"Fifty Best American Short Stories", Edited by Martha Foley

I love short stories, and I consider the short story to be the best form of all writing in literature. It has almost no room for error. Even the simplest little changes can either make a short story truly great or turn a potentially great short story into something very ordinary. I have read and studied the short story form ever since my high school days which were a mighty long time ago. I also write and have published about 20 short stories in at least 12 states in a variety of both college and university literary journals and some of the better online websites. I published my first short story in my twenties. But I don't pretend to be an expert on the short story, and I surely don't pretend to be a great short story writer. I do profess to be a good short story writer, and I believe the significant number of editors and/or editorial committees who have accepted and published my stories is some level of proof of their agreement with me about my self assessment. The best way to become a good to great short story writer is to read stories by the authors whom other people who understand the short story believe to be the best in the world. Everyone has their own opinion of what a great short story is, and there is room for some disagreement since the idea of stating what is a good to great short story is very subjective. It should also be very objective and sometimes editors are more subjective than objective. I remember one story I submitted to a book project in Texas, as I recall, and I got a handwritten rejection from the editor who had rejected it which said something to the effect that "This story really doesn't fit our project goals, but it sure is an interesting story." Did that editor mean that "interesting" was a good thing or something less. Since he bothered to send me a handwritten rejection, I assume he liked the story. You never know in a case like that. But to get to the point of this blog post, I am actually supposed to be writing about the book of stories which I recently finished by reading one stor a day from the book with my wife. This particular book, "Fifty Best American Short Stories" Edited By Martha Foley, was published in 1986 and contains stories from 1915 to 1964. It contains short stories from several of my favorite authors although the stories the editor chose are sometimes not my favorite stories by a particular author. It also contains some stories from people whom I had never read who might not make anyone's top ten or top fifty list of short story authors which speaks to that subjectivity of which I spoke earlier. But it is overall a very good book of short stories and well worth reading. The authors in this collection whom I had already placed on my list of favorites includes Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O'Connor, and Shirley Jackson. Interestingly, the editor did not include the story I consider to be each of those writers' best. She might have been bowing to copyright restrictions on what she considered their best but included another story from each of them in a bow to what she considers their overall greatness. Or maybe we just have differing opinions, hence subjectivity rears its head. If you can find a copy of this old collection, buy it, read it, and make up your own mind while trying to be totally objective about the process.

"Kinfolks: The Wigus Stories" by Gurney Norman

A recent reread of this book was, naturally, prompted by the death of its author, Gurney Norman, who is most famous for his first novel, "Divine Right's Trip: A Novel of The Counter Culture" which I had reread and written about earlier this year. I honestly don't remember the first time I read this collection of short stories. It is composed of a collection of ten short stories which have a cast of common characters who are all either family or friends of the protagonistg, Wilgus Collier, an Appalachian male who is raised in the home of his maternal grandparents. I believe all but one of the stories had been previously published in several literary journals around the country. In some respects, an argument could be made that it is a similar kind of collection to Mildred Hauns's "The Hawk's Done Gone". However, this collection falls a bit short of Haun's book in being a major part of the argument about what actually constitutes a novel versus a collection of short stories with a common setting and a common cast of characters. Norman's book and the stories it is comprised of is less tightly timelined across the lives of the characters, and falls a bit short in the depth of the character development of most of the characters as opposed to Haun's work. Enough about that. The protagonist is a member of a family which has a complicated structure and mercurial interactions. He is the grandson living in the home of his grandparents, is a close friend of his slightly older uncle Delmer who teaches him how to drink among other acts of coming of age. This book is generally perceived a series of coming of age stories and spans the boys adolescent years to his young adulthood. He is better educated than the other family members and is often viewed as a source of assistance when family problems arrives. One of the stories is about the illness of the grandfather and Wilgus' spending a night sitting with him in hospital. A similar incident with different characters is also a significant part of "Divine Right's Trip" in which D. R. the protagonist in that book performs the same chore for a family friend. The family fight often, love each other always, and show it clearly when the chips are down. They might fight each other in private but they always fight common enemies in public. These stories will make you laugh, and make you cry. They will make you a fan of Wilgus and his extended family. I sincerely doubt that any of these stories will be forever enshrined into the pantheon of great American Literature. But they are already enshrined in the pantheon of serious Appalachian Literature. This book is well worth reading especially if you are a devotee of the American short story.

"Memoirs of a Geisha", Rereading A Classic Novel

My initial reading of this book took place about 2003, about 6 years after the book was originally published. I chose to reread it with my wife because we had both loved it when we read it the first time. On second reading, the book is just as great as I had viewed it over 20 years ago. It is written by the author, Arthur Golden, as a memoir in the first person with the narrator being the protagonist, Sayuri, a poor young Japanese girl who has been sold, along with her older sister, by her father after the death of her mother to a leading man in their poor seaside fishing village in rural Japan. The buyer immediately sells her to the owner of an okiya in the large city of Gion to be used as a maid initially, but ultimately to be trained as a geisha. The dictionary definition of a geisa is "A Japanese girl or woman who is trained to entertain professional or social gatherings of men with conversation, dancing, and singing". That simplistic definition is a bit short of reality. The girls who are being trained to become geisha are nothing short of slaves, property, belonging to the female owners of the okiyas into which they have been placed. An okiya is a house which is run by an older woman, sometimes a retired former geisha, In the house, this owner will have at least one and sometimes more geisha whose work supports the entire household which is composed of the owner, perhaps an assistant or two who may also be former retired geisha, one or sometimes more young apprentice geisha, and several support staff who function primarly as maids, cooks, and errand girls. Often the maids are young girls who are being considered for training as geisha when they are older. There is a complete culture represented by the geisha, the other members of their okiyas, and their customers who are usually well to do men some of whom may even be among the richest in the country. This culture is thoroughly represented by Arthur Golden in the book and he actually trained in college to become an expert on Japanese culture and language. Incidentally, this is his only published book so far as I know, and that is a tragedy. This novel is classic and was a massive best seller when it was first published. In the okiya to which Sayuri has been sold, the primary geisha is a woman named Hatsumomo who is one of the best known and highest earning geisha in Japan. But she is a foul tempered, manipulative, and totally unlikeable woman who is the villian of the book. She does all she can to prevent Sayuri from ever becoming a geisha by lying, manipulating all those around her, and working on a daily basis to destroy the life, hopes, and dreams of Sayuri. But since she is the primary wage earner in the okiya,she is the one person on whom all the others in the house are dependent. Sayuri manages to meet and become befriended by another geisha, Mameha, who takes her under her protection and assists her in succeeding to become a full fledged geisha. Very early in the book, Sayuri meets only briefly a man referred to as The Chairman, who owns one of the largest companies in Japan, and she falls in love with him. But due to the strict social protocols of Japanese culture,she cannot make her feelings about him known. She does find steady work entertaining the Chairman over time along with his right hand man who is a former war hero who has lost an arm and been severely burned during the war. But he is compassionate despite being gruff, brusque, and overly honest in his criticisms of those around him. He and Sayuri become close friends and he wishes to become her danna, a Japanese expression for a man who provides for a geisha without ever marrying her. That relationship never happens and Sayuri near the end of the book takes actions to ensure that she doesn't ever become the beneficiary of his assitance. This is a powerful novel which provides a lenghthy ongoing portrait of live in Japan both for geisha and all those around them in the years leading up to War War II and beyond. Sayuri suffers hardships both as a child and as a geisha especialy during the war. But in the end she has become an independent woman in control of her own life and circumstances. It is one of the finest novels I have ever read about life in Asia in general and in Japan in particular. It can be found on any used book page on the internet and is still in print. Read it! You will love it!

Pinto Bean Politics!

When I was growing up in a country store on Beaver Creek in Knott County Kentucky, we sold pinto beans by the pound, weighed from a galvanized barrel that sat under the main counter in the store. We bought the beans in 100 pound bags, dumped them in the barrel which also held a pretty nice blackjack carved from a piece of wood to a shape just like a miniature baseball bat, about a foot long with a nice handgrip and about a 3-4 inch circumference on the head which was drilled to about three inches down the handle to include a nice round cylinder of lead. To my knowledge the blackjack was never used in the long period my parents operated the store. Our customers came in, usually talked small talk for a short while, bought whatever they needed, maybe even a pound or two of pinto beans, and left without ever needing to be knocked out with the blackjack in the bean barrel. I no longer own that blackjack but in today's world of the most corrupt politics in the history of the nation, and the worst living example of a human being working on a daily basis from the White House to destroy the entire nation and our democracy, we sure need a good metaphorical political blackjack. On a recent check of the price of pinto beans, I found that WalMart is charging $14.94 for a 20 pound bag of pinto beans. That boils down to about 74.7cents a pound for bulk pinto beans. WalMart is now selling the one pound bag of pinto beans for a dollar. When I was often helping my parents behind the bean barrel, I don't think we ever charged more than 10cents a pound and we were making a decent profit in those days. The point to this focus on pinto beans is important because there are millions of Americans of all stripes and cultures who are eating pinto beans on a daily basis. Several different cultures are highly dependent on pinto beans as a staple source of protein. Most people of moderate to poor means in the American south depend on pinto beans as a major portion of their diet. That includes both Caucasian and African American citizens of the deep south. Most members of the various Hispanic cultures in America are also largely dependent on pinto beans. Frijoles, in many forms, are a common sight on Hispanic dinner tables. Nearly every person who ever grew up in Central and Southern Appalachia grew up, in large part, on pinto beans. We even had pinto beans once a week in the high school lunch room at Knott County High School at Pippa Passes, Kentucky, when I was a student there. Pinto beans may well be the answer to help us solve our ongoing attempted tyranny by TRAITOR Trump and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican party.

One of my favorite memories about pinto beans goes back to about 1992 when I was working for a short while, between human services jobs, at a horse farm in Central Kentucky. I was salesprepping several brood mares which were headed toward a November Breeding Stock Sale at Keeneland. The mares were actuallly owned by a man who was contracting for the sales prepping with the owner of a farm I was working on at the time. I was sent to the owner's farm to do the work. One day, the owner who was born and raised in Quito Ecuador, a Mexican immigrant blacksmith, and I were standing in front of a barn in a conversation and found ourselves talking about how we had grown up in three very different locations and cultures. We suddenly discovered that all three of us had grown up eating pinto beans, one in Mexico, one in Ecuador, and one in Eastern Kentucky. It was an educational moment for me for sure. What is the point to all this and politics? What the Democratic party needs to do to win all the next upcoming elections in this country is to locate, educate, register, and guarantee the turnout to vote of the great majority of the pinto bean cultures in America. If we do that we will be back in control of our country, our Democracy, and our future. We will no longer be facing the horrible situation in which we finid ourselves today. We can begin the next 25 to 50 years of necessary work in order to save our country after all the political, moral, and ethical damage which has been done over the last ten years by TRAITOR Trump and the other TRAITORS who facilitate most of his crimes against the government, the country, the world, and the planet. The answer is all about pinto beans.

"Aylesford Place: The Second Year" by Steve Demaree

On July 8, 2025, I wrote a blog post about the first book in this series by Steve Demaree, "Pink Flamingoed". My wife and I just finished book two in the series, "Aylesford Place: The Second Year". These books are self-published by Steve Demaree and he sells them on most of the available internet book sellers including Amazon. Aylesford Place is a mythical neighborhood on a single street in a town somewhere in Central Kentucky. The real Aylesford Place is located just north and east of the University of Kentucky campus right off Euclid Avenue. Physically, the mythical street in the books bears little resemblance to the real Aylesford Place. The neighborhood in the book is peopled by a collection of eight or ten different households ranging in age from late twenties (perhaps) to somewhere near the late seventies or eighties. Most of the characters have lived on Aylesford Place most, if not all, of their lives. However, the characters whom I consider to be the primary protagonists of the book are a young couple, Brad Forester and Amy Carmichael, a male mystery author and his female photographer girlfriend, who are married by the end of this book. Their best friends are Allison Davenport and her boyfriend Chuck Madden who are also married by the end of the book. As this novel begins, Chuck lives elsewhere in the mythical town and Allison owns her own home on Aylesford Place. After the wedding, they are both residents of Aylesford Place. Brad and Amy, after their marriage, decide to remodel the two adjoining Aylesford Place homes in which they were already living to make a connector between the two and turn Brad's house into a Bed and Breakfast. Allison is in a wheelchair and runs some kind of never quite fully described business from her home. Her inclusion as a character in the novel, actually a major character, is the best part of the book for me since my wife Candice has been in a wheelchair for almost thirty years. I commend Steve Demaree for creating this character and dealing with her appropriately. Few novelists in today's world have the strengthy of character to create such a character in their books. I suspect that Steve Demaree has, or has had, someone in his life in a wheelchair. He has Allison take part in the life of the neighborhood just as fully and functionally as any other character. She tackles life head on and usually wins. Nothing seriously dangerous of deadly ever happens on Aylesford Place. Everyone in the novel is generally always happy. They might have brief periods of being less than content but the causes are never earth shattering and they always come to a happy ending. For me, two of the major aspects of good fiction writing are the creation of an element known as Conflict and the Resolution of Conflict. Not much of that happens in Steve Demaree's books. No one ever develops cancer, hepatitis, insanity, or much more than an occasional headache or hangnail. The books lack sufficient of the reality of life to be the kind of writing that makes one wish to see the next book in a series. My wife Candice likes these books considerably more than I. I doubt that I would have read the second book if she had not wanted us to read it together as we always do with one book at a time, spending about 30 to 45 minutes a day with Candice washing our breakfast dishes while read from our ongoing book aloud. It works for us, keeps us close, and interested in the same topics most of the time. Our habit can be a good one for other couples to try, especially if you both love literature. I'm simply saying I love a higher class of literature.

"Mountain People, Mountain Crafts" by Elinor Lander Horwitz

Lately for a variety of reasons, I have been reading a lot of books about Appalachian Folk Art which is one of my favorite types of art and, in my opinion, some of the best art in America. Elinor Horwitz was a very prolific writer who published about a dozen books including at least three on Appalachian Folk Art and/or Appalachian Crafts. This particular book was published in 1974 and I actually learned about Horwitz and her work while reading a classic book on Appalachian Folk Art, "The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and The Genesis of Twentieth Century Folk Art" by Julia Ardery, a Kentucky writer. I will write about that book in a day or two. This particular book has one chapter on woodcarving and that chapter focuses heavily on Edgar Tolson and his work wiht several excellent photographs of Tolson and his work. I never knew Edgar Tolson but have heard numerous stories about him and his work from his son Donny Tolson who is also now dead. Interestingly, the photographs in this book, or at least most of them, were taken by Horwitz's two teenage sons who had traveled with her to visit various folk artists and crafters all over the region of Central and Southern Appalachian. One of her sons also took most of the photographs for another of her books which I will also write about in the upcoming days. This book is directed toward a general audience and makes no attempt to go into great detail about many aspects of Appalachian Fok Art and crafts. But Horwitz and her sons did visit most of the subjects of the book and I am also led to believe that she was a major collector of Appalachian arts and crafts. Some of the photographs are stunning and as good as one could expect to see from truly professional photographers. I haven't yet done enough research to learn if either of her sons pursued photography as a career, but I would not be surprised if they did. She broke the book down into three major chapters plus a short epilogue entitled "Today And Tomorrow" which reflects on the potential future of Appalachian Folk Art. It is a shame that the book was published with all the photographs in black and white. Many of the subjects of those photographs such as quilts, paintings, and other works would have been much more attractive and informative if they had been shot and published in full color. For several types of the work featured in the book, Horwitz discusses at length the process the creators used to produce the work, and her sons provided excellent photographs of several phases of the creative process when they were able to do so with the cooperation of the artists. It is also a good review of quite a few Appalachian Folk Artists and crafters who are now dead. But the book is well worth reading if you can find a copy since it is now more than fifty years old. I found my copy on a used book website and it is actually a former library book which I often avoid buying. But it was apparently not the most read book in that particular library and is in good shape. If you are interested in Folk Art or crafting, the book is worth digging up a copy.

"The Unvanquished" by William Faulkner, A Wonderful Novel of The Civil War And Reconstruction!

"The Unvanquished" by William Faulkner was originally published in 1934 and has been a staple of many college classes in Southern Literature, Civil War Literature, and general American Literature ever since. It is one of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County novels and features several key figures in the saga of his mythical county: John Sartoris, John Sartoris Jr., Ab Snopes, and others. The novel covers both the period of the Civil War and of early Reconstruction. The protagonist is John Sartoris, Jr. who is about 12 years old when the novel begins and a full grown adult at the end. His slave Ringo is also a major figure in the novel. The two are just a few months different in age and literally grew up together much like brothers, but clearly also a slave owner and a slave. Their relationship is a major key to everything in the novel. They are inseparable, literally bound at the hip. That relationship, as Faulkner portrays it, is both an indictment and an apologia for the entire slave holding culture of the south. The two work together to attempt to murder the first Union officer they ever see using a musket which resides on most occasions over the mantel in the main room of the Sartoris mansion. They are still together at the end of the novel as young Sartoris goes to confront his father's former business partner and killer. The novel is the basis of a strong argument about the much vaunted code of honor of southern gentlemen, and parts of it are said to have been a fictional portrayal of some events which took place in the life of an actual Faulkner ancestor. The individual chapters of the novel, seven in all, were originally published as short stories and the book is sometimes drawn into the perpetual argument among students of literature about just where a collection of short stories with common characters ends and a novel begins. In my opinion, it is a novel and that argument should have been ceased many years ago. For an example of a collection of such short stories with common characters fails to fulfill the requirements of a novel I suggest that you read "The Hawk's Done Gone" by Mildred Haun which is a fine book but not quite a novel. You could never find two better books to read in order to fully comprehend that argument, and to help put an end to it also. As the book progresses, John Sartoris, Jr. and Ringo progress from being two boys playing war in the dust near the slave quarters to become two young southern men, both black and white, who have survived both childhood and the Civil War to become very typical white slave holding and black slave men who are still, at least in their own eyes, brothers. John Sartoris, Sr. looms over the entire novel as a larger than life Colonel in the Confederate Army and as the head of the Sartoris family although he is not present on the plantation most of the time as the novel progresses. He is both a patriarch and a symbol of the failed Confederate effort. He is a role model for his son in the most traditional of senses, and is the axis on which much of the novel moves. His mother-in-law, Granny is a major character of the novel, maintains order at home while the elder Sartoris is off at war, and is dearly beloved by her grandson, the Sartoris slaves, and most of their neighbors. She concocts a plot to use a letter signed by the commanding Union officer in the area to confiscate over two hundred head of mules, disburse them to the poor, both black and white, in the area of the plantation, and is eventually caught in the scheme along with her grandson and Ringo. Ringo is both the brains of much of the operation and a loyal servant and man Friday to his young master and companion. Drusilla, a young female distant cousin of the elder Sartoris is a young woman who loses her fiancee to the Union forces and seeks to avenge his death by utilizing her talents with both guns and horses to assist the elder Sartoris and his troops in their doomed war. Her mother uses the old southern mores about what "good women" are supposed to do and be in order to force her to marry the elder Sartoris because she has spent many weeks riding, fighting, and hiding in the woods with him and his troops as a young single woman. This is a powerful novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction by a man who lived his life in the shadow of his own ancestors who had fought and lost in the effort. It addresses multiple issues which have arisen for several hundred years in the south: slavery, male and female relationships, rich versus poor whites, Union versus Confederate, young southerners living in the oversized shadows of their elders, and the dominant question since Lee surrendered, "just how do southerners go on living after the war?"