Malcolm Muggeridge - 365 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Malcolm Muggeridge


Similar to Dorthy Day, Malcolm Muggeridge initially experienced a life of lost cause. Born into a family where the socialist upbringing was utmost, Muggeridge found relief from the ‘chaos’ after he embraced Christianity and had a teaching career in India. The latter shaped his iconoclastic nature, in addition to witnessing the prevalent caste system.


Muggeridge’s writing career started as a journalist writing for newspapers like Calcutta Statesman, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph etc. He also worked and lived in many countries like Egypt, Moscow and the experiences and observances were found in many of his articles. His career saw a wide array of work - in radio and television and editor of the British humour magazine Punch.


*Malcolm used the printed word, television and invitations to address attentive groups to oppose abortion and euthanasia, support the rights of the mentally and physically handicapped or boldly disagree with governments and society. Public reaction to the controversial Malcolm Muggeridge was strong, though not always favourable.

Malcolm's journey to faith encompassed much of his life. In spite of his concern about the drift of the Christian church via liberalism and permissive morality into moral chaos, he eventually joined the Catholic Church because of their strong stand against abortion and birth control. The dedication and compassion of Mother Teresa and Fr. Paul Bidone was instrumental in Malcolm joining the Church.


*source - Wheaton archives

Jesus Rediscovered

Jesus Rediscovered is a collection of some of Malcolm Muggeridge's answers to some deep questions regarding Christianity, religion, and life. Written in a "stream of thought" and conversational manner, the book is philosophical, reflective and contemplative.



An extract from the Foreword of the book - ‘They do not set out to present a coherent, or even consistent, statement of faith. I am well aware that they are often contradictory, repetitive and imprecise; I have deliberately refrained from trying to trim and prune them into conveying an impression of coherence and consistency which would falsify my own actual mental state. All they represent and it's little enough is the effort of one ageing twentieth-century mind to give expression to a deep dissatisfaction with prevailing twentieth-century values and assumptions.’

J R R Tolkien - 364 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

J R R Tolkien was an author, scholar, philologist and professor at Oxford University and author of the now widely popular The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As a philologist, he is recognized for his contributions to the study of language in literature. In particular, his lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics - published in 1936, the translated version was published in 2014 by his son - explains the poetic quality rather than just verbal quality.

Tree and Leaf - J. R. R. Tolkien (1964)

This is a collection of 4 works by Tolkien:

- On Fairy-Stories – Tolkien writes an article on why fairy tales / stories are just as relevant, important and can be read by any age.

- Mythopoeia – an argument in poetical form from Philomythus to Misomythus. The article supports the ;legends of myths.

- Leaf by Niggle – a short story told in a narrative way that attracts and keeps the reader glued. It’s a lovely tale with a moral which fits in with the rest of the works in this book.

- The Homecoming of Beorhthelm's Son – a drama set in old England after a battle with the Vikings. In the commentary of this piece he also discusses Beowulf.

 

Two different editions of Tree and the Leaf

Dorothy Day - 363 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Dorothy Day

Today the Catholic Church is considering Day's possible canonization. But in her youth around the early 1900s, Dorothy Day was by her own words ‘lost and in a Bohemian life’. She participated in protest movements without understanding the true motive, experienced failed love affairs, a marriage, a suicide attempt, and an abortion.

After she came to identify with the Catholic Church, its various activities, missionary initiatives, she was attracted to it. Alongwith Peter Maurin, a French immigrant, she co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper. The mission of the newspaper was to have a society constructed of Gospel values. *The newspaper spawned a movement of houses of hospitality and farming communes that has been replicated throughout the United States and other countries.

*source - Dorothydayguild site

Initially working as a journalist on socialist newspapers, Dorothy Day’s spiritual conversion reflected in her later writings. She often wrote to promote the “arousal and examination of conscience”. She believed that one of the chief objectives of The Catholic Worker was to raise Christians’ consciences on many philosophical and practical matters.


Some of the topics she commonly wrote on were Christian hospitality, war and peace and encouraging a Christian pacifist stance on preventing future wars, rapid industrial expansion shortly after World War II, poverty and destitution, anti-nuclear issues and on the labour movement.


Loaves and Fishes


Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Story of the Catholic Worker Movement is the second major memoir by Dorothy Day released in 1963. The memoir is Day’s experiences after her conversion to the Catholic Church. She is happy and content with her decision, but has questions regarding the bureaucracy of the church. She also questions the secular movements around her in the world, devoted to Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism. She also talks about the co-founder of the newspaper, the movement - Peter Maurin. The book is narrated well with philosophy, smartly and compassionately explained beliefs, role models in a humorous and readable way.

Image - Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Flannery O'Connor - 362 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Flannery O'Connor is considered one of the best short story authors of the 20th century. She wrote about religious themes and southern life, as well as religious scenes in the American South.

 




O'Connor’s work has been commented on as ‘stories about original sin’. Her writing can be described as being about the action of grace in the world, about those moments in which grace, usually in the form of violence, moves down on her comically content characters, sometimes opening their eyes to an atrocious comprehension and sometimes killing them. Many readers find O’Connor’s identification of the transcendent with an aggressive force repulsive and even more outrageous than the stories themselves. O’Connor on the other hand believed that a fierce shock was necessary to bring both her characters and her modern materialistic audience to knowledge of the potent reality of the realm of awe-inspiring mystery.

Source - FamousAuthors


Everything That Rises Must Converge

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of short stories written by O'Connor and published posthumously in 1965.

The collection is classified as Southern Gothic literature. There are elements of mamacbre twists, eccentric characters and very absurd stories. But in O'Connor’s case the message is mostly spiritual. The background here is of slavery and after affects of the American Civil War.

Thomas Merton - 361 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

In 1933, Thomas Merton, then a simple unknown man, travelled and stayed in Rome. He explored various churches and religious institutions including Tre Fontane. The experience and the visit left a deep impact on him. Though he continued in his education at Columbia University.

After about five years, reading about English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins' conversion to Catholicism and the priesthood, Merton was inspired to pursue his own vocation. He remained at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, KY.



Today Merton is known as writer, theologian, mystic, poet and social activist. He published nearly 50 books and several pieces of poetry. His poetry was noted for being long, prosy, and autobiographical. His work shifts between the spiritual and the secular.*
* source - Poets site


Thirty Poems were published in 1944.


Merton's poetry is passionate and dramatic, covering a wide variety of topics. These can be spiritual, mystical, Biblical and everyday, mundane things.

St. Augustine of Hippo - 360 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Why is St.Augustine known as the patron of brewers? Because his own life is a story of conversion from bad to good. The son of Monica, who herself became a saint, Augustine went on to be a theologian and philosopher. He was also the Bishop of Hippo Regius.

His important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.



Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount


Though published as a commentary, this writing is Augustine offering thoughts on the various sayings of Jesus in the Bible’s New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount.


The exegetical writings of Augustin are commentaries on Genesis (first three chapters), the Psalms, the Gospel and First Epistle of John, the Sermon on the Mount, the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, and a Harmony of the Gospels. Many of his commentaries, like those of Chrysostom, are expository homilies preached to his congregation at Hippo; all are practical rather than grammatical and critical. He only covered the first five verses of the first chapter of Romans, and found his comments so elaborate, that, from fear of the immense proportions a commentary on the whole Epistle would assume, he withdrew from the task. Augustin’s other writings abound in quotations from Scripture, and pertinent expositions. His controversies with the Manichæans and Donatists were particularly adapted to render him thorough in the knowledge of the Bible, and skilled in its use.


Augustine undertook Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount Augustine before working on the Pauline Epistles because he considered chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of Matthew (the Sermon on the Mount) "a perfect standard of the Christian life".


Source - Christian library.

G.K.Chesterton - 359 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

G.K.Chesterton


I came to know about this humorous writer while listening to Father Bishop Barron on one of his equally enigmatic Youtube videos.


"What can one be but frivolous about serious things? Without frivolity they are simply too tremendous."



Chesterton was an English poet, writer, essayist , novelist, theologian and philosopher. He wrote many novels, newspaper columns and created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown.

He was later eulogised by Pope Pius XI as “a gifted defender of the faith,” and there is presently a popular movement to have him canonised.


One of his many appreciative critics has said - "Chesterton is recognized by essayists as the greatest of essayists; by poets as a magnificent poet; by humorists as a humorist of tremendous versatility; by philosophers as a profound philosopher; by controversialists as a deadly but lovable master of controversy; by political economists as a man of deep political insights; by novelists as a most able novelist; and by theologians as one who saw, sometimes, far deeper than they are able to see into theological truths."

The Trees of Pride

The Trees of Pride is a novella by Chesterton which is about the people who intentionally blind themselves to the possibilities of the world around them.



Like most of G.K. Chesterton's stories, The Trees of Pride, is based on devoutly Christian philosophy. He explores the variables of human nature, in particular one’s wonder of the supernatural, and how essential it is to the human soul.



But despite its Christian bones, this novella is wrapped in a glorious pagan wildness and Anglo-Saxon myths from the ancient shores of Cornwall ("the dance of the green summer leaves was repeated beyond in the dance of the green summer sea"). His writing is vivid and lush ("Little clouds curled like feathers"), and that writing sways you into seeing the supernatural everywhere even if it isn't there.


The characters are pretty solid -- they're sombre and serious compared to most of Chesterton's other characters, but Barbara, Ashe, Trevayne and Paynter are fairly likeable characters in their own way. The doctor is an enigma, and Vane is one of those pompous old guys who think they know everything.

Source - G K C society

Ronald Knox - 358 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was an English Catholic priest, theologian and radio broadcaster.

 He wrote extensively on religious topics and also wrote novels and short fiction on detective and spy mysteries. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912 and was also appointed chaplain at Trinity College. Despite being the son of an Anglican priest, he was deeply moved by the Catholic church ,the reasons for which are explained in Apologia (1917). 

In 1947, he published in The Strand Magazine a Sherlockian pastiche The Apocryphal Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the First Class Carriage.
( Source Arthur Doyle site )




Barchester Pilgrimage is a 1935 novel by Ronald Knox. It is like an unofficial sequel to Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire ( published between 1855 and 1867) which were a series of six novels based on the lives of the gentry, clergy, statesmen etc.

The book is a satire as well as observations on the changes that time brings to the social and religious structure.

Thomas Gray - 357 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

English scholar and poet Thomas Gray, in his lifetime has written only a small number of poems but he is known to have introduced a new subject matter for poetry.



Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Gray, published in 1751. The death of his friend and poet Richard West in 1742 is the main influence for this poem. The Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges is the setting for the piece.



The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.




Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;




The speaker ponders over death while sitting in solitude in a rural graveyard in the evening. He observes the graves,and he understands the reality and universal truth that death comes for everyone in the end. He says that whether rich or poor, elaborate engraved tombs of the rich who can afford them or simple graves, some unmarked, are all the same when the body mixes with mud. Though the poem is about death, it isn't macabre. Gray’s beautiful lyrical quality makes it beautiful in darkness. The poem ends with his own imagined epitaph.

William Collins - 356 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

William Collins


English poet William Collins was famous for classical odes and elegies during the 1730s to 1740s.


Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects.


William Collins's Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), displays great technical ingenuity, rich imagery and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the passions as poetry's true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification as a medium for poetic expression.

Frank Marshall Davis - 355 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Frank Marshall Davis


Frank Marshall Davis started writing poetry when he was in college. An editor and poet, he was born in Kansas but moved to several places around the US. Under Davis’s editorship, the Atlanta Daily World became the first successful Black daily newspaper in America.



Black Man's Verse


Black Man's Verse is a miniature book of poetry that combines Davis' interest in free verse and jazz into a bitterly direct image of the issues that feed racial oppression and its impact on the social structure of American society. In the first section of the book, called "Fragments," Davis writes about finding a woman's soul in his poem entitled "Finding." He also wrote a seasonal poem from his home state, titled "Kansas Winter."


Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its innovative adaptations of African American vernacular forms, including the blues and jazz. Davis's poetry "is characterised by robust statements of urban themes, a fierce social consciousness, a strong declamatory voice, and an almost rabid race pride"

Paul Frederic Bowles - 354 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Paul Frederic Bowles was an American composer, author, and translator. He pursued music in Paris and later on forayed into novel writing.

The Delicate Prey and Other Stories is a collection of stories by Paul Bowles, published in 1950. The stories are set in North Africa and Latin America and show the characters challenged by these foreign settings. These challenges become the plot of most stories. Escape, culture clash, and abuse seem to be main themes.

Rudyard Kipling - 353 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

A deep attachment to India marked most of Rudyard Kipling’s writings. Famous for Kim and Jungle Book among a huge variety of short stories and poems, Kipling’s writings were broadly divided into writings of war, poems and experiences in India.



Plain Tales from the Hills published in 1888 is the first collection of short stories by Kipling. These were written when he wasn't even twenty. The stories centre around army life, observations of the office of British India and the officers’ vacation time in Shimla, a mountainous town in northern India.

 



Image - 1900 edition

Juan Ramón Jiménez - 352 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez was popular as the creator of ‘pure poetry’.

His famous works are La soledad sonora (Revista de Archivos, 1911), Platero y yo (Ediciones de la Lectura, 1914), Diario de un poeta recién casado (Casa Editorial Calleja, 1917), Canción (Editorial Signo, 1935), and Animal de fondo (Editorial Pleamar, 1949).



In the poem “I Am Not I”, Juan Ramon Jimenez writes about how there is a real self as well as an illusory self. The idea here is to identify that we humans can have more than one face according to our situations and to the people we meet and interact everyday. Some faces can be real, some are fake. Jimenez writes about the self who he really is. He goes on and explains how he is truly one and not the other self.


I am not I.

I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,

and whom at other times I forget;

the one who remains silent while I talk,

the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,

the one who will remain standing when I die.

by Juan Ramón Jiménez

The Scholar-Gipsy - Matthew Arnold - 351 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Matthew Arnold was an English essayist and poet. An interest in the profession of education and values of the Victorian era, were seen in most of his works. Empedocles on Etna (1852), Poems (1853), critical works such as Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869) were some of his famous works.

Hsi later works were philosophical, spiritual and meditations on Christianity.


The Scholar-Gipsy


The Scholar-Gipsy was a poem published in 1853. It was based on a 17th-century Oxford story by Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing, which is about an impoverished Oxford student who leaves his studies to join a band of gypsies.

The speaker of "The Scholar-Gipsy" describes a beautiful rural setting in the pastures, with the town of Oxford lying in the distance. He watches the shepherd and reapers working amongst the field, and then tells the shepherd that he will remain out there until sundown, enjoying the scenery and studying the towers of Oxford. All the while, he will keep his book beside him. The themes explored here are of imagination, modernity vs mythical and change vs routine life.


Source - Academy of English poets site

The Beautifull Cassandra - Jane Austen - 350 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Writing about Jane Austen is not just a lesson in humility for readers, but also an inspiring factor. Probably one of the most cited, quoted, read and reread authors in the world, Austen’s books have been published with several editions and the popularity is, rightfully, never-ending.


Her books are known today as narratives on the social and geographical milieu of her time at the end of the 18th century. She started writing at a young age, and her juvenilia includes dramatic sketches, spoofs and poems.

 

Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811. It was followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813, which she called ‘my own darling child’. In his journal, Sir Walter Scott contrasted her ‘exquisite touch’ with his own ‘Big Bow-Wow’ approach, praising the way she made ‘commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment. ( source BL UK)

Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice both revolve around sisters, and Jane had a great bond with her own sister Cassandra, but they remained single all their lives. Her other famous novels are Mansfield Park , Emma and Persuasion.

The Beautifull Cassandra is a short novel by Jane Austen written in her youth and one of her earliest pieces of writing. It is known as a dedication to her older sister Cassandra. It is a book about books and its theme was satire. Austen parodies the intense melodrama in the novels published during the time. The protagonist Casandra is a young woman who is out in this world and seeks to make a life for herself.


Narrating the slightly criminal adventures of the sixteen-year-old title character, The Beautifull Cassandra gives us Austen’s most irrepressible heroine, who, after stealing a hat, leaves her mother’s shop to flounce around London, eating ice cream (without paying), taking coach rides (without paying), and encountering handsome young ladies and gentlemen (without speaking)—all to return home hours later with whispered joy: “This is a day well spent.”


Austen was only twelve or thirteen when she wrote The Beautiful Cassandra.


Source - BL UK



Image - background of the image is that on February 4 1813, Jane Austen writes to her sister Cassandra. She writes about the second evening when the rough manuscript of Pride and Prejudice is read to her family member and Jane is not happy with the response. Jane proceeds to offer some criticism of her own novel: 'The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade.’

George Crabbe - 349 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

English poet George Crabbe started his education to be a surgeon but his future wife encouraged him to write poetry.

Three poems The Library (1781), The Village (1782), and The Newspaper (1785) were successful and well received. The poverty, harsh realities and true social life of the village folk was shown in The Village. The rest of his future work, The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), and Tales in Verse (1812) were all in a similar nature of showing that rural life is not so idyllic as imagined by urban people. It also has hardships of failed crops, bad weather and dead wildlife.

The Borough is a collection of poems by George Crabbe published in 1810. Based on the village of Aldeburgh, the poem shows the reality of life in a village.

 

Erskine Preston Caldwell - 348 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Erskine Preston Caldwell

American Erskine Caldwell novelist and short story writer. His writings focussed on the rural South and he wrote of issues facing the poor, racism and uneven social structure.



We Are the Living is a 1933 collection of short stories by Caldwell. With themes of romance and satire, the stories are mostly based in his home state of Georgia.

V. S. Pritchett - 347 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

V. S. Pritchett was an English short story writer, travel writer, biographer, journalist and novelist.

His earlier years were influenced by reading books of Dickens and Hardy.

Pritchett, told the story of his life in two volumes. The first of these is A Cab at the Door: A Memoir (the British subtitle is Childhood and Youth, 1900-1920), and the second is Midnight Oil (1971).

He published his first novel, Clare Drummer, in 1929 and a collection of short stories, The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories, in 1930. Nothing Like Leather, which appeared in 1935, traces the material success and moral disintegration of a man. Other novels were Mr. Beluncle (1951), Balzac (1974)


Complete Collected Stories

This book was published in 1990 and contained 82 short stories, written between the 1930s and the 1980s.

Since the span of years is so wide, the stories also show a range in culture and fashion. There are some light stories briefly describing the love games between young men and women. There are few dark and sentimental pieces as well.


In reviewing his Collected Stories (1982), Valentine Cunningham, who called Pritchett "the best living English author, " commented that he was "always on the alert for the illustrative moment, " that he turned "human moments into epiphanies, " and that he was "celebrating the heroism of banal life." The last comment rings true, for the lives examined are only seemingly banal and the deep current beneath them is all. Cunningham singled out for special praise " Many Are Disappointed"; however, another superior story, "Blind Love, " which deals with a blind man and his housekeeper who hides from the world a disfiguring birthmark that the blind man cannot see, truly illustrates that a rich and turbulent life can exist beneath an outwardly placid, banal one.

Grace Paley - 346 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

American writer Grace Paley was a short story writer, poet activist and a feminist.

Her first published collection of stories were The Little Disturbances of Man, in 1959, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, her second collection in 1974 and many more.



The Little Disturbances of Man

The stories have humour yet also with humanity.

The story, The Used-Boy Raisers, is about a single mother raising boys and the sense of ease and humour she expresses instead of lamenting about her situation.

In another story, an unsuccessful Yiddish actor likes to keep a mistress on the side. Most stories deal with unlikely couples - old men with young girls, a handyman falling for a teenage girl etc

A female reader reviews the stories as - ‘As a female reader, I have to take pride in a woman writer not committed to the idea that men who refuse to fall in with women’s plans are necessarily childish or unhinged. A few stories are amusingly written from the point of view of resistant and self-protecting males.’