Famous Short Story

A Death in the Afternoon - The New Yorker A Death in the Afternoon - The New Yorker Posted: 20 Feb 2021 03:00 AM PST On July 2, 1961, I was sitting in the parking lot at Convair Astronautics in San Diego, listening to music on the car radio while my older brother, Geoffrey, interviewed for a job with the company. Our father had been working there, but had suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized. Now it had fallen on Geoffrey, just graduated from Princeton, to support us for the next couple of months, until he moved on to a teaching post in Turkey and I began my new life at a boarding school in Pennsylvania. I had just turned sixteen and was largely uneducated, and Geoffrey had taken it upon himself to prepare me for the academic rigors of my new school. So he was applying to fill the vacancy left by our father. I recount this, and remember it so vividly, because that's where I was when the music stopped and the news came on, and I lear...

A good movie is hard to find: 'Flannery' shows shocking grace - Hillsdale Collegian A good movie is hard to find: 'Flannery' shows shocking grace - Hillsdale Collegian Posted: 28 Jan 2021 12:00 AM PST 'Flannery' is a new doc­u­mentary that details the life of famed author, Flannery O'Connor Few phrases stick like "a good man is hard to find."  Those words were probably uttered a thousand times before southern-gothic author Flannery O'Connor was born to Regina Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor in Savannah, Georgia in 1925 and wrote a short story by the same title 28 years later. They've probably been uttered at least a thousand times since. But were they ever drolled as Flannery drolled them? "Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia," a new doc­u­mentary by Eliz­abeth Coffman and Mark Bosco S.J. and funded by the National Endowment for the Human­...

“A Challenge You Have Overcome,” by Allegra Goodman - The New Yorker “A Challenge You Have Overcome,” by Allegra Goodman - The New Yorker Posted: 18 Jan 2021 12:00 AM PST Audio: Allegra Goodman reads. They were a family of long marriages. You might sleep in separate bedrooms and wash dishes in a fury. You might find a moldy peach in the refrigerator and leave it on the counter for three days as evidence in some private trial—but you would never leave. Dan and Melanie had been married for thirty years. Steve and Andrea were coming up on twenty-five. Andrea felt a certain vindication about this anniversary because she had married in, and her own parents had split when she was young. Steve's mother, Jeanne, used to ask Andrea, in a melancholy way, "How is your mother?" and then, after a long pause, "How is your father?" Clearly, divorce was hereditary, and Andrea a carrier. Real Rubinsteins had the marriage gene...

Shaka King Goes to Hollywood - The New York Times Shaka King Goes to Hollywood - The New York Times Posted: 12 Feb 2021 07:36 AM PST Shaka King was feeling depressed. It was his last scheduled day at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and the trip hadn't gone well. King's directorial debut, a bittersweet comedy about the misadventures of a marijuana-addicted couple called "Newlyweeds," had been rejected by seemingly every major company in Hollywood. "Newlyweeds" had cost King and his investors six figures, but it eventually sold, to a small Canadian distributor, for just $25,000 — a result that still leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Even the weather seemed to be against King — a nasty snowstorm in Park City, Utah, had grounded his flight home to New York, leaving him stranded in town for a deflating extra night. At his hotel that evening, King happened to run into another first-time filmmaker, Ryan Coogler, who...