Once Upon a Time: Reading 'Good and Bad' by Lucia Berlin

The story of the month: Good and Bad by Lucia Berlin

Link to the story: https://tinyurl.com/4rn9xxju

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: Good and Bad by Lucia Berlin

The story is from Berlin's acclaimed short story collection, 'A Manual for Cleaning Women'. Set in 1950's Santiago, a privileged American teenager, at an elite girls' school, becomes the unlikely project of Miss Dawson, an earnest and awkward teacher. Miss Dawson is determined to open her pupil's eyes to politics and poverty. Told by the grown woman looking back, it's a funny and rueful story about privilege, conscience, and what we owe the people who try to make us better.

THE AUTHOR:

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) lived the life her stories tell: a childhood in mining towns and El Paso, a wealthy adolescence in Chile, three marriages, four sons, and work as a cleaning woman, hospital clerk, and teacher. She published mostly with small presses and was little known in her lifetime. Then A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), appearing eleven years after her death, became a surprise bestseller, and established her as a major American short story writer. Her stories draw heavily on her own life, and they're funny, unsentimental, and full of sharp detail; finding grace in hard lives.

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.