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I thought it would be fun to share with you some of the reading I’ll be doing this semester, for an other-than-usual reason: I am teaching the undergraduate lit course Short Fiction (ENGL 165) to a mix of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and I’m very excited about it. My students will read something like 50 stories this semester, and we’ll discuss elements of fiction (like plot, setting, character, point of view, style, and theme) in context of those stories. I cannot imagine that I’ll be writing about each one for you all here! (Although I suppose it’s possible that I’ll be moved to write about a few standouts. And some are already covered, of course.) But I thought at least you might appreciate a list of what stories I have in mind.

I’m using an anthology as a textbook: The Story and Its Writer, which also includes pretty good text on those elements of fiction, and supplementary materials such as analyses and author commentaries. I’ll also use Jon Corcoran’s The Rope Swing – we’ll discuss how it functions as a whole as well as in each individual story. And there will be a few “extra” stories that I’ll scan for my students. So, the list – in no particular order for now.

• “I Stand Here Ironing,” Tillie Olsen
• “Crazy They Call Me,” Zadie Smith
• “A White Heron,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin
• “Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri
• “Desiree’s Baby,” Kate Chopin
• “Samuel,” Grace Paley
• “The House on Mango Street,” Sandra Cisneros
• “The Blood Bay,” Annie Proulx
• “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker
• “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Richard Wright
• “Yellow Woman,” Leslie Marmon Silko
• “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid
• “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin
• “A Brief Encounter with the Enemy,” Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
• “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut
• “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket,” Yasunari Kawabata
• “Journey to the Seed,” Alejo Carpentier
• “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,” Art Spiegelman
• “The Shawl,” Cynthia Ozick
• “A Continuity of Parks,” Julio Cortázar
• “Looking for a Rain-God,” Bessie Head
• “Cathedral,” Raymond Carver
• excerpt from Persepolis: “The Veil,” Marjane Satrapi
• “The Moths,” Helena María Viramontes
• “Dimensions,” Alice Munro
• “Brownies,” ZZ Packer
• excerpt from Palestine: “Refugeeland,” Joe Sacco
• “Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye,” Luisa Valenzuela
• “The Colonel,” Carolyn Forché
• “The Fellowship,” Alison Bechdel
• “The Swimmer,” John Cheever
• “Barbie-Q,” Sandra Cisneros
• excerpt from Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa
• “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien
• “Appalachian Swan Song,” Jonathan Corcoran, from The Rope Swing (RS)
• “The Rope Swing” (RS)
• “Pauly’s Girl” (RS)
• “Through the Still Hours” (RS)
• “Felicitations” (RS)
• “Corporeal” (RS)
• “Hank the King” (RS)
• “Excavation” (RS)
• “Brooklyn, 4 a.m.” (RS)
• “A Touch” (RS)
• “Pea Madness,” Amy Leach, from Things That Are
• “Four Boston Basketball Stories,” Brian Doyle, from The Mighty Currawongs
• “The Pull,” Lidia Yuknavitch, from Verge
• “Any Other,” Jac Jemc
• “The Little Mermaid,” (Daniel) Mallory Ortberg
• “Who Will Greet You At Home,” Lesley Nneka Arimah

This list includes writers of various ethnicities and national backgrounds, gay and trans writers, Westerners and non-Westerners, graphic stories, recent and historic ones. It is probably a few stories too long – definitely subject to some change, but not much. I meet my students in just a few days, and I want us to more or less have a plan.

What do you think? A class you’d be interested in??

Filed under: musings | Tagged: lists, reading as education, short stories, teaching |