Reading the Short Story

The Wall Street Journal has a book club on Facebook. I signed on recently because the book of the month of August was Alice Munro's Love of a Good Woman. I thought it might be fun to join in a conversation about one of my favorite authors.

However, it surprised me that so many of the readers had no patience with Alice Munro's stories. Fairly typical was one who said that Munro would not be on her future reading list because she was too "depressing." Others said they just did not "get" her stories, or else they just did not like short stories. And even those who found the stories intriguing did not seem to know what to make of them. The writer Curtis Sittenfield, who is moderating this discussion of the Munro collection, is going to do a live video on Thursday, August 28 at 12 noon EST. You can tweet her with questions at hashtag #WSJbookclub or check her out on the Facebook WSJ Book Club.

The responses I read on the WSJ Book club reminded me of one of the problems of reading a short story that aims to be more than mere escapist entertainment. In order to appreciate a good short story, you just have to read it more than once. It usually does not exist as a simple temporal "one damn thing after another" plot line in which some interesting character gets involved in an entertaining dilemma and somehow manages to get out of it, or get something out of it, so that the reader gets something out of it.

And let's, face it, not many folks want to read a story more than once, for they think of a short story as an account of a temporal action that, well, you know, tells a story--not a work of art that is always there for further observation or deliberation. We don't feel this way about a piece of music, which we might listen to over and over again, or a painting or sculpture that we might look at many times.. But for some reason, we do feel this way about a story. Novels usually provide a more immediate plot-based pleasure than short stories, which often leave us scratching our heads or shrugging our shoulders.

I suggest that novels are usually written with the understanding that they will be read one time and placed on the shelf or given to the used bookseller, never to be read again. And indeed, one reading may be all that is necessary to "get it"--that is, to understand it. But short stories, which are more like poems than novels, deserve to be read again and again, indeed, insist on being read again. For short stories are more dependent on artifice, pattern, structure, language, significance, etc.,. than novels, which are more dependent on "what happened"--just as paintings depend more on pattern, color, design, etc. rather than answering the question, "what the hell is that?"

I know, I know, there are many exceptions to this. I have read Melville's Moby Dickat least a dozen times, and I have read Joyce's Ulysses at least half a dozen times. But by and large, the distinction holds true and goes a long way toward explaining why many people don't like short stories, even the short stories of a Nobel Prize winner, which they probably think they should like, that is, unless they can dismiss them as "pseudo intellectualism," which one reader on the WSJ Book club did with the stories of Alice Munro.

I doubt I will ever be able to nudge folks who read fiction for character and plot away from the novel to the short story. At the Alice Munro Symposium in Ottawa last month, folks spent three days listening to the most avid Alice Munro critics praise her work with great enthusiasm. And then, on the last day of the conference, one man raised his hand and said that for all that rhapsodic praise he still did not like short stories and had little or no desire to try to learn to like them, even by the Nobel Prize winner, Alice Munro. By God, he liked novels, something you could get your teeth into, something that had heft and bulk and therefore significance. There was just something a little too "artsy" about short stories. And he sure as hell had no intention of reading one of those puny little things twice.

So as my elderly Irish mother-in-law is wont to say, "there you are and where are you?" Well, where I have always been, I reckon--trying to get folks to love short stories as much as I do and be willing to read them two or three times. In what follows, I offer the results of my usual fourth reading of Alice Munro's story "Nettles" from the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage—focusing on those passages I thought most important, trying to find the pattern of significance that Munro herself must have discovered as she wrote the story.

Curtis Sittenfeld, trying to get folks on the WSJ book club to engage seriously with the stories of Alice Munro in Love of a Good Woman, pointed out that a much-discussed aspect of Munro's work is her treatment of time, asking, "What do you think of Ms. Munro's treatment of time? Do you enjoy the jumps in narrative, or do you find them confusing?"

And indeed, on the first page of the story "Nettles," we are thrown into three different time periods: the summer of 1979, when the central character walks into the kitchen of her friend Sunny and sees a man standing at the counter making himself a ketchup sandwich; some time much later as she is driving northeast of Toronto with her second husband (not the one she had left that summer of 1979) idly looking for the house, but failing to find it; and then the past when the narrator was a child and she recalls drinking from their well and thinking of "black rocks where the water ran sparkling like diamonds." This image is more than just a description; it is a poetic image of a magical other world—a reference to the "in another country" theme common to the short story.

In this period of childhood, we meet the narrator at age 8 and her friend Mike McCallum at age 9. He is the well digger's son (also named Mike McCallum, suggesting a doubling typical of folk tale.)

We have an image of the two children washing Ranger the dog in tomato soup because of being sprayed by a skunk; it suggests to her the rather ominous notion of washing him in blood, and she wonders how many people or horses or elephants would it take to supply that much blood. She is familiar with animal killing, for her father shot and butchered horses to feed the foxes and mink on his farm. She recalls the wire shed with "the long, pale horses' carcasses hung from brutal hooks" and the "trodden blood-soaked ground where they had changed from live horses into those supplies of meat." The notion that the horses are transformed from one thing to another suggests a magical metamorphosis--the brutal change from life to death.

She describes the way she sees things, like the trees which had an attitude and presence—the elms serene, the oat threatening, the maples friendly and workaday, the hawthorn old and crabby. This is all romantic animism, in which sacred reality possesses things. She says her friend Mike saw them differently than she did: "My way was by its very nature incommunicable, so that it had to stay secret. His had to do with immediate advantage." This is a reference to the archetypal dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the practical and the poetic. Hers is the world of the writer, a magic world of spirit and transformations and the ideal. His is the profane, secular world of everyday reality.

The childhood memory focuses on both the idyllic sense that life is an adventure that will never change and the anxiety that the future threatens unknown dangers. She and Mike wade in the river and walk to the bridge that separates the country from the town, which threatens with town boys who were loudmouthed and hostile, tramps who sleep under the bridge, a fisherman who swears at them for making noise. The bridge is, like the bridge in "Floating Bridge," a demarcation line, and when she goes into the shadow of the bridge where she has never been in her life, she is frightened of this movement into a strange other country. They join the boys and girls in the town playing a game of war, using balls of clay as weapons. When a boy was hit, one of the girls had to attend to him. When Mike is injured, she presses leaves to his forehead and to his "pale, tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button." (This is flesh, but idealized flesh).

When the hired man sees them and says they look like they have been rolling in the mud, adding "First thing you know you gonna have to get married," her mother reproves him, saying they are more like brothers and sisters. However, this rolling around and coming away marked occurs again in the climactic scene when the doctor says they look like they have been rolling in nettles.

But the narrator says her mother is wrong and that the hired man was closer to the truth, adding they were more like "sturdy and accustomed sweethearts, whose bond needs not much outward expression." She says she knows the hired man was talking about sex, and she hated him for it, for she knows he is wrong. "We did not go in for any showings and rubbings and guilty intimacies—there was none of that bothered search for hiding places, none of the twiddling pleasure and frustration and immediate, raw shame."

She makes a distinction between her feelings for Mike and those specific sexual "escapades," which she would only consider with those who disgusted her, "as those randy abhorrent itches disgusted me with myself." With Mike she worships the "back of his neck and the shape of his head…his smell." With him the "localized demon was transformed into a diffuse excitement and tenderness spread everywhere under the skin."

Weeks after Mike moves away, she hears a woman call "Mike" and runs after the woman, but it is only a boy of five. "I stopped and stared at this child in disbelief, as if an outrageous, an unfair enchantment had taken place before my eyes." She says her heart is beating in big thumps in her chest, "like howls happening in my chest." (This theme of enchantment will be taken up later in the central climactic scene in the nettles). Much of this story is about the nature of enchantment, as in fairy tales.

The story now shifts to the time of the central event when she goes to visit her friend Sunny, a friend when she lived in Vancouver. She summarizes her marriage and children and divorce. When she takes her daughters to the airport to go to her husband, they play a game in which you pick out a number and then you count the men you saw out the window of the car; when the number came up, he would be the man you were to marry. (More childhood games predicting or setting up the future as in the title story.)

The early poetic images now are justified when we learn that after her divorce she lives alone, hoping to make her living as a writer: "The idea of being so far freed from domesticity enchanted me." (And there's that word again)

She recalls the man for whom she left her husband. "all I really wanted was to entice him to have sex with me, because I thought the high enthusiasm of sex, fused people's best selves. I was stupid about these matters, in a way that was very risky, particularly for a woman of my age." (It is not clear why she thinks sex fuses people's "best selves," but this issue of sex as being physical, but also idealized is an important theme in the story.)

She thinks of the lies or half lies she would have told Sunny: "I am learning to leave a man free and to be free myself. I am learning to take sex lightly, which is hard for me because that's not the way I started out and I'm not young but I am learning." (How to take sex, what sex means, the uses of sex—all are part of this story.)

And this is when she walks into Sunny's kitchen and sees Mike McCallum spreading ketchup on a piece of bread.

The feelings she has in the presence of Mike are idealizations, not physical encounters. This are not about what actually happens, but what might happen. This is the nature of fictional reality. She wants to brush against him, to lay a finger against his bare neck. When she sleeps in the same sheets he has slept in, she says she does not have a peaceful night. (This is like sleeping with a phantom, a trace of the past). "In my dreams, though not in reality, they smelled of water-weeds, river-mud, and reeds in the hot sun." (This is the central statement of the idealization from the past). "My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously lustful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots." The subplots she dreams have to do with obstacles in the way of their physically getting together. She says she sometimes awakes "stranded on a dry patch. Unwelcome lucidity." For she knows nothing about this man.

When they go to play golf, she idealizes them as a couple, with her in the wife's seat, feeling a kind of adolescent girl's pleasure. The notion (not the actuality) of being a wife beguiles her. "Could I really have settle in, with a true love, and somehow just got rid of the parts of me that did not fit, and been happy?" (This is typical of idealization, getting rid of the parts that do not fit. It is the nature of narrative reality, storytelling, fiction.)

On the golf course, she feels all she has to do is just follow him around, give him an "amplified, an extended notion of himself. A more comfortable notion, you might say, a reassuring sense of human padding around his solitude." She says a pleasure comes over her on the links. "Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back now into a tidy pilot flame, attentively, wifely." (But this is still idealization, not actuality). It has all the pleasures of life together, but none of the reality, all the pleasures of imagining physicality, but not the physical itself.

When the rain begins they go into the tall weeds that grew between the course and the river, as in a childhood retreat. The weeds include nettles. "It was almost as if we were looking through a window, and not quite believing that the window would shatter, until it did, and rain and wind hit us, all together, and my hair was lifted and fanned out above my head. I felt as if my skin might do that next." (This creates the magical enchanted enclosure surrounded by the storm. She is transformed into an otherworldly creature in another country of enchantment. He covers her with his body. "Then we kissed and pressed together briefly. This was more of a ritual, a recognition of survival rather than of our bodies' inclinations." It is as close to sex as they get, like the kiss on the bridge in "Floating Bridge."

After the rain when they walk in the open, he tells her about his three-year-old son who was killed last summer when he accidently ran over him backing out of the driveway. Although he does not say it was his fault and that he would never forgive himself, she knows this, knows that he was a person "who had hit rock bottom, a person who knew—as I did not know, did not come near knowing—exactly what rock bottom was like." When she says it is not fair, meaning both the "dealing out of idle punishments" and "what has this got to do with us?" he says "Fairness being neither here nor there."

When they get back to the car, he wonders what happened to the guy who was parked here before. "Mystery," he said and then "Well." This is a word she heard as a child. "A bridge between one thing and another, or a conclusion, or a way of saying something that couldn't be any more fully said, or thought." And the joking answer was always "A well is a hole in the ground." This seems like a minor detail. But it emphasizes mystery, the enchanted nature of their seclusion in the nettles, in which time ceases to exist and the stuff of the real world mysteriously vanishes. The reference to the word "well" as a bridge between one thing and another recalls the bridge in "Floating Bridge"—a well being like a gravel pit, a hole into which one can fall, a "deep subject" that poses a mystery.

They are covered with welts and blotches from the nettles. The doctor says they must have been rolling in them. "The fact that we had chosen to go off together and that we had this adventure—an adventure that left its evidence on our bodies—seemed to rouse in Sunny and Johnston a teasing excitement. Droll looks from him, a bright solicitousness from her. If we had brought back evidence of real misdoing—welts on the buttocks, red splashes on the thighs and belly—they would not of course have been so charmed and forgiving." (It is important that it is playful, not actual.)

She knows it would be the same old thing if they ever met again or didn't. "Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as in a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal." (This is the key passage about love that is "not real," but it suggests the only way that love is real—an idealization. The underground resource recalls that deep well mentioned at the beginning which she images are diamonds.

A final paragraph about the nettles, which it turns out were not nettles, but joe-pye weed. What they got into are more insignificant than nettles, with fine, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. "Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow." This final paragraph is a sort of coda that suggests the significant that is insignificant, the imagined that is real, the real that is imagined.

Next: Reading Alice Munro's story: "Post and Beam"

In my never-ending effort to figure out why most people prefer novels to short stories, one of my suspicions is that what holds novels together is more familiar to readers than what unifies short stories. I think it is pretty obvious that in order to be a long narrative, there usually has to be enough stuff to make the narrative long—e.g. social context, physical setting, multiple characters, multiple events, ruminations, ideas, etc.—all to keep the damn thing going, one thing after another usually in a long linear line in time.

In short narratives, the writerly compulsion is not to keep the damn thing going, but rather to make it mean something. In a novel, what happens on page six does not have to be closely related to what happens on page two hundred and thirty-five. However, in a short story, what happens in line six should have something to do with what happens in line two hundred and fifty-six. A novel can unwind in an illusion of natural sequence, heading on into the future or recollecting the past, going on and on seemingly indefinitely—nothing to stop it but death or marriage, depending on whether it is tragic or comic.

However, a short story does not create an illusion of natural sequence, even if it does move onward in time or backward in recollection. It seems to be compelled by some inner necessity to "mean something." I am not saying that novels don't mean anything, but they don't seem to ned to have a unified thematic meaning. They can just be realistic reflectors of reality. Short stories, however, do seem thus compelled, or else they don't seem to be much of anything at all.

Part of this is due to the nature of small things, which seem to have an inner compulsion to cohere, but it is also due to the tradition of the short story. From the beginning, a story that is short was told by someone who often began with a variation of "a funny thing happened" or "once upon a time." In either case, the compulsion to tell the story derived from a sense of mystery that this thing that happened meant something and that by relating it the teller might somehow figure it out or urge someone else to figure it out. Moreover, short narratives, such as parables, fables and exempla often illustrated a moral or truth or concept.

Yeah, I know, this is all a bit obvious. But it might have some interesting implications about why people would rather read novels than read short stories. When reading a novel, one can simply get lost in the story, even relaxing while being pulled or pushed along. But when reading a short story, the cryptic sense of mystery that the story "means" something does not allow such relaxation. If the reader drifts away while reading a short story, he or she just gets lost. Instead of completing the work with a sense of satisfaction, the reader may feel, "what the hell was that all about?"

In the following account of my "reading" of Alice Munro's "Post and Beam" from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, I hope to illustrate this compulsion for the short story to "mean" something—to hold together by virtue of its "theme" rather than by virtue of its characters or plot. I hope to show that this theme, which is most often a universal aspect of human experience, is developed by an emerging pattern of repeated and related "motifs" that come together like a poem or a piece of music rather than like a mimetic mirror of so-called "real life," whatever that is. Wasn't it Nabokov who said that whenever one used the world "reality," it should always be with quotation marks around it?

"Post and Beam" has an introit—a brief dialogue account of about a dozen lines in which the character Lionel tells that just before his mother died, she asked for her makeup, saying "This will take about an hour." When she finishes and he says that it didn't take an hour, she says she hadn't meant that—that she had meant to die. When he asks her if she wants him to call her husband or the minister, she asks, "What for?" The introit suggests that neither the husband nor the minister can have any effect on the inevitability of death. With or without them, it will happen. She missed her prediction by only about five minutes. We have no idea what the point of this introit is, what relevance to the story it has. The mother plays no major role in the events that follow; consequently, we suspect that it must be related to the meaning or theme of the story, not simply its plot.

We now get some background: The character Lionel had been Brendan's (the husband of the main character Lorna) student, the brightest mathematical mind he had ever seen. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he dropped out of sight until recently when Brendan met him in a supermarket and invited him to come and meet his wife. Lionel is skeptical about marriage. He works in the Diocese of the Archbishop and says he feels sometimes that he is in a Dickens novel. He had spent some time in a hospital after his breakdown and had shock treatments, the result of which he is short of memories and details and wants Lorna to tell him her memories.

Lorna tells about her Aunt Beatrice and her older cousin Polly who lived next door to her when she was a child. She also tells him her only memory of her mother: They are downtown and saw on the Post Office clock that the time had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to on the radio. "She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening."(This is a variant of the old "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" concept. It has to do with the mystery of what people do when you are not there, and more broadly the mystery of what "reality" actually is. This is related to the idealism of the eighteenth century philosopher George Berkeley.

Lionel tells a story about his own mother when she had taken him to the museum and he was scared of the mummies, and she had told him they were not really dead, but could get out of their cases when everyone went home. (This is another reference to the mystery of what happens when you are not there or the unknown of what is meant by "really.")

There is a tacit tension between Lorna and Lionel, for Lorna is another Alice Munro woman who has longings for another man, but does nothing about it, because to do so would be to forfeit the ideality she wants. Lorna does not "really" want Lionel, but rather ideally. In some sense, all great love stories in Western Literature are based on this ideality. It is why Romeo cannot "really" have Juliet or Heathcliff cannot "really" have Cathy.

Lionel sends Lorna a poem once a week or so. She felt about the poems the way she does about the Buddhist religion: "that they were a resource she might be able to comprehend, to tap into, in the future, but that she couldn't do that just now." (This notion appears in "Nettles," for the main character shores up the fragments of her experience against her ruin, as does the woman in "What is Remembered.") Lionel does not send love poems; there's nothing personal about them; "They reminded her of those faint impressions you can sometimes make out on the sidewalks in spring—shadows, left by wet leaves plastered there the year before." (This evokes a common Munro motif of fossils, remnants, what is left, the marks of the past). Many of her stories are about what marks the past.) More about that next week in the story "What is Remembered."

Polly, who is five years older than Lorna, is coming to visit, but Lorna cannot tell Brendan or Lionel. You cannot talk about such things to Lionel, she says: "You could not speak to him about anything seen seriously as a problem. To speak of problems meant to search for, to hope for, solutions. And that was not interesting; it did not indicate an interesting attitude towards life. Rather a shallow and tiresome hopefulness. Ordinary anxieties, uncomplicated emotions, were not what he enjoyed hearing about. He preferred things to be utterly bewildering and past bearing, yet ironically, even merrily, borne." (This could be a description of what Alice Munro prefers in her short stories. It is a key concept in the\is story; indeed, it is a key concept in many of Alice Munro's stories, indicating one of the central characteristics of the short story as a form.)

Lionel thinks of himself as a character in a Dickens novel; Lorna pretends she is in a sentimental play. Often Alice Munro's characters think of themselves as characters in a fiction—which of course they are; it's just they are not supposed to know that.

The metaphor of the post and beam house, which gives the story its title, indicate a house left unpainted, made to fit in with the original forests. It is plain and functional from the outside and inside the beams are exposed. The architecture is always preeminent. (There may be a thematic significance to something that uses artifice to appear to be natural). This does not mean it is "phony," but that it is a transformation that tries to conceal the transforming process—artifice pretending to be natural.

One of the central images in the story to suggest Lorna's desire for, not the physicality but the ideality of Lionel occurs when she goes to his room "to be for a moment inside the space where he lived, breathe his air, look out his window." The image of freedom here is to sink into the room. "To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle" This notion of freedom from all actual connections is central to the story "Family Furnishings" in this collection. More about that later.

Lorna feels both fortunate and trapped in her marriage, she is "installed" as a wife. Polly is both envious and scornful of her marriage. There is some basic discontent in Polly. When Lorna comes into her room she sees her in bed with a sheet pulled up around her like a shroud. She is a "mound of misery, one solid accusation." Lorna feels Polly is leeching off her, "becoming part of Lorna's good fortune, Lorna's transformed world." Lorna asks what right she has to do this, and the answer is that "Family gives Polly the right."

Lorna is drawn to idea, not physicality: When she met Brendan, a math professor, she fell in love with what is inside his head, excited by a knowledge a man might have that was "utterly strange" to her. Auto mechanic would have done as well.

She worries what might happen to Polly while she is away from her, that she might commit suicide. Munro uses the verb tense of imaginary events to describe her fear: "they would find the door locked; they would unlock it; they would hurry around to the front door." Raymond Carver uses this very effectively in the story "Errand," as Chekhov's wife tells the young porter to go get the doctor, telling of the action she wants him to perform as if it were happening. Lorna imagines a story to happen—how Polly's body would look, what she would be wearing, "Her long pale legs dangling down, her head twisted fatally on its delicate neck. In front of her body would be the kitchen chair she had climbed onto, and then stepped from, or jumped from, to see how misery could finish itself."

Lorna remembers a time when she had been alone with Polly for a day and Polly had left her to go to the store, taking her outside and telling her to stay there until she returned. When she comes back she kisses Lorna all around her head, for the thought had occurred to her that she might have been spotted by kidnappers. "She had prayed all the way back for this not to have happened." (This is another example of imagining what might happen when one is not present—the central recurring theme throughout the story.)

The most important example of the theme of things happening when one is not present is Lorna thinking of the years since she got married and Polly staying the same while Lorna passed her by; she now thinks it is unseemly that Polly has shown up to come "clawing for her share."

Lorna feels is afraid Polly will commit suicide, even as she calls it stupid melodrama and even though she, an unbeliever, feels the need to pray, "Let it not have happened." She thinks that there is one thing left to do—make a bargain. She rejects the idea of bargaining the children and thinks she did not love Brendan enough to bargain him, "there is a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time." She thinks she must make the bargain without knowing the terms, promising to honor the bargain even though she does not know what it is.

When Lorna returns home, Lionel is there; he looks straight into her face with a smile "from which all subtlety, secrecy, ironic complicity, and mysterious devotion had been removed. All complications, all private messages had been removed."

Lorna thinks Lionel must be punishing her for going to his room, and she thinks of what she might say to him. She thinks there must be a bond between them, "not to be made explicit, but to be relied on." But she knows she had been wrong, that she had presumed too much. She thinks that because of her offense Lionel had taken up with Polly, or "perhaps not." (This is typical Alice Munro—the mystery of motivation—the not knowing why people do what they do. It is not just that one does not know what happens when one is absent, but that one is always absent, one never can be there where the other is. This continues when Lorna thinks maybe it is because Polly is Lionel's choice or maybe it is simply that he is happier. When she sees them together, it is "A scene so ordinary and amazing, come about as if by magic. Everybody happy." (This theme of things happening mysterious as if by magic is a common one for Munro—and for the short story in general.)

Lionel watches Polly blow up the child's pool, thinking, at least in Lorna's mind, that he wants a woman competent and sensible, pliant but solid. "Someone not vain or dreamy or dissatisfied." (as she obviously is) (This is, of course, the ironic happy ending of the title story "Hateship") Lorna thinks Lionel might marry such a woman, and then change and maybe fall in love with some other woman. "That might happen…Or it might not." The mystery of what might happen is a persistent theme in this story.

Lorna recalls her vision of Polly's suicide and is surprised by, as you are long after waking by the recollection of a dream. "It had the a dream's potency and shamefulness. A dream's uselessness, as well." To think back on a dream as if it were a past event is another challenge to the notion of what "really" happened vs. what one has "imagined" has happened or might happen.

Lorna thinks of the bargain she had made and realizes it is not a bargain at all, for it has no specificity; it is a promise that has no meaning. "But as she tried out various possibilities, almost as if she were "shaping this story to be told to someone… as an entertainment," she thinks, "give up reading books." This story emphasizes one of Alice Munro's central themes—the relationship between fiction and reality, or how fiction influences reality. Lorna sits on the bed tired by all this "sport, this irrelevance," all these possibilities of a story. "What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen."

Lorna understands she was counting on something happening to change her life. "So nothing now but what she or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret or strange." "Pay attention to this, she thought." She has a dramatic notion of getting on her knees. "This is serious." Just then, she hears her daughter calling "Mommy, Mommy. Come here" With the interruption of this present immediacy, the story ends with the storytelling lines: "It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining."

If one focuses only on plot and character in this story, it doesn't seem to be about much of anything, except Polly's unhappiness at not having what Lorna does, and Lorna's schoolgirl crush on Lionel—the stuff of popular fiction. But Alice Munro is interested in something more profound that this. She explores the complex human problem of not knowing what motivates the other and not being sure of what is happening when one is not present. Only by reading the story more than once, identifying the persistent theme that keeps repeating throughout, and then reorganizing the themes in a meaningful pattern, does one begin to understand and thus appreciate the subtlety and complexity of Munro's exploration of the universal human situation of not knowing what the other is thinking, not knowing how to make the right decisions about our behavior with the other, not knowing what is happening when we are not present, and feeling helpless in face of this lack of knowledge. Not many people care to spend this much time with a piece of fiction this demanding, especially a short piece of fiction. Too much work for too little payoff.

Next time, I will "read" Munro's story "What is Remembered" and talk a bit about the relationship of the past to the present in short stories.

Like other Munro stories, this story opens with an introit about an incident that does not seem plot related to the story, but might be thematically related. It takes place at some time in the past when the central character Meriel was a young woman and is putting on white summer gloves; she smiles because she remembers something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand was quoted as saying in a magazine—a quote within a quote from the Parisian fashion designer Balmain who told her "Always wear white gloves. It's best."

Meriel is smiling because the advice "It's best" seems a "soft whisper" of advice, a bit of "absurd and final wisdom." When Pierre asks her why she is smiling, she tells him, and he says, "Who is Balmain?" Since the story is entitled "What is Remembered," this introit is about a memory within a memory, just as the quote is within a quote. It prepares us for a story about the nature of memory.

We then shift to some time after the introit incident, when Meriel and her husband Pierre are getting ready to go to a funeral of Pierre's best friend Jonas, who is 29, Pierre's age. They have been friends since childhood; Pierre was a Classics student, got married, got a job, had children, while Jonas was in engineering, but never married or settled down with a steady job. When he comes to visit he likes to talk about the past and becomes irritated when the conversation turns to the present. This prepares us for a story that is about the past dominating the present.

When Meriel tells Pierre about Jonas' death, he automatically thinks it was suicide, but is evasive when she wants to know why he thinks this. "She felt his evasion to be some sort of warning or even a rebuke. As if he suspected her of deriving from this death—or from their proximity to this death—a feeling that was discreditable and self-centered. A morbid, preening excitement." (It is not clear what significance this reference to death has, except for the fact that it suggests that one can make use of the death of another for his or her own personal reasons. The uses of death might be related to the uses of the past.

We now have a long paragraph about husbands in those days who had changed to suitors "desperate in their sexual agonies" and then once married changed to resolute and disapproving men, off to work every morning, days spent in unknown labors. While the men had a lot to learn, the women could slip back into a kind of "second adolescence" in a "throwback to high school." (This suggests that the story may be about a woman's use of the past in particular)

At the funeral service, the minister compares Jonas's life to a baby in the womb. "If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near future, would it not be incredulous, as well as afraid? And so are we, most of the time, but we should not be, for we have been given assurance….The baby is lapped in its ignorance." (The funeral sermon echoes the theme the story seems to be emphasizing—being caught in time in which we cannot know the future and seem dissociated from the past, thus lapped in ignorance.)

She watches Pierre at the reception after the funeral and pretends she is seeing him for the first time. She remembers a teacher's party a year or so earlier when she came up to him and talked to him as if he was a stranger and she were discreetly flirting with him. (This notion of pretending to be strangers suggests the sexual charge that climaxes (pun intentional) the story, for Meriel and the man she has sex with pretend to be husband and wife, which gives their encounter an additional sexual charge)

Meriel wants to go and visit an old woman her mother had admired, named Muriel, called Aunt Muriel, although not blood related. Mariel is named for her. (This is an example of a common Munro technique of doubling; it is a folktale motif). The bush doctor, Doctor Asher, who had been looking after Jonas, has flown down to the funeral and offers to drive Meriel to visit her mother's old friend. Although their conversation is polite and formal on the drive, when they arrive he offers to come in and wait for her, and his offering of his time and presence seems to have little to do with courtesy and something to do with her.

When they go in, Meriel seems changed by her knowledge of the doctor's interest. "Something had happened to her. She had a sudden mysterious sense of power and delight, as if with every step she took, a bright message was travelling from her heels to the top of her skull." When she asks him later why he wanted to come in with her, he says, "Because I didn't want to lose sight of you."

Aunt Muriel is of Meriel's grandmother's generation; she was her mother's art teacher. She knows Meriel and the doctor are not married—can tell the difference. When the old woman says she knows he is there with Meriel, he asks how she could tell that. She answers, "I used to be a devil myself."

Mariel feels there is some betrayal of the past stirring in the old woman. "Some degradation was in the offing. Meriel was upset by this, remotely excited." The old woman tells of her youth when she was a devil, and she and her friends had adventures, but all according to a script, engaging in rituals. She tells stories that hint of sexual encounters; once she was blindfolded, but says she knew who it was, for she knew all of them there. Meriel is "Distracted, play-acting, and with a vague sense of shame." The doctor and Meriel give each other a stealthy, almost married glance, "its masquerade and its bland intimacy arousing to those who were after all not married."

When they leave, in a gesture of intimacy, he reaches over and picks at the cloth of her dress which has tuck to her damp skin while setting. (There are a number of references in this section of the story to playacting, following a script, engaging in a ritual, pretending—and all of it has to do with sex and storytelling. The idea of masquerade and playing a role is a common one in folktale and fairytale. When it is in regard to sex, as it often is, it seems to suggest the magic of Carnival, or stepping outside of one's everyday world and engaging in a fantasy world, a kind of alternate reality. The old woman's recollection of the past sexual encounters adds to Meriel's sense of sexual excitement.

In the car, "She was holding in a wail of disappointment, a clamor of desire." They speak like "caricatures." Until, "unable to put up with this any more," she says, "take me somewhere else."

We now shift to the present as Meriel recalls this moment. She believes that the phrase "Take me somewhere else" rather than "Let's go somewhere else" is important. "The risk, the transfer of power. Complete risk and transfer. Let's go—that would have the risk, but not the abdication, which is the start for her—in all her reliving of this moment—of the erotic slide." (This is a key phrase—the "erotic slide" exists in the story, in "what is remembered," not necessarily in the moment. But of course the moment is now always in the past, is always what is remembered, and thus in the control of the one remembering, being used by the one remembering for her own purposes, and always being amended and altered and added to.)

When Meriel thinks back on their going to an apartment where the doctor has been staying, she thinks she would have preferred another scene, and she substitutes one she prefers in her memory—a hotel in West Vancouver. "There she would have to cross the little lobby with head bowed and arms clinging to her sides, her whole body permeated with exquisite shame. And he would speak to the desk clerk in a low voice that did not advertise, but did not conceal or apologize for their purpose." She creates a new scene using the "she would, he would" tense-- what might happen but did not except in what is remembered.

"Why did she conjure up , why did she add that scene? It was for the moment of exposure, the piercing sense of shame and pride that took over her body as she walked through the pretend lobby, and for the sound of his voice, its discretion and authority speaking to the clerk the words that she should not quite make out." (This combination of shame and pride that the invented scene in the hotel would have created in her seems important.)

"The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything—and by remember, she meant experience it in her mind, one more time—then store it away forever. This day's experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." (This is the most explicit reference to "The key to the Treasure is the Treasure." For her, the experience takes on significance if she can set it all in order, making use of all the details and creating details when necessary, making a treasure in the mind of the experience. The key to this treasure is the process of making it in the mind and making use of it.)

The final part of the story projects Meriel more than thirty years later, after Pierre has died. She recalls reading to him during his illness. One book was Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and they have a discussion about the scene when Bazarov declares his love for Anna Sergeyevna. Meriel wanted the scene to do differently She thinks Anna would not have reacted as she did, that it is just Turgenev yanking them apart for reasons of his own. She thinks they should have had the sexual encounter that Bazarov wants and Anna demurs from. Pierre says that Meriel's view is romantic. "You're wrenching things around to make a happy ending."

When Pierre argues that if Anna gave in, it would be because she loved him and when the sex was over she would still love him, for that is what women are like when they are in love, but Bazarov would leave in the morning because it is his nature; he hates loving her. When Pierre asks how would that be better, Meriel repels, "They'd have something. Their experience." (This, of course, is a reference to her experience with the doctor—that although nothing "actually" ever came of it, "what is remembered" is the treasure that remains.

Now we shift back to the past when Meriel goes home on the ferry. "What she had to go through was wave after wave of intense recollection. And this was what she would continue to go through—at gradually lengthening intervals—for years to come. She would keep picking up things she'd missed, and these would still jolt her." (And thus, the power of the encounter lies in the mind of the one remembering, and the reality of it is in the memory).

"She remembered his hazel-gray eyes, the close-up view of his coarse skin, a circle like an old scar beside his nose, the slick breadth of his chest as he reared up from her.""Sudden recollection of even their early, unsure, and tentative moments could still make her fold in on herself, as if to protect the raw surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire. My love—my love, she would mutter in a harsh, mechanical way, the words a secret poultice." (This suggests the use of the memory—what Eliot calls the fragments one shores up against one's ruin).

She sees the doctor's picture in the paper after his death in an air crash. "The fact that he was dead did not seem to have much effect on her daydreams—if that was what you could call them. The ones in which she imagined chance meetings or even desperately arranged reunions, had never had a foothold on reality, in any case, and were not revised because he was dead. They had to wear themselves out in a way she did not control and never understood." (Meriel "works" with the memory, creating possibilities that exist only in the mind—what makes the memory so powerful and important is precisely that it is a memory—that it is something one can work with creatively.)

When she was on the ferry that night, she watched the wake of the boat and the thought occurs to her "that in a certain kind of story—not the kind that anyone wrote anymore—the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body pumped up with a swe4et self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen—from a forbidden angle—as supremely rational." (This is the central romantic notion—one that Heathcliff would understand, that Anna Karenina would understand, that Gatsby would understand.)

After Pierre's death, she recalls one further detail—that when he takes her to the ferry, she starts to kiss him and he says, "No, I never do." She understands this to be a kind of cautioning. "Information that could not make her happy, though it might be intended to keep her from making a serious mistake. To save her from false hopes and humiliation of a certain kind of mistake." She doesn't doubt this recollection is true. "She did not see how she could have suppressed it so successfully for all this time. She had an idea that if she had not been able to do that, her life might have bene different." (This act of refusing to consummate the encounter with a goodbye kiss is important, for it forces her to give up any idea of sustaining the relationship except as an idea, a dream, a fantasy, a manipulation of the past into a story.)

Meriel thinks she might not have stayed with Pierre. She thinks that trying to match what had been said at the ferry with what had been done earlier would "have made her more alert and more curious. Pride or contrariness might have played a part—a need to have some man eat those words, as refusal to learn her lesson—but that wouldn't have been all. There was another sort of life she could have had—which was not to say she would have preferred it. It was probably because of her age and because of the thin cool air she breathed since Pierre's death, that she could think of that other sort of life simply as a kind of research which had its own pitfalls and achievements." She thinks that prudence, some economical sort of emotional management had been her guiding light all along.

She thinks of the "self-preserving moment" the doctor made, the kind and deadly caution, the attitude of inflexibility that had grown a bit stale with him, like an outmoded swagger. She could view him now with an everyday mystification, as if he had been a husband. She wondered if he'd stay that way, or if she had some new role waiting for him, some use still to put him to in her mind, during the time ahead."

What is the purpose of people and the past? For the writer, the past is for transformation into story. And for the writer, people exist to transform into characters in stories. I have one more Munro story from the volume Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage to "read" in preparation for my essay--"Family Furnishings"-- the central story in the collection about using people and the past to create stories. I hope by this time next week to have enough material to write that essay.

Some writers are referred to as "a writer's writer," a designation that suggests they are mainly appreciated by other writers—not bad if you treasure the approval of your fellow writers, but not so good if you want to sell your work to a larger audience than other writers--although given the burgeoning of MFA programs, the audience of writers and wannabe writers seems to be growing.

The short story writer, who used to be thought of as a money grubbing hack of the sub-literary pulp and slick paper world, is now—if he or she is any good--more often thought of as "a writers' writer" than novelists. Why is that generally true? Alice Munro is often called a "writer's writer." And indeed, if you read the reviews of her work by other writers, you know that other writers are almost universally rhapsodic about her short stories. Why is that specifically true of Munro?

As a side note: I did read a recent interview with Joy Williams (a writer I admire a great deal) in The Paris Review, Summer 2014, in which Williams was more than a little snide about Munro. The interviewer asked Williams if she enjoyed writing, and here is her answer:

That nice Canadian writer who recently won the Nobel—beloved, admired, prolific. Who would deny it? She said she had a “hellish good time” writing. This could be a subject for many, many panels. Get a herd of writers together and ask them, Do you have a hellish good time writing? Mostly, I believe, the answer would be no. But their going on about it could take some time.

I am disappointed with Williams' condescending reference to Munro as merely a "nice Canadian writer." But, to continue this aside for a moment, Williams did say something interesting in response to the interviewer's inevitable question—"Can you define a short story?"—a response with which she and "that nice Canadian wrier" would definitely agree. Here it is:

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form, the short story is hardly divine, though all excellent art has its mystery, its spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages. I read a story recently about a woman who’d been on the lam and her husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end, and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling out for fifty thousand dollars. It was so boring.

(Williams echoes Frank O'Connor's "Lonely Voice" theme in the interview, affirming her belief that "what the short story, as a form, excels in is the depiction of solitude and isolation." Munro would agree with this also. So, of course, do I, which is why I named my most recent book "I Am Your Brother.")

But back to this issue of the short story writer in general and Alice Munro in particular as a "writer's writer." I have talked about this in some detail in an presentation I made at Angers, France a few years ago and which has appeared in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Vol. 2, 2012, under the title "Why Many Writers Like Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not." Because of possible copyright violations, I will not reprint that article on this blog, but can give you an idea about its content with the following quote:

It should not be a surprise that several authors anointed with that kiss-of-death designation, “writer’s writer”—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Deborah Eisenberg, Joy Williams, Steven Millhauser, David Means—are primarily short story writers. And it should also not be a surprise that Francine Prose’s bravely titled 2006 book—Reading Like a Writer—devoted much more space to analyzing and praising the writing of short story authors than it did the writing of novelists.

I have always argued that the short story is a unique literary form that makes different demands on readers than its big-shouldered brother, the novel. However, often, the only readers I have found who agree with me are writers of the short story. So I herewith call them to my aid. I have rummaged through fifty years of notes and have read hundreds of author interviews, introductions, and commentaries to gather the judgments of 100 different authors on the short story. I have organized these judgments into several major categories that may prove helpful to our understanding of the short story. It is remarkable how much in agreement the judgments of these one hundred authors are, and surprising that no one has ever gathered them together before and tried to derive some general conclusions from them.

In the essay, I discuss a number of reasons why short story writers are often referred to as "a writer's writer." But one of the most obvious reasons that Alice Munro is so designated is she often writes stories about women who write short stories. It may be that this is one of the reasons that so many reviewers of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage who are writers themselves have singled out "Family Furnishings" as their favorite story in the collection.

In what follows, I will note some of the aspects of the story that might identify it as a "writer's writer" story.

The introit for this story focuses on a particular day in the life of the narrator's father and his first cousin Alfrida who as children lived on adjoining farms—the day when World War I ended. The seemingly trivial event on this momentous day is the two children stomping on the ice in the furrows of the field and enjoying its crackle. When Alfrida tells this story, the father says she could not remember a thing like that and is making it up, which Alfrida denies. The introit introduces the theme that the story later develops—whether a story is about something remembered or something invented—for when an event or a character is transformed into a story event or character, it always seems invention rather than recollection.

The first part of the story recounts the female narrator's recollections of Alfrida and her effect on her family. Alfrida writes a column for the local newspaper as well as responses to letters to the paper. From the narrator's perspective as a teenager, Alfrida is a sophisticated city person and has the ability to transform her rural family with her intelligence and wit. The narrator wants to escape her rural life for city sophistication, which she identifies later with her in-laws, who seem to live in a "world of storybook privilege." To the adolescent narrator, Alfrida represents a "liberated" woman, whose opinion is as valued as that of the men, although she sometimes seems to be putting on a show. She regales the narrator with stories of people and events that the narrator has bound hints of in her reading, "but felt giddy to hear about, even at third or fourth hand, in real life."

One of the key issues here has to do with what seems most real to the writer—the stuff of writing or the stuff of the everyday. When asked if "Family Furnishings" was based on life, she says no, but when she was young writing was so important she would sacrifice anything for it. "Because I thought of the world in which I wrote—the world I created—as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in." Alive in what way? Alive in the way Chekhov says life in stories is alive, not the experiential world but the aesthetic world.

However, the one point on which the narrator's parents and Alfrida diverge is their attitude about sex. When Alfrida asks if she can bring her male friend to visit, she is refused. The narrator says her mother has a horror of "irregular sex or flaunted sex—of any sex, you might say, for the proper married kind was not acknowledged at all."

When the narrator wins a scholarship and goes to school in the city where Alfrida lives (Ottawa, Ontario), Alfrida invites her to visit, but she ignores the invitation and does not want to bring any of her friends to meet Alfrida, for she now understands that Alfrida is not so sophisticated and knows she would scorn the foreign films and literary novels that she and her friends read, for she has always referred to the narrator's father's classic novels as "hotshot reading." The narrator's father pretends to agree with Alfrida about such things, even though he does read the books that Alfrida scorns. The narrator, who wants to become a writer, says she does not want to show such contempt for things that matter to her, and that in order to not have to do that she would have to avoid those people she used to know, such as Alfrida, who has now lost all importance in her life.

When she does finally decide to go visit Alfrida, she is even more aware of the fact that Alfrida is not the sophisticated woman of the world that she once thought she was. During the visit, Alfrida talks about her mother, who died when a coal oil lamp exploded in her hands. The narrator talks a great deal about this story, especially how her aunts and her mother felt about it, seeing it as a "horrible treasure to them, something our family could claim that nobody else could, a distinction that would never be let go. To listen to them had always made me feel as if there was some obscene connivance going on, a fond fingering of whatever was grisly or disastrous. Their voices were like worms slithering around in my insides." (The story as treasure is interesting to me, for it seems to suggest that the writer perceives the value of significance in events that nonreaders do not.)

She is glad her fiancé did not come on the visit, for he would not have wanted to hear about Alfrida's mother's death. "He admired opera and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy,--for the squalor of tragedy—in ordinary life… Failures in life—failures of luck, of health, of finances—all struck him as lapses and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle background." (Another reference here to the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary by the artist. What, actually does so-called real life have to do with art at all?)

Alfrida tells the narrator that they would not let her in to see her mother at the hospital, even though she yelled her head off. Alfrida says, "You know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me." Alfrida laughs at herself scornfully, adding. "I must've thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn't I? She would want to see me."

The narrators says she had never heard that part of the story before. But the phrase Alfrida uses strikes an important chord for her. Here we have the most important paragraph in the story:

And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself."

She says the story she later wrote with the line, She would want to see me in it, obviously caused a rift between her and Alfrida. When her father tells her about Alfrida's being upset, she is surprised and angry that Alfrida's objects to something that seemed to have so little to do with her. She tells her father it wasn't Alfrida at all,. "I changed it. I wasn't even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that." (This is basic paradox of art for the artist—that she is not really interested in "real life" at all, that what she takes from real life is only raw material, coarse "stuff" that she transforms into significance and meaning. )

She thinks there is a danger when she is at home with her father. "It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own, seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words, like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity." (And indeed, for the artist, it is the language that matters, not the stuff.)

At her father's funeral, she meets Alfrida's daughter who Alfrida gave up for adoption as a child. She tells her that Alfrida said she was smart but not as smart as she thought she was. The daughter says Alfrida saw the narrator as a kind of "cold fish."

The story ends after the Sunday afternoon dinner at Alfrida's as the narrator walks back alone to her rooming house. She is glad that the people around her are people she did not know. "What a blessing." She goes into a drugstore for a cup of coffee and begins to feel happy to be alone. The story ends with these lines:

"I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida, but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation. This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be."

This is a difficult conclusion for nonwriters to accept, for it suggests that the writer is not interested in individual human people in the world, but rather the "formal," the "inhuman." I will conclude these comments by referring back to Joy Williams, who is better than her condescending remarks about Munro would suggest, a writer who is as aware of the loneliness of the writer's "cold fish" attitude toward reality than she might want to admit. Joy Williams says, short story writers love the dark and are always fumbling around in it. “The writer,” says Williams, doesn’t want to “disclose or instruct of advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery…. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them.”

Munro knows there is something obsessive and inhuman about the writer. In one of her most recent interviews, she said of her retirement, “There is a nice feeling about being just like everyone else now. But it also means that the most important thing in my life is gone."

I am going to shut up about Alice Munro for a time on this blog, while I work on the essay on Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage I have promised Bob Thacker for a collection of essays he is editing. I will let you know when I think I have an essay. In the meantime, let's take a look at the forty stories in this year's O. Henry Award Stories and Best American Short Stories.

Well, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been announced, and favorite Haruki Murakami did not win. French author Patrick Modiano, not well known in the U.S., did. Congratulations to him.

Murakami has a new short story in the recent New Yorker (Oct. 13, 2014), the title of which, "Scheherazade," immediately attracted my attention, having recently read the new translation of 1001 Nights by Hanan Al-Shakyh and Marina Warner's wonderful study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights.

Murakami's story is about a guy who cannot, for some undisclosed reason, leave his house. A nameless woman is assigned (but we do not know by whom) to come to his house regularly to bring him food and supplies. She also has sex with him and tells him stories; thus, he calls her Scheherazade. The main story she tells him in the story we are reading is about her breaking into the home of a boy with whom she was obsessed while in high school, (she is middle-aged now), fantasizing about him, stealing trivial items, and leaving other items in their place.

Because the story provides no background for why the man cannot leave the house or who is responsible for sending the woman to attend to his needs, the reader is apt to focus on these mysteries. Indeed, New Yorker editor Treisman begins her interview in her weekly online feature by asking Murakami if he knows why the man cannot leave the house.

If this were the account of an actual event or even a realistic story, the question might be legitimate. However, since Murakami does not reveal in the story why the man is confined to the house, he can quite rightfully reply to Treisman: "I don't know the exact circumstances that brought about the situation." Murakami says what caused the man's situation is not important. A fan of Kafka, he might have said it is no more relevant to the story than why Joseph K in Kafka's The Trial is arrested; it just is a given of the story that makes the story possible. In some ways, we are all locked in.

Treisman also asks Murakami why he ends his story without letting the reader hear the end of the story Scheherazade is telling the man. Murakami says this is one of the most basic techniques of storytelling since the beginning of storytelling. Many of the stories in 1001 Nights end only as an introit to another story within a story until the reader gets drawn so far into stories within stories that reality (whatever that is) is left so far behind one wonders if such a thing ever existed. But readers want realism and closure, some contact with what they think is the "real world," as if their notion of "reality" is the only notion possible. This desire for closure even leads Treisman to ask Murakami if there will be a sequel--a device that Hollywood movie makers use to satisfy audiences' need for the illusion that that stuff on the screen keeps on happening even after they leave the theater.

I have only found one reader on the Internet who has read the story and commented on it—the indefatigable Betsy Pelz over on the Mookseandgripes.com website—a valuable site I have read with pleasure the past several years. And sure enough, Ms. Pelz spends much of her discussion pondering what the guy is doing confined in the room and who is sending that woman over to tend to his needs.

Is the man a criminal, a political prisoner? She asks. Is the woman a prostitute, a sex surrogate? How does the woman manage the very practical matter of getting over to the guy's house so regularly without disrupting her own marriage? Ms. Pelz even suggests that the woman might be hired by the mob to keep the man prisoner. Frustrated by finding no answers, Ms. Polz develops her own fantasy solution that the man is actually the young boy the woman had an obsession about when she was a teenager—that he is actually now her husband and they are playing some sexual fantasy game by which she keeps him interested in her even though she is no longer young.

Perhaps concerned that such a reading might trivialize the story as just an old Ladies Home Journal"Can this Marriage Be Saved?" piece, Ms. Pelz also suggests that the story has a social context, claiming, "The story addresses the kind of challenge a man faces in highly gendered societies such as Japan, where this story takes place and where the ideal for men is to be strong and silent."

I am not particularly attacking Betsy Pelz's reading of this story. She certainly has the freedom to read it any way she wishes. I suspect that most readers will have the same reaction to Murakami's "Scheherazade," especially if they are not as familiar with the history of storytelling beginning with 1001 Nights as Murakami is. Indeed, Treisman's questions in the Murakami interview suggest that she is anticipating the typical reader response of trying to "normalize" this story, ground it in "realistic" motivation and "social" context.

But as Murakami's coy responses that he does not know what brought about the situation the man is in and his acknowledgement that he is using one of the most basic techniques of storytelling "handed down the millennia" suggest that "Scheherazade" is a story that can only be understood within the context of storytelling.

"Scheherazade" begins with an acknowledgement that this is a story about the ambiguous world that story creates: "Habara didn't know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented. He had no way of telling. Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives." Stories that begin with some variation of "Once there was a man who…" often end with the reader asking the teller, "Did that really happen?" My children often would ask me after I told them a story, "Is that really true, Daddy, or just a story?"

Murakami's narrator says that regardless of whether Scheherazade's stories were true or not, she had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart, stories that left the listener enthralled," able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment." Indeed, this is one of the primary effects of reading 1001 Nights.

The man in the story is puzzled by the fact that "their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard to tell where one ended and the other began." He has never experienced anything like this. He is tightly bound to her, but he does not know why, for the sex is so-so and he doesn’t love her. Indeed, the woman performs each sexual act as if completing an assignment in a businesslike manner. Although their sex is not obligatory, it could not be said that their hearts are in it. Although the sex is not entirely businesslike, it is not passionate either.

Much of "Scheherazade" deals with the story the woman tells the man about her breaking into the house of the boy she was infatuated with while in high school. She goes to his house when no one is at home and goes up to his room, sitting in his desk chair, picking up objects he has touched: "the most mundane objects became somehow radiant because they were his." She describes herself as a "Love Thief," feeling that if she takes something, she must also leave something. It is a reminder of the inextricable connection between story and sex that she takes one of the boy's pencils and leaves one of her tampons. She scribbles things in her notebook with the pencil, smells it, kisses it, even puts it in her mouth and sucks on it.

She creates such a fantasy world that it no longer bothers her that in "the real world" the boy doesn't even seem to be aware of her existence. Murakami is exploring one of the most powerful aspects of love and sexual obsession that runs throughout 1001 Nights—that it is not the "real world" that matters—not even the "real" physical body of the other—only the powerful obsession that creates an alternate world. The fact that pornography focuses on physical events is what makes it so boring.

She continues to make trips to the boy's house, leaving strands of her hair, but also leaving the tampon, which the boy has never found because it was her first "token." Leaving "tokens" is very common in the 1001 Nights stories; simple objects become transformed into magical emblems of the obsession that drives the story. Marina Warner talks a great deal about the importance of magical objects or tokens in her study Stranger Magic. All storytellers are aware of the metamorphosis of simple objects into sacred metaphoric ones. I have mentioned before Raymond Carver's comment about how ordinary objects become transformed in short stories.

A shift takes place after the girl takes one of the boy's soiled t-shirts from the laundry hamper and the mother discovers that someone has been breaking in the house and changes the door locks. The girl does not need the boy, only the token of the shirt. When she puts her nose into the armpits and inhales, it is a as though she is in his embrace. This "as if" is, of course, a key element of all storytelling. After she tells the man about the t-shirt, she asks to have sex with him one more time, and this time, instead of it being businesslike, it is violent, passionate and drawn out, and her climax is unmistakable. Indeed, when she is having sex with the man this time, she is in her imagination having sex with the boy, and it is this imaginative sex that is central to the story.

When the girl stops the break-ins, her passion for the boy begins to cool. She says that although the fever was passing, what she had contracted was not something like sickness, but rather the "real thing." If a therapist or practical realist told the girl what she has been feeling was not the real thing but only an imaginative thing, such a judgment would just reflect a misunderstanding of what passion or desire or love or sex really is--always an imaginative thing.

At the end of his story, Murakami plays the little storytelling game so common in 1001 Nights, when the woman tells the man, "To tell the truth, the story doesn't end there. A few years later, when I was in my second year of nursing school, a strange stroke of fate brought us together again."

The man wants to hear the rest of the story (as does the reader), but fears he may never see Scheherazade again and may never have the shared intimacy of sex with her again. "What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one hand, while negating it on the other. That was something that Scheherazade had provided in abundance—indeed her gift was inexhaustible." Indeed, this is the gift of the storyteller, the key to the treasure. And as John Barth's genii reminds us, "The key to treasure is the treasure."

I hope Betsy Pelz will forgive me for using her discussion as a sort of straw man to emphasize what I think is a very important point about the short story as a genre—that to understand a particular story the reader must have some understanding of the nature of story and storytelling, especially the fact that good short stories are most often about some universal aspect of human desire and that "realism" is never an adequate means by which to understand them.

I am working on my essay on "Sex and Storytelling" in Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. My thanks for the timely appearance of Haruki Murakami's story "Scheherazade," which reaffirms my notions about this theme in Alice Munro's stories.

Heidi Pitlor, editor of Best American Short Stories, who reads hundreds of short stories each year to pick the 120 she considers the "Best," says she has moments when it seems there are more people in the U.S. who want to write stories than there who want to read them. She acknowledges what I have noted in this blog before—that many of the people who buy the annual Best American Short Stories (and the same is true for TheO. Henry Prize Stories) are "writers in training," figuring that if they read the best fiction in the country, they will learn how to write better fiction. But Pitlor ponders "What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become—or are we already—a nation of performers with no audience?"

Pitlor urges that editors, writers, teachers, publishers do whatever possible to enliven readers, to create communities for them, and by this, I don't think she means "book clubs." I share Pitlor's concern. But quite frankly I don't know what to do about it. Good short stories are not always "easy" to read; you certainly can't skim them or read them only for plot. The fact of the matter is, short stories are more appreciated by other writers than they are by non-writers. My experience last month when the Wall Street Journal made Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman their book club selection reminded me that most readers have no patience with, and therefore little appreciation for, short stories, even those by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro.

The reason that writers are the most appreciative readers of short stories can be seen in Francine Prose's 2006 book, Reading Like A Writer. Prose says, "I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision that the writer had made." She says her high school English teacher had recently graduated from a college where his own English professors taught the New Criticism, adding, "Luckily for me, that approach to literature was still in fashion when I graduated and went on to college."

However when she went to graduate school, Prose says she realized that her love of books was not shared by her classmates and professors; in fact, she found it hard to understand what they did love, for the warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminism, etc. were all teaching students they were reading "texts" in which ideas and politics, not the work itself, were what was important. Prose believes that a close-reading course should be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop., I suspect that most writers agree with her. However, most readers are just not the close readers that writers are; and in my opinion, to appreciate good short stories, you must be a close reader..

I attended undergraduate school from 1960 to 1963 and graduate school from 1963 to 1966, so I too was schooled in the "New Criticism" that valued "close reading." After I began teaching in 1966, I schooled myself on structuralism and deconstruction during the 1970's and 1980's. Indeed, I created the first theory of literature course in my department, but I never relinquished close reading. In the 1990's, when "theory" became associated with cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism, and political correctness, moving even further away from attending to the work of fiction itself, I was glad I was near retirement. In the last year I taught, my graduate students actually resented my insistence that they pay close attention to the work they were reading; they preferred to talk about social issues and politics. The only students who paid any attention to style, language, metaphor, structure, and craft were those interested in becoming fiction writers themselves.

I have just finished reading this year's O. Henry Award Stories and am now reading the 2014 Best American Short Story volume. Over the years the two books have adopted two quite different selection conventions. After Heidi Pitlor, editor of Best, has chosen 120 stories she thinks best, she sends them to a guest author/editor to pick the top 20 that will appear in the book. However, Lucy Furman, editor of the O. Henry volume is solely responsible for choosing the 20 stories that appear in that book. She then sends those 20 (with no identification of author or place of publication) to three guest author/readers, who pick their single favorite story and then write a brief essay on their choice. This year the three "jurors" are:

Tash Aw, a Malaysian author whose first novel The Harmony Silk Factorywon the Whitbread and the Commonwealth Writers prizes for best first novel. He had a short story in last year's O. Henry Prize Stories.

James Lasdun, a transplanted British writer now living in America, author of three collections of short stories, the most recent It's Beginning to Hurt. I have posted blog essays on Lasdun's stories in the past.

Joan Silber, an American writer whose collection of story Ideas of Heavenwas a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She has had three stories in past O. Henry Prize Stories.

Although these three authors are called "jurors," as far as I can tell, they have nothing to do with choosing the 20 stories; they just pick out and write a short piece on their favorite one.

This year, the single guest judge who chose the final 20 in Best American, is Jennifer Egan, whose collection of linked stories, loosely parading as a novel, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and the Los Angeles TimesBook prize.

In her brief introduction, Eagan argues that Best American Short Stories"generates excitement around the practice of writing fiction, celebrates the short story form, and energizes the fragile ecosystem of magazines that sustain it."

In her longer and more detailed introduction, Lucy Furman says that the mission of the O. Henry Prize Stories since its beginning in 1919 has been to "encourage the art of the short story. By calling attention to their gifts, we encourage short-story writers. When we put a story between book covers, we give it a longer life and a wider readership." Furman talks a bit about what Eagan calls the "fragile ecosystem" of magazines that sustain the short story form, lamenting that those magazines funded by public and private academic intuitions are always in peril from shrinking budgets, for those in charge of campus money doubt that a small magazine can be as much benefit to a university as a winning football team.

Eagan says one of the primary reasons she agreed to serve as guest editor this year is that she wanted to explore "systematically" what makes a short story great—"to identify my own aesthetic standards in a more rigorous way than I've done before." Eagan says she wants to put her biases on the table at the outset, noting first of all that she does not care very much about "genre," either as a reader of a writer. She says he does not think about short stories any differently than she does about novels or novellas or even memoirs. However, she does admit that the distillation process, which she says must take place in any narrative, has to be more extreme than in a novel. "It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes."

Eagan says she is biased toward writers who take risks—formally, structurally, even in terms of subject matter—over those who do the familiar thing even exquisitely. If there is a single factor that governed her choice of stories to include, she says, it was "the basic power to make me lose my bearings, to envelop me in a fictional world" by means of vivid specific language. After a compelling premise and distinctive language, she says the next factor is the story's pushing past obvious possibilities into something that felt "mysterious" or "extreme."

A few more general observations about the selections in the two books before focusing on specific stories in subsequent blog posts over the next few weeks: If you follow the short story at all, you will see more familiar names on the table of contents of Best than the O. Henry: e.g. Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, T.C. Boyle, Peter Cameron, Joshua Ferris, Nell Freudenberger, David Gates, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell. It is no surprise then that more stories in the Best collection were originally published in the more successful periodicals: five from the New Yorker, ten from McSweeney's, Granta, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, Zoetrope, and Glimmer Train.

The O. Henry collection has three New Yorker stories—by the three best-known writers in the collection: Louise Erdrich, William Trevor, and Tessa Hadley (who is always in the New Yorker). Most of the O. Henry stories are from such places as The American Reader, Ecotone, New Orleans Review, Cincinnati Review, Threepenny Review, Subtropics, Southwest Review, New England Review, and Southern Review—all prestigious places that any MFA student would love to appear in—even if the readership is less and the money negligible or nil.

Unless you read a great deal in small press periodicals, you may not know many of the writers in the O. Henry collection, e.g. Allison Alsup, Chanelle Benz, Olivia Clare, Halina Duraj, Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, Kristen Iskandrian, Dylan Landis, Colleen Morrissey, Robert Anthony Siegel, Kristen Valdez Quade, and Maura Stanton. No one story appears in both collections, although Laura van den Berg, a relative beginner, has stories in both.

I will finish reading all the stories—more than once--in both volumes before I begin posting essays on particular stories. If you have not purchased your own copies of Best American Short Stories 2014 and O. Henry Prize Stories: 2014, you can pick up both either in paperback or eBook versions for around twenty bucks. That's about 50 cents per story--the best bargain in publishing for those who love good fiction (And you have a much better chance of finding good writing in short stories than in novels; ask any writer.).

It's too damn bad that practically nobody reviews these two books—just another example of the short shrift the short story gets from the publishing industry.

Happy Halloween to all those who treasure that holiday. It has always been my younger daughter's favorite holiday. This morning when I went to her house to pick something up, I made my way to the door through a yard peppered with ghastly hands sticking out of the ground, a coffin near the steps, and a female skeleton lounging seductively on the porch. My 3-year old grandaughter loves it as much as her mother does.

I usually try to post something relevant to the spooky holiday each year. This year, since I am working on a history of the British Short Story, and since "weird" tales are a hallmark of the mid to late nineteenth century in England, I thought I would post an excerpt on Algernon Blackwood from my book in progress. If you have not read "The Willows," you might find it just the thing to give you chills on this haunted holiday.

In her Introduction to the 2014 Best American Short Stories, Jennifer Egan says the single factor that made her decide which stories to include in the volume was its basic power to make her lose her bearings, "to envelop me in a fictional world." This is the basis of the magic of that archetypal story collection, 1001 Nights, for as you read those stories that contain stories within stories, you move farther and farther away from any sense of phenomental reality and more and more into a purely fictional construct—what might be called the 1001 Nights, in which you move farther and farther away from phenomenal reality and more and more into the world of story.

Actually, it might make more sense to call everyday reality a fictional construct, merely an assumption that novelists more often than not take as the only real. For the short-story writer, revelation reality is true reality, just as for primitive man, sacred reality was the only reality, and profane reality was just an illusion that merely made everyday experience possible.

In a letter written late in his life to Peter Penzoldt (author of the 1952 study, The Supernatural in Fiction), Algernon Blackwood, British writer famous for his "weird" stories, insisted that his primary concern was not with the ghost story but stories of extended consciousness. "My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty."

H. P. Lovecraft has called "The Willows" the foremost Blackwood tale, an opinion with which many critics of the supernatural story agree. And indeed it is a story that seems typical of Blackwood's thematic structure of having an average man, through a "flash of terror or beauty," experience something beyond the sensory reality of the everyday. The ambiguity, as is usually the case in nineteenth-century short fiction, results from being unable to decide if the experience actually occurs in the world of the story or whether the events are hallucinated by the character. Such a question about reality in fiction is only troublesome when one takes the story as the mimetic presentation of a phenomenal event, rather than taking the story's fictionality as its true subject.

The tension between external and internal reality in "The Willows" is embodied as a tension between "place as symbol" and "mind as style"; what is most strongly foregrounded is the "world of willows" as a place that has become animated and significant and the narrator's obsessive mental response to it. Although the events of the story could have taken less than half its 18,000-word length to recount, the primary action of the story consists of the characters thinking about the situation; the effect of the mysterious place is repeated over and over again obsessively.

"The Willows" is one long process of personification which begins with the animistic sense that the Danube river itself is a "Great Personage" and the impression that the wind in the willows makes the entire plain moving and thus alive. Skimming down the flooded river in a canoe, the narrator and his companion, the practical-minded Swede, abruptly enter into what the narrator perceives as a new realm, "a land of desolation,""a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic," into which they have trespassed; the narrator begins to feel some essence from the willows completely alien to the human.

The mysterious mental experience begins with two events in the real world, events, however, fraught with initial misapprehension. At first, the two see a man's body bobbing up and down in the water, which they then laughingly recognize as an otter. Almost immediately, they see a man in a boat making signs to them, including the sign of the Cross, an event the Swede accounts for by the peasant's misapprehension that he probably thought the two were spirits. These two experiences are referred to as real, distinct events, unusual in such a place, but events nonetheless. At this point begins the narrator's obsessive reflection on the place, and he feels glad that the Swede is a practical and unimaginative man. However, as the story progresses, the Swede regularly puts into words what the narrator is thinking and feeling.

The first manifestation of the animated life of the place occurs at night when the narrator sees huge figures moving across the tops of the willows, which he hopes will resolve themselves into an optical illusion. "I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standards of reality had changed." He knows the figures are real, but not real according to the standards of the camera and the biologist. His first response is that they are the personified forces of the place itself, and he recalls stories and legends of such primitive animistic beliefs. However, he continues to reason that the moonlight and branches have created the pictures of the figures of the imagination and that he has projected them outwards to make them appear objective, to create a vivid hallucination.

The external world seems to alter even more, as naturally the river floods higher to make the island smaller, and supernaturally the willows seem to move closer to the tent to create a sense of suffocation. Moreover, a change begins to take place internally in the minds of both the characters; without having to talk about it, both are aware of the ominousness of the place as if both consciousness have become merged. The dialogue between the two suggests a mind wrestling with itself, as the narrator tries to find explanations for everything the Swede articulates. The loss of one of the oars and the tear in the canoe are real manifestations, but the cause of the events is made ambiguous by the narrator's suspicion that the Swede has gone insane or has conspired with the mysterious forces. Both men independently come to the conclusion that the attack from the place will come through their minds, and the Swede urges them not to talk about it, because "what one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens."

However, they do talk about it, with the Swede flinging sentences into the emptiness which corroborate the thoughts of the narrator, sentences so fragmented and inconsequential as to suggest that the main line of the Swede's thought are secret to himself and the fragments he found it impossible to digest. The Swede voices the thoughts of both men by saying that they have strayed out of a safe line into a spot where the veil between their realm of three-dimensional reality and a fourth dimension had been worn thin--a trespass which would cost them their lives by a mental rather than a physical process. In that sense, says the Swede, and thinks the narrator, they would be "victims of our own adventure--a sacrifice."

This is probably the key phrase in the story, for indeed, "The Willows" is about the process of characters becoming victims of their own adventure--which they characterize as either a personification of the elements or as a trespass on some ancient shrine. In either case, the place is one of spirit, in terms of fictional reality, a place of atmosphere. "The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect--as it existed across the border of that other region."

This unearthly order of experience is the order of fictional reality itself, an order of reality that the characters have entered into in much the same way that both the fairy tale and the early nineteenth-century German novellepresents characters from the external world entering into a dream-like or purely subjective world which seems both of the artist's making and at the same time a projection of the mental processes of the characters themselves. The willows exist within the world of the story as created by the author, but also seem projections of the characters. As the Swede says, "Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!"

The unified consciousness of the two persists until the narrator saves the Swede from throwing himself into the water and they find a corpse which the Swede says is a victim that the forces have wanted. In the conclusion of the story, as the corpse is released from the willow roots and floats away out of sight, it turns "over and over on the waves like an otter." With this "real event," the story concludes by returning on itself to the opening event that began the adventure.

The basic problem in reading such a story as this is to determine whether the events take place in a realm of reality other than the natural world or whether all is a function of hallucination. Such a problem must be dealt with in the short story by understanding the story as constituting a fictional realm in itself wherein the natural world has already been transformed by the symbolic power of the author's imagination and wherein there are no multiple human consciousness, but rather only the single consciousness of the maker of the experience.

In "The Willows" the narrator both makes the story and experiences it. This is not the same as saying that this is a story about hallucination within the action, but rather that the entire story is an hallucination in which the imagination is projected both on the external world and on the minds of the characters. What Blackwood thinks does exist is a projection of the imagination itself. We come to the story, just as the characters come to the island, with the willows already transformed by Blackwood into symbols. Inside the tale, the narrator sustains the plot by "thinking" the thoughts the Swede expresses and thinking into existence the actions of the mysterious willows. The story ends when a "real event" outside the thought processes of the narrator occurs and breaks up the projected illusion of the story itself.

Today is Halloween, and I can't resist a post about my favorite writer of "alternate reality" short stories, Edgar Allan Poe, who has not always been taken as seriously as he should be. Sometimes dismissed, at best, as a creator of creepy potboilers, or at worst, as a drunk and a child molester, Poe has been sneered at by many critics, even as he has been hailed as an inspiration by many fiction writers.

Edgar Allan Poe was interested in all human experiences which challenged or undermined the easy assumption that everyday reality was the only reality worth attending to. Although some readers may think that this preference for alternate realms of experience was part of his psychological makeup, it is much more likely that it grew out of his acceptance of the German romantic tradition of short fiction as a vehicle for presenting experiences that break up the ordinary.

One of the most common such "alternate" experiences, of course, one that is accessible to every human being, is the experience of dream. However, Poe was not only interested in presenting dreams as if they were reality, he was also interested, as was typical of the Blackwood fiction of the day, in presenting experiences that were so extreme that they seemed to have the nightmarish quality of dream. To present dream as reality and reality as dream was, for Poe, to blur the lines between the two forms of experience. It was to give the human construct of a dream the hard feel of the external world and to give the seemingly hard contours of the external world a sense of being a human construct.

Two of Poe's best-known stories which blur this dream/reality distinction are "Descent into the Maelstrom" (May 1841) and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). Both present characters placed in an extreme situation; however, the situations differ in a crucial way. In the first the extreme situation is a natural phenomenon, in spite of the fact that by its extremity it seems unnatural. It is a favorite Poe technique to create the extreme situation by pushing the ordinary situation to extraordinary lengths, to suggest the supernatural by pushing the natural to extremes.

In the second story, the ontological status of the situation is ambiguous, for although the character knows physically where he is, he does not know psychically what state he is in. The stories also differ in terms of what motivates the extreme state. In "A Descent into the Maelstrom," Poe devotes most of the story to setting up the situation, normalizing it, locating it in space; once the situation is established the story is almost over. In "The Pit and the Pendulum," how the character got to his present situation is left vague; a great deal of the story is spent considering whether he is in is a dream or a waking state. However, the means by which the two characters cope with their situations is similar; both make use of careful and lucid observation to try to escape their fate.

"Descent into the Maelstrom" begins in the typical Blackwood magazine manner by presenting a character who has undergone an "event" which has never happened to a human being before and who needs, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, to tell about it. Moreover, Poe follows the device common to romantic dramatic lyric poetry of having the narrator tell the story while located the self at that point where the events of the story took place, informing his wedding-guest-like auditor: "I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned--and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye." However, the teller also makes use of the eighteenth-century technique of verisimilitude, using a "particularizing manner" to give precise details of the physical phenomenon he is describing. The listener adds to this particularizing technique of authenticating the event by quoting from written sources such as Rasmus and the Encyclopedia Britannica, but asserts that no matter how "circumstantial" or detailed the descriptions are, they fall short of conveying the horror, the magnificence, or the "sense of the novel" which the scene of the whirlpool elicits, noting, however, that he is not sure from what "point of view" previous commentators viewed the whirlpool. It is this notion of point of view that motivates the story, for, as the teller has said at the beginning, no one has had the viewpoint he has had--the typical romantic perspective from within rather than from without.

The storyteller presents himself as an inadequate teller, for he often claims the inability of his words to capture the event; he says it is "folly to attempt describing" the hurricane which hits, and when he knows he is close to the whirlpool, he says, "no one will know what my feelings were at that moment". However, if his feelings of horror are indescribable, his feelings when he loses his sense of horror are calm and logical. Indeed, when he makes up his mind to hope no more, he becomes composed and begins to reflect on how magnificent it would be to die in this manifestation of God's power, becoming obsessed with the "keenest curiosity."

It is precisely this obsession to observe which saves the narrator. The nearer he comes to the bottom of the whirlpool, the keener grows what he calls his "unnatural curiosity." It is a combination of memory and observation of the geometric shapes which are less apt to be drawn down in the whirlpool that marks the means of his escape. Lashing himself to a cylinder-shaped barrel, he throws himself off the fishing boat into the whirlpool and hovers half-way between the top and the bottom, between chaos below and salvation above, until the whirlpool--which is, after all, limited in time, subsides. At this point, the teller ends his tale by moving from the past to the present-tense, reflecting on the tale itself, becoming transformed by the experience from participant to manipulator of his own discourse, for he says his companions on shore "knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land."

"The Pit and the Pendulum" is much more ambiguous about the epistemological or ontological state of the extreme situation than "A Descent into the Maelstrom." Although the entire story takes place inside a prison cell into which the narrator of the story, and indeed the story's only visible character, has been thrown, the story does not indicate what the nameless narrator has done to deserve the tortures he endures in the pit, nor does it deal with any of the religious or social implications of the Inquisition responsible for his imprisonment. It simply recounts, in excruciatingly exact detail, the step-by-step means by which the torturers try to break the protagonist's spirit and his own methodical attempts to escape each new horror that they put in his path.

Although "The Pit and the Pendulum" only focuses on one character, the reader actually discovers very little about him. We do not know his name, what he has done, whether he is guilty, whether he is a criminal, what he misses about life in the everyday world--in short, we know none of those things about the character that we might expect to learn if this were a novel in which a man spends several years in prison. Although such a lack of knowledge would make readers quickly lose interest if they were reading a novel, it is indeed all that it is necessary to know to become involved with Poe's short story. For this is not a realistic story of an individual human character caught in an unjust social system, but rather a nightmarish, symbolic story about every person's worst nightmare and an allegory of the most basic human situation and dilemma. Harry Levine has described the story as such an allegory, and David Hirsch has further argued that the character's situation embodies the modern existential experience: "the surface of Poe's world has broken and cracked, and man stands at the edge of the bottomless abyss."

The story is a Poe paradigm. Focusing on a character under sentence of death and aware of it, it moves the character into a concrete dilemma which seems to "stand for" a metaphysical situation in an ambiguous way that suggests its "dreamy,""indeterminate" nature. In this story we find the most explicit statement in Poe's fiction of his sense of the blurry line between dream and reality. The narrator considers that although when we awake even from the soundest sleep, "we break the gossamer web of some dream," the web is so flimsy that a second later we forget we have dreamed at all. However, sometimes, perhaps much later, memories of the details of the dream come back and we do not know where they have come from. This sense of having a memory of that which did not in fact occur is central to the story's ambiguity, for as the narrator tries to remember his experience, it is not clear whether the memory is of a real event or a dream event that has been forgotten.

He does not know in what state he is; the only thing he does know is that he is not dead, for he says "Such a supposition, notwithstanding what we read in fiction, is altogether inconsistent with real existence;--but where and in what state was I?" The narrator's task is simply to save himself, but in order to survive he must know where he is, and the first crucial task he undertakes is to try to orient himself. However, his efforts are complicated by his moving back and forth between sleep and waking; each time he falls asleep, he must reorient himself all over again. This explains why even after trying to demarcate his position, he awakes and, instead of going on forward, retraces his steps and thus overestimates the size of his cell.

Like the protagonist in "A Descent into the Maelstrom," he is preoccupied with curiosity about the mere physical nature of his surroundings, taking a "wild interest in trifles." However, in spite of his deliberative efforts, it is the accident of tripping that saves him from the pit the first time. Waking from another interlude of sleep, he is bound down, and this time above him is a picture of time, synonymous with death, carrying not the image of a scythe, but rather an actual pendulum which sweeps back and forth. In this situation, surrounded by the repulsive rats, with the scythe of time and thus death over his head, he again moves back and forth between the states of sensibility and insensibility.

This pattern of moving in and out of consciousness is typical of Poe, for in such an alternating state, consciousness has some of the characteristics of unconsciousness and vice versa; one state is imbued with the qualities of the other state. As a result, Poe's stories are neither solely like the consciousness of realism, nor the projective unconsciousness of romance. As the narrator totters on the brink of the pit, the walls rush back and an outstretched arm catches him as he falls. The ending is not an ending at all, but rather the beginning of waking life, the movement from the gossamer dream or nightmare which constitutes the story itself.

One of the most frequently asked questions at short story readings is: "Where did that story come from?" or "How did you get the idea for that story?" It's a perfectly legitimate question. Indeed, what other question can readers ask a writer about a story? Questions such as, "What does that story mean" or "What is that story about? "can only be answered, however tentatively, by readers, not writers. The question usually derives from the reader's sense that a story comes from "real life," which is usually more respected than "fiction." It often means, "O.K. I have heard your 'made-up' story; now tell me about the 'real' thing.

Because this is such an inevitable reader question, the O. Henry Prize Stories' appendix, "Writers on Their Work" and the Best American Short Stories'section "Contributor's Notes" usually focus primarily on writers talking about the source of their story. The following are the four most frequently-cited sources of the stories in both volumes. I will talk more about the stories in the next few weeks.

Beginning with Personal Experience

Sometimes, but certainly not always, stories come from personal experience. Louise Erdrich says that her story "Nero" (O. Henry) was based on the fact that her grandparents really did have a dog named Nero who was always escaping from the backyard. She also says the python experience in the story was based on actual experience, as was the fact that her grandfather wrestled for prize money in small farm towns in Iowa. But personal experience does not mean anything until it is made into a story. Erdrich says she did not know what to make of Nero until one morning when she was writing this story. Erdrich suggests that in the process of writing this story, she discovered it was about "existence, inevitability, and time."

Joyce Carol Oates, the consummate "profession" writer, seems to create stories out of everything she comes across, says her story "Mastiff" (BASS) derived from an actual experience when she and her husband went hiking in a canyon near Berkeley, California. She says the experience was so vivid and her emotions so intense, it was not difficult to write the story; she insists, however, that the story is fiction, "whatever its wellsprings in actual life."

One of the most common bits of advice often given to MFA candidates is, "Write about what you know." But that perhaps does not always work best. David Bradley ("You Remember the Pin Mill,"O. Henry) says he started out wanting to write about what he knew—the experience of black Americans," but changed his focus when his agent suggested, "Why not write about white people." When he wrote about a couple of white guys in a rural area of Western Pennsylvania both in love with the same woman drinking beer in a pickup, a magazine ran the story with an illustration depicting both men as black. Bradley notes, "Stereotypes and expectations apply to writers too."

Maura Stanton says her story "Oh, Shenandoah" (O. Henry) began with a personal experience of breaking a toilet seat in the apartment she was renting in Venice. When she tried to find a replacement, she realized what an absurd quest it was to try to find a toilet seat in a city full of glass and lace and masks and marbled paper. She thought this "unromantic side" of Venice might be interesting to write about. But this was just an anecdote, not a story. It was only when she came up with Marie's need to make a decision about Hugo and her recollection of hearing a chorus of college students singing "Shenandoah" once in Venice that she knew what to do with Hugo. Stanton says "once my invented world got untethered from the real world and started obeying its own laws," she was able to find the toilet seat; that is, she was able to discover what the story was about.

O.A. Lindsey, whose story "Evie M" (BASS) derives from his combat experience during Operation Desert Storm, says the gist of the story is a nontraditional soldier facing "postwar pinpricks and the anxiety related to each."

Will Mackin's story "Kattekoppen" (BASS)also stems from military (Navy) experience, this time in Afghanistan, in which he felt he never quite got his bearings and that every day was an exercise in crisis management.

Beginning with a Concept

It has always been my opinion that good short stories are usually about universal mysteries of human experience. Although this means that a short story is more often focused on theme than merely on plot or character, it does not necessarily mean that a short story writer begins with a theme or idea and then develops plot and character to embody that theme. Indeed, such a tactic is apt to create a static "illustration"—at its most extreme an exemplum or a story with a moral.

However, sometimes a story does begin with a concept. For example in BASS, Charles Baxter's story "Charity" is one of a series of stories Baxter conceived on virtues and vices. Baxter had a story in last year's BASS entitled "Bravery." Both stories will appear with others in a new book due out in February 2015 entitled There's Something I Want You To Do.The interrelated stories, featuring characters that appear and reappear, are in two sections--one devoted to virtues (“Bravery,” “Loyalty,” “Chastity,” “Charity,” and “Forbearance”) and the other to vices (“Lust,” “Sloth,” “Avarice,” “Gluttony,” and “Vanity”).

The problem with such an approach, as Peter Cameron ("After the Flood,"BASS), observes, is, what might called, the exemplum effect. Cameron says that since he does not write short stories very much anymore, he has to give himself some assignment or problem to solve in order to "jump-start" a story, hoping that such a "forced inception" won't weaken the story, that the story will "transcend its deliberateness."

Molly McNett says her story "La Pulchra Nota" (BASS) began as a contemporary story about a high school choir director falling in love with his student's beautiful voice, but then she found a text on singing that mentioned the theory of la pulchra nota, about teaching from the perfect note by Medieval music theorist Jerome of Moravia. Her story began to come together when she decided to put the story in that era. Then she came across a story of a man who lost his whole family in a month and still maintained his faith and trust in God. She says she wanted her voice teacher to have that kind of faith though she can't claim to share or fully understand it.

Nell Freudenberger's story "Hover" (BASS) began with the notion of a mother who could fly---not like superwoman, but rather sort of a gentle lift off the ground to hover in an awkward, unplanned, useless sort of way.

Chinelo Okparanta says her story "Fairness" (O. Henry) began with wanting to explore an issue she observed in women in East and Southeast Asia of women of a certain class wanting to keep their skin color light. The issue she explored, she says, however, was about loyalty and betrayal across social strata, not about skin bleaching.

Beginning with an Obsession

Some stories begin with an obsession, either a general obsessive focus of the writer or a particular event or observation that haunts the writer.

Allison Alsup ("Old Houses,"O. Henry) tells about learning of an unsolved double murder of a wife and daughter in her neighborhood when she was a child. She was friends with a girl who lived in the house of the suspected murderer, a teenage boy. She and the girl thought the house was haunted. She says she was never able to reconcile that violence with the peacefulness of her street and felt compelled to write the story "in order to discover its potential significance." "Writers are negotiators," says Alsup, "hashing out ideas until seemingly opposite camps can sit at the same table and come to some sort of understanding."

Craig Davidson ("Medium Tough,"BASS)says he is always interested in characters who are physically and emotionally broken; he says he likes characters who keep on trucking despite what life throws at them. He says he is not sure why he is drawn to such characters, although he thinks perhaps a therapist could.

Kristen Iskandrian says "The Inheritors," (O. Henry) revolves around some of her pet obsessions, the most fundamental of which is the "multilayered entity of the female friends, and wanted the "fumbling bloom of a relationship" be the story's "pulse." She chose a consignment store as the primary setting because she likes the "sentimental mess of things disowned and things reclaimed, an orphanage for objects." In such a place, she says her characters reveal their disparate desires and "inscribe one another."

Beginning with an Image

Often stories begin with an image. Olivia Clare ("Petur,"O. Henry) says that when she lived in Iceland in 2010 for a short time, she saw the land covered with ash from the eruption of a volcano and imagined "a preternatural mother venturing out into an eerie scrim of ash"; almost before realizing what had happened, she imagined the woman meeting someone.

David Gates says his story "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me" (BASS) began with an image--not one he remembered, but rather one a friend remembered of seeing Gates playing mandolin in a coffeehouse in New Haven when he was a high school kid. He says he recalls a fellow student at Bard College with a TR-6, and the death of the mandolin play in the story shares some details of the death of his father. He once kept chickens and he is a student of nineteenth-century British novels. Thus the story is a patchwork of many different things that seem to "come together" meaningfully.

Dylan Landis ("Trust,"O. Henry) says it was an image of a teenager sneaking though her father's filing cabinet that sparked the story of Rainey Royal digging around and spotting her hated middle name on her birth certificate—a "fishhook that snags everything she finds unlovable in herself. The second image—which Landis says surprised her--was a gun tucked between file folders. Landis says she believes if you "root in the basement of the mind and grasp and object in the muck, your subconscious put it there for a reason." Landis says that as she wrote the story she had no idea how it would end, noting, "With every story I write, I like finding my endings in the muck of the basement too."

Mark Haddon ("The Gun,"O. Henry) says "Good stories seem to come from some weird zone it's impossible to access in retrospect. "After all," he says, "if we knew how they came into being they'd be a damn sight easier to write." He says he only knows he had been "haunted" for a long time by the image of two boys pushing a pram containing a dead deer across the highway several miles from where he lives. He says he has no idea where the image came from, only that it had a particular charge and stuck with him. Haddon says the story contains several elements that keep cropping up in his writing, including a locale that might be described as "grubby, liminal, unloved places that are neither town nor country, whose ownership is dubious and that are never en route to anywhere," but, he adds, that might "just be portals to somewhere else altogether."

Stephen O'Connor says "Next to Noting" (BASS)would not have been written if it were not for Hurricane Irene. However, he says the "real inspiration" for the story was an image that just popped into his head of two sisters with black pageboy haircuts and eyes pale blue like the moon. When he started developing the image, he realized that wo sisters were entirely lacking in "fellow feeling," and consummately rational. When he realized that this seemed parallel with nature, he knew he would have the two women face Hurricane Irene—all of which became a means by which he could explore his longtime notion that although he is an atheist there are certain things he wants to believe that cannot be sustained by rational interpretation.

All of the Above

Of course, most stories combine all four of these "sources," as the writer engages in a dynamic process of discovery "about" something mysteriously human. The story's relationship to "real life" is usually more complex than the question about where the story comes from assumes and can only be discovered by the reader's engaging in a close reading of the fictional life of the story.

You may be wondering why after rapid-fire postings at the beginning of May (Short-Story Month, according to some bloggers), I once again disappeared for a few weeks.

The reason being:

After returning from the Canadian Literature Symposium on Alice Munro at the University of Ottawa campus, my wife and I rushed down to Tucson, Arizona for my younger daughter's being hooded for a Ph.D. degree in English, and two-weeks of helping her pack up her house for a move back to Southern California, where her husband has landed a full-time job at Saddleback College teaching math. No job yet for my daughter, for literature is not in such demand as math. Go figure!

A few words about the Ottawa conference, where I had the honor of delivering one of the keynote addresses on Alice Munro:

The conference was held over two and a half days at the University of Ottawa campus, where the two organizers of the Symposium, Gerald Lynch and Janice Fiamengo, make their academic home. It was attended by sixty or so academic scholars, critics, writers, and editors familiar with Munro's work over the years,

Among the highlights was the other keynote speaker, Robert Thacker of St. Lawrence University in New York state, author of the authoritative biography Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Bob Thacker knows more about Munro and her work than anyone. His presentation, focusing on the arc of her work from the story "Walker Brothers Cowboy" to her final collection Dear Life, regaled the audience with information and insights that only Bob Thacker would know. He was consulted many times during the weekend as a dynamic resource for all things Munro.

Bob was invited because he is the expert on Alice Munro. I was invited because I know a bit about the short story, and, as I suggested to the audience, when you talk about Alice Munro, inevitably you talk about the short story—which I did.

Among the many interesting and provocative papers presented during the weekend, another high point for me was a panel on the career of Munro, featuring Virginia Barber, Munro's long time agent and friend; Ann Close, a senior editor at Alfred Knopf Publishing; Douglas Gibson, another long-time Munro friend and her Canadian editor; and Daniel Menaker, one of the editors at The New Yorker for many years when Munro was publishing there.

Although these four provided some interesting factual information about Munro's career, including contracts and sales, the most engaging part of the panel was hearing from the four people who were the most important in helping Munro establish her career. Barber said she and Close were working on preparing a second Selected Storiesof Munro's work. Barber said that Munro's final collection Dear Life got a big boost after the Nobel Prize award, selling 400,000 copies and being licensed in forty different countries. Ann Close added that the new uniform paperback series put out by Vintage after the Nobel win has sold over 400,000 copies, and Dear Life has sold an additional 200,000 copies in paperback. I was grateful that four such important people, people who affectionately call Munro "Alice," were willing to attend and share personal anecdotes about their relationship with her.

Some other observations and reactions to the presentations: The opening panel of "Writers' Appreciations" featured Steven Heighton of Kingston, Ontario; Robert McGill of U. of Toronto, Lisa Moore of St. John's NL, and Aritha Van Herk of U. of Calgary. I particularly liked Heighton's description of Munro's stories as being "holographic," that is, not linear and not flatly two-dimensional, but rather viewable from multiple in-depth angles simultaneously—metonymic in the sense that the whole was embedded in each part.

Other presenters discussed the stories Munro wrote when she was a student at U. of Western Ontario; her use of multiple points of view; The View from Castle Rock as a story cycle; the theme of invasion; teaching Munro's stories in Slovenia; the use of letters in her stories,; and the use of memorized poems. The latter was particularly interesting to the audience, for it evoked issues of recitation as a means of linking generations, as well as the significance of embedding rhythms in the mind. One of the final presentations was a provocative piece by well-known Munro expert Magdalene Redekop of U. of Toronto, about Munro's stories "Lichen," in which Munro is seen as the prototypical storyteller—Scherazade.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the presentations of two professors from the U. of Toronto who are well-known for their light-hearted approach to the serious business of studying and teaching great literature—Dennis Duffy and Tim Struthers. Dennis did a lively presentation on Munro's story "Too Much Happiness," and Tim did what he called a tribute to "the only voice" of Alice Munro, ending with a memorable quote from the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry.

It was a pleasurable conference, with no rancor, no posturing, no academic egos—just genuine love for the work of a Canadian—indeed an international—treasure, who if there is any justice in the world, should singlehandedly rescue the short story from its second-class status.

In my last post, I commented on the four most frequently-cited "sources" of stories in the 2014 BASS and O. Henry. Here are a few others:

"Ripped From the Headlines"

T. C. Boyle, always the consummate professional writer, usually seems quite "deliberate" in constructing his stories from material "ripped from the headlines." He says his story "The Night of the Satellite"(BASS) is about his awareness of our increasingly cluttered sky and is built around his common structural device of slamming two different scenarios together to see what will result. For a professional writer like Boyle the job is to "make a story," and Boyle makes them out of whatever strikes him, often news items ripped from the headlines (or snipped from the back pages.)

Stories sometimes come from something the author has read or seen on television or the Internet. Colleen Morrissey says her story "Good Faith," (O. Henry) began with her watching a BBC documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church whose hateful anti-gay, anti-Semitic rhetoric she says holds a "train-wreck fascination." She felt there was an uneasiness in the young people about what they were saying. She coincidentally read two pieces about snake-handling and began thinking about how such an act was both empowering and self-hating. She says what she wanted to capture in the story was the tension between power and surrender.

Poetic Rhythm

Benjamin Nugent's story "God" (BASS) began with a poem written by one of his creative writing students in which a guy prematurely ejaculated while having sex with her. When he told his fraternity brothers about the poem, they started calling her God. Nugent says one day the first sentence of the story came to him and he liked the sound of its iambic pentameter rhythm.

This notion of stories beginning with a rhythm is a fairly common idea. Most recently, I ran across it in the Nov. 2, 2014 Los Angeles Timesreview/interview with Denis Johnson. Johnson says: "When I write, I don't think in terms of themes—or think in any terms, really. I'm making what T.S. Eliot called 'quasi-musical' decisions I'm just improvising and adapting, and in that case I suspect the story's course reflects the process of trying to make it…. I get in a teacup and start paddling across the little pond and say 'In seven weeks, I'll land on Mars.' Five years later I'm still going in circles. When I reach the shore in spitting distance of where I started, it's a colossal triumph."

The T. S. Eliot citation is from a letter to critic Cleanth Brooks, T.S. Eliot observed: "Reading your essay made me feel, for instance, that I had been much more ingenious than I had been aware of, because the conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing are more those of a quasi-musical nature, in the arrangement of metric and pattern, than of a conscious exposition of ideas."

Lauren Goff says that a story arrives for her either as a flash or as a slow "underground confluence of separate fixations. She says "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"(BASS) is of the latter type. She says that fiction writers should read poetry as often as they read fiction and that this story springs from reading John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" every morning. The first line of the poem gave her the title of her story.

Gimmicks

Although Karen Russell has not been at the writing business as long as T. C. Boyle has, she also is unashamed about creating stories out of "what if" ideas ripped from her reading. She says she sometimes thinks it is liberating to commit to a premise that seems "too goofy to work.""Madame Bovary's Greyhound" (BASS), a story about falling out of love, uses the point of view of the dog belonging Flaubert's fictional character. It is a gimmick, a bit of fun, that allows Russell to pay homage to Flaubert by echoing some of his meticulous language and to upend the usual assumption about a dog's complete devotion by having this dog abandon his famous fictional owner.

Joshua Ferris says he wrote his story "The Breeze" (BASS) entirely on his iPhone. He says he is not sure why, that maybe he just finds the pain of this laborious process fitting. "But the real answer is this," he says, "I wish I could tell you why I write at all."

Sometimes stories are experiments with technique. Stephen Dixon ("Talk,"O. Henry) says his story came to him when he was sitting on a bench in front of the Episcopal church across the street from his house with a copy of Gilgameshhe was planning to read. He came up with the first line of "Talk," and wrote it as an experiment in shifting point of view from first person to third person.

Beginning with a Genre

Some stories begin with a genre. Chanelle Benz ("West of the Known,"O. Henry) says she originally wanted to write a "literary western," but after introducing some of the characters, she knew she had "blood on the page," a saying she says nobody likes but her, but which best describes when she knows "a story's come alive" and she has characters who "can hurt me with their failings, longings, and loss."

Michael Parker sees his story "Deep Eddy" (O. Henry) as a "flash fiction" or "short story." Thus genre initiated the story, but because short shorts are often like prose poems, it is the music of the words "Deep Eddy," that he says "spawned the story." He creates a brackish backwoods river tainted by legend and sacred to teenagers because it is off-limits, said to be haunted or cursed. He says he dropped the boy and girl into the bottomless swirl of the water and then found other images (and this is indeed a story of images) to "convey what every story I know worth reading is, on some level, about: the sweet, desperate, and inevitable currents of desire.

A Note on Desire

Parker's comment about "desire" being the source of stories may come from Robert Olen Butler's frequently cited suggestion, in his book From Where You Dream. Butler says that yearning seems to be at the very center of fiction as an art form, citing Buddhist thought that human beings cannot exist for even thirty seconds without desiring something. He says yearning is reflected in one of the most fundamental craft points in fiction: plot. "Because plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted." Butler says, "if there is a unified field theory of yearning in fiction it is: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe."

In the Nov. 2, 2014, issue of the Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel The Laughing Monsters. He also cited some of the email conversation he had with Johnson. Ulin says Johnson sees literature as a way of framing or reckoning with the chaos of a universe we can never understand.

Johnson: "I can't remember very many situations where I had even the tiniest idea of what the heck was going on." Johnson says from time to time he seizes on a philosophy or perspective that helps him hide his bewilderment for a tie before it falls apart and leaves him baffled again. He is now reading Zen Buddhism: According to Buddhism, he says, "Unsatisfied desire is life's bedrock experience."

Parts of Novels

Some stories are parts of novels or beginnings of novels. Halina Duraj says "Fatherland" (O. Henry) actually resulted from his being asked to give a reading, and wanting to read from a novel he was working on, he could not find a section that would stand alone. Consequently, he chose a few short sections and then others that would provide context, which then seemed to call for still other sections. Thus, the story is a "distillation" from the novel Duraj was working on.

Although it clearly stated in the book that the O. Henry Prize Stories will not consider stories that are sections of novels, Tessa Hadley says right up front that "Valentine" is an excerpt from her novel Cover Girl, although, she says the novel was written "very deliberately" as a series of episodes that could stand alone like short stories. Hadley says this corresponds to something she feels about experience in time. "We like to think of our experiences as having the overarching shape and drive of a novel, but actually life more usually happens in fragments and stretches—when change comes it's often as if we start off on a completely new narrative track, forgetting our former selves."

Dylan Landis'"Trust" is a section from her novel, Rainey Royal, which was published by Soho Press in September, 2014. The book description on Amazon promotes the book by noting that Landis won a 2014 O. Henry Prize for "a section of this novel." So, what's the answer? Does the O. Henry Prize editor "consider" sections of novels or does it not?

I have been living with the 2014 Best American Short Stories and the 2014 O. Henry Prize Stories for the past several weeks, and I am sorry to say it has been a lackluster relationship. Of the forty stories in the two collections, I was impressed by very few. I don't know why the stories seem so ordinary this year.

Are the hundreds of stories that the two editors, Laura Furman and Heidi Pitlor, had to choose from really so bland and predictable that these are the "best" they could find? Were the editors restricted by editorial decisions to make the two collections as bland and "readable" and "accessible" as possible? Have I read so many stories over the years that I have become crotchety and hard to please? I don't know.

Whatever the reason, here are my thumbnail comments on the twenty stories in the O. Henry Prize Stories: 2014. I will post my comments on the twenty stories in Best American Short Stories: 2014 next week.

In "The Gun" by Mark Haddon, two young boys—one somewhat passive, one somewhat aggressive--sneak out of the house with a gun and encounter a deer. You can pretty well predict this is going to be an initiation story involving violence, death, and coming of age—although it is never clear why coming of age has to involve violence and death.

Although Stephen Dixon's "Talk" is a story about a man coping with the death of his wife, it is actually a story about point of view, in which Dixon alternates between the man using "I" and "he" to refer to his thoughts and actions. There's also some literary allusions to Gilgamesh, that iconic "oldest literary work." I suppose one could make something of how we "objectify" ourselves, shift outside ourselves to become an "I" observing our self as a "him," but I am not sure the story makes the effort worthwhile.

Tessa Hadley's "Valentine" is about two 15-year-old British girls with breasts—one small, one luscious—whose talk is "rococo with insincerity." Into their lives comes a boy named Valentine with a swaggering walk and a chin like a faun. The narrator, the one with the small breasts, says his proximity "licked" at her "like a flame." I almost stopped reading at that point. And almost stopped again when she says she read Plato about two souls divided at birth and thinks of herself and Valentine. There's some hot hands-in-the-pants sex, a jealous English teacher, some poetry allusions and a bit of a portrait of the artist as a young woman. All very predictable teeny-silly romance.

Olivia Clare's "Petur" is mainly about "place," in this case a particularly ghostly place in Iceland when the volcano erupts and scatters ash all over everything. It's a mother/son story (she is 61; he is 36)—he gets older and she seems to get younger. There are references to a "land of ash" or "ashland," and being trapped in a volcano. And then she meets a man named Petur. The story exists primarily for the setting of ashland; indeed there would be no story without it.

David Bradley, "You Remember the Pin Mill." This is a second-person "You remember" story—a phrase which begins most paragraphs. Most of the "you remembers" are about the narrator's childhood living in the country with his grandfather, who says such things as "And they found a beloved country, rich with game and fish and timber…" There's some mother/son conflict, some race issues, some lost father problems; but mainly it is about "remembering," which is all well and good, but does tend to get a bit tedious over and over and over and over again.

Kristin Valdez Quade, "Nemecia" is a better "two young girls" story than Tessa Hadley's. But I have already posted a blog on this story, which you can find, if you are of a mind, by doing a search here.

Dylan Landis, "Trust." Still another "two young girls" story, this time a chapter from Landis's Rainey novel. There is also a gun in this story, but the violence so foregrounded in Mark Haddon's story exists here as ominous threat that plays out as a dangerous game. There is kidnapping, intimidation, swaggering, posturing, etc., but since this is a chapter from a novel, you are mainly interested in what shenanigans that rascal Rainey is going to be up to next.

Allison Alsup, "Old Houses" is a sort of ghost story about a killing that took place in one of the houses 30 years ago in this peaceful neighborhood; it haunts the narrator because it is still unsolved. It's a short, lyric story with an evocative tone of mystery and fascination. But about what? Other than the puzzle of how such a thing could have happened here.

Halina Duraj, "Fatherland." The place is Poland, and the time is that of the Nazi persecution of the Poles. The story is about memories of growing up in that context. No tricks of "remembering" as in the David Bradley story—just the marvel at how the father, who suffered the labor camps and the mother who was hit by a truck survived all that and raised a family.

Chanelle Benz, "West of the Known." The interest here is the voice of the 15-year-old Lavinia who tells the story, who moves from saying such things as "disremember" and "brung" to uttering such poetic lines as "The dark of the Texas plain was a solid thing, surrounding, collecting on my face like blue dust." She and her brother rob banks, and she shoots a young teller. It ends in an abandoned stable with a noose thrown over the rafters.

William Trevor, "The Women." Now finally here is a story with some seriousness. But I have already written a blog about it, which might interest you. Do a Search over on the right.

Colleen Morrissey, "Good Faith." Snake-handling and religious fervor in mid America in 1919. The central first-person voice is that of a 20-year old woman who has a momentary faltering of fear and gets bitten. It's primarily a period piece about faith and fundamentalism.

Robert Anthony Siegel, "The Right Imaginary Person." A love story, which, like most love stories, involves one who loves and one who does not. Here, the lover is a young American man in Japan, who becomes involved with a young Japanese woman who writes. He is relatively straightforward; she is relatively conflicted and complex. The relationship will never work.

Louise Erdrich, "Nero." This is a "I remember" story combined with a bit of doggy violence. It's a more complex story than Joyce Carol Oates' dog story in BASS. The first-person narrator is a 7-year-old girl. The dog's name is "Nero," and he is a mystery of lust and hunger, which echoes the violence and desire that the young girl witnesses in humans as well. It is all pretty predictable.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, "A Golden Light." The extended metaphor of this very short, lyrical story is that when a young woman's father dies, she shuts down her responses to the world—first by being unable to talk, and then having difficulty moving. We don't know how old she is, but the many references to "when she was a child" suggest she is a grown woman, although her thoughts—"I've misplaced my ears, she thought, and tried to remember if she had put them on that morning or had simply gone out without them"—suggest a child's response. This autistic withdrawal—a sort of "Sleeping Beauty" syndrome"—suddenly ends one evening—"the magic hour" of sundown—when her room is bathed in a mysterious flickering light—which turns out to be a child next door with a mirror. A story about the reaction to grief. For a more powerful one, read Chekhov's "Misery" or Mansfield's "The Fly." This one is too easy and too predictable it seems to me.

Chinelo Okparanta, "Fairness"—Another obvious metaphor, this time of young African women bleaching their skin to become "fair," for all the young women want to look like the models in Cosmopolitan. One of the young women uses the ordinary household bleach, with painful results. The social commentary is underlined at the end when the young first-person narrator is envious of her sister's burned skin, because beneath the scabs she is pinkish and thus has wound up with fairness after all, "if only for a while." Social message, too easy.

Kristen Iskandrian, "The Inheritors." The narrator of the story volunteers to work in a thrift shop and meets another woman who interests her. And it is the nature of this interest that constitutes the reader's interest in the story. If I were still teaching, my students would think this is a story about latent homosexuality (whatever that is). But it is not as "simple" as that; the narrator's attraction to the other woman is not merely sexual or merely "romantic," but something else. The narrator says the woman reminds her of a painting she remembers from her childhood of a woman waiting for a train. Since her face is not seen in the painting, the narrator is fascinated by the painting. The narrator says she wants to "unravel" the woman she has met, find a loose thread and pull at it. I think this story has something to do with the mystery of relationships between women, and because I think I understand it only inchoately, this is one of my favorite stories in the O. Henry collection this year. This is James Lasdun's favorite story also. I would like to think that is because he is the best short-story writer of the three judges this year.

Michael Parker, "Deep Eddy." This is a "short short"—only a couple of pages long and therefore by necessity lyrical, compressed, suggestive, and perhaps a bit pretentious. A couple go park at a legendary lover's rendezvous after seeing the Meryl Streep movie of a dingo dog carrying off a baby. The "piece" ends with a montage image of swirling water to suggest the mystery of love and sex. It's carefully done, as such small things must be, but not particularly poetically profound, as such things should be.

Maura Stanton, "Oh Shenandoah"—The gimmick is that a woman and a man with whom she is involved search through Venice--that romantic city of old, valuable, artsy things—for a toilet seat for her apartment. You realize pretty quickly that the story's human plot/theme is the woman's gradual discovery that the man, Hugo, is not only a pretty nice guy, but also a real romantic in a corny ordinary way. All wired together in a predictable, old-fashioned Collier's fashion.

Laura van den Berg, "Opa-Locka." This is judge Joan Silber's favorite story, and I'll be darned if I know why. Silber says what she likes about it is that kept surprising her, that it gave her great pleasure to follow the story down several different paths. But I don't see any different paths, except the most obvious kind of plot paths in this story of two sisters who play detective, all the while trying to come to terms with the relatively simple mystery of their father. Silber says it is deceptively skilled. If so, it deceived me.

I like the editing method of Best American Short Stories better than the method of O. Henry Prize Stories. In the latter, the 20 stories depend solely on the taste and judgment of Laura Furman, and I don't always understand her judgment. In the BASS, Heidi Pitlor picks 120 stories and then turns the batch over to an independent judge, usually a fiction writer, to choose the final 20. Since the guest judge differs each year, the reader gets some variety. I really liked the selection Elizabeth Strout chose for the 2103 edition of BASS.

But although I enjoyed Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, I was not impressed with her selection in this year's BASS. I thought too many of the stories depended on "ripped from the headlines" newsworthy content, simple concepts, or technique tricks. Oh, well, next year is another year, and regardless of how I felt abou this year's batch of stories, I will look forward to the 2015 editions of Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. Here are my ho-hum reactions to the 20 stories chosen by Jennifer Egan in this year's BASS.

"Charity" by Charles Baxter focuses on a young gay man named Matty Quinn who has come back from working in Ethiopia with infections that get him started taking painkillers. He lives in a basement apartment in Minneapolis, but his boyfriend lives in Seattle. When his painkillers run out, he mugs and robs a man to buy more, for which he feels guilt. Part I of the story ends with his disappearance. The second part of the story is told in first person by the Seattle boyfriend, who has just told/written the first part of the story. He comes to Minneapolis and finds homeless Matty living on the riverbank. After cleaning him up, Harry, the boyfriend, beats up Matty's drug dealer and takes Matty back to Seattle and sets him up in an apartment. a simple plot-based story that depends on "ripped from the headlines" prescription drug abuse, African poverty, and homosexuality.

Anne Beattie, "The Indian Uprisin." The most famous story with this title is by Donald Barthelme. The only indication that Beattie may have had it in mind is the opening disclaimer by one of the characters in her story: "There's no copyright on titles. It wouldn't be a good idea, probably, to call something Death of a Salesman, but you could do it." The story is largely made up of witty dialogue with literary allusions between the female narrator and a seventy-year diabetic man who was once her creative writing professor. While they are eating in a Mexican restaurant, she sees blood on her old professor's foot and faints. When his receptionist, a postoperative transgender, comes to take him to the hospital, he takes a Mexican hat off the wall and puts it on, prompting someone to say, "There might be an Indian uprising if we stop him.". The story ends with the narrator telling us that the professor refused dialysis and died. Heeding her professor's last bit of advice to find something to write about after he is dead, the narrator says, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story." And it is this story--not a great story, but Anne Beattie-clever as usual. I don't see any thematic connection between the story and the Barthelme story. Perhaps Beattie had a personal connection in mind.

The voice we hear in Peter Cameron's "After the Flood" is that of an elderly woman who "writes" the story in a rambling, casual manner, with numerous asides. The story begins with the woman's minister, Reverend Judy, coming to ask the narrator and her husband if they will temporarily take in the Djukanovics, a family whose house and belongings have been destroyed by a flood. Something has happened in the past to the narrator's daughter, Alice, but she does not talk/write about that even. In a final conversation between the narrator and the minister, we get hints that the narrator's daughter and her own daughter Laila have been killed by the son-in-law because of financial losses. The story ends with the narrator and her husband deciding not to go to church any more. For a famous version of a similar "Displaced Person" story that deals more complexly with loss, charity, and faith, see Flannery O'Connor's story of that name. Cameron's story perhaps depends too much on a "ripped from the headlines" murder and a too simple treatment of loss of faith.

T.C.Boyle, "The Night of the Satellite." This couple-conflict story focuses on two English graduate students. On the way to a friend's farmhouse, they encounter another couple having what the central male character calls "a lover's quarrel." The central female character wants to help the young woman in the quarrel; the man does not. This leads to clashes between the two, which is cranked up even more in the evening when they go to bar and run into the couple again. While they are quarreling out in a dark field later that night, a small piece of mesh falls from the sky and hits the man on the shoulder. He finds out online that a NASA satellite had fallen out of orbit, scattering some debris; but his girlfriend thinks it is just from a tractor or a lawnmower and throws it away. The first-person narrator drives away from the farmhouse and sees the quarreling couple once again, still fighting. He thinks that they can go on "careering around the world on any orbit they wanted just as long as it never intersected mine again." He calls his girlfriend, but she is still angry with him, so he hangs up, thinking that he wanted to say was that he would be back and that she should look up in the sky "where the stars burn and the space junk roams, because you never can tell what's going to come down next." This is a simple story based on a single metaphor of accidental stuff out of nowhere that sometimes exposes character weaknesses and incompatibilities—right out of 1001 Nights.

Nicole Cullen, "Long Tom Lookout" begins with the central character, Lauren, being given responsibility for caring for her husband's 5-year-old son Jonah after the child's mother is sent to jail for drug possession and the father is on an oil spill skimming vessel on the Gulf of Mexico. Insisting that she has no intention of being the boy's mother, she drives to Idaho and takes a job with the Forest Service as a fire Lookout. You know that being stuck on a lookout tower with the boy in the forest, there will be some sort of crisis and Lauren will feel a commitment to the child. Sure enough, that's what happens.

Craig Davidson, "Medium Tough." The gimmick in this first-person pov story by a doctor is the heavy dependence on technical language of ailments, procedures, medical devices, and the good doctor's flippant use of the tools of his trade. A good dictionary would be helpful here, but is it worth it? One character says to the narrator, "I love it when you talk shop." You will have to love the shop talk also to get through this story. But then the story would not exist without it.

Joshua Ferris, "The Breeze"—This is a "What do you want to do tonight?"/"I dunno. What do you want to do" story. This "much ado about nothing" story is held together quasi-poetically and supposedly meaningfully by the metaphor of the "breeze" of the title. The woman is enraptured by the breeze and it isn't in him to feel such things. And, so it goes, or doesn't go, as they continue to query, "What do you want to do?"/ "I dunno. What do you want to do?" A New Yorker story in the old bad way.

Nell Freudenberger, "Hover"—An easy, trivial, single-read story about a mother who, against her will, hovers slightly above the ground. It only happens when she is doing "mom stuff," and so this is what it signifies—doing mom stuff.

David Gates, "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me"—I have to admit that I found this story about an English professor who teaches the Victorian novel and his friendship with a father-figure mandolin-picker of bluegrass music who is dying of cancer hard to resist. But then I am an English professor from Eastern Kentucky who loves bluegrass music and wrote his dissertation on Thomas Hardy. What's your excuse?

Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"—The story begins in good old David Copperfield novelistic fashion—"Jude was born in a cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles." Now, all Groff has to do is invent what happened to this child whose father is a crazy snake-raiser and whose mother runs away. If I were to summarize the story, you would think I was summing up a novel that ends with a man who escapes the "hungry darkness."

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, "The Judge's Will"—O.K. here's the situation: A Delhi judge has a heart attack, his second, and decides he must tell his wife about the provisions in his will for the woman he has been keeping for 25 years. When she finds out he wants her to meet the woman, she takes it rather well, for she does not love him, and is only concerned with her son, who is more like a brother to her than a son. When the woman begins visiting the house on a regular basis, the relationships between the four all become like what the son says is an "old-fashioned French farce." A plot-based 1001 Nights type story that is fun, but not fulfilling.

O. A. Lindsey, "Evie M."—This is a first-person pov story in the form of notes taken by a veteran of one of the recent wars in the Middle East. Although the narrator imagines ejaculating and a colleague makes a reference to sucking the narrator's dick, it seems relatively clear that the narrator is a female with a female lover and is suffering some form of post-traumatic stress, the story ending with a suicide attempt. More "ripped from the headlines."

Will Mackin, "Kattekoppen"—An American soldier in Afghanistan regularly gets a childhood favorite Dutch licorice from his mother, for she does not know that he no longer likes the candy. In fact no one likes the candy, so it stays on a shelf, becoming valued only when the narrator uses it to mask the smell of a decomposing ambushed comrade. You gotta like war stories to like this one.

Brendan Mathews, "This is Not a Love Song." In his comments on this story, Mathews says it was busted until he discovered the point of view he needed to make it work. The pov he uses is a series of photographs focusing on a female rock singer with whom the narrator/photographer went to high school and with whom she is so obsessed that friends think they are lesbians. The story depends largely on the photo pov.

Molly McNett, "La Pulchra Nota"—The center of this story of a14th century music teacher is his understanding of la pulchra nota—the moment that music comes closest to perfection: "La pulchra nota is the moment of beauty absolute, but what follows—a pause, however small—is the realization of its passing. Perhaps no perfection is without this silent realization." This is Isak Dinesen type fable of disfigurement, loss, denial, religious obsession, sin, and punishment.

Benjamin Nugent, "God"—The first sentence sums up the story: "He called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends." If you were in a college fraternity, you may appreciate this story. I was not.

Joyce Carol Oates, "Mastiff." I read this story when it first appeared in The New Yorker. Every time I read a new Joyce Carol Oates story, I try to like her, but God help me, I cannot. She makes it look so easy. And in most cases that's what the story is—easy. Joyce Carol Oates can make a story out of everything. And it seems she does. For Oates, anything—such as a man being attacked by a huge dog—can mean something—that is, if, like Oates, you know how to make a story.

Stephen O'Connor—"Next to Nothing"—Two sisters, sociologists, are caught in Hurricane Irene. I made the mistake of reading O'Connor's "contributor's notes" on this story before reading the story—a mistake because I liked the notes better than I did the story. O'Connor suggests the story is about the complex paradox that even though he is an atheist, he must live by faith—"not in spiritual terms, but in the sense that in order to be a happy and decent human being" he must cherish beliefs that can never be verified. Intriguing idea that catches my imagination. The story not so much.

Karen Russell, "Madame Bovary's Greyhound"—I have posted blogs on Russell's two collections of stories St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Groves. You can do a search over to the right of this and see what you think. The basic problem I have with Russell's new story is the same I had with her previous ones—they are concept stories—fun to read for their imaginative inventions, but lacking in depth. In this one, it helps if you have read Flaubert

Laura van den Berg, "Antarctica." I liked this story of a woman who comes to Antarctica to find out about the death of her brother, not because it was the longest, but because it was the most ambitious in its exploration of the mystery of being human. No tricks, no self-conscious gimmicks here, just an honest exploration of why people do the inexplicable things they do.

Back in May, when I participated in the Alice Munro Symposium at the University of Ottawa, I asked Munro's U.S. publisher and U.S. agent if there were plans to publish a Collected Storiesof Alice Munro. They said there were so many stories (139) a single volume would be too big, and multi-volume sets were not great sellers. However, they did say they were working on a volume of selected stories published since the 1997 Selected Stories—1968-1994, containing twenty-eight stories from Munro's first seven collections. They said they had a great title for the new volume, Family Furnishings, which was the title of a story that appeared in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in 2001. Family Furnishings: Selected Stories—1995-2014, Munro's final book, if we take her at her word that she has retired, came out in early November in the U.S. It contains twenty-four stories.

Since the table of contents is not posted on Amazon, or anywhere else I can find, as a public service to my readers, here is the TOC of Family Furnishings, including the titles of the volumes where the stories originally appeared in book form.

The Love of a Good Woman (1998)

"The Love of a Good Woman"

"Jakarta"

"The Children Stay"

"My Mother's Dream"

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)

"Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"

"Family Furnishings"

"Post and Beam"

"The Bear Came Over the Mountain"

Runaway (2004)

"Runaway"

"Soon"

"Passion"

The View From Castle Rock (2006)

"The View From Castle Rock"

"Working for a Living"

"Hired Girl"

"Home"

Too Much Happiness (2009)

"Dimensions"

"Wood"

"Child's Play"

"Too Much Happiness"

Dear Life" (2012)

"To Reach Japan"

"Amundsen"

"Train"

"The Eye"

"Dear Life"

I don't know who was responsible for the selections in Family Furnishings. I suspect Munro, in consultation with her Knopf editors, made the choices. Nobody asked me, but I would have made some different choices. Just to single out two, I would have liked to have seen "Wenlock Edge" from Too Much Happinessand "Corrie" from Dear Life.

Because these stories have all appeared in separate volumes, which were widely reviewed in America, Canada, and England, I did not expect there to be new reviews of Family Furnishings. And indeed, a search of Lexis-Nexis turned up only a brief notice on Kirkus and only full reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. The Chroniclereview is by Molly Antopol, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and now a creative writing lecturer at Stanford, author of a collection of stories, The UnAmericans. It is a routine praise piece, providing no insight other than that Munro disdains literary rules and gives us complicated characters capable of both kindness and cruelty.

David Ulin, book critic for the LA Times, is also at a loss for words in his attempt to account for what makes Munro the great writer she is, content with an agreement with Jane Smiley in the Foreword that Munro's stories promise no drama or transcendence, but rather domestic reflections of reality—whatever that is. "Such a line between reality and fiction, life and literature," says Ulin, "seems especially the province of the short-story writer, who can work by inference in a way novelists cannot."

Ulin does not bother to explain what he means by the line between reality and fiction or how inference in the short form walks that line better than the novel. That would have been helpful. I do think that Ulin is right when he says that Munro's characters tell stories "not just to mark their passage but also to survive." It is an issue I am exploring in my current essay on Munro as a Scheherazade who has to tell stories or die. Ulin also says it is Munro's willingness to "blur the line" (the line between reality and fiction?) that is part of "the elusive power" of her later works." But this may be simply because Munro has, at least since The View from Castle Rock, been writing what she has called "not quite stories," but rather memoirs on the borderline of stories.

In her "Foreword," Jane Smiley says Munro is "simultaneously strange and down-to-earth, daring and straightforward" and that in her last six books, she has become more experimental rather than less so. Smiley says that Munro has made something new out of the short story, "using precision of language and complexity of emotion to cut out the relaxed parts of the novel and focus on the essence of transformation." I like that phrase, but wish that Smiley had talked a bit more about what she mean by "transformation." Is this the transformation of reality into fiction, the line that Ulin says Munro blurs so brilliantly? Perhaps.

Smiley says that since Munro's chosen form is the short story, "her overriding theme is brevity—look now, act now, contemplate now, because soon, very soon, this thing that involves you will be over." What is the "theme of brevity"? That we are poor players who strut and fret and have but short a time on stage? Perhaps she means something similar to what Nadine Gordimer mean by her metaphor of "fireflies" several years ago, which I include in my Short Story Theories collection. I have quoted it before, but here it is again. It's worth repeating:

"Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known--and solved by nature of their choice of form—what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped by human reality.

How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be pure of—the present moment."

Smiley joins other writers who vow and declare that they do not understand how Munro does what she does. In a "Page-Turner" piece in which the New Yorker asked several writers what Alice Munro's fiction has meant to them, Julian Barnes said he sometimes tries to work how she does it, but never has succeeded and is happy in the failure. In the same piece, Lorrie Moore says, Munro is "a short-story writer who is looking over and past every ostensible boundary, and has thus reshaped an idea of narrative brevity and reimagined what a story can do."

Smiley says her favorite tribute to Munro is by the Canadian writer David Macfarlane, who says that although he has paid "enjoyable close attention" to Alice Munro, he can't quite figure out how she does what she does. "I guess by magic." Macfarlane says he has decided to leave it at that.

Many writers and critics have admitted they are stymied by what makes Alice Munro great, although they all—well almost all—agree that she is. A couple of years ago, Christian Lorentzen, an editor at London Review of Books, received quite a bit of flak from Munro lovers by writing a somewhat caustic review in LRB.

Several others have reacted to this rare attack on Munro, (see Kyle Minor's riposte in Salon, June 10, 2013) so I won't bother, except to suggest that Lorentzen's objections, in my opinion, boil down to his failure to understand how short stories work. Basically, his complaint with Munro is her content; in short, her focus on domestic, rural Canadian women bores him or depresses him. He says his reading of ten of her books over a short period of time left him in a state of "mental torpor" that made him sad with the shabby, grubby world of her stories, as well as her emphasis on the "real," i.e. physical, world she creates.

What he does not like about her style is her "anti-modernism," her old school realism, her sanding her prose to an "uncommon smoothness." In a cutesy metaphor, he says reading Munro's sentences is "something like walking across a field after a blizzard in a good pair of snowshoes: It's a trudge, but when you get to the other side your feet aren't wet." I am not sure how Lorentzen can criticize Munro's fiction for its grittiness and also for its smoothness.

But, this is the seeming contradiction that Jane Smiley praises when she says Munro is "simultaneously strange and down-to-earth, daring and straightforward." This is what David Ulin and many others like about Munro's blurring the line between reality and fiction—indeed what all great fiction does. This is the magic of Alice Munro. It is the magic I will be trying to understand in the three essays on Munro I am currently working on.

I have recently checked the "Best Books of 2014" postings for the following twenty different newspapers, magazines, and websites:

New York Times

The Huffington Post

Publisher's Weekly

Buzzfeed

Kirkus

The Telegraph

Time Magazine

Library Journal

Washington Post

The Globe

National Public Radio

Amazon's Best Books of 2014

Wall Street Journal

Good Reads

Guardian

The Economist

Slate

Los Angeles Times

Boston Globe

Bookpage.com

Although there are many more novels listed than short story collections, according to the experts at the sources listed above, the "Best" or "Notable," or "Recommended collections of short stories (and the number of times they were picked) this year are:

Phil Klay, Redeployment, 8

Lorrie Moore, Bark, 8

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher 5

Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't4

Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress4

The Stories of Jane Gardam 3

Elizabeth McCrackin, Thunderstruck2

Alice Munro, Family Furnishings2

Also listed are three books that are not short story collections, but on which I may post:

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21^st Century

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

Peter Mendelsund ,What We See When We Read

Other collections of stories that were picked at least once are:

Julia Elliott, The Wilds

Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

Tove Jansson, The Woman who Borrowed Memories

Paul Theroux, Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Graham Swift, England and Other Stories

The Derek Smith Omnibus

During December and January, I plan to post on :

Lorrie Moore's Bark

Phil Klay's Redeployment

Hilary Mantel's The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style

Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

Hilary Mantel must be chortling in her chops now that the BBC has decided to broadcast her story "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" on its Book at Bedtime show in January. The Tories are saying that it is a purposeful attack on them by the Left-wing biased BBC, "a sick book from a sick mind" says former Cabinet minister Lord Tebbit, whose wife was paralyzed when the IRA tried to murder Thatcher in the 1984 Brighton bombing.

I read the book that includes that purposely-provoking story when it first came out a few months ago and decided to say nothing about it on this blog, for I found practically all of the stories trivial and lazy and of interest only because Mantel has won two Man Booker prizes for her highly praised historical novels about Cromwell.

One might wonder what she would do with the short story genre.

Not much, it seems to me.

Then I read the reviews and saw the book had been placed on the "Best" list of several publications and decided that perhaps it deserved another look.

Not so. my initial judgment did not change: the stories seemed mostly self-promotions, calculated to sell the book not because of its worth, but because of Mantel's reputation and her mean-spiritedness.

It is hard not to be harsh with Mantel since she is so well-known for being mean to others. Not only as she boasted in public about her own fantasies to assassinate Thatcher, whom she admits she loathed, she also got a lot of attention a few months ago by attacking the future Queen, calling the Duchess "a machine-made princess, designed by committee," a "shop-window mannequin" with a "plastic smile."

With a title story (that originally appeared first in The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review) that describes a woman's sympathetic support of an IRA gunman who invades her apartment in order to shoot Margaret Thatcher, I suspected that reviews of the book might reflect the political leaning—left or right—of either the newspaper or the reviewer. It is also difficult to know whether reviewers might be merely influenced by Mantel's work in the genre of Historical novel, or who are swayed by the fact that she is the only woman who has ever won the Man Booker twice. I don't know.

The only two reviews that struck me as interesting is the one by displaced British writer James Lasdun in The Guardian and another by Stanford professor Terry Castle in The New York Times Book Review--and not just because these two papers originally published the story.

Lasdun, himself a fine short-story writer, whose work I have discussed on this blog, opens his Guardian piece with the following paragraph, with which I agree so fully I could have written it myself. In fact, I have written it in various places over the years:

Short stories have a way of turning innocent readers into exacting aestheticians. Their brevity invites us to engage with them as formal structures in a way that novels generally don't. We judge them as artefacts even as we consume them as narrative, and consciously or not, we demand all kinds of contradictory things from them. We want them to feel inventive but uncontrived, lifelike but extraordinary, surprising but inevitable, illuminating but mysterious, resolved but open-ended. It's a tall order, as anyone who has tried to write one will know.

It's interesting that the one story in the collection that Lasdun calls "easily the best in the book" was originally published as a memoir. "Sorry to Disturb" recounts a Mantel experience of being somewhat "stalked" by a Pakistani businessman while living in Saudi Arabia during the 80's. Lasdun calls it a "comedy of cross cultural sexual politics" and says it fulfills all the criteria for a short story that he listed in his opening paragraph.

And, yes, there is some of the mystery of motivation in the story that we associate with great short stories. The narrator's admission that after the events occurred it was difficult to grasp what had happened, Lasdun says is part of the story's power—"the sense that for all her vivid analyses and articulations of her own behaviour, she remains a little baffling even to herself." Perhaps it was Mantel's personal involvement in this experience that makes it the only effective story in the collection.

Lasdun is not so fond of the title story, which he dubs "jeerleading." Other stories, such as "Comma,""Winter Break," and "The Heart Fails Without Warning," he quite rightly, in my opinion, sees as trivial, plot-based stories of the grotesque. His conclusion: "four or five flawed successes and interesting failures; one knockout."

Terry Castle, professor of literature at Stanford, and author/editor of The Apparitional Lesbian, Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits, and the Literature of Lesbianism, calls Mantel a "master storyteller," and compares her to Edgar Allan Poe at his best in "Fall of the House of Usher." Castle puts Mantel in a long lineage of British female story-telling from Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield through Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Muriel Spark, and Zadie Smith. (One gets the feeling Castle is not talking so much about Mantel the short-story writer as she is Mantel the historical novelist, for she is rather careful to give only a cursory glance at the stories contained in Mantel's collection, being content to generalize about Mantel herself.

Castle concludes, "Mantel is such a funny and intelligent and generously untethered writer that part of what one's praise must mean is that if you're intelligent and quirky enough to take the book up at all—and anyone reading to this point most likely will be—she's got quirks enough of her own to match you, if not raise you 10."

Well, I am glad that Castle thinks she is intelligent and quirky enough to admire this book. I reckon I am just not intelligent enough or quirky enough, to appreciate Mantel's adolescent game-playing with disfigurement, birth defects, attempted assassination, and rants about poor hotel accommodations. Not to mention, just plain sloppy, rough draft writing.

More like very poor "Twilight Zone" than Edgar Allan Poe.

Not worth my time. Not worth yours. Unless you are just bound and determined to reward nastiness and condescension and shameless exploitation of one's own fame. The short story deserves better. Mantel is certainly no "master" of the form.

Although some Mantel admirers may find this blog a bit of a bashing, I assure you that it is nowhere near the nastiness that Hilary Mantel is guilty of.

I ran across Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read recently while doing the research for my blog post on Best Books for 2014. Always interested in the nature of the reading process, I ordered it, especially when I saw the subtitle was A Phenomenology, for I have long been interested in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; furthermore, I could not see how anyone writing a popular book would risk subtitling it A Phenomenology. And that's what What We See When We Read is–a popular book intended for a general audience.

Written by the associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf and art director of Pantheon Books, this is an entertaining graphic treatment of concepts that have been around a long time among philosophers and literary theorists, but which may not be familiar to the general reader, although any reader may find the ideas compelling, and cleverly presented.

The range of Mendelsund's references can be seen in the first two headnote quotations—one from Wittgenstein—"A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it"--and the other from Agatha Christie about her first imagined image of Hercule Poirot—that he was like something on the stage. Although the range of cites is fairly extensive, there are no footnotes and no list of sources at the end—just as well, for the general reader will probably not want to follow up on the originators of these ideas. With lots and lots of graphics—more graphics than text really—it is a book to enjoy for itself. I read it in about three hours, but you can spend more time just flipping through the images.

Mendelsund confronts his basic question—what do we see when we read—immediately in the book by challenging us to describe Anna Karenina. He concludes that we cannot do this—that we will come up with a body type or a vague image, for characters in fiction are not so much physical beings as they are choreographic figures who have only those few features that "signify" something. The implication of this—that characters are ciphers or sets of rules and that narratives are made richer by omission—is particularly relevant to the short story—although Mendelsund, as might be expected, primarily uses novels for his illustrations.

Indeed, I find that much of what Mendelsund says about narrative is directly applicable to the short story because—no surprise to my readers—I think the short story is the primal mode of narrative—the mode closest to a basic human need and impulse to tell stories and respond to them. I also think, of course, that the short story is the most "artistic" narrative form; consequently, what Mendelsund says about "artistic" narrative is directly applicable to the short story.

Mendelsund reminds us that when we read we withdraw from the phenomenal world, turning our attention inward. Rather than looking through a clear glass to some world outside, we look at the book as if it were a mirror and we are looking inward. I won't clutter up my comments here by referring the reader to the origins of Mendelsund's remarks, but one of the philosophic sources of this one is Jose Ortega y Gasset, who notes that when we read we have the choke of looking through a glass or looking at the glass itself to see what it reflects. I have always argued that the short story is more a matter of form than content. James Lasdun's remark, which I quoted in my blog on Hilary Mantel, emphasizes this also.

Mendelsund says that the openings of such novels as To the Lighthouse and Moby Dick are confusing to us because we have not been given enough information to begin processing the narrative, "But we are used to such confusion. All books open in doubt and dislocation." True enough, which is one of the reasons folks don't like short stories, for they don't give us enough time to get oriented to the language-created world we have entered.

Mendelsund says words are like musical notes in that the significance of a word is contingent on the words that surround it. Furthermore, in order to make sense of a book's words and phrases, he says we must think ahead, anticipate. "Reading is not a sequence of experienced 'now's…Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious moment—and in the performative reading moment as well." He cites Merleau-Ponty here: "With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of presents..." One of the aspects of Alice Munro's stories that makes them so compelling to read is her manipulation of time to remind us that our reading experience is not a "sequence" of nows. In the past, I have commented at some length on the short story's being structured like music, dependent more on rhythm and form than on content.

"All good books are, at heart, mysteries," says Mendelsund. Indeed, I have argued in other places that the short story focuses on mystery. For the most provocative considerations of this aspect of the form, see Flanner O'Connor's Mystery and Manners.

Writers not only tell us stories, they tell us how to read stories; when we read we put together a set of rules—a method for reading this particular work, a manner of thinking about this particular work. "The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much." One of the problem readers have with reading short stories is trying to figure out the rules for reading the short story as a form, and this particular short story they are reading before the short story has ended. That's why short stories have to be read more than once.

Mendelsund uses the detective mystery as the model for this process, with the characters as archetypes acting like players on a game board. Characters are mostly seen in action, Mendelsund reminds us, not as physical entities. I have posted earlier on why I think the short story began in America with the detective story by Edgar Allan Poe and how the short story is like a detective story in its structure and sense of mystery and order.

The writer takes something from its context in the real world, where it exists in a state of flux, and holds it fast in language, making it an immobile wave, no longer fluid. Yes, indeed, this is what poetry does, of course. And the short story is closer to poetry than it is to the novel.

When we examine something the author has immobilized through the lens he has given us, what we observe is not so much the thing itself, but the tools the work has made us construct in order to observe the thing. When we praise finely observed prose, we praise the efficacy of the ideas and the beauty of the equipment both at once. The inability to separate the language and the content in a short story is what makes the form so challenging—that is, if one is not sensitive to the language.

Mendelsund quotes Italo Calvino, whose collection The Uses of Literaturehave just started rereading as a Christmas present to myself: "For me, the main thing in a narrative is…the order of things…the pattern; the symmetry; the network of images deposited around it…" No comment necessary; see everything I have ever said about the short story.

Mendelsund speaks of the book as a sort of musical score which we perform and attend the performance at once. See above on short story and music.

When we read we co-create. "We would rather have sketches than verisimilitude—because the sketches, at least, are ours. And yet, readers still contend that they want to 'lose themselves' in a story." Good books incite us to fill in an author's suggestions in a co-creative act. "Some things we do not wish to be shown." Mendelsund cites the familiar example of Kafka's insisting to his publisher not to provide a likeness of his famous dung beetle on the cover of "Metamorphosis." Very nice: Who the hell wants verisimilitude? If I wanted reality, I would go out in the world. And I don't want to lose myself in a work; I want to be aware of what the story is doing.

Mendelsund says we do not refer to Hamlet as a character, but rather as a role, one who is meant to be played. I used to argue with my students, to no avail, that Hamlet's famous inability to act was because he was aware that he was always acting.

Mendelsund quotes Moses Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed: "There is no real unity without incorporeality." That which exists in time has nothing to do with the sacred, don't you think? And unity has nothing to do with the seemingly real.

Mendelsund's central point is that we do not have pictures in our minds when we read; rather, we read for the intermingling of abstract relationships, which may sound like an unenjoyable experience, but in truth is what happens when we listen to music. "This relational, nonrepresentational calculus is where some of the deepest beauty in art is found. Not in mental pictures of things, but in the play of elements." Yes, indeed. Please read that quote again; then read a great short story.

"When I'm reading a novel or story, the contents—places, people, things—of the drama recede and are supplanted by significance. The vision of a flowerpot, say, is replaced by my readerly calculation of the meaning and importance of this flowerpot. We are ever gauging these significances in texts, and much of what we 'see' when we read is this 'significance.'" The problem many readers have with short stories is that they just read for the content and not the meaning of the content.

Mendelsund quotes a passage from Wharton's House of Mirth" in which a man thinks of the hair and eye lashes of a young woman he is walking with, but it is not the physical image we sense, rather a "rhythm" of the words that convey the young man's elation. In other words, it is the rhythm of the language we feel, not the merely physical object.

He quotes Beckett on Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." No comment necessary.

"Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce, replace, emblemize. Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce… Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning." See Levis Strauss on reduction as an aesthetic act.

"Maybe the reading imagination is a fundamentally mystical experience—irreducible by logic. These visions are like revelations. They hail from transcendental sources, and are not of us—they are visited upon us. Perhaps the visions are due to a metaphysical union of reader and author. Perhaps the author taps the universal and becomes a medium for it."

In some way, Mendelsund says, readers are "see-ers" and the reading experience derives from the tradition of visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany." He asks whether the visions of literature are like religious epiphanies or Platonic verities, more real than phenomenal reality. "Do they point toward some deeper manner of authenticity? (Or: by mimicking the real world, do they point toward its inauthenticity."

Flannery O'Connor would have loved these two paragraphs. Alice Munro would also. As would have Chekhov. And, believe it or not, so would have James Joyce. Why else would he call his short stories epiphanies? This is why I titled my recent book on the short story I Am Your Brother.

Christmas is always about the past. Ebenezer Scrooge's first and most poignant visit is with the ghost of Christmas Past. And Truman Capote 's "Christmas Memory" begins with fruitcake weather when he was a child.

I indulge myself today and strain the patience of my readers by recalling a bit of my own past, primarily for folks who know me. My occasional readers may, with my apologies, skip over it and get back to the serious stuff I try to write about the short story as a literary form.

I used to amaze and appall my students with stories about my childhood. While they sneaked tweets and texts on their i-phones, they smiled that we did not have electricity in our house until I was twelve—and, of course, no running water, or natural gas, not to mention no indoor plumbing. Carrying the slop jar out to the toilet and gouging small chunks of coal out of a snow-covered frozen pile in the yard were two of my responsibilities.

Now that I am seventy-three, I recall that pre-adolescent era of my life with a kind of arrogant pride, especially when I watch my seventeen-year old grandson transfixed in front of his laptop, ear bud wires stringing down his cheeks, playing video games involving the kind of super heroes I used to read about in limp and ragged comic books that we swapped with cousins who lived on the other side of the railroad track a mile away.

I was the oldest of five children and helped my mother care for my two brothers and two sisters, spaced, between three and five years apart, from the time I was four. My father was a truck driver and was usually gone on runs up to Cincinnati, Ohio or down to Knoxville, Tennessee except on the weekends, which he spent listening to ball games on the battery-powered radio. By battery, I don’t mean those little marvels of compression that I have to constantly recharge, but rather a heavy pack of dry cells that could have been used to start a car.

I always mark the beginning of my life with a memory I never really had of my maternal grandfather and grandmother.

I see my grandmother sitting in a small shack stringing and breaking green beans into her aproned lap. Her tanned hands, although young, are already cracked and wrinkled from washing my grandfather's clothes in hard lye soap and hoeing in the garden. She breaks the beans quickly with a sharp snap and looks at her wedding day portrait on the wall.

I look at a black and white copy of that picture today on the wall behind my computer screen and remember it hanging above the bed of my grandfather's living room, the string of flowers draped across my grandmother's brimmed black hat tinted a faded rose. She stands straight and proud, her round face solemn above the high white collar of her blouse. Beside her, my grandfather stares straight into the camera with coal-black eyes and a thin moustache. He was twenty six at the time; she was 21. Although only taken the year before, already the girl in the picture must have seemed distant to the woman looking at her. Her husband was down the road playing cards with men he worked with in the mines.

Years after my grandmother died, when my grandfather, paralyzed by a stroke, lay in bed in his small living room, I would stare at that picture with the fire light flickering on the faces and be afraid my grandmother's ghost haunted the house. When I was five, I had clutched my mother's dress in front of her open coffin before the cold fireplace in the same room, the sickly sweetness of the flowers mixing with the musty odor of the house. And didn't my grandfather once tell us that he had heard her voice speaking to him from a large rock at the corner of the garden up on the hill? He never told us what she said.

She might have smiled looking down at the beans in a lap, made smaller by the child in her belly. Then she heard the shot. A sharp crack that made her jump and spill the broken beans. She must have known immediately that it was Jarvey, for she grabbed a kitchen knife and cut the newspaper backing off the picture, removing it from the frame and rolling it up with a ribbon. Then she got the cardboard suitcase from under the bed and placed the picture in it carefully, packing her stockings and cotton underwear around it. She was gathering the rest of their few pieces of clothing when, red- faced with drink, he came through the door. "I've shot a man," he said. "We have to get out of here."

My grandmother told this story to my mother many times, and she in turn told it to me—so often that it took on a mythical quality, and I filled in with my imagination details that my mother's sketchy version left out. I don't think my grandfather really killed that man, for the law never came after him. But he was capable of it. He was known as "Black Jarvey" when he was young, and it was said (another mythic story of my family) that Devil Anse Hatfield asked him to ride with him in that well-known feud that the History Channel and Kevin Costner have made more famous. He turned Hatfield down. But I know he used to carry a small black thirty-eight revolver that always tempted me from where it hung behind a picture of my great-grandparents by the fireplace mantle.

Avoiding the main road, they took off through the woods on foot and headed north toward Eastern Kentucky, my mother said, where my grandfather knew a man who might let him do some sharecropping. Somewhere in the mountains, my grandmother gave birth to a premature boy, and, to my grandmother's everlasting sorrow, my grandfather left it in a shallow grave. They walked, I don't know how many days, until they came to a narrow valley along the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River in Johnson County, Kentucky, where, indeed, a man my grandfather knew did take him on as a sharecropper and gave him the use of a hillside above the river where he built a living room and bought a cast iron bed. It was in that bed that my mother, their last child, was born. And sixteen years later, it was there that my mother gave birth to me, her first.

The house, which is just south of Paintsville, Kentucky in an area called "The Nars," had a living room with a fireplace, a narrow windowless kitchen, a concrete-floored dining room, and two small bedrooms. The Nars, is, I learned at some point in my childhood, a mispronunciation of the word "Narrows." It aptly describes a long, lean corridor created by Levisa Fork, bounded on both sides by hills so high that, depending on the season, the sun came up late and set early. Just above the river was the C&O railroad line. And just above that, in front of my grandfather's house, ran U.S. Highway 23.

By sharecropping, my grandfather earned a strip of land about sixty yards wide, extending vertically from the top of the hill to the edge of the river. There was very little of the steep rocky hillside he did not cultivate. "If you can't eat it," he would say, "I don't see no use planting it."

The two-mile strip known as the Nars was anchored on one end by Depot Hill, at the top of which a bootlegger named Peg Ward with a white pine 2x2 for a left leg lived and did business in a small tar-paper shack. On the other end was Dead Man's curve, a hairpin, where my father always said you could meet your own arse going around it. These were the points where, no matter where you stood in the Nars, your line of vision ended. There were only half a dozen modest houses in between.

Coming up U.S. 23 from town, after you passed Peg Ward's place, there was a quarter mile of sheer rock cliffs, where the road was so narrow that the big coal trucks nearly blew me off on to the railroad track below. Then came what was called "the breakdown" and the black-looking house of old Bob Rice and his wife Sallie. Bob was a drunk, and when he couldn't afford Peg's bootleg whiskey, he drank Mennen After Shave. The branch between his house and Papaw's was filled with the squat, green empty bottles.

Just past Papaw's place was the little house where I lived with my mother, father, two brothers, and a sister. Perched on a rock cliff just above and beyond us was the house of Charlie Ray Baker and his wife Nannie, a big woman my tiny mother almost had a fight with once, and their four children. Just past another stretch of rock cliffs that lined the road was the house where my paternal grandmother lived, and just above and beside it a small house which for several years we rented from my Uncle Bill for twelve dollars a month.

About a half mile on up the road, where the river took a sharp bend, was Fred Price's big gray stone house with an elaborate fish pond in front. If the Nars had been a far and distant land in a fairy tale, Fred Price's place would have been the castle. Price owned the pasture land above the highway all the way up to Dead Man's Curve. He also owned the big red bull that chased my brother and me when we went to pick blackberries or gather paw paws--a story my children and my grandchildren never tired of hearing.

The last house, located at the sharpest point of Dead Man's Curve belonged to my uncle Bill's girlfriend. Most everyone thought she was a witch; she once took warts off my fingers by holding my hands, closing her eyes, and mumbling words I couldn't understand. Just past the curve was the Newsom Family Cemetery, where all my mother's people, as well as my parents, are buried. There is a place marked out for me there, where Jordan, my younger daughter, has promised to take my ashes. I have a small polished wooden box on my bookshelf, which originally held an expensive bottle of Irish whiskey, reserved for that purpose.

My grandfather's farm held a great deal for such a small scrap of land. A few steps away from the house was the smokehouse, where salted sides of meat lay on newspaper-covered shelves and brown hams hung from hooks in the ceiling. Next was the open-slatted crib filled with corn which I shelled for the chickens and threw in the pen for the hogs. The barn had three stalls––one for the chickens and one each for a horse and a cow, both of which were sold before I was born. The barn had a mysterious second floor, which once held hay, but now was used for storing just about anything that would not fit anyplace else.

My Uncle George, a small mine owner, kept his black powder there, wrapped in heavy waxed paper in rough wooden boxes. I was warned never to go near it. But who could resist its powdery pungency? Also there, hanging from cross beams, stretched on boards, were hides of muskrats trapped by my uncle Charlie. Beside the barn was the hog pen, with one large old sow that Uncle Bill was fattening. In the fall, my grandfather would hit it on the forehead with a short-handled sledge, slit its throat when it fell to its knees, hoist it up on a tripod, and expertly gut and dress it. Finally, at the farthest edge of the property was the toilet perched on the side of the hill above the road––a three–seater well stocked with slick-paged Sears catalogues and corncobs.

From the time I was five years old until I was sixteen, the Nars was pretty much my whole world. I went to school in town––a county seat of a little over four thousand. No other children from school lived in the Nars, so it was often lonely. Town, however, filled with strangers, was frequently frightening, so I was always glad to get home.

My students at California State University, Long Beach, where I taught for forty years, would of often ask me, if I knew so much about the short story, why I did not write short stories. I have tried to write stories about my life for the last sixty years and still have in my file cabinet ragged typed pages of material I wrote when I was twelve. I really would like to create a group of short stories from these experiences. But what often happens is that I get bored trying to write them. Just moving my persona across the room seems so tedious to me. I really love sentences rather than plots, but am not quite sure how to construct a voice that captures the mysteries of my life.

Maybe my life has no mysteries; maybe that is the problem. Whenever I begin to write, I hope I will find some meaning in mere experiences, some central core in various anecdotes that will pull the piece together and make it glow with significance. Part of the problem is that I don’t seem to have that obsession that makes writers write fiction, that compulsion that drives them to carry on and on. I used to think I did, when I was young. But now I know better. I am a reader, not a writer.

Happy Holiday to those who stumble on this bit of personal background. I will get back to the real business of my blog right after Christmas.

Phil Klay's debut collection of stories about the Iraq War, Redeployment, won the National Book Award for 2014.

Short story collections don't often win the National Book Award. Since the award began in 1950, only the following ten short fiction collections have earned the prize:

1951: The Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner

1959: The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

1960: Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter

1972: The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor by Flannery O'Connor

1973: Chimera by John Barth

1974: A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

1981: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1983: Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

1996: Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett

Here are the other nine books in the 2014 Longlist for Fiction:

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman, Grove Press/ Grove/Atlantic

Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans,W. W. Norton & Company

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Scribner/ Simon & Schuster

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven, Alfred A. Knopf/ Random House

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, The Dial Press/ Random House

Richard Powers, Orfeo, W.W. Norton & Company

Marilynne Robinson, Lila,Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Jane Smiley, Some Luck, Alfred A. Knopf/ Random House

Little wonder that newspaper reports of the Award Ceremonies in November suggests that Klay (who is 30) seemed surprised that he had won.

Here are the fiction judges for 2014:

Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, March. A former foreign correspondent, she has reported from more than fifteen countries and wrote two works of nonfiction.

Sheryl Cotleur holds a B.A. from Case Western Reserve University and an M.F.A. from Kent State University. She has been a bookseller for the past 28 years and is currently the frontlist and backlist buyer for Copperfield’s, a chain of seven stores in northern California.

Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece was a finalist for both the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography

Adam Johnson is the author of Emporium, a story collection, and the novels Parasites Like Us and The Orphan Master's Son, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.

Lily Tuck is the author of five novels, including The News from Paraguay, winner of the 2004 National Book Award; two collections of stories, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived and The House at Belle Fontaine.

A judges' statement reads: "If all wars ultimately find their own Homer, this brutal, piercing, sometimes darkly funny collection stakes Klay's claim for consideration as the quintessential storyteller of America's Iraq conflict."

Reviews of the book, which came out in March, were mostly high praise. If characterizing Klay as the new Homer doesn't impress you, Jeff Turrentine of The Washington Post said if you have been seeking the Tim O'Brien or the Joseph Heller or the Erich Maria Remarque for the Iraqi war, "Mission accomplished."

Dexter Filkins' review in The New York Times calls the book "the best thing written so far on what the war did to people's souls," adding that Klay has a "nearly perfect ear for the language of the grunts." Also in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said the book "gives the reader a visceral feeling for what it is like to be a soldier in a combat zone," agreeing that Klay has a "radar-sharp ear for how soldiers talk."

Klay was not a combat soldier, but a public affairs officer (a second lieutenant and then a Captain), who has said he "hung out" with a "wide variety" of Marines while serving a thirteen-month deployment mostly in the Anbar province, during the so-called "surge" of 2007 and 2008 when he was in his mid-twenties.

Afterwards, he got an MFA at Hunter college in 2011. To give him credit, Klay has said in an interview, "I don't want to put myself forward as if I was an in-the-thick-of-it-guy. I was a public affairs officer. I worked with the media." But one gets the feeling that more of Klay's depictions of war actions derive from his research on the Internet after the war than during the war itself.

Klay has said that he wants a civilian reader to read the book and "engage with the subject matter." And indeed, it seems to me, it is its subject matter that earned the book its National Book Award—not the writing.

It is hard to resist a firsthand account of one of America's most recent wars, even if it is a so-called "small war." The problem this focus on subject matter, rather than the quality of the writing, raises, is that you just can't compete with it. You even feel a bit sheepish writing about it.

The best review of the book is the thoughtful, tentative assessment by Ed Taylor in The Buffalo News, who begins by quoting from The Aeneidabout the problem: "Far off, o keep far off, you uninitiated ones," which Taylor calls good advice for making literature out of war. Taylor notes wisely that it is it is difficult even to talk about writing about war without sounding both patronizing and naïve.

Taylor says that the problem in writing about war is the tension between factual reporting and fiction writing. He notes that there is plentiful information in Klay's book about daily military life and combat but that info is not fully mixed into the blended material out of which the best fiction is made. He quite rightly observes that the stories feel as if the agenda was to "render surface material of harrowing circumstances and slow or fast madness and pain and have that be enough." Taylor ends his review admitting his reluctance to criticize such a book, asking "am I unfairly critical?"

When asked if he thought war had to be experienced firsthand to be understood, Klay has said, "I think that's a dangerous idea… Often we think just because someone has been through an experience means that he or she gets to be the arbiter of what it means." Klay says he does not think that just because someone has been through an experience means that person has "privileged access to some kind of ineffable truth that cannot be spoken. But he does cite the old joke: "How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb? You wouldn't know, you weren't there."

Margie Romero in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette states the problem in her opening sentence: "Unless you've been through it, nobody really knows what a war is like, calling Klay's stories "like shrapnel in the gut." (Not sure how she would know that). Romero says these are not just adventure tales, for Klay's aim is to show the "beating heart beneath the body armor." However, just because the stories try to be more than mere "war stories" by focusing on the effect of war on the participants does not necessarily mean they are complex explorations of those human responses.

In an op-ed piece in 2004, Leo Braudy said he doubted that any great novel would come out of Iraq, for previous war literature reflected society's effort to understand violence in the name of an idea, a religious cause, a political point of view—something lacking in so-called "small wars" in the 21^stcentury. He concluded that perhaps the nature of war and soldiers had changed, for war now seems to have lost its "personal connection to society as a whole and gone back to being a chore relegated to the professionals."

Only in Vietnam did literature of war make a last stand, says Braudy, citing Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciatoand The Things They Carried as obvious examples, although he might also have mentioned Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story as well as some of the stories of Tobias Wolff. Indeed, it was the ambiguity of the Vietnam war that most appealed to the literary mind. David Halberstam said in his novel One Very Hot Day that the one thing one could be sure of if you were a soldier in Vietnam was "yes was no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe."

If you want to write a collection of stories about war, you probably would want to include the following:

A story about the difficulty of returning home. In the title story, a Sergeant returns home to his wife and does know where to puts his hands without a rifle in them and can't get used to walking down the street without people all around wanting to kill you. He has to kill his beloved aging dog and calls his training into action to do it

A story about the brutality of war: "Frago," in which, among other horrors, tortured men get a power drill through the ankles. And you have to have some coarse, tough-guy gibes: "That's the most blood I've seen since I fucked your mom on her period," which makes all the guys laugh. In Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story, 'he says, "Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty."

A story about how a young soldier is affected after killing an "enemy" young boy. "After Action Report," Make it tough and unfeeling, laugh it off: The story cites a joke that Marines tell each other about a "liberal pussy journalist asking a Marine sniper, "What is it like to kill a man? What do you feel when you pull the trigger? The Marine looks at him and says one word: 'Recoil."

A story about the sheer physicality of war—sex and violence and death: "Bodies." The narrator tells about a "hajji corpse (all enemies here are "hajjis", just as enemies in WWII were krauts or japs and in Vietnam they were gooks). The narrator, who works in Mortuary Affairs, says there are two ways to tell the story: funny, which is the way guys like it, or sad, which is the way girls like it. And there is only one reason to tell it to girls—to get them in bed.

The most obvious gimmick story is "OIF," (acronym for Operation Iraqi Freedom), which is filled with acronyms and practically unreadable without knowing what they mean. A short piece just for fun, in spite of a nod toward seriousness.

A story about the "business" of war, "Money as a Weapons System." The mattress king of northern Kansas sends baseball uniforms and equipment to support "sports diplomacy," in a good-character-building effort for the Iraqis, American style.

A story about women as "cooze," in which guys get infected because they have been sharing a "pocket pussy." If you don't know what that is, google it and a couple of women on YouTube will show you how to make one.

A story about the moral issues of war, post-traumatic stress, and veteran suicide. "Prayer in the Furnace." This first-person point of view story is by a chaplain who is worried about war crimes, even though he feels that Iraq is holier than home, where, "Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialistic home, where we're too lazy to see our own faults."

A story that provides an opportunity to talk about the ideological issues. "Psychological Operations." This one focuses on a young vet, a Copt, back home in school having a head-to-head dialogue about the issues with a young woman, a Muslim. The most profound philosophical statement you can expect: "Perception is reality. In war, sometimes what matters isn't what's actually happening, but what people think is happening."

"War Stories" is not Tim O'Brien, but at least a nod to him. In which war stories are "panty droppers." And the contest is whose has the biggest "war dick." In the most powerful scene in the film, G.I. Jane, Demi Moore tells an abusive, sadistic misogynist soldier to "suck my dick," suggesting that to really be a soldier you had to have one or at least grow one.

"Unless it's a Sucking Chest Wound."— A former Marine goes to law school after leaving the war, providing lots of opportunity to talk about postwar adjustments.

"Ten Kliks South"—Killing people at long distance, as a 19-year old artilleryman tries to confirm his kill and learn to live with it.

This is not a great collection of short stories. It is a job of work done in a workmanlike fashion. The judges of the National Book Award should not, in my opinion, have been so impressed by mere content, even if that content is the age-old "war is hell."

The Secret Goldfish (2004)is David Means’ third book, and it goes against good economic sense, not to mention the probable pleas of his agent and publishers, that it is, once again, a book of short stories. Although his earlier collection, Assorted Fire Events(2000), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, was short listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received rave reviews both in America and England, still it was just a collection of short stories.

I suspect the guy can’t help it. Like Borges, who once said that a short story may be, for all purposes, “essential," or Andre Dubus, who said he loved short stories because “they are the way we live," or Alice Munro, who once told an interviewer that she doesn’t write novels because she sees her material in a short-story way, David Means-- like Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley--sees the world in a short-story way.

To understand that “short-story way,” pick upThe Secret Goldfish But don’t rush through them. Read one, put the book by and meditate on the mystery of the human condition the story explores. Then wait a while before reading another. The short story is often misunderstood and underrated because readers read it the same way they do sections of novels.

Don’t go to David Means for plot that rushes to its inevitable end or for easily recognizable character, like the folks you meet every day. Go to David Means for some scary, sacred, sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies and for the shock of recognition that those you thought you knew you don’t really know at all. You go to Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short story writers from Poe to Chekhov to Carver--that if you remove everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed, stark and astonishing.

The first paragraph of the first story, “Lightning Man,” makes clear that the realm of reality that matters for Means is sacramental, ritualistic, miraculous--a world in which the old reassurances, such as lightning never strikes twice in the same place, are shown to be nonsense. Here a man is struck seven times throughout his life by a powerful revelatory energy until he becomes a mythic creature, waiting for the inevitable eighth.

In the short-story world of David Means, a mundane tale of infidelity and divorce gets transformed by the metaphoric stillness of a neglected goldfish in a mucked-up tank, surviving in spite of the stagnation around it. Means’ short stories are seldom satisfied with linearity of plot and thus often become lists of connected mysteries. “Notable Dustman Appearances to Date” is a series of hallucinatory manifestations of famous faces in swirling dust kicked up by wind or smoke: Nixon, Hemingway, Gogol, Jesus.

“Michigan Death Trips” is a catalog of catastrophic disruptions, as people abruptly disappear beneath the ice of a frozen lake, are suddenly struck on the highway, or hit by a stray bullet from nowhere.“Elyria Man," lays bare mummified bodies found lying beneath the soil, as if patiently waiting to embody some basic human fear or need.

In each of these stories, David Means reveals the truth of our lives the way great art always has—by making us see the world as it painfully is, not as our comfortable habits hide it from us.

In an interview after the publication of his award-winning second collection, Assorted Fire Events (2000), Means said he feels that if you're really good at something you should keep doing it. His fourth collection, The Spot (2010), thirteen new stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Harper’s,and other places, is just one more piece of evidence that Means is very good at what he does.

Since his first collection, A Quick Kiss of Redemption(1993), Means has largely moved away from Chekhovian realism, taking more chances with experimental narrative structure. Pursuing tactics begun in Assorted Fire Events and made more evident in his last collection, The Secret Goldfish (2004), Means takes increasing liberties in The Spot with storytelling techniques to explore the nature and importance of storytelling itself.

Two stories in The Spot focus on tramps gathered around a campfire spinning yarns. In “The Blade,” the central character, Ronnie, hesitates about telling his peers his “blade story,” for he knows it will involve making explanations about how he spent a couple of years with an old tramp named Hambone, which would expose the old tramp to the ridicule of the men. Ronnie’s blade story centers on his waking up one morning with Hambone holding a knife at his throat, insisting that if Ronnie does not believe the good things he has told him about his mother, he will kill him. However, Hambone has told Ronnie two stories: one characterizing his mother as a wonderful woman and another, two months earlier, in which he said she did not have a decent bone in her body. Even though Ronnie tries to placate Hambone by agreeing that his mother was a great woman, the old man does not let up; Ronnie is forced to turn the knife and kill him, making his blade story one in which he wields the weapon.

Means’ second hobo story, “The Junction,” is considerably lighter, but no less focused on the importance of storytelling. The central character is a man named Lockjaw, who, like all hoboes whose lives depend on telling convincing stories, knows that one has to spin out a yarn and keep it spinning until the food is in your belly and you are out the door. The story, which has to be just right, is drawn not from one’s own life, but from an amalgamation of other tales the teller has heard in the past, within which he must weave his own needs. Lockjaw tells the other tramps about spinning a story at the kitchen table of a family who is feeding him. When the husband asks him if he has taken Jesus as his savior, Lockjaw responds a little too fast to be believed, and the man goes upstairs and gets his gun. However, the wife cajoles her husband and tells Lockjaw that if he returns, she will set out a piece of pie for him on the windowsill. The story ends with Lockjaw’s coming back for the pie, which may or may not be the subject of another story.

In addition to hoboes and tramps, Means explores in three stories another group of characters who live their lives on the road--thieves and scam artists. “Nebraska,” told with Means’ usual flawless syntax, focuses on a young woman who is involved in an armored truck robbery in Nebraska, engineered by a man named Byron, with whom she lives. These are amateurs, members of the underground in the late 1960s, planning the robbery to finance bomb making to demolish the status quo, with Byron spouting a lot of rhetoric about striking out against the corrupt system. Although they make careful plans to execute the robbery, at the crucial moment when Bryon and his partner shoot two Brinks guards, the central female character, in charge of the getaway car, panics and drives away, leaving them literally holding the bag. The central tension in the story is the young woman’s romantic identification with Depression era thieves, Bonnie and Clyde—not the real bank robbers, however, but Faye Dunaway and Warren Beattie in the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“The Botch” is a more explicit exploration of the gap between the plan and the execution of a robbery. The key phrase, which opens the story, and which is repeated throughout is, “The idea is…” And the basic idea of the thieves in this story, also amateurs, is to “to tap into the old traditions” of the bank heist, in which they see themselves as Robin Hoods, trying to free money from the big syndicates. The thieves must act formally, like movie stars, playing their roles and thus avoid the typical “botches” that might make the robbery fail. However, again at the crucial moment, the central character sees a woman on the street in a tight red skirt, stumbling in her high heels, and is distracted, causing him and his partner to shoot an old man in the bank. After they escape, the central character wants to return to the scene of the crime, approach the woman, and shift the burden of the botch to her.

A more explicit treatment of the gap between the vision and the event is “Oklahoma,” in which a man named Lester picks up two young women and teaches them how to scam stores by picking up receipts in the parking lot, grabbing goods in the store, and returning them for cash back. The central point-of-view character is a young woman named Genevieve, who is taken in by Lester’s blustering talk of making a movie. Throughout the story, she sees their lives as if they are actors in a film being made, in which they move about in a fake movie night that’s not dark enough to be real, with fake snow on their shoulders, refusing to melt.

The title story, "The Spot," is about another on the-road couple--Shank, a lost sixties soul who cannot extricate himself from a high, and Meg, a fifteen-year old kid he has picked up and pimps for a seed salesman. The title comes from Shank telling Meg that there is a spot out on the lake, a “suck” where the Cleveland water supply is drawn in. She thinks about that spot while the john is having sex with her. After Meg chokes the john to death on his own string tie, Shank takes her to Niagara Falls and pushes her over. The real story is not these horrific events, but, as usual, Means’ masterful telling of them. In a story within the story, Shank tells the half-sleeping Meg about a man named Ham who lived in an old hobo hangout with a girl who Shank fancies. Offering to baptize her, Shank has her take off her clothes and holds her down in the water. When Ham comes running to the stream, Shank holds her down too long and drowns her.

“A River in Egypt” is a story of one of those terrifying periods between suspicion and confirmation of the worst. The central character Cavanaugh, has taken his son to be tested in a sweat room for cystic fibrosis. The title derives from the child’s toy called the Question Cube, for which one of the questions is, “What river is in Egypt?” Means may be playing a little word game on the old pun of “denial,” for this is a delicate story about a father trying to deny or forestall the dreaded test results. The story ends with a moment when the father, who has been concerned with his own anxiety about the future, shifts his attention to the boy lying in the back seat of the car to focus on a luminous present.

“Reading Chekhov” is a version of Chekhov’s famous “Lady with a Pet Dog.” The story is told in brief sections that move back and forth between the man, who is a 35-year-old part-time student at a seminary, and the woman who is married with a daughter. They know they are part of the overall tradition of adultery, reading “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together and comparing themselves to Chekhov’s lovers. When walking in the park, the woman’s heel stick in the soft ground and she falls, breaking the bone just above her ankle. She tells her husband she did it stepping off the curb—a lie that makes her decide to end the affair. Like Chekhov’s famous story, this is a perceptive exploration of the subtle complexities of adultery.

Means is often concerned with essential mysteries that defy explanation. “Facts Toward Understanding the Spontaneous Human Combustion of Errol McGee” is an account told in separate sections of the spontaneous combustion of a man sitting in a chair looking out a window. The different sections suggest various theories to account for this inexplicable mystery, e.g. the hair ointment the man wears, a sympathetic reaction to his son’s death by napalm during the war, the white heat of memory of a past showgirl lover. This is a story about essential mystery and symbolic explanations, for only symbolic explanations can account for the inscrutable.

In “The Gulch,” three teenage boys crucify another boy on a homemade cross set up in a gulch to see if he will rise from the dead. The focus of the story is on various possible explanations for the murder, as news commentators and professors try to find reasons and precedents for the crime. A detective named Collard, who is investigating the case, thinks that when he retires full of stories, the incident in the gulch will be the classic one he pulls out of his hat when the conversation gets boring. He knows, however, that his job now is to find out who dreamed up the idea and made it true. Making an idea come true and making stories out of inexplicable acts constitute the themes of many of David Means’ stories in The Spot.

“The Knocking,” the shortest story in the collection, is in many ways one of the most complex. The first-person male narrator complains of knocking noises from the man who lives in an identical apartment above him. We know nothing about the narrator or the noisy neighbor—just a lot about the nature of the knocking—until three quarters through the story when the narrator says that the knocking often comes late in the day when the man above knows that he is in his deepest state of reverie, feeling a persistent sense of loss of his wife and kids. In the last two paragraphs, the narrator begins to identify with the knocker, remembering when he had gone around, fixing things at his own house, trying to keep it in shape. “The Knocking” is about having nothing worthwhile to do, and thus engaging in an activity that is irritating, but that you cannot cease doing. The rhythm of the story echoes the repetitive, annoying, meaningless actions. Means creates a timeless universality here that allows the reader to become deeply embedded in the story, caught up in a language event that is, paradoxically, both a personal obsession and an aesthetic creation.

David Means’ unerring ability to transform the seemingly casual into the meaningful causal is what makes him a master of the short story, placing him in the ranks of other great short story writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro, who stubbornly resisted pressure to desert their chosen form for the more highly prized novel.

Reading Alice Munro's "Nettles"

Reading Alice Munro's "Post and Beam"

Reading Alice Munro's "What is Remembered"

Reading Alice Munro's "Family Furnishings"

Haruki Murakami's "Scheherazade": Sex and Storytelling

Best American Short Stories: 2014 and O. Henry Prize Stories: 2014--Some Preliminary Remarks

Happy Halloween! Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows"

Poe's Stories of Dream and Reality: "Descent into the Maelstrom" and "Pit and the Pendulum"

Where Do Stories Come From?: Best American Short Stories, 2014; O. Henry Prize Stories, 2014

The 2014 Canadian Literature Symposium on Alice Munro

Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories 2014--Part II

O. Henry Prize Stories 2014--Thumbnail Comments

Best American Short Stories 2014--Thumbnail Comments

The Magic of Alice Munro: Family Furnishings: Selected Stories--1995-2014

Best Short Story Collections of 2014--According to the Experts

Hilary Mantel's "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher"

Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read: The Short Story as Quintessential Narrative Art

Ghosts of my Past, or Why I Can't Write Short Stories

Phil Klay's Redeployment: Is Content Alone Good Enough?

David Means: Master of the Short Story