“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
Category: general book tag
10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read
I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!
1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout.
2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.
3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms.
4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway.
5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs.
6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race.
7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past.
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose.
9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas.
10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.
“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too…”
“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
- Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
- Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
first-son-of-finwe: I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss…
I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss it depicting places where I would actually want to go.
Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.
You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.
You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.
The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.
Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”
That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not.
But I miss beautiful, escapist fantasy that gives me a break. That takes me somewhere magical, somewhere otherworldly and gives me messages of hope and optimism in the face of darkness. I really, really miss that.
“The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is ‘all about’…”
“
- Terry Pratchett, as part of his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech for The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents.
The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is ‘all about’ wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows…is wrong.
Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting that the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.
In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It’s not the whole meal. Don’t get confused by the scenery.
”- Terry Pratchett, as part of his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech for The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents.
“It’s clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run…”
“It’s clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
- Agatha Christie, The Clocks.
- Agatha Christie, The Clocks.
“A reading major, that’s what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.”
“A reading major, that’s what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.”
- Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea.
- Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea.
“Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country….”
“Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect. Their secret country was real.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
- C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
“And I’d grown up not just in England, but in a land of fantasy. Though I was the kind of child who…”
“And I’d grown up not just in England, but in a land of fantasy. Though I was the kind of child who (like you, perhaps) read anything and everything, my true love was deep make-believe, from fairy stories to all the buried archetypes of folk tale and myth. Then when I went to the University of Oxford to study English literature, two professors named Tolkien and Lewis made sure that our syllabus stopped at the year 1832, so that we were soaked in the earliest fantasies of all: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. As a friend of mine said, ‘They taught us to believe in dragons.’”
- Susan Cooper, preface to the The Dark is Rising.
- Susan Cooper, preface to the The Dark is Rising.
