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Grex > Books > #49: A Perfect Day for a Secret Xingu for Emily | |
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md
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A Perfect Day for a Secret Xingu for Emily
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Apr 29 18:32 UTC 1996 |
Books and stories that you would never in a million years guess what
they were about if all you know is the title:
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, by Vladimir Nabokov. A man falls in love
with a pretty but vulgar young woman and marries her. He is
blinded in an accident soon afterward, and his wife and her lover
spend the rest of the novel tormenting him in cruelly inventive
ways.
A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH, by J.D. Salinger. The last hours in
the life of an eccentric young man before he commits suicide.
A ROSE FOR EMILY, by William Faulkner. One of the most nauseating
horror stories ever written. Faulkner doesn't reveal the ultimate
horror until literally the last *word* in the story.
THE SECRET MIRACLE, by Jorge Luis Borges. A playwright condemned
to death by firing squad prays to God to be allowed to finish the
play he was working on. God grants his wish by causing time to
stop just as the firing squad pull their triggers.
ULYSSES, by James Joyce. A man named Leopold Bloom spends a day
wandering around the city of Dublin.
WONDERLAND, by Joyce Carol Oates. If you weren't a vegetarian
before reading this book, you will be by the time you're finished.
XINGU, by Edith Wharton. A turn-of-the-century ladies club
invites a fashionable authoress to one of their meetings. The
ironies multiply so prolifically that you have to go back and read
the story again to catch up with them all.
Please add your own favorites:
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| 5 responses total. |
remmers
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response 1 of 5:
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Apr 29 20:50 UTC 1996 |
(I've read _Wonderland_ and know exactly what you're talking
about.)
THE NEW TESTAMENT. The son of the Almighty is sent to earth
to show mankind the path to redemption from sin. He travels
around quite a bit teaching and working miracles, managing
to collect quite a few followers in the process. His activities
attract the attention of the entrenched civil and religious
authorities, who regard him as a subversive and have him
executed. A brief return to life inspires his followers to
continue to spread his teachings, which they travel far and
wide to do. The work ends with a positively psychedelic
description of how things will end up when the Almighty
calls in the chips.
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rcurl
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response 2 of 5:
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Apr 29 21:17 UTC 1996 |
Most of Poe. The Raven is no ornithological treatise, and The Telltale
Heart is no teen romannce (I hardly have to describe what they are!).
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davel
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response 3 of 5:
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Apr 30 13:42 UTC 1996 |
_Invisible_Man_, by Ralph Ellison. An impressionable young man is recruited
by the Communist Party, serves briefly as a rabble-rouser. Discovering his
identity in a sweet potato, he ends by finding enlightenment as a hermit
hiding in a basement.
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md
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response 4 of 5:
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Apr 30 13:53 UTC 1996 |
[Re WONDERLAND, I should've said "anorexic" instead of "vegetarian."
I remember going through a phase while I was reading it where the
thought of eating anything made me sick. A very brief phase,
admittedly. Where on earth does Oates get her ideas?]
THE AMBITIOUS GUEST, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A family who live
in a house at the bottom of a mountain valley take in a young
stranger on a rainy night. They're talking about their hopes and
plans for the future when the avalanche hits.
BIRDS OF AMERICA, by Mary McCarthy. The misadventures of an
American student in Paris during the 1968 student riots there.
THE COURAGE TO HEAL, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. A book that
encourages women who had normal childhoods to imagine that they
were sexually abused by their parents, and then to spend the rest
of their lives sick with shame and guilt.
THE NAME OF THE ROSE, by Umberto Eco. Sherlock Holmes and Watson
as monks solving a multiple-murder case in a medieval Italian
monastery.
THE VANISHING RED, by Robert Frost. A miller shoves the last
Indian in town down into the mill's wheel pit, where the Indian
is ground into mincemeat.
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papa
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response 5 of 5:
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Jul 1 12:01 UTC 2017 |
Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a creapy little story.
https://flightline.highline.edu/tkim/Files/Lit100_SS2.pdf
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