hen was the last time you took an hour to read or listen to a really good short story?
The short story tends to be the most elusive of literary forms.
It is difficult to wrap your arms around a definition for its length as well as its origin (myths, fables, fairy tales, character studies, essays, legends, parables, etc.
But a good story is appreciated, savored, and passed down universally.
Over the past two centuries, the genre has been enhanced with works by some of the world's finest writers: Balzac, Flaubert, Alexander Pushkin, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekov, and Somerset Maugham.
Here in America, such notable greats as Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald have written their way into our culture with memorable short stories.
Each of them have allowed their lives to merge with their times and their works reflect for the reader a blend of experiences and characters of the period with timeless myth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, born Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald in 1896, came of age and was most prolific during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
His works, 'This Side of Paradise,” “The Beautiful and the Damned” and his classic “The Great Gatsby” were chiefly driven by the disintegration of America following World War I, exposing the hollowness and voicing criticism of the idle rich, and relating fears that the country was falling into cynical, depraved morass.
Hypocritically, Fitzgerald and his mentally unstable wife Zelda embodied much of what he claimed to loathe; he spent money freely, gave lavish parties, drank beyond excess, and globe trotted about the world.
Just recently a new release of Fitzgerald's “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories,” (originally “Tales from the Jazz Age”) has graced our bookshelves.
It has also come out in unabridged in audio book, carefully narrated by Scott Brick, Grover Gardner, Ray Porter, Paul Michael Garcia, and Jeff Cummings.
These short stories are brilliantly creative. In the “Bridal Party” the affluent bridegroom who is about to feel the repercussions of the 1929 stock market crash is distinguished from the jilted suitor whose fortunes are raising due to an inheritance.
In “Babylon Revisited,” a frequently anthologized tale set in 1930s Paris, the main character, Charlie Wade, exposes his remorse for disreputable, alcohol-induced decisions he made in the heady days before the stock market crash.
Many of the stories have Gatsby-like characters who suffer the pangs of unrequited love.
And the title story is a fantastical and ironic tale in which Benjamin Button experiences his lifetime in reverse by aging backward.
Witnessing discrimination, experiencing the class structure of the antebellum South, Button must use his wits to accommodate so as to seem to lead a normal life… that is hardly normal at all.
Here's a heads up, a major movie of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton and Jason Flemying, is currently in production and scheduled for release in December of this year.
Some of the filming will actually be shot in Reno. Here is a chance for you to read or listen to the story before it hits the silver screen!
Yo Poets! It is definitely not too early to be preparing for the Sierra Nevada College's Second Annual Poetry Slam in Patterson Hall at 7 p.m. April 10. Local poets will stand and deliver for a chance to take home the title of Tahoe Slam Poet of the Year.
Note: Competitors will be limited to the first ten people to sign up (a change from last year's Slam), so hopeful contestants should plan on arriving a minimum of 20 minutes before the event to sign up for a chance to compete.
Next week I will be giving some performance tips from the founder of Poetry Slams but if you want to know more about poetry slams, see my review of April 8, 2007).