What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver

It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

As I made clear in my review for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, I love Raymond Carver.

What he does is like magic. His combination of a compelling scene, genuine characters, and gruff voice always seem to come together as a sum more than their parts. It's amazing to me he can pack so much emotional payoff in sometimes as little as just ten pages, and using such spare prose. He's a master of subtlety; a master of the craft who's able to impart big feeling is small action and with few words.

This collection of short stories sees Carver regularly rely on the common motif of broken relationships. Right off the bat, Why Don't You Dance? is a great example of this, fashioning a poignant narrative on the life cycle of relationships in typically spare prose over a short length that has the same impact of stories exponentially longer. The majority of the stories present in this collection take place in and around the ruins and the downslide of relationships that are doomed to fail, or have already. These are something all adults have experienced at least once in their lives, and they have always left their mark on us and changed us somehow. Thus the experience of reading them hits all the more harder. Carver's characters are not good people; they're lazy, incompetent, petty, and bitter. But we can relate to that, too, because—if we're being honest with ourselves—we've all experienced such character flaws in ourselves, just like we've experienced doomed and broken relationships.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

Some of the images Carver creates here are far more striking than anything I recall in his previous collection (such as a boy seeing his mother kissing a man 'with the television going' while spying through a window, a mentally disabled man and his attachment to his bass pond, and others). He also has a penchant for disarming the reader with his subtle, everyday depictions of working class life, only to hit them with a burst of unexpected violence or tragedy near the end of the stories.

Carver's brilliant and this is masterful work. The best fiction is that which turns a mirror toward us, forcing us to admit to ourselves our flaws and idiosyncrasies, and become better, more self-aware people, and Raymond Carver's collections of short stories do just that.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Slow Learner (1961-1964) by Thomas Pynchon

The short story collection Slow Learner is my first exposure to Pynchon. I wonder if I've made a mistake and should have begun with one of the novels, such as V, or The Crying of Lot 49 instead.

Beginning with The Small Rain, I was struck immediately by some of the odd dialogue present (Pynchon seems to have confused Canadian accents with Southern), and the sex scene towards the end was curiously written. But I liked the character of Levine and the backdrop of a town destroyed by a hurricane and how the setting challenged Levine's worldview and lifestyle.

A bit rough in patches but it served as a decent enough introduction, I suppose.

The second story I found far more palatable. It's casually poetic, witty, fluid, dryly humorous, and more than a bit weird, Low-lands has me beginning to see what people adore so much in Pynchon. What I most enjoy about postmodern writers is the skill with which they render daily ennui interesting, and Pynchon does that well in the initial half of the story.

Pynchon is the second author (the other being Haruki Murakami) I've read lately who, in his own words, admits to disliking his early writings and tears them down in a foreword as amateurish work. Far be it for me to disagree with these legendary, masterful writers, but I've quite enjoyed the early material of both of them and found it worthwhile as a lead-in to later, more polished, and higher quality work.

Interestingly, Pynchon's story reminds me of a more humorous predecessor and obvious influence of Murakami's work in the surrealistic turn Low-Lands takes in its latter half, where we find our hero literally crawling down the rabbit gypsy hole and exploring an underground network of tunnels dug into a garbage dump in which a whole society of gypsies live in order to marry a three-foot-five-inch gypsy woman named Nerissa and help raise her pet rat called Hyacinth.

I swear I'm not making this up.

Up third, the story Entropy contains a few beautiful and genuinely humorous scenes that are well written, but both are constantly tempered by Pynchon's reversion back to having his characters talk at me as if he had a bullet list next to his typewriter filled with themes and ideas he had to force into this story by any means necessary. This doesn't work for me, and if Pynchon continues like this, I don't think we'll be able to be friends.

I could chalk this one up to being very-much-not-my-thing--I usually like my short stories subtle, laconic, and peppered with a bit of ambiguity; all of which Pynchon—in his overwritten style jam-packed with random factoids and obscure references—represents the polar opposite of.

I've heard that Entropy serves as a great introduction to Pynchon's unique style, which was made famous in his later work such as Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm building up to reading by first sampling some of his short stories. This is a bit worrisome since I didn't much care for this one. But I have a feeling his style will work better with a bit more polish and the more ample legroom offered by the novel versus the short story. We'll see.

Under the Rose, unfortunately, did nothing to dissuade the opinion formed by the prior story. Surely reading Raymond Carver's short fiction and John le Carré's spy fiction immediately before this didn't do any favors for Pynchon's brand of short spy fiction, which falls short of the high mark set by each. I found Under the Rose to be little more than an exercise in dry tedium. It's another story that probably works better in a longer format. I didn't feel I was given enough time to get to know these characters, indeed the only thing noteworthy about the characters are their silly names. The setting could have been an interesting one, but we're kept from spending much time there by a plot that trips forward monotonously, allowing for little life or character to the people in the story as it reaches a conclusion surely meant to have more impact than it does. Pynchon seemed more comfortable commenting on boring minutiae than filling out his characters. I found the entire thing a silly bore and loathed it.

I found the final story, titled The Secret Integration, to be a far more compelling one—at least initially. We're given a number of characters who instantly jump off the page at you, colored with Pynchon's trademark wackiness. The premise of a group of mischievous, memorable youths is whimsical and charming, but the serious edge Pynchon sets to it (the racial integration of a Massachusetts school during the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s) all but dissipates as Pynchon wastes his story mostly rambling on tangents about the various minutiae present in the story such as political figures of the Berkshires' past. I suspect this is just sort of Pynchon's thing: he seems to like vomiting his deep knowledge of useless, irrelevant facts onto the page right in the middle of a narrative that was really beginning to get interesting 8 pages ago when this meaningless diversion just got started. I didn't find any of these expository tangents engrossing enough to warrant their inclusion.

It's not all bad, though. This is the most well written story of the collection by far, featuring moments of virtuoso talent from Pynchon's pen. But the lack of a strict editor sees Pynchon waste this potentially entertaining story, and it fizzles out before it can make much of an impact, then ends.

Now that I've finished Slow Learner, my initial thoughts seem true: I do think I made a mistake reading this first of all Pynchon's work. It seems uneven and rambling, but I can see a glimmer of what folks must like about his work. So I'll pick another Pynchon up soon and hope that the good stuff shines through more often and more strongly, but for now I can't shake the fact that Pynchon's style just isn't for me.

⭐⭐

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) by Raymond Carver

One day a thousand years from now, whoever is living on this planet will unearth some of Carver's short stories from some old, burned out bookshop they've just excavated. They'll get to work meticulously translating it and they'll learn everything they need to know about latter-half 20th century American culture just from his work. Raymond Carver is our Geoffrey Chaucer and his short stories are our Canterbury Tales. He reminds me of Ernest Hemingway in that his work is almost always more than the sum of its parts. His prose is simple, dirty, and direct. But what he says with it is profound in his muted way. Reading him feels like brushing your hand against some dirty slate, or chucking an old, broken cinder block into a refuse pile. His short fiction is the holey work glove of 20th century American literature. And I mean that in the best possible way. If Hemingway had lived forever, perhaps Raymond Carver is what the injuries and trials of later life would have crushed him into.

Carver manages to capture everything about daily American ennui with such sparseness and subtlety; our insecurities and failures, our hopes and dreams, our faded love for one-another and our boredom and lack of inspiration. These stories are no more than vignettes into everyday working class life, but they're often so poignant and relatable for that. Carver's characters feel so real, sad, detestable, and pitiable. Mostly insecure, unsuccessful, cigarette-ash-covered and beer-soaked middle-aged men, they feel like your creepy uncle. Everybody has the unfortunate privilege of knowing somebody like these characters. So many of them have this putrid, embarrassing artery of insecurity running through every fiber of their being and polluting everything they do. You can trace it from their actions back down to their core like branches to the trunk of a tree. Their insecurity damages everything around them.

In the story They're Not Your Husband, Earl's insecurity tears his wife down—seemingly a hard-working, earnest woman, at least from what we're shown. It's painful for us to witness, and even harsher when considering how real it feels, despite being fiction. It begs us to question Earl, himself: Is this a man who's down on his luck, as it would seem? Or is this perhaps a man whose own shallow, passive aggressive actions have led to his unemployment? Maybe it's so affecting because we can all see traces of ourselves, at our worst, in Carver's characters. Like looking into a filthy mirror. Carver makes sure to get out of the way and let his characters do the talking with simplistic, direct prose and dialogue. And his stories are more affecting for it.

I discovered him via an interest in Haruki Murakami's work and hearing that Carver's short fiction was a strong influence on him, and never is this clearer than in the story Are You A Doctor? A phone call from a strange woman, a chance encounter peppered with romanticism... And someone making tea.

These sorts of chance encounters and the mystery that accompanies them are now a thing of the past, and the mystery that makes them provocative is somewhat lost on those of us living in the modern world, in which any name can be googled in ten seconds on a smartphone. A phone call from a stranger will never again be as mysterious as it once was, but Carver's story helps those raised in the era of smartphones understand how dangerous and compelling such a meeting once was.

Another story titled Nobody Said Anything features an expertly crafted narrative voice of your typical hormone-flooded teenage boy—a horny, lonely creature playing hooky from school and searching for something that would more entertainingly occupy his worthless time. The kid's loneliness goes from typical to pitiable to depressing over the short course of the narrative. The closing lines of the story manage to flip our feeling of him completely from mild disgust to pity.

Civilization's continuing consumption and desolation of nature seemed to be a theme running through the undercurrent of the story. The airport encroaches on the creek the boy fishes to such an extent that the fish are bloated and unrecognizable, its waters are ground down to a slimy trickle when they used to be surging and flush with healthy fish. The boys' fishing represents this as well, as they gleefully and methodically pursue their warped prey in order to kill and dismember it in a fashion that renders their actions more savage than you'd expect. It feels like Tom Sawyer written in the dark, postmodern hopelessness of Cormac McCarthy rather than the satirical gallows humor of Mark Twain.

What's in Alaska features more humor than most of the others, which was a nice change of pace. Many of Carver's stories are so bleak and grey that it helps to have a palate cleanser once in a while. I also enjoyed the layers to this one, as it's heavily hinted that one of the characters is cheating on another with a third.
My overall favorite is probably Jerry and Molly and Sam which sees a man decide to abandon the family dog, eventually ending in his experiencing an epiphany. The story is so heartrending and the change in the narrator is so genuine and real that finishing it left me reeling. I had to set the book down and take a break afterwards just to think about it, and it's amazing to me that a story clocking in at fewer than 20 pages can have such an effect.

There's always a lot packed in to the few pages Carver dedicates to each story. I never feel good after reading him, but that's not really the point. I don't think 'fun' is the right word to describe his stories, but there is joy in reading them for me—perhaps because I'm in a better place in my life now but can still easily recognize poorer times passed in which I felt bled through with the same negative emotions and existential anxiety that these characters seem to, and I can subconsciously, optimistically urge them onward towards more hopeful, carefree lifestyles once they become more aged. So reading them is cathartic and—unexpectedly—generates optimism within me.

The value of good literature is that it imparts life experience onto us. It allows us to live and feel life situations we'd never experience ourselves. And although some of these early stories are a bit too subtle for their own good, Carver's still excellent at drawing emotion from the reader with so little. Even past death he continues to create a love for the medium of the short story within his readers regardless of demographics and interests. He's certainly done so for me over the past year.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Traveling Companion (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

The Traveling Companion features the same charm that makes other Andersen stories so celebrated, but he dips too frequently into cloying irritation and I didn't find this story to be up to par with some of the others I've read from him recently. It lacks the sheer beauty of something like Thumbelina and the surprising dark humor of Big Claus and Little Claus, but I did find the resolution to be satisfying.

Worth reading, but a lesser entry in Andersen's celebrated canon than some of its contemporary counterparts.

⭐⭐

Ligeia (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe entrances us with a similar story to Morella (which I loved), but to lesser effect. His typical overwriting is present and has a strong effect on our tally of the narrator's sanity (or lack thereof). Portions of the short story are startling beautiful despite their nearly purple nature, and the climax—although good—did not affect me as much as Morella's did.

Still good stuff from Poe.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories (1917-1935) by H.P. Lovecraft (In-Progress)

I can certainly see the appeal of Lovecraft, and I don't have much to say that hasn't already been covered in any random review of one of his short stories you could chance upon. His building of atmosphere is up to par and perhaps even excels past some of the more well-respected literary horror I've been reading, and digging into some of these stories in the '20s must have been an absolute trip. That said, it's tough for me to adequately critique it given my modern biases considering his style has inspired so much genre media since the time when he was writing, be they short stories, novellas, television, film, or even video games.

His prose probably wouldn't be described as tight and I couldn't shake the feeling that some of these short stories could have been produced by one of my high school contemporaries clad in goth garb back in 1999. I can understand the praise for his ability to build atmosphere though I found many of his stories don't give me the claustrophobic sense of mind-altering madness he probably intended. Many of his creepy-crawlies thus far have felt more cartoonish than anything actually inspiring otherworldly awe, visceral revulsion, or knee-jerk, xenophobic odium. I do long for the sense of cosmic foreignness Lovecraft seems dead-set on inspiring.

Maybe I just need a few more reps of Lovecraft to fall into a groove and acquire the taste. I'll push further into this come next Halloween season — there's just too much on my plate right now.

The Gold Bug (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

19th century writers and ruining their stories by depicting unintelligible dialect phonetically; name a more iconic duo.

Look, I finish almost everything I read. And I really do like Poe. But I just can't do it with this one. There's probably a very good story in here somewhere, but Legrand's African American servant Jupiter's illiterate dialogue is so frustratingly constructed that I simply can't bring myself to continue bludgeoning through it to get to the good stuff. Reading The Gold Bug is a miserable chore and I have much better things to do with my time (and better books to read) than to waste it decoding this nonsense.

"Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate --de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye pon him noovers. Todder day he gib me slip fore de sun up and was gone de whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick ready cut for to gib him d--d good beating when he did come --but Ise sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart arter all --he look so berry poorly."

Pardon my French, but: Fuck this shit, Edgar. You're better than this. It goes past style value. This is bad without even applying the lens of 21st century ethics and criticizing this in a racial fashion. I'm not reading this for literary purposes, but for enjoyment. And this sort of dialogue is such a chore to decipher that it completely destroys my ability to read and enjoy the story.

When it comes to dialect and dialogue, let's have more Twain and less Poe, please.

⭐

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) (Dupin, #2) by Edgar Allan Poe

I really love Poe, but this is just too damn dry.

Perhaps this much dry detail about a murder may have been intriguing and curiously morbid in a society less permeated with all sorts of depictions of bloody viscera, but for us modern folks steeped in true crime fiction, slasher-horror, and everything in between, there's a distinct lack of humanity and emotion in this story to attach ourselves to.

Poe's knowledge of the science of violence is not trivial considering the contemporary era in which he lived (where 'miasma' was the hot infection theory, and actual germ theory was still just a budding, abstract idea), and it serves him well in much of his other work, but you can see why the storytelling polish present in Conan Doyle's later Holmes stories were a necessary, welcome evolution to the detective-mystery fiction of Poe's Dupin. I wasn't a huge fan of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it's still superior to The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.

I assume this isn't skippable if you want to read the (apparently) far superior The Purloined Letter (I haven't read it yet!), otherwise I'd be comfortable urging Poe fans ignore this entry entirely and jump right on to the final—and perhaps most famous—Dupin episode.

⭐

A Dog's Tale (1903) by Mark Twain

"The more I see of some people, the better I like my dog." — Mark Twain

Skillfully penned with moments of wry levity that Twain is known for. It's also quite deep in its examination of how casually human cruelty is often committed. While human beings don't have a monopoly on dealing death and pain to other species, we're certainly the most well-practiced at it, and one of the few species who revel in dispensing such things for purposes of pleasure. Perhaps animals are not possessed of human emotions or intellect, but those are not always attributes necessary to experience suffering, nor does a shallower view of suffering make it any less considerable or more bearable.

I'm too sad to write any more and I want to go hug my dog now.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Elephant Vanishes (1980-1991) by Haruki Murakami (In-Progress)

The Elephant Vanishes is Murakami's introductory volume to his short fiction. As with other authors of short fiction, this first volume is somewhat rougher than some of his later stuff.

Reading Murakami is akin to comfort food to me—not because of his weirdness or magical realism, but because I find his prose atypically easy for me to consume. It's not beautiful, nor is it workmanlike. It fits somewhere between the two, almost inconsequential. But, puzzlingly, the way the it seems to flow just 'works' for me. I lack the ability to describe it in much better terms. I suspect it's just a 'me-thing'.

That said, I do have a recurring complaint regarding Murakami. I find that he sometimes seems to struggle with populating his work with enough substance to make his more stylistic, imaginative departures worthwhile. There's the formulaic nature of his novels that rears its ugly head once you've read a couple of his books already and know what's about to be coming: the ear fetish, the lost cats, the psychic teenage girls—everyone knows his tropes and has discussed them ad nauseam. But there's also a distinct lack of substance in so much of his work that I find is rarely mentioned. Murakami badly wants to be this abstract, postmodern writer, and I can't help but feeling that so much of his "magical realism" is frequently just complete and utter bullshit. I suspect that he doesn't actually have much to say in many cases, so he's ambiguous by default to try and cover up his lack of substance and affect a more surreal narrative than is actually warranted.

This is not always the case, of course—but even some of his best work is rendered uneven by seemingly arbitrary turns of weirdness that have no justification and add no value to the narrative or the ideas Murakami is trying to explore. An early story in this collection titled The Kangaroo Communique is a good example of this. The perspective, the narrator's voice, and the premise work together to create an intriguing narrative, but it doesn't really seem to have much to say, so it ends up going nowhere and feels more like space wasted in a style-over-substance exercise. 

The best writers of short fiction—the Raymond Carvers and the Shirley Jacksons—say a whole lot with relatively few words. In stories such as The Kangaroo Communique, however, Murakami seems frequently to say relatively little, and the unique voice with which he relays the story to us does not do enough to carry it.

The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami

My experience with Murakami is akin to a couple entering their third decade in marriage. I've already read quite a bit of Murakami's work, so I'm intensely familiar with both his strengths and weaknesses. And I don't believe this collection is entirely weak. On the contrary, there are quite a few stories present here which I find quite worthwhile. 

Barn Burning is an incredible piece of short fiction. It's one of my very favorite short stories I've ever read. It's so strong that I'd consider this entire collection worth a purchase just for this one. The popularity of Barn Burning subsequent to the Korean film adaptation in 2018 led me to review it separately—see the full review here. Short summary: It's an excellent, ambiguous piece of fiction that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. It's choice Murakami.

Another solid story was On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, in which Murakami takes the notion of I-should-have-said and uses the framework to construct an affecting short story focused on hindsight and missed opportunities. There's a nice parable here on losing the ability to communicate that continues to ring true among the less socially apt of us—of which I include myself. So I found it to be entertaining and meaningful, and Murakami has returned to this particular motif in future work as well.

Note: This is an in-process review. I'll continue to update it as I read more of this collection.

The Mystery Knight (2010) (The Tales of Dunk and Egg, #3) by George R.R. Martin

The Mystery Knight is pretty important to Martin's worldbuilding, but it feels a bit scattered compared the other novellas. We're introduced to a number of hedge knights, proper knights, and lords right away and it becomes difficult to keep the lot of them straight. There are a few with differentiating characteristics—Ser Glendon Ball sticks out right away—but in general, I found myself struggling to recall who was who.

Dunk's experience in the lists is as riveting as ever, though. These novellas include some of the best action sequences Martin has written—even including the mainline A Song of Ice and Fire series—and The Mystery Knight is another fine example of that quality. But I couldn't help feeling that, while this entry is important to Martin's worldbuilding, it doesn't work nearly as well as a novella as The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword do. It lacks the focus and the tight narrative of the prior episodes, instead choosing to depict a conspiracy that deserves far more sprawl and page count than it gets here. I chalk this up to Martin's desire to fully flesh out his world's history, and not having the format to do so prior to the conception of his world books, The World of Ice and Fire and Fire and Blood. I believe that both The Mystery Knight and A Dance With Dragons are markedly weaker entries due to the fact that they're jam-packed with worldbuilding that Martin feels is important, but does not always make the stories in those two works better themselves.

The Mystery Knight is generally well-regarded by ASOIAF fans, but I found it clearly the weakest novella of the three that have been released thus far. It's still worth a read for its likable protagonists and its viscerally affecting depiction of jousting, but both The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword are more cohesive and more consistently readable.

⭐⭐⭐

The Sworn Sword (2003) (The Tales of Dunk and Egg, #2) by George R.R. Martin

Martin does so enjoy parading the reality of feudalism in front of us. Feudalism-inspired fantasy has so classically been stilted towards the romantic that it can be shocking to see it depicted as it actually was. We're dosed with a close-up view of the peasantry in The Sworn Sword, and it isn't pretty. As a child raised on Disney films, it's easy for me to forget that the peasantry weren't actually the noble, lowly heroes with good hearts that we so often see depicted in media, but instead a class of people so intellectually stunted they read more like they're mentally challenged to us. We are so used to dealing with other educated human beings each day that it can be difficult to imagine someone wholly uneducated, but Martin does a staggeringly good job in depicting a peasantry that feels so real it shocks and saddens.

It's not a miserable read, though. The characters in The Sworn Sword are markedly deeper and given more screen time than those in the most previous novella, The Hedge Knight. Rohanne Webber is one of my favorite characters that Martin has ever written. She's intelligent, interesting, and motivated by a situation that feels real to us. She provides an interesting encounter for Dunk, and Martin's dialogue and the body language he creates between the two make for a compelling dance. Some of the minor characters, such as Septon Sefton and Ser Bennis, are equally compelling, and the presence of so many enjoyable characters makes this such a satiating read for being only just over a hundred pages.

The Sworn Sword also features a riveting climax to rival the one I liked so much in The Hedge Knight. Martin pours the action on heavy, and at one point I found myself literally holding my breath. It's quite good, and the ending is perfect—It hits such a satisfying, bittersweet conclusion that I couldn't wait to move on to Martin's next novella.

There's not much wrong with this one. It's Martin at his swiftest and his best. Highly recommended.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Hedge Knight (1998) (The Tales of Dunk and Egg, #1) by George R.R. Martin

I've written both ostentatiously and at length about my love for Martin's Ice and Fire world. While The Hedge Knight digs into some of Martin's preferred themes regarding honor and character, his novellas generally have a far different tone than the main series.

Dunk is a more genuine, naive, and straightforward character than Martin typically writes. He's blessed with prodigious size and strength, making his earnest, do-gooder character something that he can get away with (just barely) in the story. That he does gives the story a far more whimsical, light-hearted tone (again—generally) when compared to some of the occurrences in both A Song of Ice and Fire and Fire & Blood, though it can still be quite gritty in its depiction of cruelty and violence.

One of Martin's favorite themes—and undeniably a core theme to ASOIAF—is the use of legally and socially permissible violence by those in power, against those without power. It shows up constantly in the main series and it's the main plot-mover in The Hedge Knight. Dunk endears himself to us not by being intelligent or particularly skilled, and not even by trying to do the right thing—but simply by doing it, without thinking. That it's not a conscious decision is both what makes it endearing and what makes it interesting. Dunk does not choose to be protect the weak after considering the potentially drastic consequences of doing so, he just does, because that's the kind of person he is.

As to be expected by its short length and 'novella' moniker, this is very much narrow-scope Martin. There's no real worldbuilding, and though his characterization is as enticing as ever, it takes more of a backseat to the two leads—Neither of whom serve more than a perfunctory role in moving things forward. The real meat of this lean serving is the conflict it follows, and the strength of the action writing at its conclusion. I don't typically think of Martin as a great writer of action sequences or thrilling narratives (at least, not any longer, since I've read A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons), but The Hedge Knight's brevity and action makes it a great treat for those with an interesting in the setting, and features enough depth to place it alongside the main series' more weighty and literary offerings. Highly recommended novella.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thumbelina (1846) by Hans Christian Andersen

A spritelike young girl adrift in a stream, on a lilypad with a leashed butterfly as a sail. A narrow shaft of light shining down upon a dead swallow in an underground mole's tunnel. A white-winged fairy floating to and fro amidst white flowers peppering marble ruins twined with grapevines, all glittering in the sunlight.

Thumbelina is full of wondrous, fantastical imagery. It's a heartwarming, touching and transcendental story. The creatures Thumbelina meets along her journey feel genuine and almost human, and she's confronted with their selfishness, jealousy, and bitterness. They provide a foil to her childlike innocence and kindness, and remind us that while such virtues often render you vulnerable, they can also be a powerful way of affecting the world and the people around you.

Thumbelina is an eessential fairy tale packed full of Andersen's endless creativity, and a must-read for adults and children alike.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Little Claus and Big Claus (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

There's something innately calming about Andersen's style that heightens his stories beyond just his impressive creativity. His storytelling is so casual, even when violence or evil occurs (which it does, often) within them. This unpretentiousness imparts a sense of sitting around the fire and listening to your grandmother speak the words rather than—in my specific case—reading one every so often in my office as I take a break from working. It reminds me of filmmaker Wes Anderson's work; timeless, whimsical, colorful.

While the stories themselves are not universally appealing to my tastes, I almost always find myself immediately enraptured whenever I do open one of his tales. This is telling of his quality, considering I typically prefer overly serious and more subtle stories and Andersen's work is most certainly not that. I believe their appeal should be nearly universal; to children and adults regardless of personal preference. Indeed history has shown it so, as these stories have been read and enjoyed for nearly two centuries and adapted (even aped) into countless other forms of media.

Little Claus and Big Claus is one of his less well-known stories, but one I enjoyed more than some of his other stuff I've read. Little Claus is an unabashed con-man who regularly outwits Big Claus, and I was also pleasantly surprised to see the dark humor the story features, as my own sense of humor is like a strong cup of black coffee.

I read a Tiina Nunnally translation of the original Danish, whom I believe has also done a well-regarded translation of the Scandinavian classic Kristin Lavransdatter. I found her work adequate. There are times which I could tell I was reading a translation, but such is to be expected if you want something reasonably accurate to the source material. I imagine it would be difficult to do a better job and thus I'd recommend her.

My recommendation: Read Hans Christian Andersen. Read him if you like Pixar. Read him if you like Harry Potter. Read him if you like Wes Anderson. And read him if you don't like these things anyway, because he'll probably still appeal to you on one level or another.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Tinderbox (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen certainly doesn't lack for imagination, but I was hoping for a bit of a darker turn that I didn't get.

The moral of the story: If you want to gain wealth and station, all you need to do decapitate an old lady and adopt 3 dogs.

⭐⭐⭐

The Princess and the Pea (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

Without artwork supporting it this is less a short story and more a satirical parable, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and found it similar in tone to some of the satirical, biting short fiction of Mark Twain.

⭐⭐⭐

The Story of the Bad Little Boy (1875) by Mark Twain

Alright Mark. You got me. Didn't expect this one. 

I've read very little Twain in my day (just Huckleberry Finn umpteen years ago, most of which I skipped over). I'm aware of his cynical, biting satirical streak mostly through reputation and internet quotes but was introduced to it for the first time here. I'm such a fan of turning convention on its head with bitter cynicism, so I loved this story.

Cleverly written with long, winding sentences, The Story of the Bad Little Boy reads like someone from 2019 being transported back to 1865 and asked to comment on the contemporary style of children's storytelling. Twain's irony continues to pile on until it reaches a level darkness that confounded me. The Story of the Bad Little Boy is like an outline of Anne of Green Gables written by George R.R. Martin.

I think we can be friends, Mark Twain. I think you get me.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Cannibalism in the Cars (1868) by Mark Twain

 

"I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal."

Gosh darn it, Twain is brilliant. His satire and his sense of humor are timeless, but jeez, I had no idea he could get so dark. Either way, I love it. Cynicism, irony, and the bucking of convention are all my jam, and Twain seems to fit those tastes to a tee.

The only thing I can really complain about in this one was the way the politicking can drone on and become monotonous, but that's kind of the point, so it's just a minor niggle.

Well worth reading.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Barn Burning (1983) by Haruki Murakami

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read Barn Burning yet!

I'm a fan of Murakami's work and this is his first piece of short fiction I've read, picked up when I had heard that it was adapted into a film by a South Korean filmmaker last year.

I had heard Murakami's novels were far better than his short stories so I wasn't expecting much and Barn Burning completely blew me away. Murakami skillfully sets the scene with interesting characters and disarms the reader with their interactions with one another. The story takes a darker turn from there and ends ambiguously.

I've had issues with some of Murakami's ambiguity in the past. I thought that it was not used particularly well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—a book I really liked but was made frustrating by an overuse of oddity and ambiguity that came off as contrived and just-because. This is not the case with Barn Burning, which I found perfectly balanced in its use of ambiguity which heightens the story's impact and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

NOTE: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW THE IMAGE BELOW! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

My interpretation of the ambiguous ending: I find it overwhelmingly likely that our faux-pyromaniacal Trader murdered the girl.

• He confesses to the lesser crime of serial arson (but still a shocking revelation if you're not aware the guy is actually a freaking serial killer) to the narrator, providing a hint, as serial killers are wont to do to feed their arrogance after having gotten away with their crimes so many times before. And, not expecting the narrator to go to such lengths to try and witness his act of arson, the killer inadvertently outs himself as having lied about the arson when clearly none has been committed. The "barn" he had planned to "burn" that he confessed was "very close" to the narrator was instead the woman in the story--their mutual friend, but the narrator's for longer--and probably he had been planning to kill her since had met her in Algiers.

• The woman wants the narrator to meet her at the airport after returning from abroad with the trader. The narrator is puzzled by this, as seemingly he has been asked there for no reason. But clearly she wants a third party present because she is still a bit creeped out or uncomfortable around the trader and wants a more trusted friend present as a chaperone in case the trader gets weird back on home soil.

• Eichmann's potential execution by suffocation is mentioned, perhaps hinting to us that the murderer smothers her or suffocates her in some other fashion.

• She disappears without a trace, yet mail keeps arriving at her apartment afterwards so that the box is full when the narrator tries to visit her after her murder, signalling to us that she had not moved out in a normal manner and simply not told anyone. She had all but disappeared, informing nobody.

• Before the woman's disappearance the narrator uses cannabis with the trader and notes that the trader looks "different": notably worn down, a bit disheveled, and with 2 days growth of beard. Presumably this is because he needs a "fix" (in this case, good ole murder) in regular intervals or his mental (and thus, physical) health deteriorates. And when the narrator stumbles upon him again several months after the woman disappears/is murdered, the trader is in the same slovenly condition because he must burn a barn kill every couple of months by his own admission. Further, his car outside the coffee shop exhibits this same fatigued, dirty visage as the trader just prior to killing the woman, and the trader himself is inside chugging multiple coffees, which would indicate he is not feeling at peak and needs to kill sometime soon.

This is a great short story and not at all what I expected from Murakami. I loved it and I can't wait to read more of his short fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐