| Author | Title | Opening Technique | Tense | Voice | First Paragraph |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anderson, Sherwood | The Book of the Grotesque | Character | Past | Third | The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Hands | Setting | Past | Third | Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. “Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,” commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Paper Pills | Backstory | Past | Third | He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long nbefore the time during which we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | The Philosopher | Character | Past | Third | Doctor Parcival was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache. He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies. His teeth were black and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes. The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor’s head playing with the cord. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Nobody Knows | Action | Past | Third | Looking cautiously about, George Willard arose from his desk in the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ and went hurriedly out at the back door. The night was warm and cloudy and although it was not yet eight o’clock, the alleyway back of the _Eagle_ office was pitch dark. A team of horses tied to a post somewhere in the darkness stamped on the hard-baked ground. A cat sprang from under George Willard’s feet and ran away into the night. The young man was nervous. All day he had gone about his work like one dazed by a blow. In the alleyway he trembled as though with fright. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Godlinesss | Setting | Past | Third | There were always three or four old people sitting on the front porch of the house or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the old people were women and sisters to Jesse. They were a colorless, soft voiced lot. Then there was a silent old man with thin white hair who was Jesse’s uncle. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | A Man of Ideas | Setting; Character | Past | Third | He lived with his mother, a grey, silent woman with a peculiar ashy complexion. The house in which they lived stood in a little grove of trees beyond where the main street of Winesburg crossed Wine Creek. His name was Joe Welling, and his father had been a man of some dignity in the community, a lawyer, and a member of the state legislature at Columbus. Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike anyone else in town. He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire. No, he wasn’t like that—he was like a man who is subject to fits, one who walks among his fellow men inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes roll and his legs and arms jerk. He was like that, only that the visitation that descended upon Joe Welling was a mental and not a physical thing. He was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his ideas was uncontrollable. Words rolled and tumbled from his mouth. A peculiar smile came upon his lips. The edges of his teeth that were tipped with gold glistened in the light. Pouncing upon a bystander he began to talk. For the bystander there was no escape. The excited man breathed into his face, peered into his eyes, pounded upon his chest with a shaking forefinger, demanded, compelled attention. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Adventure | Character | Past | Third | Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven when George Willard was a mere boy, had lived in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney’s Dry Goods Store and lived with her mother, who had married a second husband. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Respectability | Character | Past | Second | If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | The Thinker | Setting | Past | Third | The house in which Seth Richmond of Winesburg lived with his mother had been at one time the show place of the town, but when young Seth lived there its glory had become somewhat dimmed. The huge brick house which Banker White had built on Buckeye Street had overshadowed it. The Richmond place was in a little valley far out at the end of Main Street. Farmers coming into town by a dusty road from the south passed by a grove of walnut trees, skirted the Fair Ground with its high board fence covered with advertisements, and trotted their horses down through the valley past the Richmond place into town. As much of the country north and south of Winesburg was devoted to fruit and berry raising, Seth saw wagon-loads of berry pickers—boys, girls, and women—going to the fields in the morning and returning covered with dust in the evening. The chattering crowd, with their rude jokes cried out from wagon to wagon, sometimes irritated him sharply. He regretted that he also could not laugh boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and make of himself a figure in the endless stream of moving, giggling activity that went up and down the road. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Tandy | Backstory; Character | Past | Third | "Until she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother’s relatives." |
| Anderson, Sherwood | The Strength of God | Character | Past | Third | The Reverend Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Winesburg, and had been in that position ten years. He was forty years old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing in the pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from Wednesday morning until Saturday evening he thought of nothing but the two sermons that must be preached on Sunday. Early on Sunday morning he went into a little room called a study in the bell tower of the church and prayed. In his prayers there was one note that always predominated. “Give me strength and courage for Thy work, O Lord!” he pleaded, kneeling on the bare floor and bowing his head in the presence of the task that lay before him. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | The Teacher | Setting; Action | Past | Third | Snow lay deep in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about ten o’clock in the morning and a wind sprang up and blew the snow in clouds along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. “There will be good sleighing,” said Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith’s saloon. Out of the saloon he went and met Sylvester West the druggist stumbling along in the kind of heavy overshoes called arctics. “Snow will bring the people into town on Saturday,” said the druggist. The two men stopped and discussed their affairs. Will Henderson, who had on a light overcoat and no overshoes, kicked the heel of his left foot with the toe of the right. “Snow will be good for the wheat,” observed the druggist sagely. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Loneliness | Character; Setting | Past | Third | He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road leading off Trunion Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of the windows facing the road were kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his mother in those days and when he was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High School. Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the road when he came into town and sometimes read a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make him realize where he was so that he would turn out of the beaten track and let them pass. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | An Awakening | Character; Setting | Past | Third | Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store. She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the night. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | "Queer" | Action; Setting | Past | Third | From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr on the rear of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the printshop of the _Winesburg Eagle_. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes. They did not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off. With the shoes in his hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of his stockings. Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg, standing at the back door of the _Eagle_ printshop and staring absentmindedly about. “Well, well, what next!” exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from the window. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | The Untold Lie | Backstory | Past | Third | Ray Pearson and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on a farm three miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday afternoons they came into town and wandered about through the streets with other fellows from the country. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Drink | Backstory | Past | Third | Tom Foster came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young and could get many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on a farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to school there when Winesburg was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a general store on the Trunion Pike. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Death | Setting | Past | Third | The stairway leading up to Doctor Reefy’s office, in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods store, was but dimly lighted. At the head of the stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and covered with dust. The people who went up the stairway followed with their feet the feet of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the stairs had yielded under the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked the way. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Sophistication | Setting | Past | Third | It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike, where the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields now covered with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose in clouds. Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with colors. |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Departure | Action; Setting | Past | Third | Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a carpet underfoot. |
| Bowles, Paul | A Distant Episode | Setting | Past | Third | The September sunsets were at their reddest the week the professor decided to visit Ain Tadouirt, which is in the warm country. He came down out of the high, flat region in the evening by bus, with two small overnight bags full of maps, sun lotions and medicines. Ten years ago he had been in the village for three days; long enough, however, to establish a fairly firm friendship with a cafe-keeper, who had written him several times during the first year after his visit, if never since. "Hassan Ramani," the Professor said over and over, as the bus bumped downward through ever warmer layers of air. Now facing the flaming sky in the west, and now facing the sharp mountains, the car followed the dusty trail down the canyons into air which began to smell of other things besides the endless ozone of the heights: orange blossoms, pepper, sun-baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit. He closed his eyes happily and lived for an instant in a purely olfactory world. The distant past returned — what part of it, he could not decide. |
| Carver, Ray | A Small, Good Thing | Action | Past | Third | Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He'd just come to work and he'd be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry. |
| Glaspell, Susan | A Jury of Her Peers | Action | Past | Third | When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away -- it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted. |
| Graver, Elizabeth | Yellow Tent | Setting | Past | Third | From the shore, the way the dusk blurred edges, he might have taken her for something caught in the rubble of the stream. She could have been a log, or an alligator if it had been the tropics, or an animal carcass heavy with water resting against a fallen branch. In fact, she was a girl, quite alive and stretched in the Black River with her arms above her head, clinging hard to a bit of tree. Darren knew the shape was Meg because he had followed her down to the river and stood pretending not to look as shee peeled off her T-shirt and shorts. Watching her lift her shirt above her head, he had experienced a moment of panic, first at expecting flesh, then at seeing that suit there like the mottled skin of a beast. |
| Graver, Elizabeth | Have You Seen Me? | Object | Past | Third | Willa stood in the patch of light from the open freezer door and watched as the mist climbed in tendrils, swirled and rose. The milk carton in her hands was heavy, its surface smeared with yellowish cream--her mother had made more potato soup. Already the two tall freezers in the basement housed cartons and cartons of soup, enough to last them almost forever--carrot and broccoli soup, soup made of summer and acorn squash, rows of greeen and yellow frozen rectangles inside the cartons that had once held milk. And on the outsides of the cartons, rows of children--frozen, too, their features stiff, their faces etched with frost. Have You Seen Me? Do You Know Where I Am? Each time Willa put the cartons in the freezers, she set up the children in pairs so they could have staring contests when she shut the doors. |
| Graver, Elizabeth | The Blue Hour | Setting | Present | First | The pretty little night nurse Juanita takes all the Get Well cards, punches holes in them, and string them on a ribbon around the room. They flap whenever somebody comes in. The day nurse has no time for anything, all business and scrubbed, efficient hands. Juanita has a baby, six months old, and she shows me his picture, shyly, cups it in the palm of her hand where I cannot see it, then slowly, ceremoniously, turns her wrist. There: her son, framed by her fingers, fat and brown in his starched and ironed clothes. At night, though it is against regulations, she opens my window halfway to let air in. The the cards touch covers in the breeze like a row of lightly clapping hands. People I hardly remember are sending me those cards: Best Wishes, Heard You Were Under the Weather, May You Be Up and Around. |
| Graver, Elizabeth | The Mourning Door | Object | Present | Third | The first thing she finds is a hand. In the beginning, she thinks it is a tangle of sheet or a wadded sock caught between the cover and the mattress, a bump the size of a walnut but softer, more yielding. She feels it as she's lying, lazing in bed. Often, lately, her body keeps her beached, though today the sun beckons, the dogwoods blooming white, the peonies' glossy buds speckled with black ants. Tom has gone to work already, backing out of the driveway in his pickup truck. She has taken her temperature on the pink thermometer, noted it down on the graph, 98.2, day eighteen, their third month of trying. She takes it again to be sure, then settles back in, drifting, though she knows she should get up. The carpenters will be here soon; the air will ring with hammers. The men will find more expensive, unnerving problems with the house. She'll have to creep in her robe to the bathroom, so small and steady, like one of the pests they keep uncovering in this ancient, tilting farmhouse -- powder post beetles, termites, carpenter ants. |
| Hall, Lawrence Sargent | The Ledge | Action | Past | Third | It was Christmas morning before sunup the fisherman embraced his warm wife and left his close bed. She did not want him to go. It was Christmas morning. He was a big, raw man, with too much strength, whose delight in winter was to hunt the sea ducks that flew in to feed by the outer ledges, bare at low tide. As his bare feet touched the cold floor and the frosty air struck his nude flesh, he might have changed his mind in the dark of this special day. It was a home day, which made it seem natural to think of the outer ledges merely as some place he had shot ducks in the past. But he had promised his son, thirteen, and his nephew, fifteen, who cam from inland. |
| Hemingway, Ernest | Up In Michigan | Backstory | Past | Third | Jim Gilmore came to Hortons Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Horton. Jim was short and dark with big mustaches and big hands. He was a good horseshoer and did not look much like a blacksmith even with his leather apron on. He lived upstairs above the blacksmith shop and took his meals at A. J. Smith's. |
| Hemingway, Ernest | Out of Season | Action | Past | Third | On the four lira he had earned by spading the hotel garden he got quite drunk. He saw the young gentleman coming down the path and spoke to him mysteriously. The young gentleman said he had not eaten yet but would be ready to go as soon as lunch was finished. Forty minutes or an hour. |
| Hemingway, Ernest | My Old Man | Character | Past | First | I guess looking at it now my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little rolly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he’d pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He’d have maybe taken a trial trip with one of Razzo’s skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o’clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going I’d help him pull off his boots and he’d get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we’d start out. |
| Hemingway, Ernest | Big Two-Hearted River | Setting; Action | Past | Third | The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground. |
| Hemingway, Ernest | The Last Good Country | Action | Past | Third | "Nickie," his sister said to him. "Listen to me, Nickie." "I don't want to hear it." He was watching the bottom of the spring where the sand rose in small spurts with the bubbling water. There was a tin cup on a forked stick that was stuck in the gravel by the spring and Nick Adams looked at it and at the water rising and then flowing clear in its gravel bed beside the road. He could see both ways on the road and he looked up the hill and then down to the dock and the lake, the wooded point across the bay and the open lake beyond where there were white caps running. His back was against a big cedar tree and behind him there was a thick cedar swamp. His sister was sitting on the moss beside him and she had her arm around his shoulders. "They're waiting for you to come home to supper," his sister said. "There's two of them. They came in a buggy and they asked where you were." |
| Hemingway, Ernest | The Three-Day Blow | Setting | Past | Third | The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road that went up through the orchard. The fruit had been picked and the tall wind blew through the bare trees. Nick stopped and picked up a Wagener apple from bside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain. He put the apple in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat. The road came out of the orchard on to the top of the hill. There was the cottage, the porch bare, smoke coming from the chimney. In back were the garage, the chicken coop and the second-growth timber like a hedge against the woods behind. The big trees swayed far over in the wind as he watched. It was the first of the autumn storms. |
| Hemingway, Ernest | An Alpine Idyll | Setting | Past | First | It was hot coming down into the valley even in the early morning. The sun melted the snow from the skis we were carrying and dried the wood. It was spring in the valley but the sun was very hot. We cam along the road into Galtur carrying our skis and rucksacks. As we passed the churchyard a burial was just over. I said, "Gruss Gott," to the priest as he walked past us coming out of the churchyard. The priest bowed. |
| Johnson, Denis | Car Crash While Hitchhiking | Detail; Endgame | Past | First | A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping...A Cherokee filled with bourbon ... A VW no more than a bubble of hashhis fumes, captained by a college student ... And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri |
| Johnson, Denis | Two Men | Backstory | Past | First | I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veterans fo Foreign Wars Hall. I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends. I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations. |
| Johnson, Denis | Out On Bail | Action | Past | First | I saw Jack Hotel in an olive-green three-piece suit, with this blond hair combed back and his face shining and suffering. People who knew him were buying him drinks as quickly as he could drink them down at the Vine, people who were briefly acquainted, people who couldn't even remember if they knew him or not. It was a sad, exhilarating occasion. |
| Johnson, Denis | Dirty Wedding | Memory | Past | First | I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little father north in which people (through windows you'd see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a --wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head -- tunnel) actually lived. |
| Johnson, Denis | Steady Hands at Seattle General | Action | Past | First | Inside of two days I was shaving myself, and I even shaved a couple of new arrivals, because the drugs they injected me with had an amazing effect. I call it amazing because only hours before they'd wheeled me through corridors in which I hallucinated a soft, summery rain. In the hospital rooms on either side, objects -- vases, ashtrays, beds -- had looked wet and scary, hardly bothering to cover up their true meanings. |
| Johnson, Denis | Work | Backstory | Past Completed | First | I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven. But there was a fight. I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my acket, wit the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine. Once, as we stood arguing at a streetcorner, I punched her in the stomach. She doubled over and broke down crying. A car full of young college men stopped beside us. "She's feeling sick," I told them. |
| Joyce, James | The Sisters | Action | Past | Close Third | There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. |
| Joyce, James | An Encounter | Action | Past | Third | It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of _The Union Jack_, _Pluck_ and _The Halfpenny Marvel_. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling: “Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!” |
| Joyce, James | Araby | Setting | Past | First | North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. |
| Joyce, James | Eveline | Action | Past | Third | She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired. |
| Joyce, James | After the Race | Action | Past | Third | The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed. Their sympathy, however, was for the blue cars—the cars of their friends, the French. |
| Joyce, James | Two Gallants | Setting | Past | Third | The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. |
| Joyce, James | The Boarding House | Character | Past | Third | Mrs Mooney was a butcher’s daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens. But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour’s house. |
| Joyce, James | A Little Cloud | Backstory | Past | Third | Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed. Gallaher had got on. You could tell that at once by his travelled air, his well-cut tweed suit, and fearless accent. Few fellows had talents like his and fewer still could remain unspoiled by such success. Gallaher’s heart was in the right place and he had deserved to win. It was something to have a friend like that. |
| Joyce, James | Counterparts | Dialogue | Past | Third | The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent: “Send Farrington here!” Miss Parker returned to her machine, saying to a man who was writing at a desk: “Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs.” |
| Joyce, James | Clay | Backstory | Past | Third | The matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out. The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea. Maria had cut them herself. |
| Joyce, James | A Painful Case | Character | Past | Third | Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at one end of the lowest shelf and a copy of the _Maynooth Catechism_, sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann's _Michael Kramer_, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for _Bile Beans_ had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped—the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten. |
| Joyce, James | Ivy Day in the Committee Room | Action | Past | Third | Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into light. It was an old man’s face, very bony and hairy. The moist blue eyes blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once or twice mechanically when it closed. When the cinders had caught he laid the piece of cardboard against the wall, sighed and said: “That’s better now, Mr O’Connor.” |
| Joyce, James | A Mother | Backstory | Past | Third | Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the _Eire Abu_ Society, had been walking up and down Dublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts. He had a game leg and for this his friends called him Hoppy Holohan. He walked up and down constantly, stood by the hour at street corners arguing the point and made notes; but in the end it was Mrs Kearney who arranged everything. |
| Joyce, James | Grace | Action; media res | Past | Third | Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise. A thin stream of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. |
| Joyce, James | The Dead | Action | Past | Third | Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies' dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come. |
| London, Jack | To Build a Fire | Setting; Action | Past | Third | Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little traveled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o'clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more-days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view. |
| Munro, Alice | Meneseteung | Detail | Present | Third | Offerings the book is called. Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover. The author's full name underneath: |
| Munro, Alice | Friend of My Youth | Memory | Past | First | I used to dream about my mother and those the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same. The dream stopped, I suppose, because it was too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy it is forgiveness. |
| Munro, Alice | Five Points | Action | Present | Third | While they drink vodka and orange juice in the trailer park on the cliffs above Lake Huron, Neil Bauer tells Brenda a story. It happened a long way away, in Victoria, British Columbia, where Neil grew up. Neil is not much younger than Brenda -- less than three years -- but it sometimes feels to her like a generation gap, because she grew up here, and stayed here, marrying Cornelius Zendt when she was twenty years old, and Neil grew up on the West Coast, where things were very different, and he left home at sixteen to travel and work all over. |
| Munro, Alice | Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass | Detail | Past | Third | Ruins of "Kirk of the Forest." Old graveyard. William Wallace declared Guardian of Scotland here, 1298. |
| Munro, Alice | Oranges and Apples | Dialogue | Past | Third | "I hired a looker from out Shawtown," Murray's father said. "She's a Delaney, but so far she doesn't seem to have any bad habits. I put her in Men's Wear." |
| Munro, Alice | Pictures of the Ice | Action | Past | Third | Three weeks before he died -- drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention -- Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three-way mirror in Crawford's Men's Wear, in Logan, looking at himself in a burgundy sports shirt and a pair of cream, brown, and burgundy plaid pants. Both permanent press. |
| Munro, Alice | Goodness and Mercy | Action | Past | Third | Bugs said so long to the disappearing land, a dark-blue finger of Labrador. The ship was passing through the Strait of Belle Isle, on its third day out from Montreal. |
| Munro, Alice | Oh, What Avails | Setting | Present | Third | They are in the dining room. The varnished floor is bare except for the rug in front of the china cabinet. There is not much furniture -- a long table, some chairs, the piano, the china cabinet. On the inside of the windows, all the wooden shutters are closed. These shutters are painted a dull blue, a grayish blue. Some of the paint on them, and on the window frames, has flaked away. Some of it Joan has encouraged to flake away, using her fingernails. |
| Munro, Alice | Differently | Backstory | Past | Third | George once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also, too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think. |
| Munro, Alice | Wigtime | Action | Past | Third | When her mother was dying in the Walley Hospital, Anita came home to take care of her--though nursing was not what she did anymore. She was stopped one day in the corridor by a short, broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with clipped grayish-brown hair. |
| Oates, Joyce Carol | Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? | Close Description | Past | Third | Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors, or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself, who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at the moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie. |
| Proulx, Annie | The Half-Skinned Steer | Backstory | Past | Third | In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He'd got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo, bankrupt and ruined, because he knew they were. |
| Salinger, J.D. | A Boy In France | Action | Past | Third | After he had eaten half a can of pork and egg yolks, the boy laid his head back on the rain-sogged ground, hurtfully wrenched his head out of his helmet, closed his eyes, let his mind empty out from a thousand bungholes, and fell almost instantly asleep. When he awoke, it was nearly ten o'clock--wartime, crazy time, nobody's time--and the cold, wet, French sky had begun to darken. He lay there, opening his eyes, till slowly but surely the little war thoughts, those that cold not be disremembered, those that were not potentially and thankfully void, began to trickle back into his mind. When his mind was filled to its unhappy capacity, one cheerless, nightful trend rose to the top: Look for a place to sleep. Get on your feet. Get your blanket roll. You can't sleep here. |
| Salinger, J.D. | A Young Girl In 1941 With No Waist At All | Action | Past | Third | The young man in the seat behind Barbara at the jai alai games had leaned forward finally and asked if she were ill and if she would like to be escorted back to the ship. Barbara had looked up at him, had looked at his looks, and said yes, she thought she would, thank you, that she did have kind of a headache, and that it was certainly was awfully nice of him. Then they had stood up together and left the stadium, returning to the ship by taxi and tender. But before she had gone into her cabin on B deck, Barbara had said nervously to the young man: "Hey. I could just take an aspirin or something. I could meet you on the deck where the shuffleboard stuff is. You know who you look like? You look like a boy who was in a lot of West Pointy pictures with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and-when I was little. Never see him anymore. Listen. I could just take an aspirin. Unless you have something else-" The young man had interrupted her, saying, in so many words, that he had nothing else to do. Then Barbara had walked quickly forward to her cabin. She was wearing a red-and-blue striped evening gown, and her figure was very young and sassy. There were several years to go before her figure stopped being sassy and just became a very pretty figure. |
| Salinger, J.D. | Blue Melody | Past | Third | In mid-winter of 1944 I was given a lift in the back of an overcrowded GI truck going from Luxembourg City to the front at Halzhoffen, Germany--a distance of four flat tires, three (reported) cases of frozen feet, and at least one case of incipient pneumonia. | |
| Salinger, J.D. | Both Parties Concerned | Action | Past | First | There really isn't much to tell. I mean it wasn't serious or anything, but it was kind of funny, at that. I mean because it looked there for a while as though everybody at the plant and Ruthie's mother and all was going to have the laugh on us. They had kept saying I and Ruthie were too young to get married. Ruthie, she was seventeen, and I was twenty, nearly. That's pretty young, all right, but not if you know what you're doing. I mean not if everything's Jake between she and you. I mean both parties concerned. |
| Salinger, J.D. | Elaine | Action | Past | Third | On an exquisite Saturday afternoon in June, an assistant watch repairer named Dennis Cooney temporarily distracted the audience at an indoor flea circus just off Forty-third and Broadway by dropping dead. He was survived by his wife, Evelyn Cooney, and a daughter, Elaine, aged six, who had won two Beautiful Child contests; the first at the age of three, the second at the age of five, being defeated when she was four by a Miss Zelda "Bunny" Krakauer, of Staten Island. Cooney left his wife little insurance: enough for her to import her widowed mother, a Mrs. Hoover, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the aging woman had supported herself by working as a cashier in a cafeteria. The money was enough for the three to live in relative comfort in the Bronx. The superintendent of the apartment house in which Mrs. Cooney and her mother and daughter proceeded to live was a Mr. Freedlander. A few years before Freedlander had been "super" of the house where they finally "got" Bloomy Bloomberg. Freedlander informed Mrs. Cooney that Bloomy didn't look any deader than Mrs. Cooney, or anybody. Freedlander made it clear to Mrs. Cooney that Bloomy never called Freedlander anything but Mort, and Freedlander never called Bloomy anything but Bloomy. |
| Salinger, J.D. | Go See Eddie | Action | Past | Third | Helen's bedroom was always straightened while she bathed so that when she came out of the bathroom her dressing table was free of last night's cream jars and soiled tissues, and there were glimpses in her mirror of flat bedspreads and patted chair cushions. When it was sunny, as it was now, there were bright warm blotches to bring out the pastels chosen from the decorator's little book. She was brushing her thick red hair when Elsie, the maid, came in. |
| Salinger, J.D. | I'm Crazy | Backstory | Past | First | It was about eight o'clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered. I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym--shining big and bright and dumb, like the windows of a gymnasium, and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school). |
| Saunders, George | A Thing At Work | Action | Past | Close Third | Genevieve Turner stepped back into the break room. Yep, there were her keys, on top of the microwave. Also in there now (ugh): Brenda. Gen braced for the onslaught. Here it came. Gosh, wow, Brenda said, it seems crazy that they watched your time card so close and yet look at all these coffee thingies on the counter a person could just take and who'd ever know? Were those coffee thingies cheap? She doubted it! Why not make people write it down whenever they put in a fresh coffee thingie? Ever heard of cost control? Not that anybody here would sink so low. As to steal coffee. They got paid good. Pretty good. Some better than others. Ha! But same with the paper towels on top of the fridge, thought: why not just hang a sign up there saying, PLEASE TAKE? |
| Stack, Micah | How Many Times | Setting | Present | First | From the kitchen window, I watch through the breakfast nook's wall of windows as gray clouds slide across the sky. The top-left screen is torn, and the creepers that drop from the roof curl right in. They scratch at the panes. Charles says we shouldn't rip them out. He says that's landlord work. He says if the carpetbagger wants to charge $1,200 a month to live in the Upper Ninth Ward, where rent would've been like half that before the storm, the creepers can go ahead and invade the whole house. They have already crawled over the messy back patio and dug under the bricks, dislodging them. The dog shits there, on the slanting bricks. Charles says don't pick that up, either. Let's leave a minefield, he says. A minefield, I say. Let it detonate with a nasty-ass squish, right under his shoes. Sometimes I don't remember my country at all: how the air tastes, what it smells like, the pulse of bodies on public transit. |
| Woolf, Virginia | A Haunted House | Action | Present | Second | Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure--a ghostly couple. "Here we left it," she said. And he added, "Oh, but here too!" "It's upstairs," she murmured. "And in the garden," he whispered. "Quietly," they said, "or we shall wake them." But it wasn't that you woke us. Oh, no. "They're looking for it; they're drawing the curtain," one might say, and so read on a page or two. |