The Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Review, in partnership with the New Haven Theater Company and four area coffeehouses, are pleased to announce the launch of Listen Here! a weekly short story reading series. On Thursday evenings, from 7-8pm, actors from the New Haven Theater Company will read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors. Readings will take place on a rotating basis at Blue State Coffee, Koffee on Audubon, Lulu: A European Coffeehouse, and Manjares Fine Pastries (Westville).


Join us at Koffee on Audubon on Thursday, September 10, from 7-8pm, for the first reading, which will include stories of “childish adults” by Salinger and Bradbury.

A full schedule for Listen Here! follows.

September 10: Childish Adults
Koffee on Audubon
104 Audubon Street
(203) 562.5454.
www.koffeenewhaven.com

J.D. Salinger, “The Laughing Man”
The year is 1928 in Manhattan, with our story's narrator looking back to his time as a nine-year-old member of the after-school Comanche Club. Run by “The Chief,” an NYU law student, John Gedsuski from Staten Island regales his charges with the stories of the Laughing Man, the light-hearted and light-fingered criminal genius whose antics grow more somber as Gedsuski's relationship with his girlfriend begins its own downward spiral. The Chief's own tale of love gained and lost is mirrored in the fate of the Laughing Man, leaving the narrator and reader to piece together the parallels between the story Gedsuski lives and the stories he tells.

Ray Bradbury, “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!”
“Father Malley drowsed in his confessional, waiting for penitents,” and, boy, does he get himself a penitent: a chocoholic whose addiction and consequent weight raise Father Malley’s spirits from the depths of the summer's doldrums into a more heavenly realm. This little-known Bradbury tale is one of his brightest and funniest and most touching non-science fiction tales. "Have I…" suggests that there is magic in our small sins.

September 17: The Impious of the Perverse: High Holidays Special
Blue State Coffee
84 Wall Street
(203) 764-2632
www.bluestatecoffee.com

Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews”
“Mrs. Freedman had to see Rabbi Binder twice before about Ozzie's questions and this Wednesday at four-thirty would be the third time." Hebrew school student Oscar Freedman and his teacher Rabbi Binder are on a collision course and the results will not be anything you expect as an argument over what miracles divinity can perform escalates into a theological free-for-all about what it truly means to, as Oscar later puts it, "hit anybody about God." By the end, this is a tale of compulsion, suffering, and possible forgiveness.

Melvin Jules Bukiet, "The Golden Calf and the Red Heifer"
"Looming in blood-smeared smock, the master of their gastronomical discontent, Kleinberg knew his customers' appetites better than they did themselves." This story is a wild ride of hypocrisy, sex, religion, and magic. Kleinberg, the local butcher, finds himself the test case of the impure made pure, the profane made sacred. Already cheating his customers in sundry small ways, Kleinberg receives a bizarre opportunity to redeem himself, but at dreadful cost, when a young woman enters his shop and asks him — without his realizing it — to pay the true cost our small sins demand in the aggregate.

September 24: Great Expectations
Lulu: A European Coffeehouse
49 Cottage Street
(203) 785-9218
www.lulucoffee.com

James Joyce, “Araby”
“Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door.” In this short classic, which appeared in Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners, our newly pubescent narrator has fallen and fallen hard for his good friend Mangan’s unnamed sister. His head is awhirl with her and his decision to demonstrate his love by purchasing her something from an exotic-sounding bazaar (the fabled Araby), just a train ride away, ends in despair and disaster of the overwrought kind that only a twelve-year-old imagination can make these things into. The art in this story is Joyce’s penchant for understatement.

John Cheever, “The Pot of Gold”
“You could not say fairly of Ralph and Laura Whittemore that they had the failings and the characteristics of incorrigible treasure hunters, but you could say truthfully of them that the shimmer and the smell, the peculiar force of money, the promise of it, had an untoward influence on their lives.” This pretty well sums up this classic Cheever story of the American Dream in all of its bland, sunny optimism. Ralph and Laura will struggle: success is always just around the corner and their touching faith in that is what motors this story forward. The not necessarily unexpected ending is surprising not for the hope it promises but by virtue of the fact that Cheever in most of his stories is not always so forthcoming with silver linings. This tale is a delicate balance between the false wiles snares laid by capitalist expectation and the possibility that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not always the pot we expect.

October 1: In Loco Parentis
Manjares Fine Pastries
838 Whalley Avenue (Westville)
(203) 389-4489

Jim Shepard, "Courtesy for Beginners"
"Summer camp: here's how bad summer camp was." Shepard's protagonist is sent to summer camp while his parents wrestle with the difficult decision of what to do with his younger, fourth-grade brother prone to rages that gain in intensity. This is a story of surviving — adolescence, camping, family trouble — and the ways we survive by closing ourselves off, of minimizing our commitment to and our feelings for family, for the bullied ones, for the troubled among us.

Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried"
"'Tell me something I won't mind forgetting,' she said. 'Make it useless stuff or skip it.'" These are the opening words of the narrator's bedridden, dying companion at an unnamed (almost unreal) hospital. Hempel's tale is situated in a place — physically and mentally — where distraction from whatever conditions afflict the narrator and her friend/roommate is an absolute necessity for survival. In keeping with the theme of in loco parentis, our narrator is the ultimate caretaker whose hidden reserve of strength manifests itself despite her perpetual state of fear.

October 8: Shock Treatment
Koffee on Audubon

Marisa Silver: "What I Saw from Where I Stood"
"Dulcie needs things to be exact. You have to explain yourself clearly when you're around her, so she's probably a good teacher. For a minute, I wondered whether she wished we had been shot, just for the sake of logic." Silver's story of a car jacking and its cumulative effect on the trauma Dulcie and the narrator previously underwent from having lost a child in a late miscarriage sets the tone for a tale of love in the face of fear and uncertainty. Less affected by the terribleness of these events, the narrator must decide by its end whether to move on with or without Dulcie. Hempel's tale has us confront the messiness of living and consider the great strength that must be brought to bear despite or perhaps because of that messiness.

Adam Haslett, "The Good Doctor"
"The fact was he still felt like a sponge, absorbing the pain of the people he listened to." This is the problem confronting Frank, a psychiatrist working in the boonies, desperate to get out as well as out of debt. As Frank rues his financial situation and boredom, the call he pays upon the Buckholdt home shocks him with the enormity not only of the tragedy under which the family labors but his own need to, as he says, "organize his involuntary proximity to pain." In the end, Haslett's story is not about the counseling Frank's patients need but his deep-seated need to give counsel.

October 15: Love Stories
Blue State Coffee

Woody Allen, "The Kugelmass Episode"
"Kugelmass was gone. At the same moment, he appeared in the bedroom of Charles and Emma Bovary's house at Yonville." One of Woody Allen's classic tours de force, this tale chronicles professor Kugelmass' hiring of magician extraordinaire "The Great Persky" to transport him into the pages of Madame Bovary, where he carries an affair with the beautiful Emma. As he and Emma move between their respective worlds, Allen's story turns Flaubert's classic on its head, causing more than one student to ask "'Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?'"

J.D. Salinger, "Just Before the War with the Eskimos"
"Ginnie openly considered Selena the biggest drip at Miss Basehoar's — a school ostensibly abounding with fair-sized drips — but at the same time she had never known anyone like Selena for bringing fresh cans of tennis balls." Salinger's love story that is not yet a love story is of a piece with the other shorts collected in his Nine Stories. Here we have the upper crust but all-too-New York Ginnie accompanying the "drippy" Selena home to collect all the unpaid for cab fares from their weekly tennis matches. When Ginnie meets Selena's "character" of a brother, Franklin, a new world of compassion and possibility opens for her.

October 22: Make Good Choices
Lulu: A European Coffeehouse

John Updike, "A&P"
"You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A&P …" Welcome to the world of our working-class narrator, whose ogling of and misplaced sympathy for a group of underdressed, presumably upper-class beauties precipitates anything but a set of good choices.

Michael Byers, "In Spain, One Thousand and Three"
"The refrigerator still clinked with Evelyn's tall colorful jars: her fancy jams, her French sauces, and spreads. All of these were rotten now, he suspected, but he hadn't the heart to get rid of them." A directionless and confused Martin Tuttleman must cope with the passing of his twenty-something wife, Evelyn, from terminal cancer. Still in his prime, Martin wrestles with the demons of his sexual past and possibly sex-addicted future. His struggle to leaven loss with acceptance without regressing is captured in the tale's slow assembly, bit by bit, of the pieces of Martin's numbness and anxiety. Not until the final climax (pun intended) does Martin finally mature into the next stage of acceptance and release the ghosts that occupy him.

October 29: Something Wicked This Way Comes: Halloween Special
Manjares Fine Pastries

Program TBA

November 5: In the Blink of an Eye
Koffee on Audubon

Ambrose Bierce, "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
He awaited each stroke with impatience and — he knew not why — apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch." Bierce's tale is a classic of temporal telescoping (or is it microscoping?), as a convicted Civil War soldier imagines his escape just before he faces his Maker.

Dave Eggars, "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Was Drowned"
"Oh I'm a fast dog. I'm fast-fast. It's true and I love being fast I admit I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by and you say, Damn! That's a fast dog! Well that's me. A fast dog. I'm a fast fast dog. Hoooo! Hoooo!" Eggars' reworking, if you will, of Jack London's Call of the Wild and Richard Adams' Plague Dogs is a literary experiment and meditation on the "now"-ness of animal existence. It is also a commentary on the cruelties and beautiful moments, both human and animal, within the limited scope of that existence.

November 12: The Future of Our Discontents
Blue State Coffee

Harlan Ellison: "Along the Scenic Route"
"The blood-red Mercury with the twin-mounted 7.6 mm Spandaus cut George off as he was shifting lanes." Harlan Ellison's future meditation on road rage is a classic "twist ending" story, worthy of O Henry himself. The "chicken race" duel in which the much-frustrated middle-aged George engages becomes a ride for dear life itself, a ride, he discovers, that will never end.

Ursula LeGuin: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
"Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?" And what price are we willing to pay to keep a moral order intact? LeGuin's implied narrator oozes an ironic smugness that fails to understand the moral accounting it describes. As such this story is perhaps the most telling criticism in literature (barring Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery") of a dehumanized utilitarianism.

November 19: Family Romance: Pre-Thanksgiving Special
Lulu: A European Coffeehouse

Steve Almond, "The Soul Molecule"
"A cartridge has been placed in my head for surveillance purposes. This was done a number of years ago by a race of superior beings. I don't know if you know anything about abduction, Jim. Do you know anything about abduction?" What would you do if a friend from college years later claimed he had been abducted by aliens? What would you do if the rest of his family asserted the same? That's our narrator's predicament in this wonderfully absurd tale that asks us to see the beautiful in the crazy. Almond's tale is less comedy than family love story — the kind of love story that one sees only through properly tinted lenses.

Julie Orringer, "The Isabel Fish"
"I am the canker of my brother Sage's life. He has told me so in no uncertain terms." A story of tragedy and trauma, of blame and guilt, Orringer's "The Isabel Fish" is a different kind of family romance: the tensions between brother and sister taken to a level where culpability and forgiveness face off so that only one will remain. Told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old girl who survives a watery car crash that takes the life of her brother's girlfriend, this tale is equal parts pathos and stoicism.

John Updike photo by Elena Seibert