What are your favorites? Essays that taught you something about the world (personal, cultural, scientific), favorite poetry collections, short stories you can’t forget. Sarah promises to read everything in this thread so don’t go easy on her. Go!
The best short story is the one I know you will have read before, the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I also love Percival Everett's Appropriation of Cultures (it's on jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/3299316).
I really like this idea, even though I'm unlikely to actually carry through on it. And this thread feels like one that should be "pinned to the top of the Substack" for awhile, to encourage folks to add to it over a period longer than a week.
Nothing initially came to mind, but after a while I thought of an essay by Douglas Adams I read many years ago, about why he was an atheist and not an agnostic. As a not-really-serious Presbyterian as a young adult and then later an agnostic, I found his essay quite compelling, and still do.
I wanted to link directly to the essay, but my Google-foo is not working quite right today so haven't found it, but there are plenty of Douglas Adams references to be found; and he wrote a number of interesting essays, so let me just recommend him in general. And don't forget that he wrote about how "42" is the answer to the question of "life, the universe, and everything", which was a mention on a fairly recent Smoke 'Em podcast.
Douglas Adams was my age; died far too young 21 years ago.
My background is science, not literary, and I know I've read influential essays in that area; hoping to think of a few of them over the next few days. Three names in that field that would be worth some online/library searching for various essays:
- Richard Feynman (let me reference his book "What do you care what other people think"
- Carl Sagan - many books, I'm sure there are essays online
- James Burke, who created the marvelous TV series "Connections" in the late 1970s
And since this idea come from Ray Bradbury, you could do a lot worse than to add his essays to the mix.
This is not literary so forgive me. I’m not in a creative industry but need to use creativity in solving business problems. When I’m not able to think creatively I realize it’s because I’m numb. Mary Oliver poems always bring me back to the world. Sometimes I need to have a small cry to snap me back and as corny as they are the “Thank You Mom” Olympic Ads from P&G do it for me (I painstakingly raised my sweet Aspergian grown son as a single mom). Also Obama singing Amazing Grace at Reverend Pinckney’s funeral in Charleston is a beautifully palpable tear-jerker.
I recently read Dead Man's Float, Jim Harrison's last poetry collection, and it really stuck with me. Heavy subject matter, but often handled with levity and wit. Also really enjoyed David Berman's Actual Air and Leonard Cohen's Let Us Compare Mythologies (his first collection).
More people should read Bruno Schulz's short stories -- stunning, surreal masterworks. His style is similar to Kafka but very much his own. The Penguin edition "Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories" contains all of his surviving work.
I have to say I've dipped into Montaigne's essays periodically for 30 years. I'm always amazed how little the human condition has changed. Reading these essays is like when your parents sent you beer money when you were in college - it's comforting. Montaigne speaks through ages and let's you know he wrestled with the same aggravations and fears that we do today. There's a strange comfort in this which breaks through your solitude and let's you know you are not so alone.
Back in New York for a week (hi ladies), I’m in a Gotham kind of mood, the promise of leaving always ambivalent. But not for John Cheever, whose 1983 Esquire essay ‘Moving Out,’ about blowing this dodge, gives Joan Didion’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ a run for its money: https://classic.esquire.com/moving-out.
Meanwhile, the rancid smells and patches of the sleeping homeless, multiplying with my weekly returns, call back the 70s of Saul Bellow’s 1970 short masterpiece, ‘Mr. Sammler's Planet.’ It’s technically a novel and not an easy read. In it, Bellow dared to describe a strange violation of Arthur Sammler, a Jewish holocaust survivor, by a debonair pickpocket, a black man. Charges of racism ensued, though not right away. So another black man, great essayist and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, raised ‘Mr. Sammler's Planet’ above critical squalor in his opening of the later Penguin Classics release. Here is how the essay starts:
"We are now mightily perplexed by the vulgarity and the brutal appetites of our culture, which Mr. Sammler sees so, so clearly, startled from page to page and in passage after passage of Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel. The terrible children of our day, the worst of our politicians, and the rampant sleaze that slides up and down the classes, across the races and religions, from the cynical students to the unrepentingly jaded and old, can be traced back to the elements that are so alarming to the protagonist of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. As a well-educated man who has smelled the molten breath and felt the bloody teeth of European fascism, Mr. Sammler is obsessed with understanding what makes or breaks a society, what causes a civilization to embrace ruthlessness as the best way to realize its ambitions and handle its fears."
It only gets better, maybe the most stunning introduction to a novel I’ve ever read.
The vibe is different where I’m staying, at my parents’ place in Southern Brooklyn, along the still mostly Russian-speaking Brighton Beach. I jog there sometimes, on the boardwalk. So does Faith, the narrator of Grace Paley’s short story, ‘Long Distance Runner’ (https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/long-distance-runner/):
"No one paid too much attention when I started to run, easy and light on my feet. I ran on the boardwalk first, past my mother’s leafleting station—between a soft-ice-cream stand and a degenerated dune. There she had been assigned by her comrades to halt the tides of cruel American enterprise with simple socialist sense. I wanted to stop and admire the long beach. I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York. There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges. But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring. I had decided to run."
Sometimes, I dream of bumping into her while I hop awkwardly along those planks.
Proms: Sonnet 29 by Shakespeare so beautiful, such a declaration of love..
Stopping by the Woods on a snowy Evening by Frost, which my late best friend Michele Cohen, also a poet and writer recited to me one evening while we took a walk on a winter day.
Short story.. do Novellas count? Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank redemption
By SK I’m sure Sarah already read that ..
And Essay .. by my friend Michele Cohen she wrote it in high school and it was about the Beatles for English class I forget the title but it blew me away. Sorry I no longer have a copy…
I read a couple of brilliant essays in best American essays collections, one of which took the conceit of blaming the Mississippi River for all his family's ridiculous behaviors, the gambling, growing weed in the front yard, needlessly suing people in ridiculous lawsuits etc. The best part was his assertion that the Missouri River was a much more reasonable river, not driving people to insane behaviors. I really identified with the guy as someone who had made it out and was gazing back upon it all with bemusement; I know how he felt.
Love me some Australian colonial poetry, Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson etc. The Australian Impressionists--painters and contemporaries of the bush poets--are also very much worth looking up, as they were the first to really capture Australian landscapes properly. Steele Rudd is also fun, with short stories that remain hilarious today. Australian culture at the turn of the last century was richer than at the turn of this century in some ways.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology has some of my favorite short stories, notably Snake-Eyes by Tom Maddox, the guy who invented William Gibson's ICE in Neuromancer. Cyberpunk was my fave for a long time, especially Bruce Sterling. Rereading "Islands in the Net" in the future, after first having read it in the 1990s, at the actual time the novel is set, during a work trip to Hong Kong and Macau was amazing, seeing what he got right and what he missed. At one point I had been reading about a drone assassination in the book, as we took our minibus across the huge bridge near the airport, and a giant drone flew over our little tour bus. The coolest moment ever as I realized I was living in the future.
I may jump in here a few times as I think about my answers, but this short story is probably the one that's made the most recent, lasting impression on me: Miranda July's "Roy Spivey".
if you’re at all interested in the early history of Israel/Palestine, the short-story collection Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, by Ghassan Kanafani, really provoked me (and it’s a beautiful translation from Arabic). I read it in a middle eastern history through literature seminar alongside Khirbet Khizeh, by S. Yizhar, which is an extremely short memoir/almost just a very long essay, also in translation, that provides basically the polar Israeli perspective a similar period of time. Both are beautiful books
I hope you guys see this, even though it's been months since you posted this request, Sarah: I just read a short story by Kate Chopin called "The Storm." Have you read it? She wrote it in 1898, it wasn't published til about 1969 (because it was too scandalous). I often have to reread a short story to try to absorb and understand it--although too often I am left with 'huh?' and feel like a phony lit lover and just move on, but this one is quite worth spending more time with. I'll drop the pdf of it via the pod's email now because I don't think I can in the comments here...
It seems unlikely that folks will see this late comment, but just in case -- since it's been a while since the last "Smoke 'Em", I've been re-listening to the very first podcasts, and, they are just as good as when I first heard them month ago, and, especially worth listening to for anyone who has recently subscribed. The podcast goes unnamed through at least the first 3, and now I'm partway through #4, where maybe it finally gets its current name. Seriously, definitely worth a listen!
I always return to this as a gem of the magazine essay form https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/02/the-wedding-merchants/302092/
And this is one of my favourite poems. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48416/dockery-and-son
The best short story is the one I know you will have read before, the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I also love Percival Everett's Appropriation of Cultures (it's on jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/3299316).
I really like this idea, even though I'm unlikely to actually carry through on it. And this thread feels like one that should be "pinned to the top of the Substack" for awhile, to encourage folks to add to it over a period longer than a week.
Nothing initially came to mind, but after a while I thought of an essay by Douglas Adams I read many years ago, about why he was an atheist and not an agnostic. As a not-really-serious Presbyterian as a young adult and then later an agnostic, I found his essay quite compelling, and still do.
I wanted to link directly to the essay, but my Google-foo is not working quite right today so haven't found it, but there are plenty of Douglas Adams references to be found; and he wrote a number of interesting essays, so let me just recommend him in general. And don't forget that he wrote about how "42" is the answer to the question of "life, the universe, and everything", which was a mention on a fairly recent Smoke 'Em podcast.
Douglas Adams was my age; died far too young 21 years ago.
My background is science, not literary, and I know I've read influential essays in that area; hoping to think of a few of them over the next few days. Three names in that field that would be worth some online/library searching for various essays:
- Richard Feynman (let me reference his book "What do you care what other people think"
- Carl Sagan - many books, I'm sure there are essays online
- James Burke, who created the marvelous TV series "Connections" in the late 1970s
And since this idea come from Ray Bradbury, you could do a lot worse than to add his essays to the mix.
I will go classic
Poem
Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 (I fall in love with the language everytime I read it)
Short Story (or novella?) The Dead, James Joyce. One of the most captivating stories ever, the descriptions and imagery are beyond category
Essay Shooting an Elephant George Orwell; an essay that is rteally about the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized
This is not literary so forgive me. I’m not in a creative industry but need to use creativity in solving business problems. When I’m not able to think creatively I realize it’s because I’m numb. Mary Oliver poems always bring me back to the world. Sometimes I need to have a small cry to snap me back and as corny as they are the “Thank You Mom” Olympic Ads from P&G do it for me (I painstakingly raised my sweet Aspergian grown son as a single mom). Also Obama singing Amazing Grace at Reverend Pinckney’s funeral in Charleston is a beautifully palpable tear-jerker.
I recently read Dead Man's Float, Jim Harrison's last poetry collection, and it really stuck with me. Heavy subject matter, but often handled with levity and wit. Also really enjoyed David Berman's Actual Air and Leonard Cohen's Let Us Compare Mythologies (his first collection).
More people should read Bruno Schulz's short stories -- stunning, surreal masterworks. His style is similar to Kafka but very much his own. The Penguin edition "Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories" contains all of his surviving work.
Is that Wallace?
I have to say I've dipped into Montaigne's essays periodically for 30 years. I'm always amazed how little the human condition has changed. Reading these essays is like when your parents sent you beer money when you were in college - it's comforting. Montaigne speaks through ages and let's you know he wrestled with the same aggravations and fears that we do today. There's a strange comfort in this which breaks through your solitude and let's you know you are not so alone.
Back in New York for a week (hi ladies), I’m in a Gotham kind of mood, the promise of leaving always ambivalent. But not for John Cheever, whose 1983 Esquire essay ‘Moving Out,’ about blowing this dodge, gives Joan Didion’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ a run for its money: https://classic.esquire.com/moving-out.
Meanwhile, the rancid smells and patches of the sleeping homeless, multiplying with my weekly returns, call back the 70s of Saul Bellow’s 1970 short masterpiece, ‘Mr. Sammler's Planet.’ It’s technically a novel and not an easy read. In it, Bellow dared to describe a strange violation of Arthur Sammler, a Jewish holocaust survivor, by a debonair pickpocket, a black man. Charges of racism ensued, though not right away. So another black man, great essayist and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, raised ‘Mr. Sammler's Planet’ above critical squalor in his opening of the later Penguin Classics release. Here is how the essay starts:
"We are now mightily perplexed by the vulgarity and the brutal appetites of our culture, which Mr. Sammler sees so, so clearly, startled from page to page and in passage after passage of Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel. The terrible children of our day, the worst of our politicians, and the rampant sleaze that slides up and down the classes, across the races and religions, from the cynical students to the unrepentingly jaded and old, can be traced back to the elements that are so alarming to the protagonist of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. As a well-educated man who has smelled the molten breath and felt the bloody teeth of European fascism, Mr. Sammler is obsessed with understanding what makes or breaks a society, what causes a civilization to embrace ruthlessness as the best way to realize its ambitions and handle its fears."
It only gets better, maybe the most stunning introduction to a novel I’ve ever read.
The vibe is different where I’m staying, at my parents’ place in Southern Brooklyn, along the still mostly Russian-speaking Brighton Beach. I jog there sometimes, on the boardwalk. So does Faith, the narrator of Grace Paley’s short story, ‘Long Distance Runner’ (https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/long-distance-runner/):
"No one paid too much attention when I started to run, easy and light on my feet. I ran on the boardwalk first, past my mother’s leafleting station—between a soft-ice-cream stand and a degenerated dune. There she had been assigned by her comrades to halt the tides of cruel American enterprise with simple socialist sense. I wanted to stop and admire the long beach. I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York. There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges. But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring. I had decided to run."
Sometimes, I dream of bumping into her while I hop awkwardly along those planks.
So many…
Proms: Sonnet 29 by Shakespeare so beautiful, such a declaration of love..
Stopping by the Woods on a snowy Evening by Frost, which my late best friend Michele Cohen, also a poet and writer recited to me one evening while we took a walk on a winter day.
Short story.. do Novellas count? Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank redemption
By SK I’m sure Sarah already read that ..
And Essay .. by my friend Michele Cohen she wrote it in high school and it was about the Beatles for English class I forget the title but it blew me away. Sorry I no longer have a copy…
I read a couple of brilliant essays in best American essays collections, one of which took the conceit of blaming the Mississippi River for all his family's ridiculous behaviors, the gambling, growing weed in the front yard, needlessly suing people in ridiculous lawsuits etc. The best part was his assertion that the Missouri River was a much more reasonable river, not driving people to insane behaviors. I really identified with the guy as someone who had made it out and was gazing back upon it all with bemusement; I know how he felt.
Love me some Australian colonial poetry, Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson etc. The Australian Impressionists--painters and contemporaries of the bush poets--are also very much worth looking up, as they were the first to really capture Australian landscapes properly. Steele Rudd is also fun, with short stories that remain hilarious today. Australian culture at the turn of the last century was richer than at the turn of this century in some ways.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology has some of my favorite short stories, notably Snake-Eyes by Tom Maddox, the guy who invented William Gibson's ICE in Neuromancer. Cyberpunk was my fave for a long time, especially Bruce Sterling. Rereading "Islands in the Net" in the future, after first having read it in the 1990s, at the actual time the novel is set, during a work trip to Hong Kong and Macau was amazing, seeing what he got right and what he missed. At one point I had been reading about a drone assassination in the book, as we took our minibus across the huge bridge near the airport, and a giant drone flew over our little tour bus. The coolest moment ever as I realized I was living in the future.
Anne Tyler's essay "Still Just Writing"
James Arthur's poem Charms Against Lightning
The Lady or the 🐯 Tiger
I may jump in here a few times as I think about my answers, but this short story is probably the one that's made the most recent, lasting impression on me: Miranda July's "Roy Spivey".
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1yp87wtTz8lv8O8KTGljiY?si=8nTk5K3mQPiMUBIsvrTTXA&utm_source=copy-link
if you’re at all interested in the early history of Israel/Palestine, the short-story collection Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, by Ghassan Kanafani, really provoked me (and it’s a beautiful translation from Arabic). I read it in a middle eastern history through literature seminar alongside Khirbet Khizeh, by S. Yizhar, which is an extremely short memoir/almost just a very long essay, also in translation, that provides basically the polar Israeli perspective a similar period of time. Both are beautiful books
The short stories of Breece D'J Pancake
Love the cat art!
Since it’s still sort of Halloweenie…
Berenice, a short story by Poe that scared the crap out of me when I read it as a child.
https://poestories.com/read/berenice
I hope you guys see this, even though it's been months since you posted this request, Sarah: I just read a short story by Kate Chopin called "The Storm." Have you read it? She wrote it in 1898, it wasn't published til about 1969 (because it was too scandalous). I often have to reread a short story to try to absorb and understand it--although too often I am left with 'huh?' and feel like a phony lit lover and just move on, but this one is quite worth spending more time with. I'll drop the pdf of it via the pod's email now because I don't think I can in the comments here...
It seems unlikely that folks will see this late comment, but just in case -- since it's been a while since the last "Smoke 'Em", I've been re-listening to the very first podcasts, and, they are just as good as when I first heard them month ago, and, especially worth listening to for anyone who has recently subscribed. The podcast goes unnamed through at least the first 3, and now I'm partway through #4, where maybe it finally gets its current name. Seriously, definitely worth a listen!