(both the stories I talk about here are online in full—links below—and both are very short)

Almost all Katherine Mansfield’s stories end abruptly: it seems an aesthetic instinct, like a built-in metronome.   In her later stories—which in the collected edition I’m reading follow “Bliss”—she finesses these endings into remarkably complex anti-epiphanies, refusing us knowledge as much as revealing it.

continue reading Anti-Epiphanies: Thoughts On Katherine Mansfield's Endings

First up in my independent study is Katherine Mansfield, whom you should totally Wiki, but only after reading “Bliss,” which is free here.

“Bliss” contains one of the first and best modern party scenes.  To me it feels far more contemporary than it is (ninety-two years old), and it’s some of the most beautiful writing in English:

ALTHOUGH Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at–nothing–at nothing, simply.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss–absolute bliss!—as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? …

continue reading Bliss, Absolute Bliss