Short Stories, Irish literature, Classics, Modern Fiction, Contemporary Literary Fiction, The Japanese Novel, Post Colonial Asian Fiction, The Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and quality Historical Novels are Among my Interests








Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Stepchildren of the Shtetl : The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir.- 2020


 

Stepchildren of the Shtetl : The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir. - in The Stanford University Jewish Studies Series

"This outstanding book offers us a glimpse at the underbelly of a Jewish community rarely studied from this vantage point. Meir tackles an elusive topic with analytic skill, keen sensitivity, and clear, accessible prose."―Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

Winner of the 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.

Finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards (History category), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.

Honorable Mention in the 2021 DHA Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Disability History Association

Stepchildren of the Shtetl : The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir. - in The Stanford University Jewish Studies Series- is very through study of a not much written about aspect of Eastern European Jewish, especially Jewish Russian history.

Meir details the numerous reasons an Eastern European Jew were to live in poverty.  If you were disabled or seriously mentally ill or cognitively challenged and had no family you had few options.  Public Begging or charity were your primary options,

Meir covers the operations of "poor houses" and the traditional obligations of Charity, the cholera weddings of the poor as well as the fears of many in Jewish society that the marginalised Jews played into the hands of Anti-Semitism.

"Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust.

Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe—from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery—Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority." From Stanford University Press

About the author

Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University.

I borrowed this book from The New York City Public library 


"Poaching" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004


 "Poaching" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004  - 4 pages

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.


The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.


Buriedinprint.com

"Poaching" is the 11th Short Story by Carol Shields I have so far read. 

"Poaching"  centers on a couple driving throughout England. We never learn much of their history.  They often pick up hitchhikers so they can learn their "story". The man calls this "Poaching".  

"I am partial, though, to the calm, to those who stand by the roadside with their luggage in the dust, too composed or dignified to trouble the air with their thumbs. There was the remarkable Venezuelan woman who rode with us from Cardiff to Conway and spoke only intermittently and in sentences that seemed wrapped in their own cool vapors. Yes, she adored to travel alone. She liked the song of her own thoughts. She was made fat by the sight of mountains. The Welsh sky was blue like a cushion. She was eager to embrace rides from strangers. She liked to open wide windows so she could commune with the wind. She was a doctor, a specialist in bones, but alas, alas, she was not in love with her profession. She was in love with the English language because every word could be picked up and spun like a coin on the table top. The shyest traveler can be kindled, Dobey maintains—often after just one or two strikes of the flint. That sullen Lancashire girl with the pink-striped hair and the colloid eyes—her dad was a coward, her mum shouted all the time, her boyfriend had broken her nose and got her pregnant. She was on her way, she told us, to a hostel in Bolton. Someone there would help her out. She had the address written on the inside of a cigarette packet. I looked aslant and could tell that Dobey wanted to offer her money, but part of our bargain was that we offer only rides".

I especially enjoy the literary references in her stories, today's story mentions the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the playwright Ben Jonson.

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 



https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – , 2019 - by David Wallace-Wells - 320 Pages - Nonfiction




The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – , 2019 - by David Wallace-Wells - 320 Pages - Nonfiction is an expansion of a 2017 article published New York Magazine - is a vivid account of the disastrous consequences if global warming is not mitigated soon.

Every day now on international news programs we see terrible storms that were once said to occur every 500 years, droughts causing potential mass starvation, insurance rates in hurricane prone areas in America becoming much higher with many companies withdrawing from the Florida market,  Forest fires grow more frequent in Canada and California.
Millions seek to migrate from areas hardest hit.

Wallace-Wells begins with an account of the comfortable myths well meaning people believe about climate warming.

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a reliable shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will inevitably engineer a way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true"


"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.

An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.

Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth

“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times

“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist

“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post

“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books" from The Publisher- Penquin Randomhouse 

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.







Sunday, March 24, 2024

"A Purple Dote" - A Short Story by Tadhg Coakley - - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work



 Irish Short Story Month XIII 
March and April - 2024

Today's Story, "A Pure Dote"' by Tadhg Coakley, a resident of Cork originally from Mallow,  is the second of the eighteen stories 
included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - 

It is my intention to post upon each of the stories.

"A Purple Dote" focuses on what happens within a family when the forty year old father develops early dementia.  Coakley with depressing at times vermilitude details how it changed the marriage, how his children forced into being a parent to their father reacted.  The family had been financially secure before but now the wife must deal with government and medical authorities to survive.

 "‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?’ Try telling that to someone diagnosed with early onset dementia in the prime of his life, with a wife and three young kids and a mortgage. Try telling it to his wife and children, his friends and family. Then you’ll know what hurt is. Nuala knew what hurt was. Hurt was the love of your life turning into a helpless child, so that you have to look after him every day and sleep beside him every night and feed him and wash him..entitlement, every support, waiting on phone lines, standing in queues, filling out online forms, swallowing the shame of the hand-outs she never in her life expected that she would be forced to accept."

From website of Tadhg Coakley 

"I am the author of five books, Before He Kills Again (Mercier Press, 2023), The First Sunday in September (Mercier, 2018); Whatever It Takes (Mercier, 2020), the 2020 Cork One City, One Book choice; and the autobiography of Denis Coughlan, called Everything (Hero Books, 2020) which I co-wrote. My fourth book The Game: A Journey into the Heart of Sport (2023) was shortlisted as Sports Book of The Year. 

My short stories, articles, and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Winter Papers, The Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, The42.ie, Aethlon, The Holly Bough, The Honest Ulsterman, Quarryman, Silver Apples and elsewhere."

https://tadhgcoakley.ie/

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been and avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.



The best way to purchase this marvelous collection  is via the Publisher Doire Press 

https://www.doirepress.com/




Friday, March 22, 2024

"God and Ants" - A Short Story by Steve Wade - a Irish Short Story Work

"God and Ants" - A Short Story by Steve Wade - a Irish Short Story Work 


Irish Short Story Month XIII 

March and April - 2024


I am very pleased to once again feature one of Steve Wade’s award-winning stories during Irish Short Story Month.




I have been following the work of Steve Wade since March of 2013.  Reading all his work for the last ten years is my sincerest demonstration of my high regard for his work




His debut collection can stand with the masters of the Irish Short Story.


  Gateway To Steve Wade on The Reading Life 


Website of Steve Wade 



A Wide Ranging Q and A Session With Steve Wade 


This is the ninth  short story by Steve Wade that has been featured on The Reading Life.  The fifth  from his debut collection.


As “Gods and Ants” opens Alfred working on a painting of a boatin the harbour.  As he paints people strolling about ask him why the painting shows a different number of windows

on the boat than they see. Of course like any artist he does not take kindly to this.  He begins to imagine art connoisseurs and visiting Parisians at “encountering the painting during Alfred P. Parkinson’s first major art exhibition, which would one day be staged in Sacre Coeur, would experience thescene’s essence. He saw them marvelling at the paradise island blue sky and the more sombre blue reflecting in thesea below into which the overwhelmed sun bled white-gold. On their tongues the coastal-air saltiness blends with the plaintive sound of the gulls screaming their interminable plea before the endless sea. And the boats – patient, rusting leviathans, whose white, multi-eyed cabins have witnessed countless fishing adventures far out in the cormorant-black sea, watched over by a yellow moon, hours before the dawn spills across the horizon.”


His vision of his future exhibit is interupted by people strolling by. Of course he is offended by their philistine  observations on his work.


“The few aimless evening strollers who had gathered tentatively around Alfred and his easel pulled in others. They swarmed about him like ants crawling over a fallen raptor, flightless, though not yet dead. Their presence and proximity interfered with his concentration. Time and discipline was his defence – Gods were not peeved by Ants”. 


Arnold begins to imagine his work is great art.  Then something happens.


“Gods and Ants” is as I expected it would be,a perceptive, interesting and fun to read story.



About the Author - Steve Wade’s award-winning short fiction has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. His work has been broadcast on national and regional radio. He has had stories short-listed for the Francis McManus Short Story Competitionand for the Hennessy Award. His stories have appeared in over fifty print publications, including Crannog, New Fables, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. His unpublished novel, On Hikers’ Hill was awarded First Prize in the abook2read.com competition, with Sir Tim Rice as the top judge. He has won First Prize in the Delvin Garradrimna Short Story Competition on a number of occasions. Winner of the Short Story category in the Write by the Sea writing competition 2019. His

short stories have been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Award, and for the Pushcart Prize.



From the Author’s  introduction 


“The stories in this collection first appeared in anthologies and periodicals. Some of them have won prizes or have been placed in writing competitions. Ostracised by betrayal, isolated through indifference, gutted with guilt, or suffering from loss, the characters in these twenty-two stories are fractured and broken, some irreparably. In their struggle for acceptance, and their desperate search for meaning, they deny the past”



A very worthy edition to the reading list of all lovers of the short story.


Mel Ulm










 

"The Cook and the Star" A Short Story by Anne O’Leary - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 


Irish Short Story Month- XIII- 2024


I have decided to extend Irish Short Month XIII for 2024 through at least April.

There are just too many great stories I want to feature to confine the event to one Month,

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been and avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

Today's Story, by Cork Native Anne O'Leary, "The Cook and the Star" is set in the vicinity of Cork and centers on a  woman temporarily working as a Cook for a Hollywood movie star there making a picture.

"The first time she sees the Hollywood star, he is cautiously descending the staircase. He has not noticed her standing in the kitchen doorway and his large body is tilted sideways as if he is negotiating a steep hillside. He is snorting with the effort, fingers gripping the banister. Halfway down, he spots her. Immediately, his wheezing stills and his back straightens.  ‘You must be my saviour,’ he says. His famous, velvet voice is gentler than she expects."

As the story develops, the cook becomes important to the star, a man with drinking problems mourning the recent death of his son.  He loves a big Irish breakfast, who doesn't, and often needs a reason to get out of bed. Without him fully functional the movie won't get done. This will stop the counted for tourist activity,  There are heartbreaking revelations about the cook.

This is my first encounter with the work of Anne O'Leary but there will be more.

See Anne O’Leary website for additional information on her work 

https://anneolearyblog.wordpress.com/about/

Mel Ulm 
The Reading Life 



Tuesday, March 19, 2024

"Boundary" - A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri- from her collection Roman Stories - 2023


 "Boundary" - A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri- from her collection Roman Stories - 2023

At the same time I wonder what they know about the loneliness here. What do they know about the days, always the same, in our dilapidated cottage? The nights when the wind blows so hard the earth seems to shake, or when the sound of rain keeps me awake? The months we live alone among the hills, the horses, the insects, the birds that pass over the fields? Would they like the harsh quiet that reigns here all winter? “ from “The Boundary”


Jhumpa Lahiri is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of contemporary authors.  So far I have read and posted upon these of her books:


Interpreter of Maladies 1999 A Collection of Short Stories, Pulitzer Prize Winner


The Name Sake 2003


Unaccustomed Earth 2008 A Collection of Short Stories 


The Lowland 2013


The Clothing of Books - a nonfiction work on book jackets 


Additionally I have read and posted on eight  of her short stories, mostly in The New Yorker besides those in her two collections.


Jhumpa Lahiri first wrote “The Boundary” in Italian, then translated it into English ( the link above includes a discussion of her involvement with Italian and her life in Rome).  There is no geographic setting given in the story so I decided it was set in the hills of Tuscany, or my version was.  The narrator is a late teenage girl.  She lives with her parents.  Her father is the caretaker at an estate.  Her mother takes care of a sick man.  The owner, a wealthy foreigner rarely visits.  (They live in a small house.: When he does he rides horses during the day and reads at night.  In the summer time, the main house is rented out.  The narrator takes care of getting the house ready and making sure the visitors have what they need.


The girl and her family are foreigners, just like the visitors.  We don’t learn where they are from but we do learn the narrator feels out of place in school as she “looks different”.  We learn something shocking and heartbreaking as the story closes. It made me rethink my experience of the story.

I was able to obtain this collection via a Florida library through the Libby Application