This week we’re featuring another reader-suggested short story, John Cheever’s “The Death of Justina,” which was a recurring favorite in our recent “Reading Your Way Through Life” thread. It hooks you from the start: So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
by Dish Staff A reader emails: “It’s time to resurrect that one-time Young Adult staple, Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,’” and we agree. How the story begins: The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
by Dish Staff This weekend’s short story selection is Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” which begins with these arresting paragraphs: Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
by Matthew Sitman Since starting our Saturday short story feature, readers occasionally have written to us suggesting we use this or that story. Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (pdf) is one of them, and when it arrived through our “Reading Your Way Through Life” thread this week, I thought it was … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
by Matthew Sitman It seems fitting to feature a story about depression this week, and few wrote about what it feels like with more acuity than David Foster Wallace. Here’s the opening paragraph of his “The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing” (pdf), published in 1984 in The Amherst Review: … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
Here are the opening paragraphs of Martin Amis’ 1992 short story, “Career Move“: When Alistair finished his new screenplay, Offensive from Quasar 13, he submitted it to the LM, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the Little Magazine. On the other hand, his most recent … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
Given that The New Yorker has made their archives, going back to 2007, available all summer, now seems like a good opportunity to dip into their fiction. Here’s the beginning of a short story they published in July of 2012, Junot Díaz’s “The Cheater’s Guide to Love“: Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually she’s your … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
Today’s short story, Ann Beattie’s “Eric Clapton’s Lover,” first appeared in the Summer 1976 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. How it begins: Franklin Fisher and his wife, Beth, were born on the same day of March, two years apart. Franklin was 39 years old, and Beth was 41. Beth liked chiles relenos, Bass ale, … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
This week, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell published his latest short story, “The Right Sort,” on Twitter. The narrator, a teenager hopped up on his mom’s Valium, begins the story this way: We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
This week’s story is Amy Bloom’s “Silver Water,” in which a woman movingly describes her older sister’s descent in mental illness. How it begins: My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the clear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond your body. After we … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
