The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher
by Hortense Calisher
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Finalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Award-winning novelist Hortense Calisher The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author's best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker stories, "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks," in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new friend who finally awakens him to the world. show more Also included are "The Sound of Waiting," one of the chapters in the Elkin family saga; the chilling, Jamesian "The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street," in which a New York widow hears a scream late one night but cannot decide how to investigate without appearing to her neighbors to have gone mad; and the nearly novella-length "The Summer Rebellion." show lessTags
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Member Reviews
The story, Heartburn, has a fairytale familiarity. A man goes to a neurologist and says:
“I have some kind of small animal lodged in my chest… Probably a form of newt or toad.”
I was reminded of when my little brother put a frog down the front of my swimming costume (and of the first Alien film). We were all in a shallow, outdoor pool, and the frog was slippery, wriggling, and scared. I certainly wasn’t enjoying it either... Ugh. All was well in the end.
The patient explains how he thinks his situation occurred and is anxious to know the doctor’s opinion.
There are some excellent turns of phrase (“Swollen with irritation, he was only half conscious of an uneasy, vestigial twitching of his ear muscles, which contracted now as show more they sometimes did when he listened to atonal music.”), but the story itself was predictable, albeit it was more about disbelief than belief.
Short story club
I read this in Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 24 March 2025.
You can read this story in the group.
You can join the group here. show less
“I have some kind of small animal lodged in my chest… Probably a form of newt or toad.”
I was reminded of when my little brother put a frog down the front of my swimming costume (and of the first Alien film). We were all in a shallow, outdoor pool, and the frog was slippery, wriggling, and scared. I certainly wasn’t enjoying it either... Ugh. All was well in the end.
The patient explains how he thinks his situation occurred and is anxious to know the doctor’s opinion.
There are some excellent turns of phrase (“Swollen with irritation, he was only half conscious of an uneasy, vestigial twitching of his ear muscles, which contracted now as show more they sometimes did when he listened to atonal music.”), but the story itself was predictable, albeit it was more about disbelief than belief.
Short story club
I read this in Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 24 March 2025.
You can read this story in the group.
You can join the group here. show less
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Jewish Books
367 works; 24 members
National Book Award Finalists - Fiction
377 works; 12 members
Author Information
33+ Works 665 Members
Hortense Calisher, 1911-2009 Author Hortense Calisher was born in Manhattan, New York on December 20, 1911. She graduated from Barnard College in 1932 with a degree in English composition. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a sales clerk, a model, and a social worker. She wrote a total of 23 novels and short story collections during her show more lifetime including In the Absence of Angels (1951), False Entry (1961), Tale for the Mirror (1962), Textures of Life (1963), The New Yorkers (1969), and Sunday Jews (2002). Her memoir, Herself, an exploration of the intersection between a writer's life and her fiction, was published in 1972. Many of her short works have been anthologized and she is a contributor of short stories, articles and reviews to the New York Times, Harpers and other journals. She also lectured on literature and taught creative writing at several colleges and universities including Columbia University and Bennington College in Vermont. She received four Henry Awards and two Guggenheim Fellowships. She died on January 13, 2009 at the age of 97. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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