Beard combines the dissolution of her marriage, the squirrels in her attic, her dying collie and the murder of students at the University of Iowa by a discontent student into a powerful short story.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter
This is also known as an essay since Beard was a student there in 1991 when this happened.
I am perhaps telling you too much about what happens when I shouldn't. It took me by surprise but all of the descriptions give it away too.
Jerry House (TV based on a short story)
24 comments:
Even the title, since the 4th state of matter is plasma, suggests certain things. Thanks for the pointer!
gets around paywall: https://archive.ph/eZ6td
Now having read it, it loses nothing (I suspect) from being aware of what you mention.
I've commented on my roundelay contribution, K. A. Laity's "The Big Break" at publication site THE HOBO CAMP REVIEW: https://hobocampreview.blogspot.com/2026/01/k-laity.html
I note how we collaborate with our fates. Opposing them gets us only so far, after all.
That had to be one of the most depressing stories I've ever read. It makes me feel like shooting myself in the head.
I'm reading Ann Packer's second short story collection, SWIM BACK TO ME.
Absolutely.
will look for it.
I don't know about the Packer collection, but all the other stories cited so far are also primarily "downers"...even if the fantasy element of the original Fitzgerald story is indeed engaging. Downer times?
(Jerry's is from the CBS Radio series ESCAPE...the fine companion to SUSPENSE.)
I have not read an upbeat story in a long time.
Crime fiction and "lit" fiction can trend that way in the best of times.
Now here's a story I liked, "Her Firstborn" by Ann Packer. Dean and his wife Lise are around 40, having their first child. Theirs, not hers, as 8 years earlier, when married to her first husband, she had a baby who died in his sleep. You really feel you know Dean in particular, and their life in Eugene, Oregon, as they wait for the baby to be born.
Jerry's short story: https://jerryshouseofeverything.blogspot.com/2026/01/short-story-wednesday-mr-smith-kicks.html
The link to Jerry's story, by Fredric Brown, as reprinted in THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE, September 1957: https://archive.org/details/the-saint-detective-magazine-v-08-n-03-1957-09
Kind of tragic background, though. Everything seems likely to go well?
Charteris/Yin, at least in this issue, is a hanging judge in his capsule book-review column...
Todd, those capsules reviews, under the heading "The Saint's Ratings." were often vicious in their pithiness. I'm not sure if they were written by Charteris, whose involvement with the magazine was basically one story a month and a few paragraphs on the inside front cover, but they also appeared to be too mean-spirited to be written by editor Hans Stefan Santesson, who had a longer, much more nuanced review column each month, "What's New in Crime."
It's been years since I've looked at back issues of THE SAINT, but they definitely read like Yin's non-fictional "voice", and I doubt he'd let anyone else be so blunt under his by-line.
If the story is that depressing, I am not reading it right now. Sounds interesting though.
I have a cough and runny nose (and accompanying sore throat) that kept me up all night. I feel a bit better this morning.
I read the first story in SHE AND HER CAT by Naruki Nagakawa and Makoto Shinkai, a book of four short stories that are linked. Each story is about 30 pages long.
I have sort of had those symptoms for the last week. I think it might be an allergy so I am taking Claritin. You find the most interesting books, Tracy.
Got my flu shot yesterday. I was supposed to get a Covid shot as well, but for some reason they seem to have lost track of that at my pharmacy. This didn't instill confidence, and I begged off (it was a mob scene there, probably part of the problem, and I didn't want to hang around for another half-hour+ to get stuck again). Inasmuch as my appt was at 3pm, and my CVS is in a Target that also has a Starbucks, the store as a whole was flooded wit,h kids just out of the public and Catholic schools nearby, and I was struck, not for the first time in my adulthood, by how unencouraging to premarital celibacy dressing teen girls in miniskirts in Catholic schools might be...at least one of my women friends has noted that the patriarchs on down to the priests Like It that way, thank you very much, and perhaps even if it's Not For Them, they are also hoping that marriages at 18 or so, one way or another, will ensue and families not long after.
Of course, the dressing the girls thus hit home even harder when I was still in high school myself, not one with a dress code/uniform, but a private school in Honolulu so riding the same city buses with no few Catholic (and, I believe, at least one Anglican) school girls.
Anglican school with uniforms, that was.
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