This rules and I opened 5 new tabs to search for 5 of these. Posts like these are always so nourishing for the literary ecosystem in the best and broadest possible sense!
Ahoy, Karl! It's yer 'ol pal, Mark (formerly of Whiteis-) Helm. I'm so glad I popped in to see what was cookin' on the hotplate. I'm teaching a short fiction course this summer (at the TN Prison for Women. Fantastic students, awful place), am I've been casting about for some fresh stories. Already have some Bradbury on the syllabus, natch ("The Veldt" and "A Sound of Thunder"), but I think I'm gonna switch out "Thunder" for "The Whole Town Is Sleeping." The story has some of Bradbury's most gorgeous descriptive prose. I love the passage: "How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists ... baseball bat and balls lay upon unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn white-chalk game of hop-scotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk." No one ever got so much out of the humble hyphen. I'd be willing to bet, too, that he invented the construction "unfootprinted" on the spot. And, as there often is in Bradbury, so much music. Wow. Thanks for reminding me of that one; I probably haven't read it in 30 years.
Whenever I come across your story recommendation posts, I wonder where you find all the fucking time to read all this stuff, Karl. Seriously, man, I'm jealous. If I'm lucky, I get in maybe 6-8 novels a year, tops, and 15-20 new stories (more, I guess, if you count the Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Pseudopod, etc. stories I listen to in the car every day to and from campus. It's hard to find time to read and write (he said, neither reading nor writing). Anyway, I look forward to checking out Bora Chung and hunting down some of Ben Hecht's short fiction (Oh, and re-watching "Angels Over Broadway'!).
A story I'm especially looking forward to re-reading and teaching this summer is one I'm sure you've read, but in the off-chance you haven't, you're in for an enormous treat: Stanley Elkin's "A Poetics for Bullies." And, ya know, because one good turn and all, here's a few stories you might not know--but, hell, you probably do. Still, I'll give it a shot: "Every Body Depicted is Exploited," by Elise LeSage (creepy as fuck and wilidly original piece about how art often exploits the bodies it claims to celebrate, name-checking Archibald Motley and calling to mind countless others); "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" by Annalee Newitz (read the story when Slate published it back in 2018 and it's still up. An interesting meditation on the nature of friendship, language, and the brighter side of AI); "Our Side of the Door" by Kodiak Julian (a truly lovely piece of portal fiction: A father trying to capture the wonder of childhood for his young son like lightning bugs in a mason jar); and couple you've probably read but I'll mention it anyway, “The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (made me break down in tears at the end when I first read it to students, even though I'd already read it a half-dozen times), and "The Third Bear" by Jeff Van Der Meer (Bloody frightening, literally. And relentless).
Hope this finds you well, Karl. Looking forward to digging into a post I missed: "24 Stories Between 2,000 and 3,000 Words." I laughed when I read the intro bit about your idea of the canon being a half-century out of date. Mine, too. Whattya know?! I also tend to go for shorter pieces, not because of a Kindle limitation, but because it's rare for me to get my students to dig into longer pieces. Recent exceptions have been "A Poetics for Bullies," Neil Gaiman's "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains," and Willa Cather's haunting and lovely "Paul's Case."
Thanks again for all the recommendations and your always engaging, erudite, and funny posts. You should send me a couple of your stories or point me in the direction of places I can find them. I'd love to read some!
Man, too much to follow up on point for point here, but I’ll put these titles in my wishlist. I have in fact read poetics for bullies— it’s pretty great. It’s on my survey list but probably a few batches away as I recall it being long. All the rest of that stuff is new to me so will put on my list. (Haven’t read that van der meer but I read something of his and it was good) And yes that Bradbury story has some of his finest small town poetry. He has so many excellent stories. I’ve read some great ones by him but there are so many more to get to. It’s funny reading a story of his and feeling like you’ve read it even if you haven’t, since so much of his stuff has either been adapted for TV or film or ripped off to the point where it seems familiar
I don’t have anything placed yet— still at the prehistory of that process but I’m putting a list together of places to submit
Give me some time with that and I hope to have some stuff to point people to. I’m also happy to send you a copy of something if it takes forever to place, which it certainly might
This rules and I opened 5 new tabs to search for 5 of these. Posts like these are always so nourishing for the literary ecosystem in the best and broadest possible sense!
Thanks, Rachael!
Ahoy, Karl! It's yer 'ol pal, Mark (formerly of Whiteis-) Helm. I'm so glad I popped in to see what was cookin' on the hotplate. I'm teaching a short fiction course this summer (at the TN Prison for Women. Fantastic students, awful place), am I've been casting about for some fresh stories. Already have some Bradbury on the syllabus, natch ("The Veldt" and "A Sound of Thunder"), but I think I'm gonna switch out "Thunder" for "The Whole Town Is Sleeping." The story has some of Bradbury's most gorgeous descriptive prose. I love the passage: "How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists ... baseball bat and balls lay upon unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn white-chalk game of hop-scotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk." No one ever got so much out of the humble hyphen. I'd be willing to bet, too, that he invented the construction "unfootprinted" on the spot. And, as there often is in Bradbury, so much music. Wow. Thanks for reminding me of that one; I probably haven't read it in 30 years.
Whenever I come across your story recommendation posts, I wonder where you find all the fucking time to read all this stuff, Karl. Seriously, man, I'm jealous. If I'm lucky, I get in maybe 6-8 novels a year, tops, and 15-20 new stories (more, I guess, if you count the Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Pseudopod, etc. stories I listen to in the car every day to and from campus. It's hard to find time to read and write (he said, neither reading nor writing). Anyway, I look forward to checking out Bora Chung and hunting down some of Ben Hecht's short fiction (Oh, and re-watching "Angels Over Broadway'!).
A story I'm especially looking forward to re-reading and teaching this summer is one I'm sure you've read, but in the off-chance you haven't, you're in for an enormous treat: Stanley Elkin's "A Poetics for Bullies." And, ya know, because one good turn and all, here's a few stories you might not know--but, hell, you probably do. Still, I'll give it a shot: "Every Body Depicted is Exploited," by Elise LeSage (creepy as fuck and wilidly original piece about how art often exploits the bodies it claims to celebrate, name-checking Archibald Motley and calling to mind countless others); "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" by Annalee Newitz (read the story when Slate published it back in 2018 and it's still up. An interesting meditation on the nature of friendship, language, and the brighter side of AI); "Our Side of the Door" by Kodiak Julian (a truly lovely piece of portal fiction: A father trying to capture the wonder of childhood for his young son like lightning bugs in a mason jar); and couple you've probably read but I'll mention it anyway, “The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (made me break down in tears at the end when I first read it to students, even though I'd already read it a half-dozen times), and "The Third Bear" by Jeff Van Der Meer (Bloody frightening, literally. And relentless).
Hope this finds you well, Karl. Looking forward to digging into a post I missed: "24 Stories Between 2,000 and 3,000 Words." I laughed when I read the intro bit about your idea of the canon being a half-century out of date. Mine, too. Whattya know?! I also tend to go for shorter pieces, not because of a Kindle limitation, but because it's rare for me to get my students to dig into longer pieces. Recent exceptions have been "A Poetics for Bullies," Neil Gaiman's "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains," and Willa Cather's haunting and lovely "Paul's Case."
Thanks again for all the recommendations and your always engaging, erudite, and funny posts. You should send me a couple of your stories or point me in the direction of places I can find them. I'd love to read some!
Man, too much to follow up on point for point here, but I’ll put these titles in my wishlist. I have in fact read poetics for bullies— it’s pretty great. It’s on my survey list but probably a few batches away as I recall it being long. All the rest of that stuff is new to me so will put on my list. (Haven’t read that van der meer but I read something of his and it was good) And yes that Bradbury story has some of his finest small town poetry. He has so many excellent stories. I’ve read some great ones by him but there are so many more to get to. It’s funny reading a story of his and feeling like you’ve read it even if you haven’t, since so much of his stuff has either been adapted for TV or film or ripped off to the point where it seems familiar
I don’t have anything placed yet— still at the prehistory of that process but I’m putting a list together of places to submit
Give me some time with that and I hope to have some stuff to point people to. I’m also happy to send you a copy of something if it takes forever to place, which it certainly might