★★★★ The Survivors: A Memorial Day Story, by Elsie Singmaster, 1915 (pg. 1-7)

By coincidence, I began reading this book on Memorial Day 2020, and this first story is about Memorial Day. It’s about a border town which sent men to fight for the North, except for one guy who had ties to the South. And when that one guy returns, he can’t bring himself to reunite with his old friends, even his cousin. Finally, when only he and his cousin remain, he gives up his old grudge. It’s well written and tight. The only thing that bothered me is the longstanding trope (maybe it wasn’t a trope back then?) that I constantly see in media: some slight in the past can simply be forgotten, though neither person has changed or learned anything from it.

★★★★ The Lost Phoebe, by Theodore Dreiser, 1916 (pg. 8-22)

This is a poignant portrait of an older rural man who descends into mental instability after the death of his wife. Despite the expected outdatedness of terms and diagnoses of mental illness, the story seems plausible enough given the circumstances — and the circumstances are vividly described.

★★ The Golden Honeymoon, by Ring Lardner, 1922 (pg. 23-37)

An elderly couple on a multi-week vacation to Florida (from some unspecified northern state) meet up with another couple — the man of the latter couple had once dated the woman in the former couple. After that, nothing much of interest occurred. The author chose to use ungrammatical English throughout, which would have been fine in dialog but as narration is grating. The narrator consistently referred to his wife as “Mother” and felt compelled to use several racial slurs. I added a point for all the main characters being elderly (an under-represented demographic in literature).

★ I’m A Fool, by Sherwood Anderson, 1922 (pg. 38-48)

Finding the N-word on the first page, I nearly skipped this one, and now I wish I had. Oddly, the first few pages, which are sprinkled with N-words, are unrelated to the rest of the story, apparently only existing to be racist. The first person narrator is poor, but saved enough money for a suit and then lied about being wealthy to a young lady and then felt foolish about it afterward. That’s the whole story. Plenty of intentional poor grammar, along with hokey 1920s slang and stories about horse-racing.

★ My Old Man, by Ernest Hemingway, 1923 (pg. 49-60)

Also heavily about horse-racing, this early Hemingway work is not indicative of coming genius. The writing is half-baked at best, with anything of importance obscured by jargon, slang, and the fact that the narrator himself doesn’t know what’s going on. As best I can tell, the narrator (Joe) follows his father around from track to track as the father attempts to make a living on or near the racing circuit. Until the dad dies. Again, the characters are as uninteresting as the story. Unlike the previous two, it has no deprecating terms for African Americans (because it takes place in Europe?).

★★ A Telephone Call, by Dorothy Parker, 1928 (pg. 61-66)

This entire piece is a monologue, from the narrator to God, begging for some man to call her. It was mostly a one-star story, but I added a star for humorous phrases like: “You sit up there, so white and old” and “You think You’re frightening me with Your hell, don’t You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.” I imagine such things were as scandalous to certain crowds in the 1920s as they are today.

★★ Double Birthday, by Willa Cather, 1929 (pg. 67-81)

Disconcertingly, the author switches main characters multiple times, as if having trouble deciding which story to write. Only the last is an interesting person, or used to be. Now he just sits on the back porch doing nothing or listening to his nephew play the piano. One character’s name changed without warning; I first thought it was a clue but apparently it was simply a mistake. Though a birthday is mentioned early, it is apparently not an important part of the narrative. There are good, clear descriptions of scenes and people.

★ The Faithful Wife, by Morley Callaghan, 1930 (pg. 82-86)

In this one, a restaurant employee meets a “girl” (full-grown woman), she calls him for a date, he meets her and they make out for a bit, and then she admits she’s married. He leaves. I didn’t notice anything interesting about either character, their motivations, or the setting.

★★★ The Little Wife, by William March, 1930 (pg. 86-97)

Joe, the main character, has just received a telegram saying his wife gave birth early and that there were complications. Most of the story takes place on the train as he hurries home. There are fascinating bits of emotional insights as Joe refuses to believe the worst and descends into a frenzied giddiness to mask his fear. But there are also weird bits like when Joe approaches two unaccompanied girls and chats them up for a while.

★★★★★ Babylon Revisited, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1931 (pg. 98-117)

This one made up for the pointlessness of several previous stories. It was poignant, filled with relatable characters. In the aftermath of the 1929 market crash, the main character (Charlie) returns to Paris — where he had cavorted lavishly in previous years, losing his wife to death and his child to the legal guardianship of his wife’s sister. Now reformed and restrained, he tries to convince the sister-in-law that he’s ready to take over parenting his daughter. More than anything, the reader can feel the emotions of Charlie’s memories — both good and bad — from the earlier years, as well as his current sitution.

★★★ How Beautiful With Shoes, by Wilbur Daniel Steele, 1933 (pg. 118-137)

Out in the country, a girl is abducted by a “loony” and eventually rescued by a drunk. Some of the inner dialog is outstanding; other parts seemed like gibberish to me. I liked that it was told from the girl’s point of view, and how the author seemed to be trying to get inside these characters’ heads. I just don’t think the story was told very well.

★★ Resurrection Of A Life, by William Saroyan, 1935 (pg. 138-147)

Most of this seemed to be stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences of gibberish, possibly about the memory of a boy selling newspapers and buying cheap bread to feed his poor family. One worthwhile part was when the boy was shouting out his headlines for the day and one of the headlines was about “ten thousand Huns” had been killed. It gave him pause to see what little effect this had on passersby. He thought of each “Hun” as an individual person with his own desires and plans, each suddenly startled at “the monstrousness of war, the beastliness of man” as he died.

★ Only The Dead Know Brooklyn, by Thomas Wolfe, 1936 (pg. 148-153)

Wolfe was once praised by Faulkner as a great talent, but this aggravatingly stupid story shows no signs of that. It was an exercise in writing in the accent and idiom of a place not one’s own. Wolfe, who was highly educated and from the South, here writes as an uneducated first-person narrator from 1930s Brooklyn. Nothing is interesting in this story aside from the overly exaggerated patois; there is no plot or point, no character development, and no reason to read this.

★★★★ A Life In The Day Of A Writer, by Tess Slesinger, 1936 (pg. 154-164)

Taking place entirely within one room, this story is about a writer constantly frustrated by the intrusions of real life and obligations upon his mental processes — something with which I entirely empathized. It also fairly well described writer’s block and also the magical feeling that ensues when everything comes together in the mind and words flow onto the page.

★★ The Iron City, by Lovell Thompson, 1937 (pg. 165-189)

On a ship named Iron City, one passenger becomes inexplicably jealous of a photo carried by a stowaway. It’s a photo of a woman, whom the passenger determines to “steal” from the stowaway (because women are possessions, correct?), so much so that he ends up murdering the stowaway. While descriptions of the scenes and emotional states were impressive, the huge leap from “I saw a picture” to “I must murder this man” was never explained and didn’t make sense. It was presented as if this is what any reasonable person would think in these circumstances.

★ Christ In Concrete, by Pietro Di Donato, 1937 (pg. 190-202)

According to Wikipedia, the characters in this story were real-life people known to the author, including main character Geremio (Di Donato’s father) and Annunziata (Di Donato’s mother). Geremio was killed in 1923 when a building collapsed, and this story describes that. (Di Donato later wrote a novel on the same topic, with the same title.) At the time, it was apparently received as “eloquent” and a masterpiece of storytelling. However, to me, it read like horrible mockery of Italian-American immigrants and Catholics, and most of the time it was difficult to tell what was going on through the run-on sentences, garbled phrasing, thick dialect, and constant blurted prayers. Only the incredibly gruesome death at the end sticks out in my mind.

★★ The Chrysanthemums, by John Steinbeck, 1937 (pg. 203-213)

I’m hard pressed to think of any other story I’ve ever read that’s so well-written yet so stupendously boring. In it, a woman works in her garden growing chrysanthemums while her husband sells some cattle in the distance. Later in the day, they decide to drive into town for dinner. See?

(Note: there are entire academic papers about “Symbolism In The Chrysanthemums”, which try to show how important it is that the flowers symbolize the woman’s role in society, her femininity and her sexuality, her frustrations at being childless and in an unromantic marriage and even more. These people are, I think, reading more into this story than is actually there. Also, I don’t care about symbolism if nothing actually occurs in a story.)

★★★★ Bright And Morning Star, by Richard Wright, 1939 (pg. 214-246)

Sadly, I hadn’t heard of Richard Wright before reading this short story, which was a powerful and twisted tale of a double lynching. Centered on an older Black woman, it tells of her oldest son who’s been in jail a while and the younger son who is currently organizing for the local Communist Party. Both the woman and the younger son are captured and tortured by a gang of white thugs, comprised of both police and laypersons. Before dying, the woman manages to shoot and kill the man who had betrayed the Party and who was about to reveal the names of its members. I was struck both by the mother’s willingness to lose her sons to lynching (in the hopes that their cause would go on) and by the son’s willingness to partner with white people in his organizing — despite how many of them had betrayed him.

My only frustration with this story is that the southern dialect (of both white and Black characters) is so thick I sometimes couldn’t determine the meaning. (This has been true for me in real life as well.)

(It was this story that led me to read Native Son, which I awarded five stars.)

★★ Hand Upon The Waters, by William Faulkner, 1940 (pg. 247-260)

In this one a county attorney solves a murder in a day or two. The descriptions of places and weather, people and scenes, were all very clear. But I found it difficult to determine what was happening during the action scenes, and the key parts of this “whodunnit” were unclear to me — motive, how it happened, how it was solved.

★★ The Net, by Robert M. Coates, 1941 (pg. 261-269)

When a man learns his wife has sought (and enjoyed) the attentions of other men, he confronts her. Apparently annoyed by her dismissiveness of his concerns, he strangles her to death in the vestibule of her mother’s apartment, and then wanders about the neighborhood justifying his acts in his own mind. I got the impression that the author enjoyed writing the scene of domestic violence, and it seemed like he believed some of the justifications as well. The only reason this is two stars instead of one is that the writing was very clear; the scenes, actions, and thought processes all perfectly described.

★★ Nothing Ever Breaks Except The Heart, by Kay Boyle, 1942 (pg. 270-277)

In an unnamed city (presumably in Europe), several Americans await a chance to return to the United States, including one person who is (we are left to assume) rich and famous. At one point, a man who works at a flight counter (and consistently fails to get anyone flown back) takes the rich lady out on a boat to look at an airplane floating in the river. I never grasped quite what was going on, or what the people were thinking or feeling, or why they did what they did.

★★ Search Through The Streets Of The City, by Irwin Shaw, 1942 (pg. 278-285)

A man walking through New York spots a woman he once dated, and approaches her, walking with her a ways. She tells him she’s married now and expecting a baby. He keeps pestering her about the good times they had, ignoring her body language and actual words meant to discourage him, until she breaks down crying and hops in a cab to escape him.

★ Who Lived And Died Believing, by Nancy Hale, 1943 (pg. 286-304)

A woman loses her mental faculties in a hospital, while the nurse who takes care of her gets taken advantage of by the guy she thought she loved. It’s truly very poorly written and isn’t as interesting as it sounds.

★ The Peach Stone, by Paul Horgan, 1943 (pg. 305-322)

Four people and a dead baby travel by car from one run-down town to another for the burial. Almost all of it is thoughts and feelings of the four living people — a man, his wife, their son, and an unrelated teacher friend (it isn’t explained why she’s in the car too). The author writes these thoughts and feelings as if he’s never been a human, so each person comes off as very strange. Also, there’s a gratuitous racial slur.

★★★ Dawn Of Remembered Spring, by Jesse Stuart, 1943 (pg. 323-329)

Written as a first-person account from a boy’s point of view. The boy is left home alone while his mom visits another local boy who was bitten by a snake. The narrator spends all his time killing fifty-three water moccasins and seems pretty good at it.

★ The Catbird Seat, by James Thurber, 1942 (pg. 330-338)

In which a fragile male employee is upset that a woman supervisor is making changes at the company so he first conspires to kill her, but having failed at that, conspires to gaslight her and make it seem as if she’s gone insane. It was all presented as clever on the man’s part, as if it was something the author approved of.

★★ Of This Time, Of That Place, by Lionel Trilling, 1944 (pg. 339-374)

It’s possible this story just went over my head. But it is also possible that it simply isn’t very interesting. The main character, an instructor at a college, talks to various students, reads scholarly articles criticizing his own book of poetry, and decides one of his students is simply “mad”. Two semesters pass in these 36 pages, but nothing of import happens.

★★★★ The Wind And The Snow Of Winter, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 1946 (pg. 375-386)

Here, an old man wanders in the Nevada mountains during good weather, thinking about how he heads back to town when he senses winter coming. He used to be a prospector but now he just wanders with the stories in his head and his dutiful mule behind him. It’s a lovely portrait of aging in the West, from the perspective of a man who remembers the Old West and sometimes forgets things have modernized.

★★★★ The Enormous Radio, by John Cheever, 1948 (pg. 387-396)

A normal couple in a normal apartment building replace their radio (at some expense) because the old one broke down and they just love listening to music. The new radio seems all science-fictiony with extra glowing dials, but they have trouble locking onto actual radio stations. Over time, it becomes obvious that what they can hear on it are real sounds from in and around their building — conversations and appliances running in other apartments. It’s fascinating how these two people react to their newfound abilities to listen in on the lives of their neighbors — and it reminded me a lot of today’s social media, where so many people don’t really post anything, but regularly scroll through to keep up with the lives of others.

I took a point off for the husband dismissing his wife’s pleas that he stop a neighbor from beating his wife (she has heard this on the magical radio). After he listened a bit, he simply turned off the radio and told her she shouldn’t listen in: “It’s indecent (referring to the listening, not the abuse)... It’s like looking in windows.”

★★ Children Are Bored On Sunday, by Jean Stafford, 1949 (pg. 397-406)

The main character, a woman named Emma, is caught between her “rube” upbringing and her current pretension of being an intellectual, something she realizes about herself while browsing in a museum and mulling over how it feels to be divorced. She spots a guy she once flirted with, who is also divorced, and she suspects that he too isn’t fully comfortable at the cocktail parties where people gather regularly to skip supper and argue about their pointless opinions.

★★★ The NRACP, by George P. Elliott, 1950 (pg. 407-437)

This was a sci-fi kind of story, imagining concentration camps in the U.S. It is written in the form of letters from a writer who has volunteered to work for the government agency tasked with “solving” the “Negro problem” — which they do by building secret camps in the desert, issuing propaganda throughout the land about pleasant farm and factory work, and then... It really isn’t clear what exactly is happening, though I think we’re supposed to assume the Black people are being exterminated. What bothered me was that the narrator, while seemingly feeling bad about what was happening, also seemed to believe that Black people couldn’t coexist with whites in the U.S. — and it felt like the author’s opinion as well.

★★ In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks, by Hortense Calisher, 1950 (pg. 438-452)

It starts off about a man and his mother, who he drops off at a sanitarium — apparently she spent too much time drinking (while also providing for him very well). But then the man (Peter) drives over the home of an older friend (Robert), where other characters sit around drinking and listening to music. Suddenly, one of the guests jumps to his death and Peter leaves with Robert’s (minor) daughter and drives her around until they get to Peter’s house.

★ The Other Foot, by Ray Bradbury, 1952 (pg. 453-465)

I couldn’t tell whether this is the worst story I’ve ever read, or a mediocre one suggesting an unworkable way to solve racial strife. It’s about a future in which all (yes, apparently every single one) Black people moved from the Earth to Mars, and after they did, everyone else on Earth blew themselves up with atomic weapons, leaving only a handful of repentant old white men who fly to Mars to beg the Black people for help.

★★ Three Players Of A Summer Game, by Tennessee Williams, 1953 (pg. 466-487)

Told by a teen boy narrator who watched it all from the window of his house, this story is about a “family” across the street that plays croquet a lot. The widow of a young doctor, her preteen daughter, and the drunk guy who’s left his own wife to live with the widow and her daughter. Williams seems overly enthused when describing the widow’s breasts “like two angry fists” and the girl’s “plump little buttocks and her beginning breasts”. The descriptions of the drunk guy were spot-on, but otherwise the story was uninteresting (except where it was creepy).

★ A Mother’s Tale, by James Agee, 1953 (pg. 488-507)

A mother cow tells a story to young calves about a former cow that was hauled off to the slaughterhouse, skinned but miraculously survived to walk all the way back to tell the tale about what Men really do to cows. It’s written in simple, childish language, as if meant to be a fable, but I could detect no moral to it.

★★ The Magic Barrel, by Bernard Malamud, 1955 (pg. 508-523)

A young man studying to be a rabbi decides he needs a wife so he hires a matchmaker. The matchmaker shows him pictures and tells him about several young women, each of whom the soon-to-be-rabbi declines. At the end, the young man sees a photo and falls in love, but the matchmaker says that particular photo was a mistake; it’s his daughter, and she’s dead. But the young man insists, so the matchmaker introduces them. (It isn’t explained how the dead woman was brought back to life.) There are a few interesting insights, but otherwise the story is bunk.

★ A Circle In The Fire, by Flannery O’Connor, 1955 (pg. 524-541)

Right off the bat, there is some gratuitous racism (for example: “Negroes were as destructive and impersonal as the nut grass”), and what the author referred to as “a Southern accent” is in fact just very poor grammar. The story itself was strange — three teen boys arrived on the property and decided to stay, and the owner (though she didn’t want them there) didn’t do anything about it.

★ The First Flower, by Augusta Wallace Lyons, 1956 (pg. 542-548)

A girl at an all-girl school has a lot of thoughts about how unattractive she is — and about how utterly unconcerned she is about being unattractive — until a boy she doesn’t know asks her to dance and gives her a flower. (The introduction calls this a “love story with an honest happy ending”, but I detected neither love nor a happy ending.)

★ The Contest For Aaron Gold, by Philip Roth, 1956 (pg. 549-562)

At a summer camp, a failed ceramics-maker is hired to teach ceramic-making to the boys attending camp and fails at that too. The camp has a rude swimming instructor that’s mentioned a lot, but I’m not sure what for. (I don’t know if it was supposed to be relevant or instructive or something, but most of the characters had surnames that made me think they might be Jewish — Steinberg, Samuelson, Shulberg, etc.)

★★ One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts, by Shirley Jackson, 1956 (pg. 563-572)

A man walks around New York City being nice to people. There’s mild surprise at the end when he comes home to his wife and the readers learns that she had been walking around New York City being mean to people. They decide to switch roles the following day.

★ To The Wilderness I Wander, by Frank Butler, year (pg. 573-601)

On the surface, this is about a woman riding a subway car and getting off at a nonexistent station, from which she wonders into an alternate world that’s stuck in time. I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor about losing one’s mind but the prose was so gruesomely tacked together — as if the author had recently learned a lot of new big words and wanted to show them off — that I can’t be sure.

★★★ The Ledge, by Lawrence Sargent Hall, 1960 (pg. 602-617)

A Maine fisherman takes his son and a nephew out to shoot ducks on Christmas morning. They end up drowning to death, even their dog. I give it points for solid descriptions of the characters’ personalities and the setting, but the plot seemed contrived (he forgot to make sure the skiff was safely on the exposed reef before walking off?) And some parts seem crazily dated, like giving the two boys (age 13 and 15) brand new shotguns for Christmas — which wouldn’t have seemed odd in 1960 but now seems like someone should call Child Protective Services.

★★★★ This Morning, This Evening, So Soon, by James Baldwin, 1961 (pg. 618-655)

A U.S.-born Black man, who’s become relatively famous in both music and film, lives in Paris with his Swedish wife and their young son, and contemplates his upcoming trip back to America. Through conversations with his visiting sister and via memories of his last trip to the States, he examines the ways in which white and Black people experience the world differently, and how that dynamic is different in Paris than in the U.S.

This story was perfectly written for the first three-quarters or so; then the plot suddenly shifted to an encounter with some traveling Americans at a nightclub and an old friend from Tunis. That part seemed less meaningful to me, and unrelated to the rest of the story, so that the story ends weaker than it began.

★★ Tell Me A Riddle, by Tillie Olsen, 1961 (pg. 656-690)

A compilation of words, few of which comprise complete or grammatically correct sentences, this “story” is (I think) about an elderly American couple (formerly immigrants from Russia) who have grown apart in later years, after their children leave home. Then the woman gets cancer and dies. The only part that felt meaningful to me was when the woman was in the hospital and became upset that a rabbi came to visit her. Someone (it isn’t clear who) explains to her that the hospital arranges a list based on “race, religion” for the “men of God” to visit patients. The woman complains that her designation on the list should be changed. “Tell them to write: Race, human; Religion, none.”

★★★ The Old Army Game, by George Garrett, 1962 (pg. 691-701)

A former soldier narrates a tale of his former drill sergeant. I give this one points for descriptions of details and how it sounds like it could be real. There’s a good spot for an earlier ending, but the author just kept going and ruined the story for me with seemingly irrelevant further details.

★★★ Pigeon Feathers, by John Updike, 1962 (pg. 702-719)

This one started out strong, with a young boy’s attempts to maintain belief in God and the afterlife despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary — a journey that began when he started reading his mother’s old college texts. But then the boy is sent out to kill pigeons in the barn, and he kills a bunch of them with a .22 rifle. Looking at their corpses as he buries them, he is suddenly convinced there is a God and an afterlife — though nothing in the story leads the reader to the same conclusion.

★ Sound Of A Drunken Drummer, by H.W. Blattner, 1963 (pg. 720-759)

One of the longer stories in this book, this one is a collection of words, some of which are strung together in a useful order, but those seem to be the highlights. The little intro by the editor says this story is about a “whore”, but I couldn’t tell that from reading it. Here’s a sample paragraph.

“As though some merciless outside force were attacking his face it twisted, wrung by a rising agonized ecstasy that dissolving in sudden improbability reshaped with a kind of gradual successive integration and sank like a spear profound, strengthless into the evacuating eyes.”

—page 726

★★★ The Keyhole Eye, by John Stewart Carter, 1963 (pg. 760-784)

The narrator recalls his wealthy boyhood and how much time he spent with his youngest uncle, and how he later thought of that same uncle when they were both grown. Early on, the details are powerful and the reader is poignantly drawn into the kid’s emotional world. But the final section is elusive in meaning, with the narrator expressing emotions that don’t make sense and don’t seem to be related to what’s happening around him.

★★ A Long Day’s Dying, by William Eastlake, 1964 (pg. 785-798)

While a young man drowns slowly in quicksand, his father rides around with a Native American friend, looking for the son and talking about the differences in mindsets between “Indians” and white men. The boy eventually survives and the three ride off into the sunset. According to the short intro, “their dialogue is tremendously rich in its illuminations of both cultures and the end is fable-like”, but I found the dialog stilted and full of stereotypes, if not outright childish, and I found the end improbable at best.

★★★ Upon The Sweeping Flood, by Joyce Carol Oates, 1964 (pg. 799-814)

A man driving home from a funeral encounters a hurricane and ignores a deputy’s order to turn back. When he finally can’t drive anymore, he pulls over at a house where two children have been abandoned by their drunk father, and he rides out the storm with them. I gave it a couple of extra stars for the powerful descriptions of the storm and people, but did not understand at all any of the motivations of the characters, especially near the end when the man begins trying to kill the boy just before help arrives.