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  “The Red One” by Jack London There it was!  The abrupt liberation of sound!  As he timed it with his watch, Bassett likened it to the trump of an archangel.  Walls of cities, he meditated, might well fall down before so vast and compelling a summons.  For the thousandth time vainly he tried to analyse the tone-quality of that enormous peal that dominated the land far into the strong-holds of…

“The Resurrection Morning” by Winifred Holtby When Mr Barrow died, none of us knew quite what to say to Mrs Barrow. ‘Deepest sympathy in your loss’ perhaps was best, because you can sympathise with fortune as well as with misfortune, and loss may be good riddance of bad rubbish. Not that Mr Barrow was exactly bad rubbish. The obituary notices called him a ‘prominent citizen of Kingsport,’ and he…

“A Society” by Virginia Woolf This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a milliner’s shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember,…

“Christmas Eve” by Nikolai Gogol translated by George Tolstoy as “The Night of Christmas Eve: A Legend of Little Russia” The last day before Christmas had just closed. A bright winter night had come on, stars had appeared, and the moon rose majestically in the heavens to shine upon good men and the whole of the world, so that they might gaily sing carols and hymns in praise of the nativity of…

“The Girl I Left Behind Me” by Muriel Spark It was just gone quarter past six when I left the office. ‘Teedle-um-tum-tum’ — there was the tune again, going round my head. Mr Letter had been whistling it all throughout the day between his noisy telephone calls and his dreamy sessions. Sometimes he whistled ‘Softly, Softly, Turn the Key’, but usually it was ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ rendered at…

“Columbus in Chains” by Jamaica Kincaid Outside, as usual, the sun shone, the trade winds blew; on her way to put some starched clothes on the line, my mother shooed some hens out of her garden; Miss Dewberry baked the buns, some of which my mother would buy for my father and me to eat with our afternoon tea; Miss Henry brought the milk, a glass of which I would drink with my lunch, and another…

“One of These Days” by Gabriel García Márquez translated by J.S. Bernstein Monday dawned warm and rainless. Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, and a very early riser, opened his office at six. He took some false teeth, still mounted in their plaster mold, out of the glass ease and put on the table a fistful of instruments which he arranged in size order, as if they were on display. He…

Eco-Fiction, 1971, ed. John Stadler. Pocket Books (1971). No cover artist or designer credited. 206 pages. The cover art is by Michael Eagle (you can see his signature in the illustration). In addition to the names listed on the back cover, this collection also features stories by J.G. Ballard, Frank Herbert, J.F. Powers and more. The vignette “The Turtle” condenses all of The Grapes of Wrath–and…