again from the gentlemen

In a book of 50 Great Short Stories edited by Martin Crane, the 41^st one is the best so far, and they were all good.  H. L. Mencken’s The Girl from Red Lion P.A. is the story I’m recommending.  It may also be available in the book Newspaper Days, by Mencken.  As to plot and storyline it might best be described as a romance of innocence.  If you were a young girl, how would you go about actively pursuing perdition in the big city?  Ah, but as a reading experience, it is a feast of cynicism, sarcasm, and irony—textbook examples—delightfully piquant .  The characters are Runyonesque without the vernacular, the perspective Twain without the exaggeration, and the story might be human interest journalism at its most interesting. 

The Gentlemen’s Auxillary

from the Gentlemen's Auxiliary

I have just finished a book, Herland, and selected stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I say finished in euphemistic form, I skimmed a bit of Herland, the initial novella and decided to skip it as both too farfetched in premise and too predictable in point of view and outcome—an undiscovered land of women, and the not very salacious adventures of three young Victorian gentlemen who stumble upon it.

Ah, but all the others, some 20 short stories unrelated one to another with the following exceptions. In each case but one, the heroine prevails with humor and wit and a perfectly sensible outlook, if a touch more modern than the minor characters find appropriate for the times. In sum, they are stories by a turn of the 20^th century female O’ Henry. Each with a gentle, feminine twist, each made me smile.

That one exception I noted, The Yellow Wallpaper, is her most famous, and probably most anthologized work. It is a dark tale of a woman slowly going mad. Well worth reading, to be sure, formidable of theme and powerfully written, but not light, not uplifting, nothing in the end to smile at. With that said, I believe I can recommend any collection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short stories.