30 Stories in 30 Days

Vicki turned me on to a BookTuber named Angelina (Read & Reread) who is reading (among other things), one short story a day during Book Tube’s “Shorty September” — I thought I’d give it a whirl. Anyone else want to play along??

Angelina chooses the stories and links them on her YouTube page, and for your convenience, I’m listing the stories here, and will add a link to them as we go along.

I guess this her 4th year doing this thing. I may go back and read the 2022-2024 picks, but first let’s see how this month goes. I will read and comment here, so this is going to end up being the longest blog post ever.

Flannery O’Connor. Isn’t she adorable? And so, so dark…I read that her stories paved the way for other Southern gothic writers like Cormac McCarthy.

1. “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor

Back in the teaching days, the literature textbook in our classroom included the O’Connor story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” which I failed to bring to life for the kids. I assigned it one or two times mid-career (2008-2012, maybe?) during a short story unit, and the students read it (or pretend-read it) in the most perfunctory way imaginable. On the other hand, one rainy day I read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” out loud to my students, and as I remember it, all of our heads caught on fire.

I had never read this story, and if you go to Angelina’s YouTube channel (linked above), you’ll see it’s the first choice for all four years — it’s her favorite. I read it this afternoon, and it has all the stuff that makes O’Connor great: icky people, horrible situations, and a dark comic thread. I know I’ll read it again before I go to sleep tonight.

Tomorrow, Speedoman. What I like about this list is that although there are familiar writers I have read before, most are new to me.

2. “Speedoman” by Ghassan Zeinnedine

What I love about literature like “Speedoman” is how it opens up to a world that is completely ordinary — even mundane — and yet completely foreign to me. I loved the flashbacks the husbands in this story provided, offering glimpses of their growing up in Lebanon, and then living through a civil war, eventually fleeing from the violence, and finding lives and new opportunities in Dearborn, Michigan. The familiar American story that is currently under attack.

I had to go and review the war — It was the early 80s, and I had just entered my 20s; I didn’t remember much but the song “The Lebanon” by the Human League. The internet told me that the invasion of Lebanon was the Israeli response to a Palestinean attack on the Israeli ambassador in the UK. And from there, how could I avoid thinking of Gaza?

Anyway, much of the story takes place at a gym swimming pool and spa area, where a mysterious Arab man in a pink robe suddenly appears on the scene, and underneath that robe he is wearing — you guessed it, a speedo — and a different one each week, with various famous Lebanese landmarks emblazoned on his firm ass. The shifting points of view between the husbands and wives, the inclusion of Arab pop culture like “the burkini,” the text messages exchanged between the wives as they think about this mysterious stranger with his intriguing package, the comical restaurant names like “Ali’s Famous Sushi and Kabobs” where the couples meet for dinner each week — all of these elements combine to make this story rich, funny, and totally unexpected. Loved the ending. Weird in the best way.

3. “The Great Awake” by Julia Armfield

I am realizing that there is so much good writing out in the world, but you must somehow make a point of seeking it out. I had never been to thewhitereview.org where this story appears, and there is so much rich content sitting there, waiting to be discovered. Maybe the way to find these places is to follow a few Book Tubers who make reading their business, treating it as both vocation and avocation. And like everything else interesting and compelling, you cannot hope to capture it all.

I don’t want to sound like an undiscerning fangirl, but I loved THIS story too about a city full of people who have lost their Sleep, a specter that has exited the body, and then shadows their host, mimics them, putters around, alphabetizes the books on the bookcases, and never, ever speaks. Armfield explains that sleep had transformed to a “sudden persistent wakefulness, the mutation of sleep from a comforting habit to a creature that crouched by the door.” People live in uneasy relationship with their ghost-like Sleeps, and wander around at night, filling these new hours with work and hobbies, social interaction, artistic performance — everybody zombie-tired, deep purple bruises under the eyes…yet never able to lose consciousness.

This story resonates, and I’m still trying to digest it. I especially loved Armfield’s language, like “Two a.m., dark throat of summer. A bleary stagger of us collected in the corridor…” A bleary stagger of us. What a great phrase.

Hey, if you’re reading along and would like to write a few of these these little paragraphs — neither analysis or summary, just pure reaction — I would welcome the offer. I’m enjoying it, and handling it now, but what will it be like come September 13th or whatever? At some point down the road, I just know I’m gonna miss because of all the other demands of life. Anyone out there wanting to jump in with me?

4. “Woodland” by Lydia Millet

Oop, it’s happened, and I’m behind schedule. No matter though.

“Woodland,” is a lonely, gut-rending story, told in a disjointed, sparse prose that reflects the diminished world that it is set in — a world of tremendous loss that we are facing. I was thinking about this the other day; Silent Spring and Rachel Carson are placed squarely in my lifetime, and climate change was my generation’s problem to solve, but despite the good work of many wise people, the decimation rolled on. We lacked a savvy marketing team to capture the risk and communicate it clearly, urgently, and today when I see my former students starting families, and having lots of kids, more than Zero Population Growth calls for, I fear what their world will be in 40 years. I think of it when I fold up a piece of used tin foil and put it in the recycling, and imagine that a child may scavenge it out of the dump someday, and perhaps trade it for something nourishing or useful. When future generations look back at our era of easy abundance and our blindness to the cost we have forced them to bear, I cannot help but believe that they will hate us.

5. “The Mine” by Nathan Harris

I know this story is widely acclaimed, but I don’t know. I couldn’t connect. Perhaps I’ll try it again, but I’ve already read it twice. Maybe some stories are better left alone. I didn’t hate it. I just felt nothing. Clearly I’m missing something because as I said, this story received much attention and praise.

6. “The Stone” by Louise Erdrich (audio)

I assume the reader in this audio is the author — it didn’t say, but it sounds like I imagine Louise Erdrich to sound like. I enjoyed this strange and charming story of a woman’s lifelong, often secret relationship with a rock that looks like a skull.

7. “Your Body is a Jewel Box” by Kay Boyle

What a well-written, horribly grim story. I started wondering, “who is this Kay Boyle?” I like reading authors who nobody seems to remember despite their excellence (like Kate Chopin), and Kay Boyle garnered a fair amount of attention in her time. I read that her main concern as a writer is the absence of love in the world. But good lord. Why hasn’t anyone purchased the rights to this story and created a horror film? I can imagine it, shot and lit like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I advised my sister — who loves cozy mysteries and Hallmark movies — to skip this one. I know it would upset her.

8. “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler

I can’t find a copy of this story that my computer would let me open safely — “this site is not secure, open at your own risk” — so I will just say that I love Octavia Butler’s novels (Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Fledgling), and just last night on Substack, someone published photographs of pages from Butler’s private notebook that she must have written when she was just starting out. She is coaching herself, encouraging herself, visualizing her life as a successful writer, refusing to settle for anything other than wide acclaim and commensurate royalties. She knew she would not be poor much longer, and she dreamed of financial security for herself and her mother. I’m quite inspired by the way she spoke to herself. She wrote down exactly what she wanted, like a nice home in a safe neighborhood, and then she’d exhort herself to “see to it!” She knew she was great, and just had to wait for her audience and the publishing world to catch up.

Just a side note. This experience of reading one short story after another has inspired me to renew my subscription to The New Yorker, and to subscribe to George Saunder’s Substack “Story Club.” And no George Saunders story on Read and Reread’s list for the last four years? Seems like a grave oversight.

9. “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Oh, Marquez. I fell in love with One Hundred Years of Solitude in my twenties, and that novel remains in my Top Ten of all time. When pressed, I will say it’s my favorite, but I haven’t read it in two decades (I read it 3x those early decades of life), so I’m not sure whether it’s still my personal GOAT.

This is a beautiful story, about a gigantic, beautiful man, who washes in from the sea, obviously dead and covered in seaweed and mud. The small village that discovers the body, the women who tenderly care for him and gaze at him as they prepare his large body for proper burial at sea, and the men who reluctantly realize how magnificent this man is, all are changed by the mysterious appearance of the handsomest drowned man in the world. “…they all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss.”

A great, very short story. How can a writer do so much in such a small space? A fun question to ponder.

10. “Ghost Birds” by Karen Russell

In this story, all of the birds are gone. Only ghost birds remain, and not everyone can see them. Here is another glimpse into a bleak future, wherein we see a degraded world, a surveilled place, and a lonely father trying to connect with his adolescent daughter by taking her out to a forbidden area where they might see some ghost birds. He can see them, but she cannot, and neither can her mother. Russell portrays that tug that exists in many children of divorce: a longing to love and admire your father simply because he is your father, but watching him try too hard to please you, and all the disappointments in your father that your mother carries become your disappointments too. I’m not sure how to think or feel about the ghost birds. I think I need to read this again.

11. “The State” by Tommy Orange (audio)

I can’t think of how to express how hard this story moved me — I’m left feeling both uplifted and bereft. This one travels deep. I read along as I listened to Orange read, and think this is the way to do it. I felt something different from listening to his voice tell the story, and from reading his beautiful words. A deeply satisfying experience.

12. “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury

13. “The Redemption of Galen Pike” by Carys Davies

14. “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu

15. “Year’s End” by Jhumpa Lahiri

16. “The History of Sound” by Ben Shattuck

17. “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss

18. “Letter of Apology” by Maria Reva

19. “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

20. “North Of” by Marie-Helene Bertino

21. “I Won’t Let You Go” by Hiromi Kawakami

22. “Arianespace” by Maylis de Kerangal

23. “You Got It, Take it Away” by Fernando Flores