Category: short story

Title: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" Author: James Thurber Category: Short Story First published: March 18, 1939 in The New Yorker Rating: 4½ out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Audible | Amazon Walter Mitty, a mild-mannered forty-year-old man, drives into Connecticut with his wife for their weekly shopping trip and his wife's appointment with the hairdresser. Tired of his drab, schedule-driven life, Walter escapes into five elaborate daydreams, and finally becomes the hero he always hoped to be. I don't know why that blurb says Mitty becomes the hero. I don't think he ever really did, outside of his daydreams. Each of his daydreams is prompted by something in his environment. First, he's as a pilot flying in a storm, prompted by his fast driving, then he's a surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery as he drives by a hospital. Next, he's an assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then a RAF pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. As the story ends, Mitty imagines...

Title: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" Author: Robert Louis Stevenson Category: Horror First published: 1885 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Amazon Stevenson's famous exploration of humanity's basest capacity for evil, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has become synonymous with the idea of a split personality. More than a morality tale, this dark psychological fantasy is also a product of its time, drawing on contemporary theories of class, evolution, criminality, and secret lives. This is not so much a review as my comments about Stevenson's classic story, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." After all, how can you really review a classic like that. It's obviously captured people's imaginations for years, impacted culture, become one of the stories we know, even if we don't actually know it. Dr. Jekyll creates a potion that he drinks and it lets loose his "evil side," Mr. Hyde, the side that lacks inhibitions, that gives into his baser instincts. Dr. Jekyll believes that...

"A Venetian Night's Entertainment" by Edith Wharton tells of Tony, who has dreamed of visiting Venice since he was a child. To him, Venice is a magical city, "midway between reality and illusion." Finally, as a young man, he gets his chance to visit as part of his grand tour of Europe aboard his father's merchant ship. Upon arriving, Tony has to immediately explore the city, on his own since his chaperone insists on staying on the boat until morning. Here was the very world of the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour, and bubbling with merry noises. What a scene it was! A square enclosed in fantastic painted buildings, and peopled with a throng as fantastic: a bawling, laughing, jostling, sweating mob, parti-coloured, parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under the hot sun like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way through the press, aware at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness,...