"Gimpel the Fool" | |
---|---|
Author | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
Translator | Saul Bellow |
Publisher | Noonday Press |
Publication date | 1957 |
"Gimpel the Fool" (1953) is a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated into English by Saul Bellow in 1953. It tells the story of Gimpel, a simple bread maker who is the butt of many of his town's jokes. It also gives its name to the collection first published in 1957. David Roskies has put forward the view that the story constitutes a modernist revision of a story by Nachman of Bratslav. [1]
The 1957 collection contains the following stories:
The Unseen is all about desires and how far a person is willing to go to get what they desire, even at the expense of others they care about.
Elka
Elka, who is known as the town prostitute, marries Gimpel when he agrees to get the town to take up a collection to raise a dowry for her. She is five months pregnant by another man when they are married, but she tells Gimpel the child is his and, when it arrives four months after their marriage, that it is simply premature. Throughout the story Elka commits numerous infidelities and eventually has six children, none of whom are Gimpel's. On her deathbed she admits her infidelities to her husband and asks him to forgive her.
The Spirit of Evil
The devil appears to Gimpel the baker and tells him to urinate in the bread intended for the village in order to get revenge for the many injustices the villagers have forced him to endure over the years. He does so, but is scolded by the spirit of his deceased wife. He destroys the tainted bread and becomes a homeless wandering shoemaker; at night he talks with the spirit of Elka.
"The Miller's Tale" is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s–1390s), told by the drunken miller Robin to "quite" "The Knight's Tale". The Miller's Prologue is the first "quite" that occurs in the tales.
"The Merchant's Tale" is one of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In it Chaucer subtly mocks antifeminist literature like that of Theophrastus ('Theofraste'). The tale also shows the influence of Boccaccio, Deschamps' Le Miroir de Mariage, Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris, Andreas Capellanus, Statius and Cato. The tale is found in Persia in the Bahar Danush, in which the husband climbs a date tree instead of a pear tree. It could have arrived in Europe through the One Thousand and One Nights, or perhaps the version in book VI of the Masnavi by Rumi. Though several of the tales are sexually explicit by modern standards, this one is especially so. Larry Benson remarks:
"The Reeve's Tale" is the third story told in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The reeve, named Oswald in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. He is described in the Tales as skinny and bad-tempered and old; his hair is closely cropped reflecting his social status as a serf. His sword is rusty while he rides a fine gray horse called Scot. The Reeve is a skilled carpenter, a profession mocked in the previous "Miller's Tale". Oswald responds with a tale that mocks the Miller's profession.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as The Golden Ass, is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.
Let's Do it Again is a 1953 Technicolor musical film set in 1950 New York, and released by Columbia Pictures. The film was directed by Alexander Hall and starred Jane Wyman, Ray Milland, Aldo Ray, and Tom Helmore. It is the story of a composer's wife (Wyman) who tries to make him (Milland) jealous, but the ploy backfires and leads to divorce.
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"What Men Live By" is a short story written by Russian author Leo Tolstoy in 1885. It is one of the short stories included in his collection What Men Live By, and Other Tales, published in 1885. The compilation also included the written pieces "The Three Questions", "The Coffee-House of Surat", and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?".
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"The Hardwood Pile" is a contemporary fantasy story by American writer L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in the magazine Unknown for September, 1940. It first appeared in book form in the collection The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales ; it later appeared in the collection The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, and the anthology Bestiary! The story has been translated into French and German.
Last Tales is a collection of short stories by the Danish author Karen Blixen, which was published in 1957. The collection contains a group of stories taken from several other collections Blixen had been simultaneously working on for several years.