Create a Story Club Instead of a Book Club
In my freshman year in college, a friend of mine started a book club. We chose Ulysses . Once we met, and I still haven’t read Ulysses . Book clubs are hard! They are so complex that blogs have a list of things to talk about when no one in the book club is reading a book . (“Read the book reviews aloud and talk about them.”) If your book club is really just an excuse to chat, that’s okay! But if you really want to read and discuss literature, try the story club.
Count on everyone to finish
A typical book club book takes hours to read. For most people, this requires multiple reading sessions. If the reader hasn’t started reading by the morning of the club meeting, he has screwed up. With a short story, they can read it in one lunch break. Damn, they can read it twice.
Risk more
Because it takes so long to read a bad book, it is exhausting. Reading a bad story is all the same, which is good, but okay, further. So your club can try more complex, avant-garde or conflicting stories. You can “try out” a new author without committing to writing an entire book.
If the story really doesn’t appeal to most readers, at least no one thinks they’ve wasted hours of their lives. Especially if you double it.
Double
You can read two or three short stories per meeting, but you end up with less homework than a book. Choose multiple stories from the same author, the same genre, the same time period, or the same anthology. Or deliberately pick up contrasting stories.
If people only read one or two stories, they can still take part in them, and they don’t have to worry about messing up a book they only read halfway through.
Read for free
Most modern books will cost you a lot, but many stories are published for free on the Internet. This also means you can read them on your phone. Here are some of my favorites:
- Lee Alexander’s “Soft Truth” : If Dostoevsky had become addicted to “oddly satisfying” YouTube videos, he would have written The Double that way .
- Lucy Breach’s “Sex Robots” : This is really about professional pizza eaters. Britch writes like James Thurber or Miranda Julie. Most of Breach’s stories focus on loners and eccentric geniuses with different guys who support or not support.
- “We Men of Science” by Raphael Bob-Waxberg: After you google all of Lucy Breach’s fiction and wait for her next story, you will be delightedly entertained.
- Carl Jr. and What Happened There by Chris Onstad: A nonfiction about the fraternity of web comic creator Achewood .
- Curtis Sittenfeld ‘s Prairie Wife : A Story of How We Resent Our Childhood Friends, and How the Internet Helps Us Accept That Resentment.
- Night Runner Kristen Rupenian: Naughty schoolgirls terrorize a Peace Corps volunteer in a story by the author of the deservedly acclaimed New Yorker short story, The Cat Man.
- «UnWindr» Michael Lutz : History of Halloween, presented in the form of branches forum – a very clever way to tell the story in reverse order.
- Ashram and Mama by Jesse Eisenberg: The social networking actor also writes fiction and humor, and his series Bream Hiccups Me: Restaurant Reviews from a Privileged Nine- Year-Old is a McSweeney classic.
- A Narrative of the Land of Witches by Sofia Samatar: For fans of AS Byatt, a broad, polyphonic story about mythology and academia.
- Julian Mortimer Smith’s Headshot : I’m not a fan of Gary Steingart’s futuristic satire Super Sad True Love Story , but I’m a 17776 fan of John Boyes, and this story of soldiers as Twitch streamers reminds me of both.
- “CONTINUE? Yes / No ” by Kendra Fortmeyer: The flower girl in the video game refuses to be an NPC. It’s like Black Mirror was good.
Choose a carefully selected collection
The stories are included in collections. Some of the above are from current online series. You can subscribe to the one that your whole group likes. The New Yorker publishes a story in every issue (plus an annual fiction issue) and has archives that span decades. Until you reach the pay limit, you can get these stories for free online.
Or subscribe to One Story , a literary magazine that only sends you one story every month. (You will also receive one teen story every three months.)
You can also split one published anthology into multiple discussions. For classics, try Norton’s Anthology of Shorts . For just over a century, the annual anthology of the best American stories has collected the best fiction of the year. This year’s edition is being edited by author Roxanne Gay.
You can also start an articles club , as author Joanna Goddard did. This may generate lively discussion, but it will lack the escapism associated with the discussion of fiction.
If everyone in the club doesn’t like the same author, you don’t have to crawl through the collection of stories by the same author. But if you do, it can be an interesting way to spend an entire year discussing Borges, Wolfe, or Lorrie Moore, while still leaving plenty of time for other reading.
Or you can fill your entire squad with the suggestions from the comments below. Readers, what stories do you like the most?