The short story is one of my favorite art forms. It’s precise, to the point and extremely powerful. Here are 15 inspiring stories you can read in one sitting.

A short story always reminds me of Pablo Picasso’s sketches of a bull, because the art is reduced to it’s bare minimum–only the essentials. Each sentence, each word and each image is so concise and purposely placed. Through these inspiring stories, authors teach us so much while explaining so little.

Can’t sit down to read a short story? Take it with you. The New Yorker Fiction podcast is a great way to experience inspiring stories on the go. In each episode, an author published in the New Yorker, chooses a short story from the magazine’s archives.

Regardless of how you consume them, here are 15 inspiring stories to read this week.

1. “Gertrude Talks Back” by Margaret Atwood

2 .”A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka

3. “Teddy” by J.D. Salinger

4. “Roy Spivey” by Miranda July

5. “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant

6. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez

7. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

8. “The Daughters of the Moon” by Italo Calvino

9. “Voices Lost in Snow” by Mavis Gallant

10. “A&P” by John Updike

11. “Eve’s Diary” by Mark Twain

12. “Love” by William Maxwell

13. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway

14. “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck

15. “The Dead” by James Joyce

Did we miss one of your favorites? Tell up in the comments below!

Related on EcoSalon:

14 Books to Read For Every Woman (And Man) 

20 Must Read Books for Women

28 Must Read Books That Will Change How You See The World

Images: Susivinh, Putnam Books, Ginnerobot, Zitona

The post Quick Lit: 15 Inspiring Stories You Can Read In An Hour appeared first on EcoSalon.

The new feminist looks like what? Caitlin Moran has some ideas.

Feminism has taken a bit of a hit in recent years. In 2009, foodie guru Michael Pollan notoriously blamed feminism, among other reasons, for American obesity and convenience-store culture; women working outside the home raised a generation that expects to spend no more than 27 minutes a day preparing food (with another four minutes for clean-up).

The new domesticity, with its emphasis on hobbies like canning and knitting, venerates figures like the Pioneer Woman for their handsome husbands and homemade cinnamon rolls. Glorifying domesticity perpetuates the idea that a woman’s place is married and in the kitchen, while glossing over the fact that Ree Drummond is also an ambitious career woman who carved a booming business out of the Oklahoma plains.

Our feminist role models are dwindling, replaced by a bevy of reality TV stars, pop singers in candy-colored underwear and hipster homemakers. No wonder Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman has been embraced, first in Britain and earlier this summer in the United States. Along with Tina Fey’s Bossypants, its frank, hilarious discussions seem unusually timely — at least, for women who are getting tired of trying to figure out how to simultaneously puree baby food out of homegrown carrots, hold down a successful career and keep their “minge” trimmed (or, as Moran would put it, “your lovely big Hair Bear Bunch-style ‘minge'”).

Part of the  book’s delight, at least for this American reader, is the constant, joyous stream of jokes and British slang. However, most of the book’s appeal lies in Moran’s unabashed feminist call to arms. Moran cites Germaine Greer as one of her heroes and uses a quick, handy formulaic for determining if you’re a feminist — “Do you have a vagina? Do you want to be in charge of it? Then congratulations! You’re a feminist.”

With chapter titles like “I Am Fat!” and “I Go Lap-dancing!” Moran covers topics as innocent as what kind of shoes to wear (flat ones, preferably yellow), and the horrifying, gory details of giving birth: “[I] was nobly resigned to my own poignant gravestone in a churchyard: ‘Died in childbirth. 2001. Like Miss Melly in Gone with the Wind.'”

If we can’t talk about a topic, we let its basic assumptions go unquestioned, and so Moran leaves no stone unturned. Some of her stances seem problematic — I, for example, don’t really think that holding a large wedding is necessarily a sign of female oppression. But overall, Moran’s writing sounds like the honest, funny and possibly drunken conversations that you might have with your best friends at 3 am.

At a time when so much feminist literature seems to be screeds pitting one woman against another, it’s refreshing and arguably necessary to see an insightful and enthusiastic, if occasionally messy and unfocused, embrace of what it means to value women’s equal rights, in both personal and professional arenas. Says Moran, “I don’t think the word ‘feminist’ on its own is enough. I want to bring it back in conjunction with the word ‘strident’…It’s been so wrong for so long that it’s back to being right again.”

The post Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to be a Woman’ a Hilarious Defense of Feminism appeared first on EcoSalon.

The best of EcoSalon’s stories this week.

The novel and the short story are two very different forms of literature. Scott Adelson challenges himself – and us – to learn the latter.

Californian artist Annie Voight hates how the waning popularity of handwritten letters is hastening the disappearance of handwriting. (Yes, really). Her response? To painstakingly cut the words out of her correspondences with a knife and make art with them. You can see the amazing results here.

Imagine Ethiopia is on a mission to charitably bring education to where it’s needed, and they’re looking for talented, hard-working volunteers to spread the word about their efforts to build schools in Ethiopia. (For equally good works, check out Passports with Purpose).

Kicking off a new series featuring remarkable women overcoming extraordinary challenges, we featured Mountain2Mountain founder Shannon Galpin, facing down fear with two wheels and a lot of grit.

Lastly, we’re not convinced gardens are best grown horizontally. Take a look at these 12 luscious vertical gardens and tell us if you feel the same way!

The post The Friday 5: Word Up Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

I love you.

Who better to write the world’s most passionate love letters than the world’s finest writers? In Irish journalist, political activist and Nobel Prize winning dramatist George Bernard Shaw, we find a man so enamored with love letters that  he conducted an entire affair by them…

The midnight train…gets to Dorking at 1 (a.m.) 14th-15th June 1897…stopping just now, but will joggle like mad presently.

Do you read these jogged scrawls, I wonder. I think of your poor eyes, and resolve to tear what I have written up: then I look out at the ghostly country and the beautiful night, and I cannot bring myself to read a miserable book…Yes, as you guess, Ellen, I am having a bad attack of you just at present. I am restless; and a man’s restlessness always means a woman; and my restlessness means Ellen. And your conduct is often shocking. Today I was wandering somewhere…when I glanced at a shop window; and there you were – oh disgraceful and abandoned – in your third Act Sans Gene dress – a mere waistband – laughing wickedly, and saying maliciously: “Look have restless one, at your pillow, at what you are really thinking about.” How can you look Window and Grove’s camera in the face with such thoughts in your head and almost nothing on…

Oh fie, fie, let me get away from this stuff, which you have been listening to all your life, & despise – though indeed, dearest Ellen, these silly longings stir up great waves of tenderness in which there is no guile.

I shall find a letter from you when I get back to Lotus, shall I not? Reigate we are at now; and it’s a quarter to one. In ten minutes, Dorking station; in seventeen minutes thereafter, Lotus, and a letter. Only a letter, perhaps not even that. O Ellen, what will you say when the Recording Angel asks you why one of your sins have my name to them?

When George Bernard Shaw first met Ellen Terry in 1892, she was an internationally renowned actress and he was a relatively unknown journalist. They corresponded fitfully for 3 years, by which time Shaw had made a name for himself, and then embarked on (in Shaw’s words) “a paper courtship…perhaps the pleasantest and most enduring of all courtships.” Their love of their shared craft bound them with a strange, coy intimacy – they would only meet when their rate of correspondence slowed and a real romance became out of the question.

And Terry’s assessment of Shaw in person?

“He was quite unlike what I had imagined from his letters.”

Further Reading: Ellen Terry & George Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (and thoughts on).

Images: TCNJ and Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Love Letters Project #14: George Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry appeared first on EcoSalon.

A love letter from Mary Wordsworth in response to her husband, William.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? And just imagine if that love letter came from a husband that was one of the most famous English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth? Here is his wife’s response to a letter sadly lost to us…

Oh My William! It is not in my power to tell thee how I have been affected by this dearest of all letters – it was so unexpected – so new a thing to see the breathing of thy inmost heart upon paper that I was quite overpowered, & now that I sit down to answer thee in the loneliness & depth of that love which unites us & which cannot be felt but by ourselves, I am so agitated & my eyes are so bedimmed that I scarcely know how to proceed…

Wordsworth’s marriage to his second wife, Mary Hutchinson, would come at a difficult time for the English poet. Two of his children would soon die, his brother would be lost at sea and his sister would suffer an emotional breakdown. Throughout, his love for his wife Mary shines through – even if we can only catch second-hand glimpses of it…

The post The Love Letters Project #12: In Response To William Wordsworth appeared first on EcoSalon.

A letter (of love?) from Jack London to fellow writer Anna Strunsky.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? In turning to author and journalist Jack London, we are faced with a question – where does close friendship end and love begin?

Dear Anna,

April 3, 1901

Did I say that the human might be filed in categories? Well, and if I did, let me qualify — not all humans. You elude me. I cannot place you, cannot grasp you. I may boast that of nine out of ten, under given circumstances, I can forecast their action; that of nine out of ten, by their word or action, I may feel the pulse of their hearts. But of the tenth I despair. It is beyond me. You are that tenth.

Were ever two souls, with dumb lips, more incongruously matched! We may feel in common — surely, we oftimes do — and when we do not feel in common, yet do we understand; and yet we have no common tongue. Spoken words do not come to us. We are unintelligible. God must laugh at the mummery.

The one gleam of sanity through it all is that we are both large temperamentally, large enough to often understand. True, we often understand but in vague glimmering ways, by dim perceptions, like ghosts, which, while we doubt, haunt us with their truth. And still, I, for one, dare not believe; for you are that tenth which I may not forecast.

Am I unintelligible now? I do not know. I imagine so. I cannot find the common tongue.

Large temperamentally — that is it. It is the one thing that brings us at all in touch. We have, flashed through us, you and I, each a bit of universal, and so we draw together. And yet we are so different.

I smile at you when you grow enthusiastic? It is a forgivable smile — nay, almost an envious smile. I have lived twenty-five years of repression. I learned not to be enthusiastic. It is a hard lesson to forget. I begin to forget, but it is so little. At the best, before I die, I cannot hope to forget all or most. I can exult, now that I am learning, in little things, in other things; but of my things, and secret things doubly mine, I cannot, I cannot. Do I make myself intelligible? Do you hear my voice? I fear not. There are poseurs. I am the most successful of them all.

Jack

Is this the voice of an eloquent man overcome with passion? Clearly. What kind of passion? Good question. At the time of writing, London was a willing participant in a loveless marriage to his first wife, Bessie Madern – a union designed to create stability and children. It would falter, and a divorce would follow in 1904. Through this marriage ran the close friendship he shared with Strunsky. Both writers were fascinated with the nature of love, and would collaborate on The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903), a fictionalised exploration of two philosophies of love with Strunsky taking the romantic view, London the scientific.

So is this a letter exploring a friendship and foreshadowing a piece of academic enquiry – or is it the work of a man who can’t contain his romantic feelings? We may never know.

Images: Wikimedia Commons & JackLondons.net.

The post The Love Letters Project #9: Jack London and Anna Strunsky appeared first on EcoSalon.

A love letter from Mark Twain to his future wife, Olivia.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? And it’s difficult to top the fame of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (described by William Faulkner as “the father of American literature”). This is how Mark Twain goes a-wooing…

Livy dear,

I have already mailed to-day’s letter, but I am so proud of my privilege of writing the dearest girl in the world whenever I please, that I must add a few lines if only to say I love you, Livy. For I do love you, Livy…as the dew loves the flowers; as the birds love the sunshine; as the wavelets love the breeze; as mothers love their first-born; as memory loves old faces; as the yearning tides love the moon; as the angels love the pure in heart…

Take my kiss and my benediction, and try to be reconciled to the fact that I am

Yours forever,

Sam

…..

P.S.– I have read this letter over and it is flippant and foolish and puppyish. I wish I had gone to bed when I got back, without writing. You said I must never tear up a letter after writing it to you and so I send it. Burn it, Livy, I did not think I was writing so clownishly and shabbily. I was in much too good a humor for sensible letter writing.

Self-mocking it may have been, but this courtship was a success. The object of Twain’s affection here is Olivia Langdon – having rejected his first proposal of marriage, she had just accepted his second and would become his wife within the year. Through her, Twain came into contact with a number of American luminaries including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Their marriage would last 34 years until Olivia’s death in 1904.

Images: Abdullah Frères (Wikimedia Commons) & Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Love Letters Project #8: Mark Twain & Olivia Langdon appeared first on EcoSalon.

A love letter from Winston Churchill to his wife, Clementine.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? Proving romance isn’t always confined to courtship, we turn to a letter from future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to his wife Clementine, written during Winston’s trip to Germany after one year of marriage:

15 September 1909 Kronprinz Hotel

Wurzburg

My darling, We have been out all day watching these great manoeuvres. . . .

I have a very nice horse from the Emperor’s stable, & am able to ride about wherever I choose with a suitable retinue. As I am supposed to be an ‘Excellency’ I get a vy good place. Freddie on the other hand is ill-used. These people are so amazingly routinière that anything the least out of the ordinary – anything they have not considered officially & for months – upsets them dreadfully….I saw the Emperor today & had a few minutes’ talk with him. He is vy sallow – but otherwise looks quite well. . . . .

We have had a banquet tonight at the Bavarian palace. A crowd of princes & princelets & the foreign officers of various countries. It began at 6 p.m. & was extremely dull. . . .

This army is a terrible engine. It marches sometimes 35 miles in a day. It is in number as the sands of the sea – & with all the modern conveniences. There is a complete divorce between the two sides of German life – the Imperialists & Socialist. Nothing unites them. They are two different nations. With us there are so many shades. Here it is all black & white (the Prussian colours). I think another 50 years will see a wiser & gentler world. But we shall not be spectators of it. Only the P.K. [“puppy kitten” – their nickname for their first child] will glitter in a happier scene. How easily men could make things much better than they are – if only all tried together! Much as was attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situation – I feel more deeply every year – & can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms – what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.

Sweet cat – I kiss your vision as it rises before my mind. Your dear heart throbs often in my own. God bless you darling keep you safe & sound.

Kiss the P.K. for me all over

With fondest love

W.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill’s later fame as wartime Prime Minister has overshadowed his prowess as an artist, historian and writer – regarding the latter, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. His love affair with the written word was matched only by his devotion to the love of his life, Clementine Hozier – they first met in 1904, were married in 1908, would have 5 children and would still be together at Winston’s death in 1965, aged 90.

Images/Reference: The Library Of Congress.

The post The Love Letters Project #7: Winston & Clementine Churchill appeared first on EcoSalon.

The best of EcoSalon’s stories this week.

Everything Fred Astaire did, Ginger Rogers did backwards and in high heels – and this week, we take inspiration from one of early cinema’s most graceful performers.

Helvetica – the font without personality? Not so, as these 20 terrifically creative (and obsessive) projects illustrate.

If you’ve ever found yourself turning up your nose at a young adult novel, you might be missing a trick. Scott Adelson looks at 10 examples of truly terrific fiction for kids and teens.

Just because you’re renting doesn’t mean you have to live in drab surroundings. The landlord won’t let you repaint? Then refurnish yourself a riot of color.

Finally, fermented food means tasty food. How many of these have you tried?

The post The Friday 5: Unsung Heroes Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

The only problem? Sometimes, it is finding the next book. We’ve already rounded up 28 books that will forever change how you see the world, eco fashion books we love and the best books for your home.

This list of our favorite tomes is compiled for the modern woman and those who admire her. Inspired by our friends at The Art of Manliness, check out the texts that helped to shape our lives and easy chairs.

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The Awakening by Kate Chopin Kate Chopin’s 1899 masterpiece tells the tale of Edna Pontellier, a wealthy Creole woman lost in her own search for meaning. Chopin’s heroine who eschewed convention so disturbed critics that the novel was banished for decades, only to be revived during the modern feminist movement. Simply, it is exquisite.

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Beloved by Toni Morrison Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Morrison’s classic looks at antebellum slavery, motherhood, and racism through a dense and complex web of subtle revelation. We follow the tale of Sethe, a former slave, who slowly gives up her horrifying past in a way that will stay with you for a long time.

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood In the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, the extreme right has massacred Congress and is in control. Women are unable to read, hold jobs, or even have their own name. You are a chaste Wife, a domestic Martha, or a Handmaid – and your sole purpose in life is to bear children you will hand over immediately after birth. Feminist nightmare? Definitely. A must-read? Absolutely.

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Ines of My Soul by Isabele Allende As Bookmarks Magazine writes of this novel, “If Inés of My Soul isn’t among Isabel Allende’s best novels, it still tells a remarkable, ambitious, and heretofore untold story about one of the first female conquistadors of the New World. Allende finds so many surreal subplots in Inés’s own story that the author’s imagination, rather than magical realism, prevails in her attempt to recreate the 16th-century Americas.”

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Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi Faludi argues that women in the 1980s were the victim of a powerful backlash against the 1970s feminist movement. Publisher’s Weekly says “this eloquent, brilliantly argued book should be read by everyone concerned about gender equality.”

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Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum Tanenbaum compiles a revealing look at slut-shaming through several first-person narratives, all detailing how 50 different women survived shaming in a world ripe with double standards. As one reviewer put it, “Her social critique is solid, but it’s the personal accounts of emotional abuse – and, thankfully, perseverance – that will thoroughly convince you that the current tolerance of slut bashing is simply unacceptable.”

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Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert Love her or hate her, Elizabeth Gilbert knows how to pull you in. At the age of 31, Gilbert swaps a husband and life in the suburbs for adventure and east in Italy and beyond. It’s a funny, relatable tale of a woman’s search for self-discovery. And the best part? No one has to die for it in the end.

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Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin Germaine Greer called this “The most shocking book any feminist has yet written.” Dworkin looks at sexual intercourse as a tool of societal oppression and declares women are less able to “assert their humanity” because of the breaching of boundaries during the act of sex. It is alternately extremely controversial and absorbing.

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Living My Life by Emma Goldman This one review says it all: “Forget all those New Left memoirs: for readers who want to know what it is to be a revolutionary in America, this is the book to read. At the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was probably the most hated woman in her adopted country. (She emigrated from Russia at age 17.) It was bad enough that she was an anarchist, accused of complicity in the 1901 assassination of President McKinley. But her vehement espousal of women’s rights, including birth control, really enraged upright citizens.” And then there’s more…

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“The Laugh of the Medusa” by Hélène Cixous Cixous is considered a mother of post-structural feminist theory. In her essay “The Laugh of Medusa,” she writes: “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges the anti-linear, cyclical writing so often frowned upon by patriarchal society.”

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The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank Anne Frank’s intensely moving account of her rise into womanhood while hiding with her family from Nazi Germany is not only a memorial to the Holocaust, but a testament to the strength and grace of the human spirit.

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Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by Bell Hooks Hooks looks at the history of black women from the seventeenth century onwards and how they have been oppressed by men and white women alike. As one critic writes, “Illustrating her analysis with moving personal accounts, Ain’t I a Woman is deeply critical of the racism inherent in the thought of many middle-class white feminists who have failed to address issues of race and class.”

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The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton Wharton’s Lily Bart lives in New York City during the Gilded Age, but she finds life amongst convention and appearances to be her greatest struggle. As Wharton writes, Bart lives “as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room.” Her fall from grace from a world built on superficial conformity and double standard reflects the narrow confines of womanhood of the time.

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Crescent: A Novel by Diane Abu-Jaber As one reviewer writes, “Abu-Jaber (Arabian Jazz) weaves the story of a love affair between a comely chef and a handsome, haunted Near Eastern Studies professor together with a fanciful tale of a mother’s quest to find her wayward son in this beautifully imagined and timely novel, which explores private emotions and global politics with both grace and conviction.” Others call it “a positive relief to read a novel that treats Iraqis as real people.”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 1811. Two sisters, two ways of looking at the world. There’s dashing men, English countryside, and expensive pianofortes. Need we say more?

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Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by Andrea Dworkin Legendary feminist Andrew Dworkin shares the account of her “political formation.” If you want to see what makes a modern-day feminist and anti-pornographer, then pick up her tome.

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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See Set in 19th-century China, See’s graceful novel tells the story of Snow Flower and Lily, lifelong friends bound together by the strict conventions places on women of this time. It reveals nu shu, which is a secret written phonetic code among women. And it leads the reader most vividly through the excruciating process of foot binding, where the idea of “you must suffer for beauty” takes on a whole new meaning.

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Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher As Publisher’s Weekly writes, “From her work as a psychotherapist for adolescent females, Pipher here posits and persuasively argues her thesis that today’s teenage girls are coming of age in a girl-poisoning culture. Backed by anecdotal evidence and research findings, she suggests that, despite the advances of feminism, young women continue to be victims of abuse, self-mutilation, and consumerism and media pressure to conform to others’ ideals.” A must-read for anyone who knows a young girl.

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How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez As one review wrote, “Reading this book was like talking to the friend that went on the same trip as you, only the week before.” Alvarez’s tale tells the story of four Dominican daughters in exile in New York City and how they rebel against the older generation.

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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Alcott’s classic tells the tale of four other American daughters, but these live in mid 19th-century New England. Epitomizing the four tropes of womanhood, timely yet still applicable today, are Domestic Meg, Independent Jo, Angel Beth, and Artistic Amy. Alcott fashioned a classic for women of all time.

Image: eflon

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