On “The Last Thing I Heard” by Theron Hopkins (1343 words) *****

Here's a hard-luck story that manages to feel somehow genuine and authentic, the great strength of this piece. It's about a son, and about a dad who takes one too many financial hits. What happens to such a relationship in the years that follow? Read the story here at The Sun.

On "The Letters" by Edith Wharton (14,438 words) *****

This story is many things and one that seems, at first, particularly timely in a nation focused on the #MeToo movement. It's a tale of a man taking advantage of a naive young woman. Or at least, that's what it seems at the beginning, when Mr. Dearing first takes a pass at his nanny, an older single gal whose life has not turned out so well. Disadvantaged, with few good marriage prospects, she's falls hard for the married man. And then . . . the story takes a strange turn. Mr. Dearing's wife dies. The two might actually be able to settle down together. Does the man really want her, however? It seems so--and then, maybe not, and then maybe so, and then maybe not. The middle portion of this long piece reads like many a real-life romance, the way we never know someone's heart or true motives. But in the end, the story becomes something other than that, something about the will, about how sometimes truth is less important than willing one's self into happiness. Read the story here.

On "Afterward" by Edith Wharton (5322 words) *****

This ghost tale focuses on a ghost one doesn't know exists until "afterward," and as such it's rather chilling. A couple buys a haunted house in which nothing seems wrong. But the woman keeps having premonitions about something being odd or strange. That said, nothing is. Until . . . it's too late. Afterward. Read the story here.

On "Full Circle" by Edith Wharton (8349 words) *****

Betton is an author who finds fan mail tiresome, so he hires a man named Vyse to respond to the mail for him. Vyse is a former classmate--and also an author himself, an unsuccessful author who once asked Betton for help getting his novel published, a novel that Betton found riveting, much better than anything he could write himself. Betton, however, did not help--let other matters get in the way. Now, with Vyse as his needy and poor assistant, Betton feels guilty--but also uncertain of Vyse's motives. Does Vyse recognize that Betton is not as good a writer? Does he realize that this second novel is not as good as the first? How can Betton keep up his reputation for Vyse or keep needy Vyse in his employee? In one sense, this is a story of revenge--but of revenge that a person perpetrates on himself for a life badly lived. Read the story here.

On "Flight" by John Steinbeck (7661 words) *****

One of my favorite stories of all time, this one reminds me of what I found so engrossing about John Steinbeck when I was a teenager. It's a bit overwrought and melodramatic toward the beginning, but the slow, deliberative descriptions of a young boy--er, man--on the run fits with the inevitable end. Read the story here.

On "The Last Asset" by Edith Wharton (12,119 words) *****

A journalist befriends an American woman who is at the center of the social world from which he draws his stories. She in turn wants a favor--she wants him to get in touch with her husband, from whom she has been separated for years. The husband is needed for the daughter's wedding, or else no wedding can take place. Why the husband is separated, how he lives, and why he has no interest in helping is at the center of this story, a center which comes to encompass even the journalist. The story is told in the third-person limited perspective of the journalist, and yet, it's one of those tales that fits in with The Great Gatsby or On the Road insofar as the story isn't really about the main character but about someone whom the main character is obsessed with (although actually, this story is about the main character insofar as he is the one transformed in it, even if he's not the main spring for the events). Those two novels are first person, and I wonder to some degree why, given that the story is still told from a limited perspective, why Wharton didn't settle on first person for this one. Read the story here.

On "The House of the Dead Hand" by Edith Wharton (10,201 words) *****

Wharton had a knack for mysteries. This one reads like a gothic tale ala Poe and Borges. A man is asked to get a copy of a newly discovered painting by Leonardo, which has been purchased for a private collection. The purchaser, however, is a man who will not allow others to photograph the image and, save for the young visitor (who has some special connections), even look or describe the painting, which was purchased by the daughter of the current owner. The painting, however, is also the daughter's prison sentence, for the father is not just possessive of it but insanely attached to it such that no one else in the family can live a normal life. Read the story here at the Atlantic.

On "The Reckoning" by Edith Wharton (8233 words) *****

This story looks at the emotional toll that divorce takes on a person, most especially the person not expecting/wanting the divorce. Unattached love is all fine and glorious if you're the one who gets out first. The story renders a bit too little of the pain that is usually experienced on the part of the party ending the relationship, but it does so to make a point about how love cannot be all about one's own self and feelings at a given time. Read the story here.

On "The Touchstone" by Edith Wharton (26,849 words) *****

Essentially a novella, this work ruminates on the subject of loyalty, love, and literary acumen. A man befriends a woman writer whose husband soon dies; she falls for him, writes to him for years, but the love is unrequited. Years later, after her death and needing money to be able to marry, the man arranges for the publication of the letters, which are a huge literary hit, but at what price to his personal soul? What do we owe to the dead? Do we keep their secrets forever? Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "The Pelican" by Edith Wharton (7614 words) *****

There's something about stories that are written in the first person about someone else that I seem drawn to. I think of The Great Gatsby, On the Road, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The latter seems less like the first two insofar as things actually seem to happen around Owen that affect the narrator; by contrast, the narrator in the first two pieces isn't really a large part of the story. He's a hanger-on, a person fascinated by the characters around him--and most especially one. (Brideshead Revisited has a similar dynamic, I'm now realizing.) Perhaps it's the narrator's fascination that works its magic on me: I too become interested in knowing more about this acquaintance or friend, as mystified as the narrator is. "The Pelican" works a similar form. Here, the narrator is a man who happens to fall in with a woman whose husband has died and who has a young child. She takes to the lecture circuit to make money. Unlike those other stories, however, here perhaps it is the narrator himself who is rather fascinating--this because he seems so much to detest the woman but still spends so much time writing about her, dropping in on her lectures, trying to avoid her, and so on. In short, he finds her lectures facile. But years go by, and every five to ten years he ends up running into her, each time, she's still at it, raising money to educate her son. At some of these drop-ins, she's wildly successful; at others, she's down on her luck. Such is fortune. But that son, well, she's been doing this a long while--and we begin to realize something more about the woman, that she's a con of sorts. And we begin to wonder also what exactly it is that draws her to lecturing, what makes her tick. Read the story here.

On "A Landing Called Compromise" by Donna Baier Stein (4990 words) *****

In this opener from Stein's collection, two women come to terms with the friendship among their sons and another boy who suffers from a terrible accident. While the accident furthers the distance between the two women, an unnatural disaster brings them to a point where common humanity is recognized. Read the story here at the Saturday Evening Post.

On "The 37" by Mary Miller (2097 words) *****

"The 37" seems a fitting end to Miller's Always Happy Hour collection. It's about a woman who tries. What I mean is that it's about a woman who, despite her constant anxiety, forces herself to travel, to go to places and to do things that she's uncomfortable with, like riding the bus. And in a sense, that's the most healthy thing a person can do--even if that person's mental state is seemingly unhealthy. Read the story here at Joyland.

On "Beverly Home" by Denis Johnson (5155 words) *****

The final tale in Johnson's collection of a drug-addled young man, this one focuses on his recovery. The piece examines sick people, which happens to be the job that the narrator has managed to find himself in. The deformed also happen to be the kind of people this man dates. But each night, he sneaks peeks at a seemingly normal couple, an ideal life, that he can only view through a window. What he comes to see is that we are all deformed in our own way. Read the story here at Revision 30.

On "Two Men" by Denis Johnson (3569 words) *****

Seemingly random, this story follows a set of druggies as they pick up a hitchhiker, try to get him home, realize that they do not know what they are doing, and then ends up somewhere more sinister than one could ever imagine at the start. And that's just the first man! Read the story here at the Short Story Project.

On "Emergency" by Denis Johnson (3569 words) *****

Georgie, the narrator's friends in this piece, is one of those characters that sticks in one's head. He's a drughead who seems only semiconscious of things going on around him but who somehow manages to make good repeatedly--not necessarily out of some sense of love or goodness, just out of sheer luck. He stands in contrast to the narrator, who tends to think of his life as falling apart, of himself as one who constantly messes things up for others. I was curious to know how Georgie would be portrayed in the film version, and I wasn't disappointed, though in some ways, that portrait now sticks in my head more than the one that was in my mind before. Georgie was a bit more subdued in my mind, whereas now he is always over the top. The story can be read here at Narrative Magazine.

On "The Lurking Fear" by H. P. Lovecraft (8173 words) *****

One of the stronger Lovecraft stories, this one shows off many of Lovecraft's standard techniques and proclivities. It involves a reporter who goes in search of "the lurking fear." An entire village of townsfolk disappears. The reporter goes with some aids, who als disappear. One night, staying in a house, his partner goes to the window upon seeing something intriguing--when he doesn't speak or turn around, the reporter goes up to him and finds his face has been mauled off. The fear, the reporter comes to believe, might have something to do with a family that once lived in the house, specifically with one man who was murdered. But the truth, as the story unfolds, is something ghastlier than a ghost. Read the story here.

On "A Decent Life" by Peter Meinke (4047 words) *****

This great story from one of Meinke's collections recounts the life of a man who is discovered to be having an affair. The issue: He lives in a totalitarian society, and his wife is the one who reports him. As such, the government's ultimate control of the two lovers means that they can be compelled toward actions that they would not otherwise contemplate, enough that choices about life are altered forever. Read the story here at VQR.

On "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" by Denis Johnson (about 2000 words) *****

The first story in Johnson's collection Jesus' Son, this one features an unlikely set of flash forwards. It's a technique I'd never seen before, and Johnson makes it work--astoundingly. Read the story here.

On "Excursion in Reality" by Evelyn Waugh (4499 words) *****

One of the better tales Waugh tells is "Excursion in Reality"--or perhaps I'm just a sucker for Hollywood stories. In this one, a novelist is recruited to rewrite Hamlet for the motion pictures--but to update it in terms of language. In the process, of course, with studio committees what they are, the play loses much of its actual being. Meanwhile, the novelist's fickle relationship with his girlfriend is put on hold, as he becomes wrapped up in a completely other affair. Methinks Waugh uses the term reality ironically. Read the story here.

On "Identity" by Felipe Alfau (4636 words) *****

In Alfau's introductory story to Locos, we start with a character--or person--who is slated to be important. That is his role in life. But no matter what he does, he is ignored. The premise seemed so much like the lives of many I know, including myself. We want our lives to amount to something, but in the end, all our artistic endeavors or service endeavors or whatever we do seem to go nowhere far. We trudge on in anonymity, questioning our existence. That is Fulano, who volunteers to be part of the Alfau's novel in an effort to gain some importance. It is suggested the Fulano commit suicide to start the novel, so he sets about that course of action. He won't really do it, but he'll leave a note and disappear mysteriously, making him the center of action--except that when he does do it, he is the victim of a thief, who seeing Fulano drop his possessions and his suicide note in the streets, absconds with the items and makes the suicide note his own, leaving his own possessions with the note in its stead. The story becomes then a vehicle to right this wrong. Read the story here at Barcelona Review.