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Celebrating short works of literature.

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I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center.

Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know.

For example, I didn’t know that she thought I was a bad kisser:

“Your kisses are unpleasantly moist,” she says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Actually, no,” I say. “I’ve always gotten compliments on my kisses.”

“Well,” she says. “Women very rarely tell the truth.”

I smile at her. “You’re lying,” I say, cleverly. But she doesn’t seem to catch the interesting paradox. She looks at me blankly and downs the last bit of wine in her glass.

—

Click here to read Shepherdess by Dan Chaon.

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«Ha! Ha! Forgive me. I must laugh now.»

And she flung herself upon a polar-bear skin in a paroxysm of giant mirth.
Utterly crushed, I went out to do myself in. Racking my brain for the most expressive method, I suddenly remembered a man called Harringay, a taxidermist who was often at her cocktail parties, where he had eyed me with a friendly interest.
I went to his shop. He was there alone.

«Harringay! Stuff me!»

«Sure. What shall it be? Steak? Chop suey? Something fancy?»

«No, Harringay, bitumen. Harringay, I want you to employ your art upon me. Send me to Miss Bjornstjorm with my compliments. For her collection. I love her.»

—

Click this to Read Squirrels Have Bright Eyes by John Collier.

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Buy Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier

Cole Porter wanted to control what was happening, including that admiration and love, but when he looked up after the last refrain he saw that the young man was gone. In the midst of all the laughing and the clinking of glasses, behind the facade of perfection, something was not quite right. There would be other young men, he knew that, and more or less he accepted it. But not really. Which is why he went horse-back riding.

Sales guy for a narrative experiential lifestyle product, narrator. Just titles, really. My job is to sell this story to you. To make it yours. To make you believe. To make you feel something again. Isn’t that what you wanted?

They couldn’t stop expressing surprise and joy at the revelations; the discovery of shared misery was as thrilling, in its way, as the discovery of mutual love. Terence said he wanted to take early retirement and drive a motorcycle to Central America. What a cliche, Kathleen thought, then realized that his behavior no longer implicated her, that she didn’t need to be concerned. And she told him it sounded like a great idea.

Having penetrated a man’s personal space,
immediately seek out his Sweet Spot.
The Sweet Spot is where he empties his
pockets at the end of the day and stores
the essentials he needs to begin the next.
The Sweet Spot of a secretive, catlike man
will most often be inside a cupboard or a
drawer.
When you find it, consider using a Data
Surge to capture the contents of his
handset.
A Data Surge must be deployed with
extreme caution, and only if you feel
confident of an exceptional yield.
The quantity of information captured will
require an enormous amount of manpower
to tease apart.
Its transmission will register on any
monitoring device.
We can guarantee its effectiveness
only once.

On the way back to Jennifer’s room I did something Barbie almost didn’t forgive me for. I did something which not only shattered the moment, but nearly wrecked the possibility of our having a future together.
In the hallway between the stairs and Jennifer’s room, I popped Barbie’s head into my mouth, like lion and tamer, God and Godzilla.

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra — A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Shipley had an old VW van he drove Beatrice around in after class. He bought her lunch with a credit card belonging to a Shipley Sr., and wrote stories in which the two of them met Chekhov and took him to the doctor. He let Beatrice stick a fine sewing needle in his face and insisted it made him feel better all around. Knowing her financial situation, he cut her envelopes of coupons, brought her bags of pharmaceutical samples from his mother’s office. They lay side by side on the grassy campus hills, drinking children’s cough syrup and chewing Flintstones vitamins until the sun set over the Fine Arts Building and they fell asleep, waking up with bugs and grass in their hair. The word idyllic sprang to Beatrice’s mind more than once, but she ignored it, thinking it was probably just anxiety. For when she wasn’t with Shipley, she was irritable, unsettled. She had lost track of some of her unhappiness and could not seem to relocate it, not even in the bedrooms of the boys on the second floor-though she had looked.

The strange and mysterious things which day by day befell the Student Anselmus, had entirely withdrawn him from his customary life. He no longer visited any of his friends, and waited every morning with impatience for the hour of noon, which was to unlock his paradise. And yet while his whole soul was turned to the gentle Serpentina, and the wonders of Archivarius Lindhorst’s fairy kingdom, he could not help now and then thinking of Veronica; nay, often it seemed as if she came before him and confessed with blushes how heartily she loved him; how much she longed to rescue him from the phantoms, which were mocking and befooling him.