Review: Three short stories by Robert A. Heinlein, John Cheever, and Isaac Bashevis Singer
Judged and ranked
I've read many short stories, but far more pages of novels and even more pages of non-fiction. I suspect I'm missing out. So I've decided to read at least one short story per day, starting with these three anthologies...
Where Do We Go From Here - Isaac Asimov curated this collection of classic science fiction
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
The Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Asimov anthology is one of the first books I bought from the Science Fiction Book Club back in the early 1970s. It has sat unread on my shelves (in nine different cities) for more than fifty years. It's time to read it. So what did I do? I turned to the middle of the book to reread a story I had already consumed in some other long-forgotten anthology. I loved the story then, and I wanted to see if it still held up. That story is...
And He Built a Crooked House by Robert A Heinlein
Science fiction has some great titles. Consider, for instance, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. That may be the best title ever. And He Built a Crooked House is another contender.
The "what if" premise is an architect who wants to design a house in the form of a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube.
It is, of course, impossible to build a hypercube in three-dimensional space, so the architect unfolds it to show how the elements would look in our world. Alas, something goes wrong. When he takes his clients to see the house, it doesn't look right. Strangeness ensues in four dimensions!
The story made me smile years ago, and it did this time, too. The 1941 dialogue feels archaic, but the charm of the concept more than makes up for it. Excellent!
The next entry is...
Goodbye, My Brother by John Cheever
I've been seeing The Stories of John Cheever in people's homes my entire adult life. I've also heard great things about it. And I loved the movie Burt Lancaster made of Cheever's story, The Swimmer. Recently, Cheever appears as a character in a movie I want to see, Parthenope, Seeing Gary Oldman play Cheever in the movie trailer reminded me yet again that I wanted to give his work a try someday. And so I finally bought a copy.
The stories are organized in chronological order. That gives me hope that the later entries will be better than this first one. It has a leaden opening, a somewhat interesting middle, and a climax that makes no sense. If I had been the editor who found this story in the slush pile I would have rejected it. But somehow it gained a berth in The New Yorker.
Now we come to the highlight...
Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Every sentence of this one is lovely, funny, and moving. The story is about a fool, and nobility. It feels pointless to say more about it. It's a work of art.
Ranking...
Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer
And He Built a Crooked House by Robert A Heinlein
Goodbye, My Brother by John Cheever
Only the first two are worth reading.
*****
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Copyright © Perry Willis 2025
Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the national Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.
Okay. You've inspired me. I likewise have collected collections of short stories unread. Amazing in that, on a fishing trip with my dad at 12, I read one story from Glenway Westcott's "Goodbye, Wisconsin" and then devoured the rest. It was the first adult book on my list.