Short Stories Flashcards
Describe a short story that you like.
Literature
Original Highlight: One of the more surreal journeys in literature takes place over the course of a single afternoon, covers a distance of approximately eight miles, and was first published in the New Yorker magazine in July, 1964. John Cheever’s The Swimmer begins inauspiciously – if not quite innocently – enough, on “one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying ‘I drank too much last night’.” Ned Merrill (a man with the “vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure”) is sitting in the garden of his friends, the Westerhazys, a glass of gin in his hand, “breathing deeply, stertorously, as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure”. On a whim Ned decides to swim home via the pools of his neighbours: “that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county”. He names this route Lucinda after his wife and sets off feeling like a “pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny”, confident that “friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River”.
