SHORT STORIES

And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colourless. . . .
-from The Kiss, by Anton Chekhov

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
-from Araby, by James Joyce

He dove in and swam the pool, but when be tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder be saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.
-from The Swimmer, by John Cheever

So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down.
-from The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges

Great lines from great stories. Great writing. I decided to make a list of my favorite short stories, an impossible task, but a good distraction from an illustration commission that requires more than simple procrastination to avoid. So I made this list. Here, a highly subjective list of my all-time favorite short stories:

The Kiss - by Anton Chekhov
Car Crash While Hitchhiking - by Denis Johnson
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - by Alan Sillitoe
Axolotl - by Julio Cortazar
Babylon Revisited - by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Dead - by James Joyce
Cathedral - by Raymond Carver
Signs and Symbols - by Vladimir Nabokov
Walking Out - by David Quammen
People Like That Are the Only People Here - by Lorrie Moore
The Blue Hotel - by Stephen Crane
Helping - by Robert Stone
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - by James Thurber
A Clean, Well Lighted Place - by Ernest Hemingway
Rock Springs - by Richard Ford
A Good Man is Hard to Find - by Flannery O'Connor
Barn Burning - by William Faulkner
The Things They Carried - by Tim O'Brien
A & P - by John Updike
The Schreuderspitze - by Mark Helprin
The Swimmer - by John Cheever
The Barracks Thief - by Tobias Wolf

And my all-time favorite, The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges.

To read The Aleph, click HERE for the complete text.

LIBERTANGO

Astor Piazzolla and Yo Yo Ma -- a beautiful tango. Tango is the music of street criminals and dangerous women, smoky hangouts, quick flashing eyes. Jorge Luis Borges described his tango stories as ''a brief and tragic mirror of the character of those hard-bitten men living on the edge of Buenos Aires before the turn of the century.'' A chorus of hookers, an intruder with a knife, a man of legendary machismo awaiting his fate at the dark end of the bar. See if you can hear the tension and the drama. Libertango.

A SHORT STORY BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

"Borges and I"

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer, 1899 -1986

http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html