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Old 07-01-2014, 01:26 AM   #1
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Short Nominations • July 2014

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for July 2014!

The nominations will run for four days until 5 July. Then, a separate voting poll will begin where the month's selection will be decided.


The category for this month is:

Short
(any short work or short story collection)


In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs four nominations - the original nomination plus three supporting.

Each participant has four nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) a work that has already been nominated by another person.

To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest.


What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!


The floor is now open!

*

Nominations are now closed. Final nominations:


Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- issybird, fantasyfan, Bookpossum, caleb72


4.21 stars at GR.


Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal).


Available as an ebook in the U.S.


The Summer Book by Tove Jansson - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- issybird, fantasyfan, Bookpossum, desertblues


4.12 stars at GR.


Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.


Available as an ebook in the U.S.


Runaway by Alice Munro - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- Bookpossum, ccowie, desertblues, Billi


Alice Munro is last year's Nobel Prize winner. This book collects eight short stories.


From Kobo:

The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this exquisite collection. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written before.


The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- fantasyfan, issybird, BelleZora, Billi


From the blurb on the Penguin Edition:

"A master of the tongue in cheek, G.K. Chesterton's ingenious and, above all, paradoxical stories introduce Basil Grant, a sleuth so finely portrayed as to rival Sherlock Holmes. Eschewing facts for physiognomy, deduction for intuition, method for madness, he moves unerringly to his goal.
"Accompanied by the gullible narrator of the tales and an excitable private detective, Basil Grant deals with a lethal message written in pansies, a professor's insanity, a country vicar's predicament and other puzzling situations, all of which lead them to the same source . . . .
"While each story is complete in itself, together they weave another mystery which leads to its own climax . . . ."

The six classic stories taken together occupy only 126 pages in the Penguin edition.

It is available free from Project Gutenberg and in both a free and very cheap Kindle edition in Amazon {and on Feedbooks} as well as being included in many ebook collections devoted to Chesterton.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_...k%3AThe+Club+o


Berlin Stories by Robert Walser - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- issybird, BelleZora, Billi, Bookworm_Girl


In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.


It's short, at 160 paper pages, as well as being short stories.

Available as an ebook in the US.


Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- sun surfer, desertblues, BelleZora, paola


~179 pages


From Goodreads:

Jorge Luis Borge's Fictions introduced an entirely new voice into world literature. It is here we find the astonishing accounts of Funes, the man who can forget nothing; the French poet who recreated Don Quixote word for word; the fatal lottery in Babylon; the mysterious planet of Tlön; and the library containing every possible book in the whole universe. Here too are the philosophical detective stories and the haunting tales of Irish revolutionaries, gaucho knife fights and dreams within dreams which proved so influential (and yet impossible to imitate). This collection was eventually to bring Borges international fame; over fifty years later, it remains endlessly intriguing.


O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- sun surfer, Billi, Bookpossum, Bookworm_Girl


~176 pages


From Goodreads:

A tale of the prairie land encountered by America's Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather's novel is a uniquely American epic.

Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father's farm and must transform it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise, is the first of Cather's great heroines, all of them women of strong will and an even stronger desire to overcome adversity and succeed. But the wild land itself is an equally important character in Cather's books, and her descriptions of it are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us."


The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- sun surfer, BelleZora, paola, fantasyfan


~144 pages


From Goodreads:

Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive and romantic young man, meets and falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Although he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion for her, and his infatuation torments him to the point of absolute despair. The first great 'confessional' novel, 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' draws both on Goethe's own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of his friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Goethe's sensitive exploration of the mind of a young artist at odds with soceity and ill-equipped to cope with life is now considered the first great tragic novel of European literature.


Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- ccowie, sun surfer, paola, Bookworm_Girl


The single short story, not the collection.


(note- the link in the title is to Wikipedia since there is no Goodreads page for the single story, but be aware that there are spoilers on the Wikipedia page)


Apparently available online for free at the University of Minnesota Duluth here.

Last edited by sun surfer; 07-05-2014 at 01:13 AM.
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