Jan, I read The Bishop that night after I received this newsletter. Thank you for providing the push I needed to finally plunge into Chekov. I enjoyed it very much. I don't have anything insightful to add beyond what you and Susan have written. I look forward to your future short story selections. Also, I keep getting these nudges to read Death Comes for the Archbishop!
Thanks a million, Katy. Next month Susan (@susanlowell) and I are doing “The Lottery,” a story that a lot of Americans read in school and still don’t understand.
I read it in the eighth grade (age 13), and when I reread it in adulthood, I was shocked to realize that I’d never considered that the victim is a woman, the men draw names, etc., and that this story may have a feminist subtext (Shirley Jackson would never say). Seldom have I felt that I missed so obvious a point (even trying to cut myself some slack for being 13 when I read it).
I read The Lottery in the ninth grade, and my primary memory is that I was horrified. It will be good to read it again with more knowledge and life experience. I will be on the lookout for the feminist subtext!
I read this, and I'm participating in this group, out of self-interest. When Jan announced the reading group's focus on short stories, it dawned on me that while I was familiar with the form, I haven't had any notable experiences with any stories that come to mind. I even wrote a short story for an English class in college, coincidentally, about a young woman's weekend visit to a convent for nuns-to-be. But at my stage of life, with as much pent-up and backlogged material I want to write about, maybe I'd be better off concentrating on the short form. So I'm here to learn. As for my thoughts on the story, I wish I had waited to read it until after I read Susan's thoughts that included Chekhov's six points.
Welcome aboard, Steve! I know @Susan Lowell will be glad to hear her comments were helpful.
Just one question: You say you’d had no notable experiences with short stories. Did you read “The Lottery” in school? That was the first story that made a big impact on a lot of us. And I’m wondering if none of your schools taught it or if they did and it made no impression. By coincidence, that’s the story Susan and I are doing in May.
I remember O. Henry stories (and I’m free-styling here, not googling anything to refresh memories). I believe this was Henry’s, “The Gift” (maybe?) in which a couple exchanges Christmas (?) gifts. She had long beautiful hair so he bought her a bejeweled brush. Unbeknownst to him, she had cut off her hair to do something with it that was her gift to him. When The Natural movie with Redford and Close came out I bought a second-hand copy of an anthology that had the Malamud story in it that was the basis for the movie and I read that. Now you’ve got me curious so I’ll go back and check. I don’t remember reading “The Lottery.” In college I was all about Gatsby and Yossarian (Catch-22) in fiction and Emerson, Thoreau and William James in non.
How could I have forgotten “The Gift of the Magi”? I read that in school at about age 11, even before “The Lottery” at age 13.
I haven’t read the story that inspired “The Natural,’ but I’d bet that @Kent Anderson has and if so, that has an intelligent opinion of it that he might be willing to share with you.
For anyone who hasn’t read “The Gift of the Magi” but wants to, here it is:
A book group for classic short stories sounds right up my alley! I just finished George Saunders' book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and started writing again
We'd love to have you jump in when you have comments, Sean. I enjoyed "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain," which has a nice conversational style that draws you into some of the highly complex stories he discusses. And it's likely that in the future I'll quote from it when its comments relate what we're discussing. Thanks for the reminder that I'll need to keep an eye on to one to check for relevance to our club.
You're so welcome, Alex. I'm guessing that the only reason you haven't read Chekhov is that in your schools he was consistently upstaged by British novelists of the same era who are great in their own way.
There also used to be a slight bias among British critics against short stories, which they saw as an "American" art form as opposed to the "British" art form of the novel. That's been changing, but I suspect it still exists among old-schoolers.
It wasn't exactly short, but, like most of his stories based on real people, accurate. Since none of us was around 125 years ago, we'll never know what kind of author he was, but his works endure.
They do endure. Have you read any you especially liked? Susan and I were both trying to keep our comments short and focused on “The Bishop,” so we didn’t bring up other stories. But I’m hoping some recommendations will come out in these comments for people looking for them.
Jan you are one of my happy connections as a result of using Notes. Lovely to see your mind at work. I hope you will discuss the short stories in The New Yorker. Some are brilliant. Others strike me as dull or meandering ( or clever. God save me from being clever!) . Still I often listen to the authors read them on the podcast.
Thanks, Christine. We’re doing only dead writers for now. But some of the best short stories writers of our time so died recently, you may well have read in The New Yorker some we’re likely to do.
We’re doing only dead authors at the moment because this club is an outgrowth of one Susan and I belong to on Zoom that another friend and I started partly out of a frustration we’d had with other book clubs: They kept asking us to read books that were too long and required more time than we wanted to spend, given how little value they were delivering. One of our rules for that group also became a rule for this one: Any story we do has to be available for free, legally, online :).
Every book club should have that rule! That relates to another reason for our dead-authors-only rule in the Zoom group: It wasn't just that in other groups we were asked too read books that were too long, too expensive, and not worth the time ... people were proposing books without having read them! Seriously, we'd heard things like: "I haven't read the book, but my friend liked it and she has good taste." And often that book would turn out to be the biggest clinker of all.
It was definitely one of his last. And he’d had tuberculosis for 20 years! It’s remarkable that he could write hundreds of such good stories when he was so sick. He’d started coughing up blood two decades before he died. I am in awe of how he could keep working at such a high level without things like central heating or antibiotics.
Jan, I read The Bishop that night after I received this newsletter. Thank you for providing the push I needed to finally plunge into Chekov. I enjoyed it very much. I don't have anything insightful to add beyond what you and Susan have written. I look forward to your future short story selections. Also, I keep getting these nudges to read Death Comes for the Archbishop!
Thanks a million, Katy. Next month Susan (@susanlowell) and I are doing “The Lottery,” a story that a lot of Americans read in school and still don’t understand.
I read it in the eighth grade (age 13), and when I reread it in adulthood, I was shocked to realize that I’d never considered that the victim is a woman, the men draw names, etc., and that this story may have a feminist subtext (Shirley Jackson would never say). Seldom have I felt that I missed so obvious a point (even trying to cut myself some slack for being 13 when I read it).
I read The Lottery in the ninth grade, and my primary memory is that I was horrified. It will be good to read it again with more knowledge and life experience. I will be on the lookout for the feminist subtext!
I read this, and I'm participating in this group, out of self-interest. When Jan announced the reading group's focus on short stories, it dawned on me that while I was familiar with the form, I haven't had any notable experiences with any stories that come to mind. I even wrote a short story for an English class in college, coincidentally, about a young woman's weekend visit to a convent for nuns-to-be. But at my stage of life, with as much pent-up and backlogged material I want to write about, maybe I'd be better off concentrating on the short form. So I'm here to learn. As for my thoughts on the story, I wish I had waited to read it until after I read Susan's thoughts that included Chekhov's six points.
Welcome aboard, Steve! I know @Susan Lowell will be glad to hear her comments were helpful.
Just one question: You say you’d had no notable experiences with short stories. Did you read “The Lottery” in school? That was the first story that made a big impact on a lot of us. And I’m wondering if none of your schools taught it or if they did and it made no impression. By coincidence, that’s the story Susan and I are doing in May.
I remember O. Henry stories (and I’m free-styling here, not googling anything to refresh memories). I believe this was Henry’s, “The Gift” (maybe?) in which a couple exchanges Christmas (?) gifts. She had long beautiful hair so he bought her a bejeweled brush. Unbeknownst to him, she had cut off her hair to do something with it that was her gift to him. When The Natural movie with Redford and Close came out I bought a second-hand copy of an anthology that had the Malamud story in it that was the basis for the movie and I read that. Now you’ve got me curious so I’ll go back and check. I don’t remember reading “The Lottery.” In college I was all about Gatsby and Yossarian (Catch-22) in fiction and Emerson, Thoreau and William James in non.
How could I have forgotten “The Gift of the Magi”? I read that in school at about age 11, even before “The Lottery” at age 13.
I haven’t read the story that inspired “The Natural,’ but I’d bet that @Kent Anderson has and if so, that has an intelligent opinion of it that he might be willing to share with you.
For anyone who hasn’t read “The Gift of the Magi” but wants to, here it is:
https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/1-the_gift_of_the_magi_0.pdf
A book group for classic short stories sounds right up my alley! I just finished George Saunders' book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and started writing again
Sean, are you also subscribed to Saunders’ substack? I just love it.
We'd love to have you jump in when you have comments, Sean. I enjoyed "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain," which has a nice conversational style that draws you into some of the highly complex stories he discusses. And it's likely that in the future I'll quote from it when its comments relate what we're discussing. Thanks for the reminder that I'll need to keep an eye on to one to check for relevance to our club.
Thank you Jan, a great article. I'm working through some classics thanks largely to my local library so your article caught my attention.
I've never read Chechov but time to rectify that through your Guttenburg link or Amazon UK if they also have a free Kindle download.
You're so welcome, Alex. I'm guessing that the only reason you haven't read Chekhov is that in your schools he was consistently upstaged by British novelists of the same era who are great in their own way.
There also used to be a slight bias among British critics against short stories, which they saw as an "American" art form as opposed to the "British" art form of the novel. That's been changing, but I suspect it still exists among old-schoolers.
Yes, you're quite right, Jan, when I was at school the focus was on British authors.
It wasn't exactly short, but, like most of his stories based on real people, accurate. Since none of us was around 125 years ago, we'll never know what kind of author he was, but his works endure.
They do endure. Have you read any you especially liked? Susan and I were both trying to keep our comments short and focused on “The Bishop,” so we didn’t bring up other stories. But I’m hoping some recommendations will come out in these comments for people looking for them.
Jan you are one of my happy connections as a result of using Notes. Lovely to see your mind at work. I hope you will discuss the short stories in The New Yorker. Some are brilliant. Others strike me as dull or meandering ( or clever. God save me from being clever!) . Still I often listen to the authors read them on the podcast.
Thanks, Christine. We’re doing only dead writers for now. But some of the best short stories writers of our time so died recently, you may well have read in The New Yorker some we’re likely to do.
We’re doing only dead authors at the moment because this club is an outgrowth of one Susan and I belong to on Zoom that another friend and I started partly out of a frustration we’d had with other book clubs: They kept asking us to read books that were too long and required more time than we wanted to spend, given how little value they were delivering. One of our rules for that group also became a rule for this one: Any story we do has to be available for free, legally, online :).
Great rules. My book group also requires the person proposing the book have read it first.
Every book club should have that rule! That relates to another reason for our dead-authors-only rule in the Zoom group: It wasn't just that in other groups we were asked too read books that were too long, too expensive, and not worth the time ... people were proposing books without having read them! Seriously, we'd heard things like: "I haven't read the book, but my friend liked it and she has good taste." And often that book would turn out to be the biggest clinker of all.
You are totally on to something!
I read "Uncle Vanya," years ago. "The Bishop" was probably his last story, since he died two years later.
It was definitely one of his last. And he’d had tuberculosis for 20 years! It’s remarkable that he could write hundreds of such good stories when he was so sick. He’d started coughing up blood two decades before he died. I am in awe of how he could keep working at such a high level without things like central heating or antibiotics.