Reviews for Shorties

The average rating for Shorties based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-28 00:00:00 Edward Tilley The experience of going through the[se] stories was also something like what is supposed to happen when a man is drowning, as scene after scene of his life passes before his eyes. If the drowning man is devout, it can be imagined that in those final moments he examines the scenes to determine the balance between his sins and his virtues with a view toward eventual salvation. Since I am not particularly devout, my chances for salvation lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf. These stories were selected, often with doubts and misgivings, with the hope that a spot on that distant shelf is waiting for them." _ Irwin Shaw, 1978 reading experience Part because it was given to me as a present, and part because my reading ocd is overwhelming I wanted to finish this book no matter what. This book contained 63 out of 84 of all the short stories Irwin Shaw wrote in his career. The days of the months of July and August combined add up to 62 and that was almost ideal for 1 story a day. But it didn't work exactly like that. I was reading one story a day up to July 19 and then I was drawn into Stephen King's last book in The Dark Tower series and at the beginning of August I dedicated a whole week to catch up with the stories, reading around 300 pages. Then I was buddy-reading To Kill a Mockingbird and again I stayed behind so it was time for one more catch up, and yesterday I decided to exhaust every single story even though it wasn't the end of August as I planned. Irwin Shaw is a bit of an underrated author these days. He wrote a few novels that became well known films and TV series in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, with well known actors like Marlon Brando and Nick Nolte starring in them. So reading 63/84 of his stories is like reading 1/5th of his writings and I can say he's not my cup of tea. Although many of his later stories, if not all of them, have an intensity that you find in films, they didn't please me enough to like or love them them. For example many of his stories started abruptly (in medias res) and when you finally started getting an idea of what was going on the story ends even more abruptly; like watching a scene from a 50's movie. Nice but not enough. Most of the time I had a feeling of disappointment and a feeling of WTF. . . . the stories The stories begin in the difficult years of the 1930's then they move on into the turbulent years of 1940's with the World War II as a main theme, then they move into the 1950's with the memories of the war still fresh, still affecting the lives of young people (mainly), and then by the end they move on into the 1960's and 1970's with a feeling, a touch of noir films; bourbon, dark bars, rain and old fashioned cars, love and hate. The stories taking place in the 1930's (1-168pp. 23 stories) with a few exceptions were pretty boring. The stories taking place in the 1940's during the World War II (169-284pp. 10 stories) were where the stories became more interesting to me and they weren't brief and abrupt, many of them taking place in Europe and Middle East. The next group of stories (285-461pp. 16 stories) takes place after the war mainly in the US with people moving on with their lives but haunted with the memories of the war. The next group of stories (462-617pp. 8 stories) takes place in France and Switzerland, the war well behind but a war that changed the way people act and think. The last group of stories (618-756pp. 6 stories) has no allusions to WWII but a new war takes place now (Vietnam War) and the anti-communist craze is on the rise along with the hippies and the anti-war protests. Overall, reading this massive collection of short stories I experienced the idiosyncrasies the character and lives of Americans from the end of the Prohibition (early 1930's) up to the early 1970's. If all these themes are your favourite kind of themes you want to find in stories then this book (might) be for you. If not stay away or proceed with caution. 7/10

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-11 00:00:00 David Shankar best book of short stories I' ve ever read. Period.