A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore...

Pages: 473 Original date of publication: 1909-1986 My copy: 2012 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, January 2013 The Persephone Book of Short Stories is a collection of thirty short stories—some that have been previously published in other Persephone books (crowd pleasers such as Minnie Panter-Downes’s “Good Evening, Mrs Craven” and Irene Nemirovsky’s “Dimanche”)—some that have been published in the Persephone Post , and others that appear here for the first time. The earliest story in the collection, Susan Glaspell’s“A to Z,” was published in 1909 and the last, Georgina Hammick’s “A Few Cases in the Day Case Unit,” in 1986. My favorite story in the collection is the first: Susan Glaspell’s “A to Z,’ in which a young college graduate gets a job as a dictionary copyist at a publisher’s office. She strikes up a friendship with a young man at the office; the irony of the story being that while these characters’ bread ...

Pages: 327 Original date of publication: 1921-1928 My copy: 2007 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, October 2012 Katherine Mansfield wrote the 25 stories in this collection during the 9 months she spent at Montana sur Sierre in Switzerland, seriously ill with tuberculosis. The stories are arranged in the order she wrote them, and many were left unfinished. Some characters are recurring; Mansfield also gained inspiration from other writers, including Chekhov, Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and DH Lawrence. Mansfield chastised herself for writing “lowbrow” stories and made jokes about them (“ the Mercury is bringing out that very long seaweedy story of mine ‘At the Bay.’ I feel inclined to suggest to them to give away a spade an’ bucket with each copy…”); but as the publisher’s note at the end says, “what choice did she have?” Mansfield wrote herself that she did not consider herself a good writer. B...

Pages: 315 Original date of publication: 1924 My copy: 1995 (Scribner paperbacks) Why I decided to read: How I acquired by copy: Amazon.com, April 2011 Old New York is a collection of four novellas set in 19th century New York in the 1840s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, which reveal varying sides of upper class New York society at the time. Each of the four novellas digs deep below the surface of society. False Dawn chronicles the relationship between a father and son, the latter of whom goes off to Europe on a Grand Tour and brings home “unsuitable” artwork; in The Old Maid, a young woman’s daughter is adopted by her cousin; The Spark, the shortest of the four, is about a young man’s encounter with Walt Whitman during the Civil War; and the last, New Year’s Day, is about a young woman’s alleged adulterous affair. Edith Wharton is skilled at describing people and her motivations; she’s especially adept at seeing the way her characters really are. There’s no “real” link be...

Pages: 626 Original date of publication: 1944 (original collection; additions made to later editions) My copy: 2006 (Penguin) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Phoenix airport bookstore, December 2012 Dorothy Parker was famous for her satirical wit, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, and one of the earliest writers for the New Yorker. She was once arrested for protesting the execution of the murderers Sacco and Vanzetti. Later, she pursued screenwriting in Hollywood and was later blacklisted there for her involvement in left-wing politics. She was married three times, twice to the same man; and had four suicide attempts, none successful. After her death, her ashes lay for 21 years on a shelf at a funeral home and then in the office of a Wall Street law firm, before she was finally buried at the headquarters of the NAACP. Parker loved one-liners and word play, and this is a compilation of short stories, magazine articles, letters, interviews, b...

Pages: 293 Original date of publication: 1932, 1933, 1930 My edition:1982 (Virago Modern Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: Philly bookshop, August 2011 Women Against Men is a collection of three novels published in 1932, 1933, and 1937. Delicate Monster is the story of a writer and her many husbands, told from the point of view of a family friend; The Single Heart is the story of a young woman’s marriage and subsequent reconnection with an old flame; and A Day Off is the story of a middle-aged fallen on hard times woman who looks back on her life. The theme is as the title states, about the relationships and sometimes conflicts between women and men. But it’s also about the conflicts between women, particularly as seen in Delicate Monster (you get a sense of jealousy from the narrator over her friend’s exploits). Other than that theme, though, there’s not much to connect these three novellas. They don’t work either as short stories or longe...

Pages: 125 Original date of publication: My edition: 2008 Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: October 2011, Persephone subscription In Minnie’s Room , a collection of 11 stories published between 1947 and 1965, Mollie Panter-Downes explores some of the same themes she explores in her novel, One Fine Day . In the 1940s and beyond, people were struggling to adapt to their new circumstances, because things were, indeed, dire (for example, as the introduction to this book says, “bread had been newly rationed in 1946”). It was rough going for everyone, especially the middle classes, who were hit especially hard by the imposition of increased income tax to deal with postwar shortages. So the stories in this collection reflect on a small scale the larger issues that were going on in England and the world at that time. Although there is no immediate theme to this collection, her stories are all about people dealing with the aftermath of WWII and the effect it ha...

Pages: 224 Original date of publication: 1940s-1990s My edition: 2010 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: How I acquired my copy: The Strand, NYC, July 2011 The New York Stories is a collection of stories that Elizabeth Hardwick published between 1946 and 1993—years that spanned nearly her entire career as a writer. Hardwick grew up in Kentucky and lived for many years in New York City, working as an essayist for the New York Review of Books . She was married briefly to the poet Robert Lowell, who after their divorce married Caroline Blackwood , leading Hardwick to quip, “he never married a bad writer.” She was also friends for many years with the writer Mary McCarthy and lampooned her 1963 novel The Group . There is a theme to these stories; all of them deal to some extent with the idea of escape, whether a character escapes from New York back to her Kentucky childhood home or escapes a sour relationship. Although Hardwick claimed that she couldn’t write much ...

Pages: 196 Original date of publication: 1960-1972; previously published as An Unavoidable Delay My edition: 2011 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: it’s a Persephone How I acquired my copy: Persephone catalogue, June 2011 Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is a collection of 12 stories, 10 of which were previously published in the collection An Unavoidable Delay. Diana Athill is no stranger to the publishing industry; for decades she worked as an editor for Anddre Deutsch (she makes a cameo appearance in Q’s Legacy ). Athill herself wrote the preface to the Persephone edition, and she says that “the discovery that I could write changed my life for the better in a very profound way, so [the stories] mean a great deal to me.” Nevertheless, Athill never published any other fiction and preferred to remain in the background as an editor, although she did publish several memoirs about her career. The 12 stories in this collection are all very different from one another but have a lot in com...

Pages: 452 Original date of publication: My edition: 2007 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: at the time it was the sesquicentennial of EW’s birth How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com gift card, April 2011 The New York Stories of Edith Wharton is a collection of 20 stories that Edith Wharton wrote over the course of her career. The stories are presented in the order in which they were published, so you get to see how Wharton’s style grew over time. Her stories cover a wide range of people and places, from industrialists to artists and from ballrooms to tenements. In her novels, such as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence , Wharton tends to focus on the upper classes of turn-of-the-century New York, but what I like about her short stories is that she focuses on a wide range of people. Many of the stories have been published in other volumes (ie, “Pomegranate Seed” also appears in the Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton ), but what I like about this collection really shows how she ...

Pages: 229 Original date of publication: 1930s My edition: 2010 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: Dorothy Whipple is one of my favorite authors How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, May 2011 The Closed Door and Other Stories is a collection of 10 short stories. Dorothy Whipple is skilled at describing the relationships between people: parents and their children, husbands and wives, young girls experiencing the thrill of their first potential romance. The stories are less plot-driven, but character development is strong, even though some of these stories are very short. The title story, The Closed Door , is more like a short novel than a short story, and it tells the story of a young girl as she grows up and gets married to get out from under the thumb of her repressive parents. As such, it skips over a lot of stuff, and I think this story might have been good as a longer novel. Other than that, though, I really loved the stories in this collection; some of them have a ver...

I’m really, really behind on review-writing, so I thought I’d write a few short reviews instead to get caught up... Miss Mole, by EH Young Pages: 288 Original date of publication: 1930 My edition: 1984 (Virago) Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of Virago Modern Classics How I acquired my copy: The Strand, New York, April 2011 The story of a middle-aged nanny/companion/nurse/housekeeper. Set in EH Young’s fictional city of Radstowe (based on Bristol), Miss Mole’s sharp tongue keeps getting her into trouble. A very witty novel, but not my favorite by this author, because the pace of the book is rather slow at times. 3 stars. The Group, by Mary McCarthy Pages: 437 Original date of publication: 1963 My edition: 2009 (Virago) Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of Virago Modern Classics How I acquired my copy: Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, September 2011 The Group is the story of eight roommates from Vassar living in New York City in the 1930s. Although the author is extremely candi...

Pages: 346 Original date of publication: 1952-1980 My edition: 2008 (NYRB Classics) Why I decided to read: it’s on the list of NYRB Classics How I acquired my copy: Borders, April 2011 Don’t Look Now is a collection of nine short stories that Daphne Du Maurier published between 1952 and 1980. Daphne Du Maurier’s writing runs the gamut from straight historical to suspense/thriller, so I was intrigued to see what her stories would be like. These stories cover much of Du Maurier’s career, and they’re all stunning. She takes what are seemingly ordinary people and subjects and turns the story into something far more sinister. From the arresting opening story, in which a couple are grieving the loss of their child and take a holiday to Venice, to a story in which England’s birds attack the human population, to a story in which a woman has eye surgery and wakes to view the inner beast in humans, these stories are amazing and contain a lot of significance, even though some of them are a coupl...

Pages: 174 Original date of publication: 1947-9 My edition: 2000 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: heard about it through the Persephone catalogue How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, September 2010 Tell It to a Stranger is a collection of short stories hat Elizabeth Berridge wrote during and after WWII. All the stories deal with the war in some way, but they focus more specifically on the relationships between people and the way they deal with the war. The stories reflect many of the emotions that people experienced during the war, as many people in England were displaced. Some of these stories are sad, some happy, but they are all moving in their own way. Elizabeth Berridge wrote the Afterword to this collection, and she shares with the reader some of her own personal stories about the war, some of them serendipitous. And some of the stories in this book are based on real things that happened to Elizabeth Berridge—like the character in the first story, “Snows...

Pages: 270 Original date of publication: 1934-1941 My edition: 2010 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: it’s a Persephone! How I acquired my copy: Persephone website, April 2010 Dimanche and Other Stories is a collection of ten stories, some very short, some much longer. Irene Nemirovsky’s stories focus on average, everyday people in France just before and during WWII, when these stories were published. Love, in all its forms, is an overriding theme of this book, but Nemirovsky’s collection is also about the diametric differences in social situations of her characters. I’ll be honest and say straight away that I really didn’t like Suite Francaise when it was reprinted a number of years ago, although everyone else was raving about it. I just thought it was to depressing. In this collection of short stories, Nemirovsky deals with the same topics and themes, but for some reason I much preferred this book to her other. Nemirovsky is skilled at highlighting and putting under a m...

Pages: 203 Original date of publication: 1939-1945 My edition: 2008 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: browsing on the Persephone website How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, June 2010 Good Evening Mrs. Craven is a collection of 21 short stories that Mollie Panter-Downes wrote for The New Yorker during the war years. Although she was English and lived in Surrey for most of her life, her work both as a short story writer and as a journalist has been virtually forgotten in England; and yet she was a prolific writer, writing over 800 pieces for The New Yorker during her career. Mollie Panter-Downes’s stories are vignettes that focus on short moments in the day of average Britons during the war. None of these people is particularly remarkable, but they live in extraordinary times, and how they cope with that is what’s so fascinating about this collection. From country housewives serving on Red Cross committees and housing evacuees, to young working women sur...