the eerie quality of 'Noon Wine' - a story that seems a fusion of Steinbeck and Stephen King (and may possibly have inspired King's own '1922', in his 'Full Dark, No Stars' collection) - as well as 'Holiday', in which a young woman seeking a vacation is encouraged to spend a month with:

a [huge] family of real old-fashioned German peasants, in the deep blackland Texas farm country, a household in real patriarchal style--the kind of thing you'd hate to live with but is very nice to visit.

I should note that 'A Day's Work' builds to perhaps the funniest conclusion possible for an attempted murder tale. And this volume ends with a microcosm narrative ('The Leaning Tower') which, in retrospect, may have been a bit of a dry-run for Porter's novel 'Ship of Fools'.

Ultimately, this is hardly an uplifting collection. The relationships detailed tend to be abrasive and laced with sorrow, uneasiness or regret. Still, more often than not, the writing tends to sing.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Granny Weatherall is nearly eighty and she's in bed, surrounded by her children, her doctor and a minister. She's dying. Her mind and senses go from one memory to another, from one sensation to another, thoughts fluttering like distracted butterflies going in all directions, or like a malfunctioning television catching all sorts of signals. Among these, the strongest of all, was one sorrow--the grief which wiped all her other sorrows away-- she was twenty and the love of her life didn't come to their wedding.

A powerfully imagined, unforgettable story. If I get lucky and grow very old and slowly waste away in bed surrounded by grieving relatives and creditors and quietly happy heirs I'll surely remember, in my grogginess, this story. What was the name of the dying grandmother there? Ah, yes, Granny Weatherall (for she weathered all!). I am like her now. And who wrote it? Alice Munro? No. She has a longer name. Ah, yes, Katherine Ann Porter! What are these people doing here, crying? I've got to call my brother. We need to check out that new bookstore downtown. What is that novel I'm now reading? I've been at it for months now, my eyesight is not that good anymore, my eyes tear up five minutes into staring at a page. Is it day or night? What is this heaviness in my chest? It is certainly getting dark and cold. Tomorrow I need to give my friend's grandson that old bike I no longer need...

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I bought this at Half Price Books a few weeks ago, the clerk said to me "Katherine Anne Porter is such a good writer that she almost makes up for the rest of Texas." I repeated that comment to my parents later, but they didn't find it quite as amusing as I did.

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The collection of a writer's work in a way functions like an artist's retrospective exhibition. In that you can plot the writer's development, the methods they develop and perfect or those which they later reject and drop. There's really not a single bad story in this collection, by bad meaning a story that relies on tricks or one that is poorly constructed with abrupt endings or one-dimensional characters, but instead there's a high level of technical execution here, which makes these stories (some of them over and around a century old) read as modern as some of those published today. Probably because the language here is concise without using its period’s jargon, or that this work doesn't seem deeply influenced by the various sociological ideologies and theories of the time (those from Freud mostly) but still maintains great psychological depth into human nature and action, that a certain freshness permeates in this book.

The book is divided into three different collections: Flowering Judas and Other Stories, which was her debut collection and where one can see the artist working at the craft she later masters and perfects; Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three short novels (longer short fiction labelled so by insistently by the writer) which I think are among the best of its form I've read and the writer’s best work as well, as close to perfection as you can get with fiction; and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, which was the writer's last short collected fiction and which shows a master seemingly settled in her craft. Arranged in the chronological order of publication and therefore giving the reader a sense of the artist's development.

Katherine Anne Porter lived through two world wars, a great (economic) depression, witnessed a revolution, survived a plague that nearly killed her, endured years of uncertainty and instability in her personal life, and if it is to be believed that experience enriches art by suffusing it with knowledge and truth, then Ms. Porter more than proves that with this book. Of course what distinguishes a great artist, and I believe Katherine Anne Porter is a great artist, is the ability to transform experience, and together with imagination, and through craft, to create a work of subtlety where all this is made recognizable to the reader without being polemical or condescending. What these stories all have in common is that they show how mortality, the fear and awareness of death, and the way it runs undercurrent above life, slowly and imperceptibly shaping reality.

[Anne Sanow · Rating 5 out of 5]

KAP is one of my favorite writers, and this collection is a must-read not only for those who appreciate classic 20th-century stylists such as Hemingway and Faulkner but for those who enjoy contemporary multi-layered narratives of, say, Alice Munro. And though Porter is often considered to be a bit formal, there are passages of her writing that lean toward the experimental that she manages to blend beautifully into her storytelling.

This collection has all of Porter's stories, and it's definitely a mixed bag; her best are long, thus not often anthologized like the somewhat overrated "He" or "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." The best are from the "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" trilogy: the title story and another, "Old Mortality," feature Porter's alter-ego character, Miranda, as a child in the early 1900s and as a young woman during the end of WWI and the influenza epidemic of 1918. Both are novella-length (60 pgs or so), and in them you'll experience that sense of history from the inside out. You just have to take a step back, too, and admire the way Porter manages big events and precise, quotidian detail while never relinquishing hold on her characters.

Other good ones: "The Leaning Tower" (inspired by Porter's interwar Berlin experiences), and "Holiday" (a visit to a German peasant family with brutal family secrets).

In short, KAP is brilliant; these are to read & re-read. Enjoy.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been carrying around The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter for almost four decades without reading them, just one of the books I kept passing over as I took them out of shipping boxes in state after state, country after country. Recently I read a memoir by Reynolds Price in which he said that she had written stories of the highest order, equal to Chekhov, Faulkner, Joyce and others. So I went looking for her collected stories in this new house of ours and found them right where I had placed them, fully intending to leave them there until we moved somewhere else and took them with us again.

Now I've read them and would say that Price had it right. There are stories in this collection--"The Cracked Looking-Glass," "Noon Wine," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"--as good as stories can get.

Porter was born in Texas in 1890 and moved around quite a bit for the next 90 years. She wrote tales of farm children in Texas, communists in Russia, Irish immigrants in Connecticut, and rootless Europeans in Berlin that all have exceptional authenticity. "The Leaning Tower," written in Berlin in 1931, is as close to anything I know predicting the catastrophe of Nazism before it reached its most virulent state.

The power of Porter's stories lies not so much in their plots or "what happens" as in the firm power of her commanding sentences. She is amazingly able to capture psychological inflections in a few words or sum up the essence of a stage of life or convey the hardness of heart an old woman feels toward her old husband, whom she indifferently abandons. These sentences are stories in themselves and raise questions about the genre overall. Good writing is good writing, short or long.

In a marvelous, multi-part tale called "The Old Order," Porter paints an age through characters and generations not through plot. The tale goes nowhere and yet its portraiture is so exacting that it works beautifully in its peculiarly wandering, discursive way. It's hard to imagine a literary journal publishing it today because it is so long and pointless; by the same token, it is so superbly written that it is hard to imagine an editor not breaking all the rules and simply surrendering to the story, giving it the space it needs to be what it is, more or less the fictional equivalent of a Chekhov play.

Porter remembered what she saw in train compartments, kitchens, restaurants, and old graveyards; she then recorded those impressions accurately, never letting the virtue of brevity force her into the betrayal of neglecting a telling detail. In a way she wrote stories the way D.H. Lawrence wrote stories, letting them blossom like an English garden, full of interesting things whose theme was totality more than unity. She was apparently unaffected by the modernist age in which she lived, but she wasn't old-fashioned.There's too much spice and candor in her work for that--no covering up the sins and passions and pettinesses of characters who are not at all more heroic or intriguing than the person sitting across from you on a subway car, but no less compelling, either.

Thematically, there is a lot of disillusion and death in her work, but it is unsentimental stuff, not tragic stuff. Why wouldn't life wear a person out? Why wouldn't it scare a child? Why wouldn't it make a mother refuse to assume the blame for how her twelve children turned out?

Hats off to Reynolds Price for reminding me why I've been carting this book around all these years.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read these stories over a period of several weeks, reading a single story at a time or even the longer stories over 2-3 days. A few of the stories are very short, only 3-4 pages, and a few others are more "short novels" being 50+ pages, but most are about 10-20 pages in length. This is a collection of three of her prior publications: Flowering Judas and Other Stories, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and The Old Order: Stories of the South.

I liked the stories from Flowering Judas better than the others. These were stories of poor Mexican peasants for the most part and were filled with universal emotion. The first story in Pale Horse and those from the Old Order were of the same family. These also were good and it was interesting to learn about this more or less aristocratic family. They had been slave owners in Kentucky and then moved to Louisiana, settling finally in Texas. They brought their Negroes with them, who, while free, continued to serve.

I am glad I read them over time. It is a large collection and I think I would have gotten tired of so many had I read them back to back without interspersing with other reading.

[Andrew]

I'm afraid that Katherine Anne Porter is slowly being forgotten by the American body literary, which is unfortunate because she is witty, observant, and deeply influential. I can't imagine the Just-Like-You-and-Me contemporary American writers without the precedent that Porter set.

Her strongest works are the later ones, everything from the stories contained in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" forward. In particular, "The Leaning Tower" is an unsung wonderment... 30 pages of American-abroad disenchantment, and one of the funniest things I've read in months. And yet she's able to work in so many different styles of writing in so many settings. Ms. Porter, return to popularity, we need you.

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maravillosamente escrito. Son relatos de situaciones y vidas sencillas, pero que albergan una gran profundidad psicológica. A su manera me han parecido cercanos -aunque se sitúen en la primera mitad del s. XX y principalmente en el sur de Estados Unidos-, me han rememorado a la vida rural que me han relatado mis familiares que crecieron en la posguerra. Pienso que, en todo aquello que penetra el alma del ser humano, que con igual esplendor que crudeza, lo une y retorna a la tierra, existe una extraña y oscura belleza. Gracias Katherine Anne Porter.

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only bright side about this is that I wasn't required to read all of her short stories for class.

There was nothing pleasant or bewitching about her writing. It constantly told, told, told and never once showed. I was completely unmoved by the few stories I had to read and, honestly, I couldn't have cared any less for what she was yammering on about in any of them.

In fact, I can't see myself reading anything else of hers. Unless, of course, it's a requirement for some reason or another.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have often said that I prefer novels to short stories and I still do. However, I have a method for short stories: read one per day. By that method I have come to find that I do like a good short story. As I grew up, I read stories in magazines. Those are probably the best ones, simply because they were picked for magazine publication. I even wrote one of my own in middle school and won a contest with it.

In Katherine Anne Porter’s collection, all her published stories, from very short to quite long, are included. So, I meandered my way through and discovered some of the best writing I have ever read. She won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for it in 1966.

Her excellent creation of place and her finely drawn characters put me right in the times and locations she was bringing to life. From Mexico to the Texas hill country where she grew up to various cities, she is concerned with human interaction and its effect on children. One of her recurring characters is clearly based on herself.

Ms Porter published only one novel: Ship of Fools, in 1962 was the #1 bestseller that year. I read it back in 2002 but was not that impressed. In my opinion, the short story is her proper medium and anyone who wants to learn to write stories would be enlightened by reading this collection.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admire Katherine Ann Porter. So many of her loves died and rejected her, ran away, and deceived her. Somehow she ended up writing truthfully about it. At least I believe her. Her stories do not seem like acts of judgment, since the lovers' sins are not forgiven or changed. Yes, I believe her, because her final relief was to understand it all in a story. What relief? It is only the comfort and joy between reader and author. If I could step back somewhere and propose to Katherine and win her heart we would certainly repeat some of these ugly acts. No solution for love in the stories of Katherine Ann Porter, just the comfort and joy between author and reader.

"He wondered if anybody had ever thought - oh, well, of course everybody else had, he was always making marvelous discoveries that other people had known all along - how impossible it is to explain or to make other eyes see the special qualities in the person you love. There was such a special kind of beauty in Miriam. In certain lights and moods he simply got a clutch in the pit of his stomach when he looked at her. It was something that could happen at any hour of the day, in the midst of the most ordinary occupations. He thought there was something to be said for living with one person day and night the year round. It brings out the worst, but it brings out the best, too, and Miriam's best was pretty damn swell. He couldn't describe it. It was easy to talk about her faults. He remembered all of them, he could add them up against her like rows of figures in a vast unpaid debt. He had lived with her for four years, and even now sometimes he woke out of a sound sleep in a sweating rage with himself, asking himself again why he had ever wasted a minute on her."
-That Tree

"Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperatete seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it? It is something of my own, she thought in a fury of jealous possessiveness, what shall I make of it? She did not know that she asked herself this because all her earliest training had argued that life was a substance, a material to be used, it took shape and direction and meaning only as the possessor guided and worked it; living was a progress of continuous and varied acts of the will directed towards a definite end. She had been assured that there were good and evil ends, one must make a choice. But what was good, and what was evil? I hate love, she thought, as if this were the answer, I hate love and being loved, I hate it. And her disturbed and seething mind received a shock of comfort from this sudden collaps of an old painful structure of distorted images and misconceptions."
-Noon Wine

Not all of Porter is bombastic revelations on the nature of love. Some of these passages struck me because they came after walking close with some character, knowing them closer than a sister or a brother, and then hearing them decide on something that they had never thought to decide before - it is a joy and comfort.

I first heard of Katherine because she was an astonishing and lucky survivor of the 1918 influenza epidemic. She lived, and when her hair grew back it was all white. The young man that briefly took care of her when she was first struck with the sickness was not alive when she came out of it. Writing about it in 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' and 'Holiday' is a stunning response to such agony, it doesn't matter if it took decades. I stand up and cheer her.

Here is this:

"He was wearing a new hat of a pretty biscuit shade, for it never occurred to him to buy anything of a practical color; he had put it on for the first time and the rain was spoiling it. She kept thinking, 'But this is dreadful, where will he get another?' She compared it with Eddie's hats that always seemed to be precisely seven years old and as if they had been quite purposely left out in the rain, and yet they sat with a careless and incidental rightness on Eddie. But Camilo was far different; if he wore a shabby hat it would be merely shabby on him, and he would lose his spirits over it. If she had not feared Camilo would take it badly, for he insisted on the little ceremonies up to the point he had fixed for them, she would have said to them as they left Thora's house, 'Do go home. I can surely reach the station by myself.'
'It is written that we must be rained upon tonight,' said Camilo, 'so let it be together.'"
-Theft

Wonderful. I'm so glad to have finally met her, born only ten miles away in the town of Kyle, Texas.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools (1962) was a sensation at the time, a top best seller that was made into a Hollywood movie with an all-star cast, but today Porter is best remembered and remains influential for her short fiction. Most of it was written in the 1920s and 30s and much of it, like that of her contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, who also didn’t write much more short fiction after the 20s and 30s, was excellent. The Collected Stories (1965) includes all three of her published short fiction books, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930), Pale Horse Pale Rider (1937-39), and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944) and deservedly won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1966.

Porter’s stories are intense, sometimes grim, but tautly written and rich in psychological insight. The earliest stories are set in Mexico and feature either the native people or groups of ex-pats from the US or elsewhere. The last story is set in Germany in the early 30s before the Nazis rise to power, exposing the climate that welcomed them forth. In between are stories involving farm families, Irish ward politicians, revolutionaries, movie folks, and a handful involving a woman named Miranda, set in early childhood through young adult. Whether long or short, the stories are sharp and gritty. They shatter illusions as effortlessly as the protagonist in “The Leaning Tower” accidently destroys a statue of the famous Pisan tower that is his landlady’s romantic keepsake. The great revolutionary, the romantic uncle, love and patriotism, family, and other plaster icons fail to survive in the reader’s hands, no matter how gently they are held or carefully turned. That said, Porter’s stories are not literary bulls in a china shop. They are the antithesis of clumsy and obvious. They are real, nuanced, subtle, suggestive, and potent depictions of individuals afoot in a world that conforms to no convenient ideology or mythology. Life is sloppy with weakness and folly, it is unfortunately rich in obscene forces, and people can use friendship or work or a proper beverage or a willingness to side with the underdog as a mitigating agent for life’s indifference and humanity’s tendency to behave cruelly when given half the chance.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was, I think, the fact that I had participated in death and I knew what death was and had almost experienced it,” she continued. “Now, if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.”

Katherine Anne Porter spoke in a 1963 interview about the time she contracted influenza during the 1919 resurgence of the pandemic. Subsequently, she wrote the novella for which she is most famous, Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

I came to this collection intrigued by the pandemic theme of this story and by the fact that Porter is a Texan, but I left with a deep appreciation for Porter's writing. Porter sees the world and she writes just what she sees. She doesn't stick to writing from within her own narrow culture of her time, either; somehow she is able to sneak little glimpses of other cultures, too.

V. S. Pritchett wrote of Porter in the New Statesman: "Miss Porter's singularity as a writer is in her truthful explorations of a complete consciousness of life. Her prose is severe and exact; her ironies are subtle but hard...." Yes.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were only a handful of short story collections that won the Pulitzer, this being the second after Tales of the South Pacific. However, I was not really all that impressed with the writing. Other collections, particularly Collected Stories and Other Writings, impressed me far more. This is perhaps the third Catholic author (after O'Connor and Wilder) to win the prize, so that is a positive. And Porter certainly appreciated Mexico a lot because many of the stories take place there. There were sparks of genius, but I was just not blown away by her short stories like I am with those of Hemingway or Cheever.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really impressed. I don't think I would have picked this up if I hadn't started on the questionable quest of reading all the Pulitzer winners for fiction. Love the writing.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fig Tree and The Grave by Katherine Anne Porter

Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... and http://realini.blogspot.ro/


These are two excellent short stories, described in an article that I have seen as short pieces.
Indeed, they may be shorter than stories and they also form the fabric of The Old Order.

And they are connected to each other.
The protagonists are:

Miranda- that I have met in a different story, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, but when she was already a grown woman- And Grandmother.
Miranda's brother is also present, but it appears that his importance will fade with time.

The Fig Tree

In this first part, the family is getting ready to leave for another property.
They both have fig trees and that may explain in part the title.

But the fruits are different from one place to another and as they get ready to leave figs are taken along and offered to Miranda.
The little girl is very intrigued by what is happening in the animal world.

Albeit at one stage she evaluates those beings and she concludes that their existence is boring, uneventful and primitive...not in these words though.
But when an animal dies, she is aware that it needs to be buried.

And they expire often when they are small.
Hardly ever a cow or a horse is dead.

But it happens frequently with chicken, piglets and small turkeys.
As she is watching the hen with her small offspring, one of them is not moving.

Miranda knows that when you poke an animal and he is not budging it means he is gone.
And because this small bird is not alive anymore, she prepares a wrapping and a box as a coffin.

After the burial alas, there are sounds like cries:

- Wee, wee, wee...

And just as she hears this cry for help, her father calls for her to come because they are starting on their long journey.
Miranda is panicking because she wants to help and obey her father

But she cannot do both.

She tries to escape and go back y saying she has to go...

- Are you sick?
- Did you eat something wrong?

Finally, she is told by a relative what the sound was.
And she can even see it.

But I will not reveal the secret.


The Grave

In this second part, Miranda is playing with her brother.
But they are doing this near and within The Grave.

- Sounds horrific?
- Well, it is not a Gothic vampire story though.

The reason for this bleak place for action is that land was sold.
And on this piece of land the family had their graves and now thy had to move them on the remaining property.

And the children feel at one moment as if they were trespassing.

They get into the grave and find a ring and another item.
And they trade and exchange what they found.

The gruesome part for me is not here.

It has to do with their hunting.
And I always hate it when the story moves to killing deer or other game.

As I am a vegetarian-again- I can now have some moral justification to be squeamish.
An eleven year old with his eight year old sister are shooting pigeons and rabbits.

This does not sound right to me.
And I think it is not just the epoque because even now, children are encouraged to do just that.

Especially in the south and on account of the Americans love for their second amendment and their guns.
Not all of them of course, but a huge number nevertheless.

A pregnant rabbit is killed, with just about to be born little ones inside.

A terrible picture.

That notwithstanding, the two accounts are very good.

[Chris Gager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't started yet, but will when Amazon gets the book to my mailbox.

1 - Maria Concepcion - reminiscent of Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy(except that CM rarely, if ever wrote about women).

- In his novel "Providence Island," Calder Willingham had his protagonist, Jim, fantasize about his(Jim's) ultimate lover and Jim named her Maria Concepcion Diaz.

2 - Virgin Violeta - teen-aged romantic hysteria Mexican-style. I was watching a bit of "One-Eyed Jacks" the other day, and early on there's a scene of a scalawag/bandit Marlon Brando stealing a kiss from an uptight, respectable senorita. She and Violeta seem to be coming from the same place. There's a bit of a connection here to "All the Pretty Horses."

3 - The Martyr - about an artist who eats his way to an early grave as a way of self-medicating after a profound romantic disappointment. Second consecutive story(the other was by Jean Stafford) about rampant food addiction. Watch out for that sugar-thing.

4 - Magic - NOT set in Mexico(I think), as depressing story of down-and-outers set in a whorehouse. Ick ...

5 - He - As I began reading this I remembered(barely) reading it long ago, maybe in boarding school. In Wallace and Mary Stegner's SS collection?(it is, but that means I read it for the second time a few years ago. This makes the third time. Ms. Porter has a fine touch with the speaking modes of the rural poor. She knows the territory, I do believe. What it's about is anybody's guess. Perhaps it's those tears at the end.

6 - Theft - Another short and bitter tale of female woe. This one's about a struggling writer in Manhattan and thus connects superficially to "The Locusts Have No King."

7 - That Tree - Another murky Mexican story. Desperate, discouraging love with an obnoxious self-absorbed man.

8 - The Jilting of Granny Weatherwell - a prose poem about dying. VERY well written.

9 - Flowering Judas - read before once or twice. A mysterious Mexico-set tale of a young woman already at the end of her rope.

10 - The Cracked Looking-Glass - a fairly long and emotionally intense tale in which the author gets inside the life of an aging woman. Ms. Porter definitely focuses her stories on the lives of women.

11 - Hacienda - A story of trial and tribulation for a film crew in Mexico. I assume based upon a real deal. Just checked, and the real deal was an attempt by Sergei Eisenstein to make a film in Mexico in 1930. The eventual title was/is "Que Viva Mexico!". I'm not sure what Ms. Porter had to do with it.

12 - Pale Horse, Pale Rider - a book containing three short novels. A work that the author was/is well-known for.

... Old Mortality - a story with a youthful character who returns in the third story(Miranda). Presumably based on KAP herself. She was brought up in rural Texas semi-poverty.

... Noon Wine - Not sure what(if any) connection this middle story has with the two stories that bracket it. The story of a man with a quick temper and what happens to him when it gets away from him. I can identify - it happened to me about 1 1/2 times BITD and I was almost as mortified as the guy in the story. Also, this story has a definite connection to R. Ford's "Canada."

... Pale Horse, Pale Rider - Miranda(from the first story) is now an adult and working in near poverty at a western(Denver?) newspaper. I'll have to check the author's bio in wiki. Yup - Denver's the place and The Rocky Mountain News was the paper. The influenza epidemic and WWI come into play in this one. The author stated that all three stories are about death. Indeed, they are. Also very well written, though the writing is of the early/mid-20th century. This means that some may find it over-wrought. It can be a fine line and the same author may write on either side, and even in the same piece.

- A whiff of Cormac McCarthy? Also Faulkner(of course, if I haven't already mentioned it.

- I don't know how REAL people conversed back in the late 19-teens, but some of the dialogue sounds a bit stiff - like a Hollywood melodrama od the 1930's. Did people really say "beastly"?

- the Spanish Flu epidemic was Covid before Covid came along. Another excellent read based on the times = "They Came Like Swallows"

The next section of stories comes under the title of "The Leaning Tower and other Stories," which I assume is the title of that published collection. So far it's been what I assume is a fictionalized family history(set mostly in Texas) of the author(named Miranda in these family stories). REALLY well written, like Faulkner without the fog or Flannery without the insanity. The first story, compose of smaller titled sections, is titled "The Old Order," and is very much about the passing of time in terms of family history and people's lives(and deaths). Much of it has to do with race relations and it looks back as far as pre-civil war days. The writing continues to be super-solid.

13 - A Day's Work - The author leaves Texas behind and flexes her instrument in this sad tale of The Great Depression. Plenty of Irish-NYC color in this slice-of-life of a mis-matched and aging couple. Moral? Be careful who you marry, and stay away from the booze!

14 - Holiday - I didn't recognize this story from the title, but As soon as I started reading I knew I'd read it before. It's a powerful tale, emotionally and spiritually challenging. Only one more to go in this awesome collection.

15 - Finished this book last night by reading "The Leaning Tower," a short novel set in Berlin in the early 1930's. Not so sure what it's about. The protagonist is a young American trying to settle himself in Berlin at the beginning of a low-grade continental tour. Is this based on KAP's own experience? I assume so. Der future Fuhrer makes a sort of cameo appearance in a barber shop.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to rank this book, which comprises three collections and runs from the very bad (most of her stories about Mexico) to the extremely good (the long story “Old Mortality”). I advise readers of this book to skip over the first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories and proceed straight to Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which is a solid four stars and will give you everything that's good about Porter's writing (lush characterization, amusing plot quirks that yield major epiphanies, inventive prose, and piercing insight into the, like, human heart). Then, move on to The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, which combines some of those merits (insights and epiphanies) with some problematic stuff that will give a sensible, sensitive reader pause.

It's difficult to stomach the encomiums to former slaves who continued to work for their former owners as loyal members of “the family”; Porter's use of the stereotype of childlike and basically unthinking black people (or Mexicans, or Irish people) is disturbing and unfortunately prevalent. In “The Old Order” Porter goes on to problematize her own problematics, in a fascinating way: watch her follow through the logic of the black mammy who loves her white nurselings, by positing a white woman who nurses, and loves, her slave's baby; Porter shows the upheaval in a white family's notions of loyalty and affection when a “loyal” servant, after her beloved (!) mistress has died, refuses to have anything more to do with the white family who'd believed that she loved and needed them. This is interesting material; however, Porter wasn't always willing to invert the stereotypes she exploited; it's not even clear what kind of awareness she had of the stereotypes, or of their inversion. It's possible that, like most people who engage in stereotyping, she believed herself to be simply observing—and that this fault was ramified by her position as a writer who observed professionally, and that the inversions came about because of her interest in plot, particularly absurd, inventive plots, rather than in her noting and wanting to expose any particular truths about race and ethnic relations. It's hard to balance Porter's acceptance of the idea that Germans are racially stolid, graceless, and generally belonging to a lower order of animal, with her astute observations about war, poverty, hunger, and the ways they twist people into unrecognizable shapes, in the story “The Leaning Tower,” written and taking place in Berlin, 1931.

The shortcomings are particularly evident in the early collection Flowering Judas, with its unbearably patronizing attitudes toward Mexicans. It also displays the faults typical of an unseasoned talent. Porter's early stories often show the kind of verbal accomplishment and glib cleverness (particularly in the “gotcha!” endings) that are typical of many story writers' early work (and, perhaps, of the form itself, in the early 20th century); she rises above this mere glibness in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and, to a lesser extent, the title story of the collection (a Mexican story, but a better one, with a great deal more self-consciousness), both of which begin to show off her prodigious talent.

So, how to rate such an uneven collection and such an uneven talent? Four stars, with the caveat of my review.

[Catie · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite choices for the Real Readers Book Club. Katherine Anne Porter has such a unique and descriptive way of writing. We were assigned to read four of her short stories, three chosen by this month’s host and one that we then shared about, including why we chose it. Many of us, ended up reading more than what was assigned (should testify of her writing ability) and now, I’d like to go back and read all her short stories.

The main thing I took away from our lively discussion and from reading this collection, was a curiosity about the author herself. Much of her real life adventures inspired her stories, but I longed to know more about why she wrote about a certain topic or what exactly influenced her unique and original way of describing. I think it would have been fascinating to sit with her, and just let her talk and share her personal life stories. We discussed that Porter, herself, looked down on this desire to analyse the author and their message, but there is something about her writing that makes you want to learn more.

The majority of our group enjoyed her stories that revolved around the southwest and Mexico. I of course found her journalism and European stories to be the most fascinating. Overall, I highly recommend reading anything by Porter and look forward to reading more of her short stories and her one novel.

Real Readers Book Club - February 2019 (Priscilla)

[Bap · Rating 3 out of 5]

Katherine Anne porter wrote 38 short stories. Her collected short stories garnered her a national book award and the Pulitzer prize. Three stars may be too low. About half the stories were superb, close to a 5. Others did nothing for me. She writes best when she sets the stories in Texas where she grew up.where she w,as born in 1890. There is a gothic element in her writing. Several stories center on handicapped children kept in a state of bondage by their families on farms and there is a heartbreaking moment when a mother turns over her damaged son to a state home with tears coming from the son and the mother who tries to convince herself that it is for the best. The stories of strong woman on the frontier are very good. I did not like the stories set in Mexico except for "Marie Concepcion", which is a great story of vengeance and revenge by a peasant woman who bided her time but gets even.

Porter married when she was 16. Her husband beat her and she left him to take a train to Chicago where she was an extra in movies, sang ballads, and later became a journalist. She married 4 times including a much younger man who promptly left her when he learned her age. She lived in Texas. Greenich village, Mexico , and Europe.

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one took me a while to work through. I have to admit, somewhat grudgingly, that Porter is a very good writer. She’s well-versed and her style is natural, easy, and evocative. But while I acknowledge the superior writing talent, the stories themselves were depressing and her characters were on the whole pretty unlikeable. She was not very kind to her women characters, portraying them most often as stereotypically jealous, shrewish, vindictive, petty, and mean. Most of the male characters weren’t paragons of virtue either. They are well-written stories, but not uplifting stories. Is it worthy of a Pulitzer? I’d have to say yes purely on the strength of the writing. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Anne Porter seems sadly under-read, and this is a truly strong and impressive collection of stories. Most notable, I think, is Porter’s impressive stylistic range. She seems capable of shifting her narrative technique with perfect, invisible ease from story to story. I should have read them more slowly.

Favorite stories:
“María Concepción”
“Flowering Judas”
“Old Mortality”
“Pale Horse, Pale Rider”

[Kimberly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this short story for one of my creative writing courses, but it does not really speak to me. Granny is thinking way too much about trivial things while she is on the verge of dying. All will be well, Granny, you can go now.

Perhaps Katherine Anne Porter's other stories are more to my liking, perhaps I'll read something else written by her in the future.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. Katherine Anne Porter has written a collection of 28 short stories. Like other collections of short stories some were more interesting than others. I give this book 3 stars. The best collection of short stories I have read is Jhumpa Lahiri's, Interpreter of Maladies which was the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner.

[Baily Volpel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Granny Weatherall is lying sick in bed fighting death from over taking her. Doctor Harry is standing by trying to help her, but she doesn't want his help because she thinks he isn't helping. Cornelia, Granny Weatherall´s daughter is standing right next to the bed trying to comfort her mother in her last hour. Then the pastor comes in to give Granny Weatherall her last rights.

Granny Weatherall is a very old lady who has lived a long life by fighting for everything. She is strong willed and doesn't give up, even so close to death she is still fighting because she doesn't want to accept reality. Her daughter is a very supportive person who will not leave her mother´s side.

Doctor Harry, Cornelia, and the pastor are all in Granny Weatherall´s room waiting for her to pass on. They are trying to comfort her in her last moments. It is a time of sorrow and loss, and there is an air of impending doom around the room because there is nothing they can do for Granny.

I think this is a book filled with sorrow and a will to survive. ¨The Jilting of Granny Weatherall¨ is a moving book that teaches us a lot about staying strong through the tough times. It is easy enough to read with not really any big words or confusing lingo. I would recommend this short story for any age, or for anyone look for a different perspective on life.