#731 Maurice in New York City- Fatima Shaik

#731 Maurice in New York City- Fatima Shaik

Some people come to New York for new opportunities, some come for the excitement, and some come running from their old lives looking for a place to hide. Maurice wanted a simple life, and for a while in New Orleans he found it. He had a good job and the perfect woman for him. Well, nobody is perfect and desire can leed to jealousy, and jealousy to violence. 

I’ve always felt New York embodies all that you bring to it. If you bring loneliness and despair, that’s what you get, only more of it.

Notable Passage: “Love had all the symptoms of a low grade flu that altered into something life-threatening.” 

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#722 The Book Signing- Pete Hamill

#722 The Book Signing- Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill is a New York writer. He has written for every major NY newspaper, several NY based weeklies and of course his novels and memoirs outline a New York life in a way that has made the name Pete Hamill synonymous with the great five boroughs. He is the perfect writer to open this collection of stories, Brooklyn Noir.

Buddy Carmody is also a writer. He moved out of Brooklyn and headed west in 1957, the same year and direction as the Brooklyn Dodgers. He needed to leave, to free himself, to allow himself the things that would make him a writer. Now, forty years and seventeen successful novels later, he returns for his first book reading in his home town.

Before the reading, he walks his old neighborhood, now clean and gentrified. His memories make him uneasy and a run in with the brother of the woman he left behind reveals some unpleasant truths. His past, one he didn’t know existed, now comes back to haunt him. His freedom came at a cost, and the bill is due.

Notable Passage: “On this high slope the harbor wind turned snow into iron.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#366 The Brief Debut of Tildy

#366 The Brief Debut of Tildy- O.Henry

Wow, 366! We’ve finished one whole year of short stories.

I’d like to end the year, where it began: O. Henry, the inspiration for this project and its most frequently read author. This story is another New York City atmosphere piece. The atmosphere is a greasy spoon diner called Bogle’s Chop House and Family Restaurant. The food is tasteless, and the owner is cold.

“At the cashier’s desk sits Bogel, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change, files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather.”

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

BLOG UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who read the blog and followed along this year. I’m not sure exactly how much longer I will continue. It was supposed to be only 1 year, but ended up reading over 1,000 series, so i plan on posting one a day for at least that long.

#362 The Dive Bar- Katherine Heiny

#362 The Dive Bar- Katherine Heiny

This is the first story in the debut book by Katherine Heiny, Single, Carefree, Mellow. This is my first time reading anything by Heiny…she had me at Dive Bar. I like dive bars, I like drinking at dive bars…hell I just like drinking. Of course this story isn’t really about a dive bar.

What I do like about this story is the setting, New York City. There are a lot of writers that are from, have lived in, or pretend to understand NYC. Not all of them succeed. Having moved away from NY just a year ago, and recently returned, reading about the bar and singles scene in Manhattan makes my heart twitch just a bit.

It’s small things, but familiar things, like Sasha and Monique deciding where to drink by walking towards each other on Broadway, and just stop in whichever bar they meet in front of.

“Sarah looks up and sees Monique down the block, and has that thrill you get from seeing someone familiar on the streets of New York, like looking through a box of old paperbacks at a garage sale and finding a copy of a novel you love.”

This collection is about being single. Heiny’s writing style is easy and treats this topic without pretense. So far, she gracefully avoids stereotypes of gender norms, which is hard when dealing with such a topic.

Now I want to go hit up a dive bar and talk with a friend about topics, both meaningful and not.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#325 Archy and Mehitabel- Jerome Charyn

#325 Archy and Mehitabel- Jerome Charyn

Archy and Mehitable was an old cartoon written by Don Marquis and appeared regularly in the Evening Sun daily newspaper. They are a poetry writing cockroach and alley cat duo always on their own adventures. Jerome and Merle are such a pair, at least in Merle’s mind.

She was a brilliantly talented singer and avid teenage reader, but was also a bit of a shut it.  Her “liquid imagination” would often meld the world of literature and reality as she often referenced William Blake, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, etc.

“Her stories and poems were chiseled dreams from her days and nights in a madhouse.”

She liked Jerome, thought of his as her little cockroach, and allowed him into the sanctuary of her west-side home. Her parents, leery of rumors and bad reputation in their high culture clique liked Jerome immediately because of his humbleness and his own talents.

“I went to Music and Art [school] and looked like J.D. Salinger. That was enough of a resume.”

All the world’s a stage, so says Shakespeare—I guess that makes us all characters. Charyn certainly has found that line between genuine New York characters and fictional story telling. I don’t even want to try to figure out where that is.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#314 Stone- Edith Pearlman

#314 Stone- Edith Pearlman

At seventy-two, Ingrid didn’t need a change in her life, didn’t need to leave New York City. But, she found herself doing just that, moving to a small flat southern town, at least for a while.

“A stone house instead of a stone city. An underfunded public library instead of that pretentious den. Rabbits on the lawn instead of monkeys at the zoo…”

She found her new surroundings intoxicating and life giving:

“Happiness lengthens time. Every day seemed as long as a novel. Every night a double feature. Every week a lifetime, a muted lifetime, a lifetime in which sadness, always wedged under her breast like a doorstop, lost some of its bite.”

“Anyway she liked to walk through the woods. It took more time. She’d discovered she was interested not in saving time but in spending it.”

The three month respite she spent outside of New York gave her perspective as the things around her died and her life came closer and closer to that as well. She holds onto what’s important for as long as she can. She could adorn the important things and wear them around her neck for all to see, but she chooses to keep them hidden, showing only a few, trying not to change them in any way.

Notable Passage: “She was another house he would never build.”

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#304 Adonis- Jerome Charyn

There is nothing quite like New York City. You don’t have to be rich, you just have to be interesting. You hang around long enough and you find yourself woven in the fabric of some crazy world; everybody is connected.

A young high school boy, a poor talented artist, with a family beaten down by war and misfortune is snatched up by a modeling impresario, Rosenzweig, aka-Dracula. This blood sucker has taken many young beautiful models and made them rich, but at what cost?

“I’d lost my belief in Van Gogh’s missing ear—it seemed like madness, not the mystery of great art.”

He finds himself in an intoxicating world of artists, mobsters, scene-makers. But like any intoxicant, too much is poison. Even with a box of cash under your bed, free meals and fancy parties, life gets complicated.  This story is half about the boy, and half about New York, a divided city between the old tradition and the new ethnic underworld:

“We belonged to that clan of West Siders who never wore watch fobs or attended debutante balls. We had galas for indigent artists.”

 Notable Passage: “I had to ride the local in and out of the Bronx. Each stop was a kind of purgatory.”

Rating: 9-9-8-8 Total= 34