The Art of the Short Story
In-Person – Thursday 1:10 pm – 2:50 pm
Sept. 19, 26, Oct. 10, 17, 24, 31 – No Class on Oct. 3
“With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed — he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog.” (Graham Greene)
We conduct an in-depth exploration of more than a dozen great short stories for their substance, impact, resonance, relevance, as well as the degree to which they attain the “perfection” noted by Graham Greene. We look forward to stimulating and interactive discussions and analyses. It is suggested that class members read the short stories ahead of each class. After all, they are short stories!
- Week 1: The Lady with the [Pet] Dog, Anton Chekhov; I Spy and The Root of all Evil, Graham Greene
- Week 2: The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman, Nikolai Gogol; Bontsche The Silent, I.L. Peretz
- Week 3: Young Goodman Brown and The Minister’s Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne; Eve’s Diary, Mark Twain; Bartleby The Scrivener, Herman Melville; A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka
- Week 4: Selections from Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, Zora Neale Hurston; The City of Refuge, Rudolph Fisher
- Week 5: Selections from Bliss, Katherine Mansfield; A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor; Irwin Shaw; John Cheever and Alice Munro
- Week 6: Tenth of December and Liberation Day, George Saunders; Defender of the Faith, Phillip Roth; For Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
Art Gang graduated from NYU with Honors in English, writing a thesis on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. After graduating from Brooklyn Law School, he practiced law for 40 years. He earned a Masters in American Studies from Fairfield University, writing a thesis on the plays of Tony Kushner. He is the president of the Fairfield County Chorale, has served on the Westport Library fiction book selection committee and served as a docent for the Arthur Szyk exhibit at the Fairfield University Museum.