Thanks car-London, for telling the [adrian belew voice] ”this is a dangerous place!" story to everybody in ear shot, threatening to get the cops involved but not actually usefully getting anyone involved at all, just being annoying to everyone around, and useless, to boot
Really enjoying Alice Munro stories, more than I expected, and a little bummed that I don’t remember who suggested them.
I started with the '68–’94 collection, “A Wilderness Station”, great stuff so far!
Figure 1. obnoxious photo-of-the-book-text, but with easy copy paste alt text, yay:Before she came to Dr. Henshawe's, Rose had never heard of the working class. She took the designation home."This would have to be the last part of town where they put the sewers," Flo said."Of course," Rose said coolly. "This is the working-class part of town.""Working class?" said Flo. "Not if the ones around here can help it."🤣🤣🤣.Figure 2. the cover of my paperback, a watercolor in grays, of the author.
I haven’t gotten covid yet because of my positive mental attitude, which you can tell I have because I’m cracking trying to say this with a straight face
As a fun thought experiment, every time I hear a car alarm going off in the city, I think to myself: Wow, our great Mayor, London Breed, who is a car, must really love San Francisco. There she is, living her best life, occupying a parking spot, honking her horn with devotion.
Twelfth book of '23 for me, "Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature” ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53080.Black_Water I started a Bookwyrm and posted there too but, alas no one there has reviewed it yet), edited by Alberto Manguel. 72 fantastic stories in a door stop of a paper back (at least that’s how I read it), each one with a contextual introduction, and organized into themes.
gravely (@gravely@mastodon.social)Attached: 2 images
new to me used book, lovely inscriptionMastodon (opens in a new tab)Figure 2. Link preview of https://mastodon.social/@gravely/109372394967950916, "gravely (@gravely@mastodon.social)".Figure 3. paperback cover of Black Water, the title in black over an illustration of three people in blue, green, and red tunics decreasingly obscured in waht look like doorways in a subway, part of a larger painting https://whitney.org/collection/works/3052.Figure 4. The Subway is the best known of the figurative paintings George Tooker made in response to the social injustices and isolation of postwar urban society—paintings that find an analogue in the period’s existentialist philosophy. In The Subway, Tooker employed multiple vanishing points and sophisticated modeling to create an imagined world that is presented in a familiar urban setting. Whether closed off in tiled niches or walking down the long passageway, each androgynous, anxiety-ridden figure appears psychologically estranged, despite being physically close to others in the station. The central group of commuters is locked in a grid of the metal grating’s cast shadows, while the labyrinthine passages seem to lead nowhere, suspending the city’s inhabitants in a modern purgatory. As Tooker remarked, he chose the subway as the setting for this painting because it represented “a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.” (https://whitney.org/collection/works/3052).
I’ve only ever read one other collection of stories that was so well assembled I chased the editor before the various authors therein and that was Otto Penzler.
So, if Black Water looks fun to you (it was for me!), I also recommend Penzler’s collections: “The Best American Mystery Stories of the Twentieth Century”, “The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century”, and “The Best American Noir of the Century” ( https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/12471.Otto_Penzler?utf8=✓&sort=popularity)
