"A Clean Well Lighted Place"

The short story "A Clean Well Lighted Place" written by Ernest Hemingway is about to waiters, one young and one old, who are having a conversation about an old man who comes in to the cafe to drink the night away. I really liked the story. I liked how Hemingway was able to make the old waiter and the old drunken man parallel. As I was reading I couldn't help, but think how one day the older waiter will be the old drunken man in the cafe. The old drunken man and the older waiter are similar in that they would rather be in a well lighted cafe drinking all night than to go outside in the cold lonely darkness. This story is my second favorite out of all we have read. Amy Tan's being the first.

"Metamorphosis"

The short story "Metamorphosis" written by Franz Kafka is about a young traveling salesman who morphs into a giant bug. His sister is the only one who takes this transformation well. He stays in his room and the family feeds him. Since the family no longer has Gregor to work the family debt off they must all go find jobs. Gregor's state eventually leads to his mother's death, and the family begins using his room as a storage room. One day he hears his sister play the violin and he goes down stairs to see her and to in way let her know that he is there and he will do what he can to help her with her gift. He scares their tenants and he goes and dies in his room full of sadness. I hated this story. Not only was it long, but it had an awful ending.

"A Pair of Tickets"

The short story "A Pair of Tickets" written by Amy Tan is about a woman who goes to China to meet her twin sisters she has never meet before. Along this journey through China, June May, begins to feel Chinese as her mother said she would. By the end of the story June May has found who she really is and she finally understands what her mother had told her before she died. Her mother told her that her Chinese heritage was in her blood. June may felt as though she was as Chinese as her Caucasian friends, but again when she visits China she begins to feel exactly what her mother had talked about all those years. I really enjoyed the story. It has been the best one so far.

"Sonny's Blues"

The short story "Sonny's Blues" written by James Baldwin is about a young man who is addicted to Heroin and the story is written in his brother's point of view. The narrator, Sonny's brother, doesn't understand why his brother does drugs. When Sonny finally comes to live with his brother he begins to open up and tell his brother about the pain he feels and what it feels like to be high. He then asks his brother to come to the club where he plays the piano. His brother goes and listens to him and can hear the pain in the music played by the band. It is the first time the brother has really ever felt anything by music and the story ends there with the brother starting to understand Sonny from a different perspective.

"The Tell-Tale Heart"

In Edgar Alan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" A man who already seems quite insane from the beginning kills the older man he lives with. The insane man justifies his killing by saying that the man's evil eye, an eye that look like a vulture, was making him go mad. At the end of the story the cops are called by a name who says that he or she has heard a suspicious squeal from the house the insane man and older man are in. When the cops arrive the insane man convinces the, at the beginning, that everything is okay and the squeal was him being startled awake, but when the man began to hear a heart beat coming up from the floor boards where he buried the old man. He tells the cops everything that happened.

"A Rose for Emily"

William Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" is about a psychotic women by the name of Emily Grierson who's family was very self absorbed. When Emily's father dies she no longer has to pay taxes. Colonel Sartoris made up a story that Emily's father loaned the town a good bit of money and the way that the town was going to pay it back was eliminating any taxes due by Ms. Emily Grierson. Eventually Emily met a man that was of a lower class rank and began "dating" him. Not long after their "dating" Emily kills him with arsenic, and the towns people find her "surprise" after her death in a locked up room where she laid with the decaying body night after night.

"A&P"

John Updike's short story "A&P" was about a young man working at a grocery store who has found an interest in three girls that walk in with bathing suits on. Updike is very descriptive when talking about these girls through the narrator, Sammy. This is why Sammy is considered to be a first person unreliable narrator. He is very dramatic and over emphasizes the reality of whats going on. I thought Sammy was quite immature for nineteen years old. I also thought that it was funny when he quit his job to impress the girls, but they had already left and didn't even see his "heroic" act.