Once Upon a Time: Reading 'The Devastating Boys' by Elizabeth Taylor

The story of the month: 'The Devastating Boys' by Elizabeth Taylor

Link to the story: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14GNGmanSmDzR-6R6bVLyMsAxZTxCkrpX/view?usp=sharing

Link to the Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/tnt-fnkp-uhp

The meeting room will open 5 minutes before the session.

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"A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it."

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Despite unwarranted reports of its demise at various times, the short story has been robust and thriving. The form itself has constantly changed, always reflecting the times it came out of, unlike the novel.

From the great short story writers – Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, O’Henry, and Saki – we moved to the more modern writers who brought a change in the middle of the twentieth century – Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver were at the forefront of this.

Once Upon a Time is a session in which we try to familiarise ourselves with the world's best short stories. Shankar will read the story aloud in the session. After the reading, we will analyse it together to learn from it.

But if you can, please read the story beforehand.

THE STORY: 'The Devastating Boys' by Elizabeth Taylor

The Devastating Boys (1966) begins as a polite social visit that slowly curdles into something cruel and unsettling. Taylor dissects casual privilege and unexamined masculinity with such calm precision that the damage lands almost immediately after the story ends.

Link to the story: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14GNGmanSmDzR-6R6bVLyMsAxZTxCkrpX/view?usp=sharing

THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was one of the great English chroniclers of quiet lives, writing with exquisite restraint about marriage, loneliness, and moral evasions. Her stories excel at showing how small social moments expose deep emotional failures.

THE HOST: Shankar is living in Pune and has been a lifelong reader and was bitten by the writing bug after reading stories by Tobias Wolff, Anton Chekhov, and William Trevor. While he loves novels, especially by the Russians, he always has a particular fondness for short stories.