Progress of Stories

by Laura Riding, Laura (Riding) Jackson (Preface, Commentary)

To the eighteen stories of the original, celebrated 1935 edition are added twelve stories from "Anarchism Is Not Enough" and "Experts Are Puzzled," a 1966 story, and a new general preface.

I. Stories of Lives:
Socialist Pleasures
The Friendly One
Schoolgirls
The Secret
The Incurable Virtue
Daisy and Venison
Three Times Round

II. Stories of Ideas:
Reality as Port Huntlady
Miss Banquett, or The Populating of Cosmania

III. Nearly True Stories:
The Story-Pig
The Playground
A Fairy Tale for Older People
A Last Lesson in Geography

IV. A Crown for Hans Andersen

V. More Stories:
In the Beginning
Eve's Side of It
Privateness
In the End

From Anarchism Is Not Enough:
How Came It About
Hungry to Hear
In a Café
An Anonymous Book

From Experts Are Puzzled:
Mademoiselle Comet
The Fortunate Liar
Molly Barleywater
Buttercup
The Fable of the Dice
Perhaps an Indiscretion
Arista Manuscript
That Workshop

Finale:
A Later Story: Christmastime (1966)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, American, Poetry, Literary Fiction

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Laura (Riding) Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.

1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson

She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't have the mental energy to write a real review at the moment, but for now let me just say that this was on of the most singular works of fiction I have read. The book becomes stranger and more abstract as the stories, er, progress. It begins with biographical stories, moves into a section of wholly original near-creation-myths, and concludes with a set of hyper-abstract philoso-fairy-tales (and a geography lesson?). All of it is written in fairly simple language, occasionally reminiscent of Stein, but remarkably, this never takes away from the complexity of what is being told. Did I get it all? No way. But I'm sure I'll be coming back around to it eventually. And hopefully then I'll be able to make a little progress.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

LRJ was a well known poet, and this is one of the best books of short fiction out there. Maybe *the* best.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Library of America, I love you, you've done PKD solid. Now it's time to unleash L(R)J on a sleepwalking world!

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

her poems do a lot more for me than these stories. though it's nice to read someone who reminds one of kafka, stein, lydia davis.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura (Riding) Jackson was a difficult, uncompromising person, better known for her poetry but still relatively unsung. She was close with the Language poets and the so-called Objectivists (though they mocked the term) Zukowsky and George Oppen. This collection of stories spanning her career has surprisingly little attention, either here on the wider WWW : all I could find was an admiring 1982 review in the NYRB by none less than Harry Matthews (paywalled: her response was an angry 1,100-word letter excoriating him for referring to her by her first name [fair enough, I guess!]); David Auerbach's interviews with scholar Lisa Samuels at his website; and this perplexed review. The difficulty is undoubtedly part of it. To use a visual metaphor, some of the early stories seem post-Impressionist: recognisable tales from a queer, unfamiliar perspective. Most are fully abstract, almost impossible to parse, moving beyond the surreal to the realm of Pure Story.

(Riding) Jackson had no tolerance for fools (even calling out The Madwomen in the Attic in an afterword for using an epigraph from here, and misconstruing her work as feminist) and I'm far from being on the level to review her, but I think some clue are found in the story A Crown for Hans Andersen. There she divides the world into sentimentalists and raw intelligence, and the struggle between them, classifying writers (Rabelais, Chekhov, Mansfield) and historical figures (Napoleon). To her, the purity of European folklore - the Arthurian myths, or Hans Andersen's revival of them - is the essence of stories, and she seeks to break off the accrual of irrelevance by breaking her fiction down to its components, trying to distill the clarity of those myths into modern terms as Pure Story. It's a difficult work, and it's unfortunate that as yet so few critics have picked up the mantle of interpreting it.

Note: (Riding) Jackson wrote some of these stories when she was Laura Riding, and later ones (after a decades-long hiatus) under the name Laura Jackson after her marriage to Schuyler Jackson. The new editions of Progress of Stories contain stories under both names, hence the unusual nomenclature (and Matthews' ill-advised choice of 'Laura').

[rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is psychotic. someone andrew "knows" recommended this, and he bought it for me when i was going crazy in san francisco as a "you are crazy" going away gift, i guess. GIMME COFFEE IS FULL OF RETARDS. sorry. anyway, this book, although it has a strange physical smell, ????, is so amazing. it's the kind of book i'd write if i were an old, bitter woman, i mean like if i were born in a different era and maybe was even a happy, kind woman.
i recommend it to people who are feeling okay about themselves, or else they might get a little tweaked. i forgot my copy in maryland, or else i'd mail it to everyone. and like xerox it and stuff. it's as good as david foster wallace. it's short stories. complex interactions. totally amazing.

[Ben Askin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got through 13 of the 18 original stories.

Unconventional and very avant-garde. I appreciated the creativity, uniqueness and the challenge, but at times grew exhausted and tired of the repetition & length. I tried to explain this book to my friends but would up babbling. I feel these stories would have been great if they had been tightened up a bit more. This book reminds me of this website:


https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrow...


My favorites of the collection would be:
Schoolgirls, Daisy and Venison, Miss Banquett, Reality as Port Huntlady, The Story-pig, The Playground

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard. Really hard, and of course worth it, but if this is the first book I read this year then it will likely be the first book I'm still thinking about next year. "Huntlady," though, is just a masterpiece.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars for the stories I've read so far - I mired midway through the second section, the "stories of ideas," but mean to take up the book again. The first group of stories, which, the author states, deal with "unequivocally unimportant material," are as surprising and delightful as fairy tales. The later stories are more likely to make one wonder what their author is "up to." And Riding's ideas about the relationship of fiction to truth, as expounded in the two prefaces and the after-notes - full of assertions such as "whatever is not happening now is unimportant; it is merely curious" - are not always illuminating and occasionally seem downright dotty. (I understand that her theories of poetry, which led to her abandoning of same, are also considered impenetrable by many). But I will allow that she may be trying to express complex ideas in simple words, like Stephen Hawking trying to explain space-time without using any equations. Perhaps the stories are her equations.

[Jean Bosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could tell early on that this was special. Halfway through, it was already one of my favorite books. Fun, interesting, inventive, weird, intelligent. Riding's use of language is simultaneously playful and thought-provoking. Everything that I've wanted from short stories and more is here.

'Reality As Port Huntlady' is the masterpiece and centerpiece, but Riding hits every one of these out of the park. The appended stories in this Enlarged Edition are just as good.

People who believe at all in the "death of literature" deserve to have their minds blown by this book. It should fan the flames of our hope that the stories that language might tell are endless - that they can be endlessly interesting rather than endlessly banal.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Laura (Riding) Jackson is master writer, and I'm often in awe of her sentences. However, I found myself frustrated with Jackson's perspective. She views writing as an attempt to find Truth (note the capital T). She is dismissive of anything that doesn’t serve that search of Truth. In many of her stories, she's contemptuous of her character, her readers, and the act of storytelling itself. If this contempt is not clear from her stories, it becomes clear from her commentary on them. Ultimately, Jackson wrote wonderful stories, but she is frustrated and angry that readers will interpret them in ways she had not intended.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Stories that are products of nature—of human nature as against human art—fill the mind's vacancies in its conception of the possibilities of personal life, as physical nature has experimented in variations in living forms to the kind and number that vacancies in biological possibility have invited...[stories] that come naturally to the mind for telling, reflecting the infinite progression of circumstances in which the reality of live being consolidates itself reiteratively"

[Jeb Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stories of ideas. Read this superb collection along with Riding's incredible early literary manifesto, Anarchism Is Not Enough, which doesn't get quite enough attention here. Riding was one of the visionaries.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only language matters.