Everybody Loves a List [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood and Tom Flynn to talk about the last six stories in Rodoreda’s Selected Stories. (And mildly insult a bunch of different people. As you do.) I’m not prefacing that conversation at all in the post below.

As always, you can get Selected Stories and Death in Spring for 20% from our website by using the code 2MONTH. It’s also available at better bookstores everywhere.

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I don’t know if it’s the winter weather setting in (it’s dark outside here in Rochester at 4:30pm), the combined bleakness of all of Rodoreda’s stories, the fact that it’s time for the “Best Books of 2017” lists to start crushing my hope and joy list-by-list, or that it’s simply difficult to write about a short story collection week after week, but regardless, I don’t have it in me to write one of my normal, long, rambling posts about Rodoreda’s Selected Stories. (I do have a really good thing planned for next week’s Death in Spring intro post though, so stay tuned.)

Instead, now that we’re done reading this entire collection, I thought I would pull a FlavorFeed and just rank all the stories from my most favorite to my least. So here goes!

1. “Carnival”
2. “The Salamander”
3. “The Thousand Franc Bill”
4. “Happiness”
5. “Friday, June 8”
6. “The Mirror”
7. “Paralysis”
8. “Orléans, Three Kilometers”
9. “The Bath”
10. “Before I Die”
11. “Nocturnal”
12. “The Beginning”
13. “Summer”
14. “It Seemed Like Silk”
15. “In a Whisper”
16. “Guinea Fowls”
17. “Ice Cream”
18. “On a Dark Night”
19. “The Red Blouse”
20. “Engaged”
21. “Threaded Needle”
22. “Ada Liz”
23. “Night and Fog”
24. “White Geranium”
25. “The Fate of Lisa Sperling”
26. “Departure”
27. “Blood”
28. “Afternoon at the Cinema”
29. “Love”
30. “On the Train”