What's Your Favorite Short Story?

There's a story I love that I cannot find, remembering neither author nor title (which is pathetic, seeing as I actually heard the author read it). A woman babysists for her sister and her sister's husband while they are staying at a resort. There's a teenage girl from the previous marriage also with them, and the building caretaker also does "deep tissue massage". Sounds daft, but it captures a mood very well.

My name here is a reference to his novel, "The Dead Father"

I just read Cheever's "World of Apples" over lunch -- turned out to have the collected stories in my bag -- and thanks, Alfred!

Great story.

from Come Back, Dr. Caligari

Margins
A Shower of Gold
Me and Miss Mandible
For I'm The Boy
Will You Tell Me?

from Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

The Balloon
The President
Game
Alice
Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning
Report
The Dolt
See The Moon?
The Indian Uprising

from City Life

Views Of My Father Weeping
Paraguay
On Angels
The Phantom Of The Opera's Friend
City Life
Kierkegaard Unfair To Schlegel
The Falling Dog
The Policemen's Ball
The Glass Mountain

from Sadness

Critique de la Vie Quotidienne
The Sandman
Träumerei
The Rise Of Capitalism
A City Of Churches
Daumier
The Party

from Guilty Pleasures

Eugénie Grandet
Nothing: A Preliminary Account

from The Dead Father

A Manual For Sons

from Amateurs

At The End Of The Mechanical Age
Rebecca
The Captured Woman
I Bought A Little City
The Sergeant
The School
The Great Hug
Our Work And Why We Do It

from Great Days

The Crisis
Cortés And Montezuma
The New Music
The Zombies
The King Of Jazz
Morning
The Death Of Edward Lear
The Abduction From The Seraglio
On The Steps Of The Conservatory
The Leap

Previously Uncollected

Aria
The Emerald
How I Write My Songs
The Farewell
The Emperor
Thailand
Heroes
Bishop
Grandmother's House

Borges
Bowles
Calvino
Chekhov
Déon
Fitzgerald
Maugham
Maupassant
William Maxwell
Nabokov
Sartre
Singer
Tatiana Tolstoya

her story in the new yorker a couple weeks ago was pointlessly depressing and horrible.

Loved the ending though.

1. Cortes and Montezuma
2. The School
3. At the End of the Mechanical Age
4. The Great Hug
5. The Policemen's Ball
6. Rebecca
7. See the Moon?
8. The Glass Mountain
9. The Balloon
10. A City Of Churches

100. Nor are eagles plausible, not at all, not for a moment.

Like: huh?

A thousand thanks, Mr. Que, that is indeed the story and the book is available used on Amazon for 50 cents. Double score.

Part of what I like about Calvino -- and part of what's especially on display in "The Aquatic Uncle" -- is that he manages to craft stories that contain both of two things: one on hand they're incredibly cerebral, they're symbolic or allegorical, they can toy with grand thinky things right up to and including semiotics; and on the other hand these same stories are remarkably observant in terms of basic, timeless human emotion and behavior. The stories at the end of Difficult Loves aren't as otherworldly and imaginative as some of his others, but they maintain that same amazing mix, I think. The photography one is really stunning; it spends all this time teasing out the implications of photography as an idea, but it's also really rigorously about how that idea might affect the way conventional people look at life, what impact this piece of technology actually has on our emotional world.

But look to "The Aquatic Uncle" for the best example of this I know. It's placed at a point in evolution where you get an amphibious creature pining for some lovely evolved land-creature, ashamed of his roots in a bog and ashamed of his old-fashioned aquatic uncle, and then once he swallows hard and introduces his leggy land-creature to his uncle, she falls in love with his old aquaticism: this dynamic absolutely amazes me, because it's this unchanging dynamic of aspirations in either direction -- it's absolutely the same as the way we treat a million things now, from class to race to whatever. These are the kinds of enduring root-level human desires and dynamics that Calvino seems to have way more understanding of -- even in the most fanciful and imaginary settings -- than 99% of writers.