Your Next Read Before the Election: “Cannibalism in the Cars” 

24 congressmen walk into a bar. There’s a snowstorm and they can’t leave for seven days. Who do they eat first? 

Mark Twain’s 1868 short story, “Cannibalism in the Cars,” takes place in a train, not a bar, but there’s still cannibalism — don’t you worry. 

The story follows the so-called “Stranger’s Narrative”: the story of 24 “gentlemen” on a train bound for Chicago in December of 1853. Snow is falling and there is a pleasant atmosphere, but soon the train can no longer push forward.The men realize they have no food, only wood for fire to keep them warm. 

Days pass and among the sorrow, hunger lingers. On the seventh day, the gentlemen can no longer take the starvation.

Discussing Death from Beyond the Grave: Denis Johnson’s Final Stories

 

Few authors can place their readers in wildly uncomfortable situations with unreliable characters and still leave them with a sense of poignancy like Denis Johnson. In his long-awaited collection of stories The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Johnson weaves together five fairly disjunctive tales, all of which mimic the style of Jesus’s Son, one of his most accredited works. However, in his most recent book, published posthumously in January 2018, Johnson’s writing is slightly darker than his previous works. There’s something more resonant about the lessons these stories teach the reader, considering that they come from the grave. Perhaps Johnson describes the experience of reading his work best in the opening of “Strangler Bob” when he says, “you hop into a car, race off in no particular direction, and blam, hit a power pole.”

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is in many ways a follow-up to Jesus’s Son in that it shares some of the same characters, but more so in the way it evokes the same sort of humanizing tone to discuss recurring struggles in his stories.

DAYS OF OUR LIVES | Chemistry

In my first year of college, I made the misstep of taking class at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m. Against all advice, I, the beaming young student, was eager to tackle the demons of chemistry in the wee hours of the morning. The folly of my decision would soon become apparent through sleepless nights of composing reports and balancing equations, but for the moment I possessed an unrelenting determination to succeed. After successfully ignoring my alarm for a week, I soon understood that 8 a.m. was not as charming as I had thought, and I numbered the days until I would finally drop the course. On the last day, I decided out of respect for the teacher that I would brave the challenge of the early morning one final time. So I sat in the last row of seats, unsure of whether or not to take notes, feeling an awkward sense of premonition.