0109807
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It is a happiness to wonder; -- it is a happiness to dream.
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wonder
happiness
morella
short-story
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Edgar Allan Poe |
5c4e717
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I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.
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sanity
short-story
insanity
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Edgar Allan Poe |
a4fb914
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"Happy birthday," she said. "And next time? Eat the stupid cupcake."
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cupcake
claire-danvers
morganville-vampires
shane-collins
short-story
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Rachel Caine |
50127d0
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"From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the "River of Silence"; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever."
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silence
love
eleonora
short-story
river
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Edgar Allan Poe |
7e80716
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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
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short-story
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Amy Hempel |
50acdd6
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I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.
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humor
me-and-miss-mandible
wives
short-story
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Donald Barthelme |
e2c2931
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Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.
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death-and-dying
short-story
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John Updike |
56fe13d
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I equate love (bodies touching indecently) to the limitlessness of being - to nausea, to the sun, and to death.
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short-story
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Georges Bataille |
fca860d
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She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.
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joy
quote
living
life
joys
small-joys
like-life
lorrie-moore
complicated
pressure
short-story
realization
quotes
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Lorrie Moore |
70b697b
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They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.
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short-story
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Haruki Murakami |
5c0bed9
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I learned there were lots of realities in the world.
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short-story
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Haruki Murakami |
5cacf30
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She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.
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spy-vs-spy
short-story
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Maile Meloy |
1b4c676
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The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...
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writing
short-story
writers
short-stories
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Lawrence Block |
aa32362
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"Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts: ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts. LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short. SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome repetition, being locked into a single voice, etc. LIKE A FABLE. (Examples: Kafka, Keller, von Kleist, Tolstoy's 'Three Hermits.') Through its very concision, this kind of short short moves past realism. We are prodded into the fabulous, the strange, the spooky. To write this kind of fable-like short short, the writer needs a supreme self-confidence: The net of illusion can be cast only once. When we read such fable-like miniatures, we are prompted to speculate about significance, teased into shadowy parallels or semi allegories. There are also, however, some fables so beautifully complete (for instance Kafka's 'First Sorrow') that we find ourselves entirely content with the portrayed surface and may even take a certain pleasure in refusing interpretation. ("Introduction")"
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short-story
short-fiction
short-stories
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Irving Howe |
ebfe993
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Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.
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family
spy-vs-spy
short-story
genetics
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Maile Meloy |
c52f424
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This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.
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literature
humor
short-story
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Miranda July |
092e29d
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It's the only light we've got in all this darkness
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memorable
short-story
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James Baldwin |
62ba41e
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I hate complaining to strangers -- you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
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short-story
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
77acd40
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Isn't it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed?
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short-story
the-new-yorker
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
37ea140
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"There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena."
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humor
transgressive-fiction
short-story
satire
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Donald Barthelme |
f3af98c
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"The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ... Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state. Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ... Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively. Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room. There's often a brilliant overfocussing. ("Introduction")"
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short-story
short-fiction
short-stories
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Irving Howe |
0d8b0d8
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"Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn't like things that were ineffable... ...a lot of people don't like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don't mind telling you so. "If he'd just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long..." --from "The Temptations of St. Anthony," by Donald Barthelme"
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humor
sainthood
short-story
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Donald Barthelme |
9a43d2a
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You have to believe me without proof. That's what faith is -- believing without proof.' They got up from the bank of stones. It was getting late, the shadows lay cool and lengthened on the grass and the tops of the trees had the stillness around them that means the end of the day and its liquidation in the setting sun. They retraced their steps back to the house where his car was parked, and when they passed through the blighted orchard, he picked up an apple for her and she ate it. She didn't even have to look; she knew it would be whole, without worms or decay.
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relationships
fiction
literary-fiction
short-story
short-stories
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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala |
c39d034
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"His lips turned upward. "Man told you to lick salt off me, but he didn't say where you would be licking the salt from."
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elizabeth-morgan
party-game
truth-or-dare
short-story
sexy
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Elizabeth Morgan |
e07c67c
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"I have nothing I want to ask you, and if I did, you would probably lie anyway." "I'm drunk. Drunk people tell the truth." "Like hell they do. Besides you're not that drunk." "Then dare me something." I snorted. "No, because I'm not that drunk, or stupid."
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elizabeth-morgan
party-game
truth-or-dare
short-story
sexy
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Elizabeth Morgan |