Short Stories - Real Estate by Lorrie Moore is part of Birds of America, placed on the 1050th place on The Greatest Books of All Time site, where it used to be in the first one thousand, that is the reason I took it up – more than five thousand works, books and films, are reviewed on my blogs https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-this-unique-could-it-make-money.html if you want to check this

 

Short Stories - Real Estate by Lorrie Moore is part of Birds of America, placed on the 1050^th place on The Greatest Books of All Time site, where it used to be in the first one thousand, that is the reason I took it up – more than five thousand works, books and films, are reviewed on my blogs https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-this-unique-could-it-make-money.html if you want to check this

 

 

8 out of 10

 

Short stories are a great genre: if the author is one of the luminaries, then readers have the benefit of enjoying a fabulous tale, and getting the most, in a very short time, compact, but not to the detriment of catharsis

 

Somerset Maugham https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-buried-talent-by-somerset-maugham.html was the nec plus ultra, well, he still is a favorite, although Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis has dented the image

 

‘Maugham is the only bad writer whose books you read to the end with interest, sympathy and enjoyment’ this was from The Letters of Kingsley Amis, a book that is more than one thousand pages long…

 

-          A chef d’oeuvre

 

Somerset Maugham has helped me through a very difficult period, when I had to spend months in hospitals, not because the illness was that serious, albeit a duodenal ulcer is no flimsy matter, but because of the tedium

A paradigm shift took place then, and whenever I mention paradigm I remember Vernon God Little https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/vernon-god-little-by-dbc-pierre.html Booker Prize Winner and a fantastic novel

 

-          A paradigm shift is defined in there

 

‘Imagine you enter a room, and a stranger has a finger up your grannie’s ass, what do you think? Vernon says “the bastard’, but then you find out that this fellow has tried to save your relative from some great danger’

Now what?

 

-          He is a hero

 

Words to that effect, only it is much funnier in the glorious book

One of the Stories from Birds of America, has a main character, I think her name was Helen, that comes from…Romania, which is where I live, although the town in the story is Targu Mures, way up, placed in Transylvania

 

They left this country, changed the name, and the woman works in a library, where she has to sort some Romanian books, which seems implausible, in some way, but then we were not living in the age of MAGA, so who knows?

 

There was an episode that was a bit (or maybe very) cruel, when they find this poor bat, and her partner uses a tennis racket, and he kills the animal, after which Helen (if that was her name) is upset and insists that he should have spared the creature…

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Woland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence

Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-this-unique-could-it-make-money.html  – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’