Currently reading
The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories
Her Benny
Vedere din Parfumerie
Mysticism and Logic (Western Philosophy)
The Analects of Confucious
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
Does Anything Eat Wasps?: And 101 Other Unsettling, Witty Answers to Questions You Never Thought You Wanted to Ask
Mutual Aid
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
The Brothers Karamazov
Stories of Erskine Caldwell
What I have is another strange little book produced by Russians during the U.S.S.R., so some stories in the description are missing. Caldwell's father was a Presbyterian minister, and the stories I have, to a letter, are morality plays, with an extra serving of melodrama for the hot weather.Sometimes the message seems so hamfisted, you'd think it had been hammered there by a far more liberal David Cameron. Sometimes you just want to say, in the old country way, "In a pig's ear!", as with the slightly maudlin depiction of an old sharecropper who lives with three healthy sons, worried that he'll have no way to live if he's forced to leave a manipulative white man's land. Caldwell was almost certainly ahead of his time on race relations in the south, so maybe the morality of black and white required a broad brush that looked more like a frayed knot. His altogether predictable morality, even when it's wearing your very teeth, will still produce absolutely haunting results, as was the case with a young man's mistake with a terribly poor girl he courts behind his house.
