Tag: Spring Break Short Story Recommendation

TBT: Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2022: “Witch’s Money”

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It’s SPRING BREAK!  One of my multiple cushy, extended breaks—the primary perk of dedicating one’s life to the molding of young minds—has now commenced, which means next week I’ll be inundating you with reviews of short stories, as is this blog’s Spring Break tradition.

One story I read last year was John Collier‘s “Witch’s Money.”  It’s the tale of a haughty artist who succumbs to the ignorance and greed of peasants who think that checks are a magic source of money. I read it when I was quite young—to young to appreciate its nuances at the time—and it made an impression on me.  Don’t write a check your butt can’t cash… or, at the very least, don’t write checks in lands where people don’t understand the basics of modern banking.

With that, here is 20 April 2022’s “Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2022: ‘Witch’s Money’“:

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Lazy Sunday CLXII: Spring Break Short Story Recommendations Recap 2022

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Another Spring Break is in the books, and as I look wearily ahead to the final weeks of the school year, let’s look back at the good times—and good stories—of this past week:

Happy Reading!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT: Spring Break Short Story Recommendations 2021, Part I: “Black Tancrède”

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Going through last year’s Spring Break Short Story Recommendations, I came across the first one of 2021, a delicious little tale of Caribbean horror, Henry S. Whitehead‘s “Black Tancrède.”

It’s a weird little story, but a fun one.  I won’t prattle on too long—here’s me one year ago in “Spring Break Short Story Recommendations 2021, Part I: ‘Black Tancrède’“:

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Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2022: “Witch’s Money”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2022 comes from a very old, very tattered collection of short stories I purchased probably twenty or more years ago.  I think I picked it up on a trip with my grandparents when I was somewhere between the ages of ten and thirteen, the amorphous “tween” years.

The collection is called, simply, Short Story Masterpieces, and boasts Robert Penn Warren as one of its editors (the other being Albert Erskine).  I have a vague recollection of attempting to read some of the stories in our hotel room the night that I bought it, and realized that these stories were way over my head at that time.  I could read the words, but I could not comprehend them, at least not fully.

Short Story Masterpieces

However, one story that always stuck out to me was John Collier‘s “Witch’s Money.”  I probably flipped to that story because it had “witch” in the title, and even back then ghost stories and the like fascinated me.  The story—which was published in The New Yorker in 1939—has little to do with hags and haunts, but instead explores a fatal misunderstanding about the nature of “cheques” (or “checks” to my fellow American readers).

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Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2022: “The Machine Stops”

The Portly Politico38 Comments

As is my custom, I dedicate a few days each Spring Break to recommending and reviewing various short stories.  Typically, I read through an anthology of short stories over break and highlight three or four of the best stories from them.

However, I neglected to take an anthology with me when I left town for Easter weekend, and I didn’t have the time to pluck one from my parents’ substantial library.  So, I’m doing a one-off today (and possibly for other Spring Break Shorty Story Recommendation 2022 installments this week), although I am sure this story has appeared in many anthologies.

The story is E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” which I wrote about in brief in another post in April 2020, during the early days of The Age of The Virus.  The Z Man wrote about it in one of his posts from the time, which intrigued me enough to read the story.

It is, I believe, one of the great works of prophetic science fiction.  There’s a great deal of that from the mid-twentieth century; Forster was predicting things like FaceTime and social media in 1909.

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