SMEAR! - A Short Story Collection (Vol I)

Her supportive, though misunderstanding husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a rest cure after experiencing symptoms of "temporary nervous depression". The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it". She and her husband move into an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery. Her husband chooses for them to sleep there due to its multitude of windows, which provide the air so needed in her recovery. In addition to the couple, John's sister Jennie is present; she serves as their housekeeper.

Like most nurseries at the time the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. The narrator attributes all these to children, as most of the damage is isolated to their reach. Ultimately, though, readers are left unsure as to the source of the room's state, leading them to see the ambiguities in the unreliability of the narrator.

The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room — its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design, and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern.

Believing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall. After many moments of tension between John and his sister, the story climaxes with the final day in the house. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper.

She asks excitedly, "I've got out at last, Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America during the late s and early s. She highlighted many issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the medical, professional, and societal oppression against women at the time.

While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally weak and fragile. Women were even discouraged from writing, because it would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance. Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time when they had very few rights.

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• The Yellow Wallpaper!

Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: Weir Mitchell , and convince him of the error of his ways". She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day. After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis, along with the treatment methods, and started to work again. Aware of how close she had come to complete mental breakdown, the author wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her own criticism for the medical field.

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Gilman sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response. She added that The Yellow Wallpaper was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". Gilman claimed that many years later she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods, but literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this.

19 Must-Read Collections for Short Story Month

Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as — 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published — was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible. This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the male control of the 19th-century medical profession.

Her ideas, though, are dismissed immediately while using language that stereotypes her as irrational and, therefore, unqualified to offer ideas about her own condition. This interpretation draws on the concept of the " domestic sphere " that women were held in during this period. Many feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the story. Although some claim the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a woman's assertion of agency in a marriage in which she felt trapped.

If the narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found the escape she was looking for. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story, as her husband lies on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over him.

This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, at the expense of her sanity. Lanser, a professor at Brandeis University, praises contemporary feminism and its role in changing the study and the interpretation of literature.

Critics such as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly rejected the short story because "[he] could not forgive [himself] if [he] made others as miserable as [he] made [himself]. Lanser argues that the short story was a "particularly congenial medium for such a re-vision. At first she focuses on contradictory style of the wallpaper: She takes into account the patterns and tries to geometrically organize them, but she is further confused.

The wallpaper changes colors when it reflects light and emits a distinct odor which the protagonist cannot recognize p.

22 short stories and short story collections you have to read in

At night the narrator is able to see a woman behind bars within the complex design of the wallpaper. Lanser argues that the unnamed woman was able to find "a space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection". Feminists have made a great contribution to the study of literature but, according to Lanser, are falling short because if "we acknowledge the participation of women writers and readers in dominant patterns of thought and social practice then perhaps our own patterns must also be deconstructed if we are to recover meanings still hidden or overlooked.

Cutter discusses how in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works she addresses this "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women. In this time period it was thought that "hysteria" a disease stereotypically more common in women was a result of too much education. It was understood that women who spent time in college or studying were over-stimulating their brains and consequently leading themselves into states of hysteria. In fact, many of the diseases recognized in women were seen as the result of a lack of self-control or self-rule. Different physicians argued that a physician must "assume a tone of authority" and that the idea of a "cured" woman is one who is "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician".

Often women were prescribed bed rest as a form of treatment, which was meant to "tame" them and basically keep them imprisoned.

22 short stories and short story collections you have to read in 2017

A boy might return from the dead in the guise of a fox. With a fresh and utterly contemporary voice, Johnson lays bare these stories of women testing the limits of their power to create a startling work of fiction. From Richard Russo, the winner of Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls novel, comes a collection of four short stories that demonstrate the author is also the master of this genre. Now you can get this classic collection in a new elegantly redesigned edition, with a foreword by Robert Redford.

A dazzling new collection of short stories—the first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his 1 best-selling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic. No Middle Name collection includes twelve stories. One of them is a brand new novella, Too Much Time. Separated from his human parents, Mowgli is raised by wolves, mentored by the cunning panther Bagheera, and taught the Law of the Jungle by Baloo, the strict but kindly bear. The Indian jungle is full of dangers and he must fight to survive; the tiger, Shere Khan, has sworn to kill him, the sinister monkey residents of the Cold Lairs wish to kidnap him, and his home is threatened by the Cobra and the Red Dog.

Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Carefully crafted over 15 years, they explore unbounded sexualities, a vision of the fluidity of the person, and politics — from the deaths of black people at the hands of the police, to the deep shifts that signal the subtle changes in the nature of capitalism and much more. These stories may sometimes tickle, sometimes shock; but will always engage both the intellect and the heart.

These meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting stories by Joyce Carol Oates confront the dangers that surround us, and the dangers that lurk within. A precocious eleven-year-old girl, in thrall to the mysterious black sheep of the family, climbs into his sky-blue Chevy for a drive into the unknown… A university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the murder of a female classmate, placing her own sense of self in peril… A recent widow fantasizes about transforming into a great flying predator, unerring and pitiless in the hunt… A trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe, and to a harrowing fate….

MatchUp takes the never-before-seen bestseller pairings of FaceOff and adds a delicious new twist: Box, and Nelson DeMille. Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover — or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere.

It includes stories by Daisy Johnson and James Kelman, among others. Razor-sharp and lightning-fast, this standalone short story from the 1 international bestselling author Karin Slaughter will leave you breathless. Now a lawyer herself, Charlie has made it her mission to defend those with no one else to turn to. So when Flora Faulkner, a motherless teen, begs for help, Charlie is reminded of her own past, and is powerless to say no. In he published Knots for the first time.

The collection includes very concise stories as well as longer reads. They range from the surreal to the oddly mundane, and prod the discomforts of mental, sexual, and familial bonds. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions, and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen.

Sarah Hall is one of the most skillful young British authors.

Best short stories to read in 2017

The author of The Wolf Border and the Man Booker Prize finalist is releasing in June a collection of nine short stories that are both disturbing and dazzling. In Madame Zero , Sarah Hall uses her piercing insight to plumb the depth of the female experience and the human soul. This anthology is the first volume of an annual collection that recognizes outstanding fiction debuts published in a print or online literary magazine. The dozen winning stories take place in South Carolina and in South Korea, on a farm in the eighteenth century and among the cubicles of a computer-engineering firm in the present day.

They narrate ancient themes with current urgency: Feel free to share this visual on your site Creative Commons license. Interested in lists like this? Make sure to get free updates by RSS or email. Founder of Ebook Friendly. Ebook enthusiast, technology geek, and self-published short story author. Info Posts Twitter Blog Mail. The big update of the iBooks app is coming together with iOS It may roll out to users as soon as on September Illustrated by acknowledged bibliophile Jane Mount and adorned with elegant touches of gold, this book-shaped vase will add literary feel to any room.

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