He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled

Category: short story

  • Ray Bradbury Reading From New Collection image of tag icon

    In you are not in Chicago in the dead of winter enjoying AWP, and are in Los Angeles which has seen a spell of rain but also some temps in the 70s, consider checking out Ray Bradbury at the Beverly Hills Library on Friday. He’s launching a new collection of short fiction, “We’ll Always Have […]

    February 13, 2009

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  • Genre Short Stories image of tag icon

    B&N Review has a piece by Paul Di Filippo on the state of short stories, specifically genre short stories. It starts: If at any given moment short fiction is not actually experiencing a Golden Age, it is always seen to be dying. Critics, authors, publishers, editors, readers — even sociologists! — engage (or should that […]

    February 11, 2009

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  • Listening to Short Stories image of tag icon

    If the recession/depression has you pinching pennies, check out audible.com, the iTunes of short stories. To celebrate four weeks of short story month, Audible has lots of stories for 99 cents. But if you just want to read the stories, not listen to them, both the Fitzgerald Benjamin Button story and the Junot Diaz story […]

    February 9, 2009

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  • Ali Smith On Short Stories image of tag icon

    The first story in Ali Smith’s collection The First Person is half meditation on the form and half character struggling with her friend’s cancer. I won’t reproduce any of the cancer storyline, but the first two quotes below are said by characters when trying to describe the short story: “The novel, he was saying, was […]

    January 13, 2009

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  • Glen Pourciau Interview: Kafka, Buddhism, and Linked Stories image of tag icon

      Glen Pourciau’s short story collection Invite won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa press. The stories contained in Invite, ten in all, were originally published in journals such as New England Review, Ontario Review, and Mississippi Review. I caught up with Pourciau over email and asked him […]

    January 11, 2009

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  • Short Story Book Club image of tag icon

    The One Story blog, Save the Short Story, alerted me to a new book club, Andrew’s Book Club, which focuses on two short story collections a month. January’s picks are Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff and Things That Pass for Love by Allison cheap drugs pharmacy Amend. The book club offers multiple ways to […]

    January 10, 2009

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  • Story Prize Finalists image of tag icon

      Out of a field of 73 books, the Story Prize has announced its finalists for 2008: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Alfred A. Knopf) Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno (Akashic Books) Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff (Alfred A. Knopf) I am surprised by the Joe Meno nomination, but also delighted because […]

    January 8, 2009

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  • Ten Short Story Collections You Should Know About image of tag icon

    Let me whet your appetite for short fiction in 2009. Below is a list of ten upcoming short story collections, most of them coming out in the first six months of the year. Some heavy hitters, some favorites, some in translation, some from bigger publishers and some from smaller publishers. In a word, Variety. 1. […]

    January 4, 2009

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  • Chris Adrian’s “A Better Angel” Review image of tag icon

    Frequent readers of this blog will know that I found Chris Adrian’s short story collection “A Better Angel” to be one of the more fascinating short story collections of 2008. Which is why I decided to do an in-depth 2500-word review. In a reviewing culture that rarely gives space to short fiction, and space, when […]

    January 2, 2009

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  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button image of tag icon

    Just in time for the Christmas-day debut of the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett film, Jacket Copy has a multi-blogger discussion about the Scott Fitzgerald short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m one of the voices in this discussion, so please pop over there as the posts roll out over the next couple of days.

    December 24, 2008

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