That meant long pauses in between and umpteen gasps of OMG to masticate, ingest, and for the ‘shock and awe’ of the stories to sink in. The nebulae from a host of glittering literary galaxies ranging from O’Henry to Woolf are a veritable reader’s bonanza.
As the reader pores and ponders through the stories his mood is on a roller- coaster ride - from the exhilaration of fables and fairy tales to the thrill and adventure of a mystery , or the twist in the tale by the supernatural ; from the glow of cutting wit and humour to ineffable bliss of a sublime narrative and storyline ; from the joy of charity to pathos of abject poverty ; from uninhibited flight of thoughtful fancy to realism of the subtleties, absurdities artificiality and hypocrisy in human conduct. You read it all.
My best - the mystery of a dead and buried soldier rescued alive in ‘A Man with Two Lives’ (Ambrose Bierce) ; allusion to the supernatural in ‘Music on the Hill’ ( Saki )- an antler rushing to gore Sylvia, ‘but her eyes saw other than her incoming death...in her ears rang the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and unequivocal’ ; the bizarre in cornered, badly outnumbered allied soldiers chanting ‘Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius’ for invisible bowmen to appear mysteriously and arrow to annihilation the onrushing Germans in ‘The Bowmen’ (Arthur Machen); Chekov’s baring of underlying human motives that spur human acts in ‘The Lottery Ticket’ and ‘A chameleon’ ; the unbearable echo of guilt besieging a cold blooded murderer in ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ by the master of horror and the macabre, Alan Edgar Poe; the story without a plot - ‘The Night Came slowly’ (Chopin) ; the frivolous discovery of ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots’ by the great ‘White’ orientalist, Kipling ; depiction of the innate dignity and goodness of common folks in ‘The Peasant Marey’ (Dostoevsky) ; understanding the need to be loved felt even by a whore in ‘Her Lover’ (Maxim Gorky) ; humour concocted by Stephen Leacock in the very ordinary act of ‘Borrowing a Match’ from a passerby ; the lyrical, sublime narration of a Sabbath day unfolding and folding up at day-end in ‘Sunday at Home’ (Nathanial Hawthorn) ; the morphing of the real and spectral in ‘The Haunted House’ (Virginia Woolf) ; the disastrous fallout of a hollow boast in ‘The Cactus’ (O’Henry) ; the artificiality in day-to-day communication brought out so sharply in ‘The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones’ and an ‘endless’ story - ‘ The Lady or the Tiger’ by Frank Stockton.
Loved too Tagore’s poetic-prose bouquet - Cabuliwallah, The Postmaster, Raja Rani, et al.
From a vast expansive universe cherry-picking the best stories is daunting . Still omission of some great contemporaneous writers like Gogol, Maugham, Turgenev, Pushkin, Doyle, Gilman seems inexplicable. Several critically acclaimed stories of included writers too are missing like Chekhov- My Life, The Black Monk ; Arthur Macher -Great God Pan, The White People ; Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence at the Owl Creek Bridge, A Dead Man’s Dream; Maupassant- The Necklace, Boule de Suif ; HGWells- The Magic Shop ; Chopin - Desiree’s Baby ; O’Henry - The Gift Of the Magi ; Oscar Wilde- The Happy Prince. Maybe that ‘long’ short stories got under the Robespierrean guillotine.
Whatever, the compilation is a wonderful read. Short stories coerce writers into distilling their expressive sublimity, fecundity of thought and literary ingenuity into aromatic essences, a few drops of which perfume the whole of Arabia , Lady Macbeth notwithstanding.
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