The Broken Record Technique is a collection of short stories by Canadian author Lee Henderson. It was first published by Penguin Canada in 2002, and contains ten short stories. The tenth story, entitled simply "W", is considerably longer than the rest, standing at one hundred pages. The average for the other stories is a little over ten pages each. This was Lee Henderson's first book, and contained some previously published short stories, one of which, "Sheep Dub" was part of the 2000 Journey Prize Anthology.
The short stories within the book are not connected, but recognizably follow the same quirkiness that gives the collection its charm. The opening story "Attempts at a Great Relationship" describes a young man who lives through five possible scenarios at the new wave-pool with his wife, searching for the one that would save his marriage. "The Unfortunate" tells the heart-breaking story a boy born with a football-shaped head. In "The Runner after John Cheever" a man takes an unusual marathon in memory of his dead lover.
The book takes its odd name from a work by Edmund J. Bourne titled "The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook". In this work, the "broken record" technique is a form of calm persistent repetition that allows the user to eventually achieve what they want. The author specifically warns against the use of this technique in close relationships.
Contents
Attempts at a Great Relationship
Mirage/Fata Morgana
Spines a Length of Velcro
Shaved Temple
Sheep Dub
Any Number of Reasons to Act as One Does, Under the Circumstances
The Runner after John Cheever
The Unfortunate
Highlights From the Young Boy vs The Ram
This article about a collection of short stories published in the 2000s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century.
James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorised biography. He became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series Noctes Ambrosianae, published in Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. His other works include the long poem The Queen's Wake (1813), his collection of songs Jacobite Relics (1819), and his two novels The Three Perils of Man (1822), and The Three Perils of Woman (1823).
William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and "The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: The Wapshot Chronicle , The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982).
Andre Jules Dubus II was an American short story writer and essayist.
Sketches New and Old is a collection of short stories by Mark Twain. It was published in 1875. All the stories are fictional except for "The Case of George Fisher." It includes the short story "A Ghost Story", among others.
The Stories of John Cheever is a 1978 short story collection by American author John Cheever. It contains some of his most famous stories, including "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Country Husband", "The Five-Forty-Eight" and "The Swimmer". It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979 and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award.
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a mentor and confidant to many authors.
England, My England is a collection of short stories by D. H. Lawrence. Individual items were originally written between 1913 and 1921, many of them against the background of World War I. Most of these versions were placed in magazines or periodicals. Ten were later selected and extensively revised by Lawrence for the England, My England volume. This was published on 24 October 1922 by Thomas Seltzer in the US. The first UK edition was published by Martin Secker in 1924.
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant,, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.
The Langs' Fairy Books are a series of 25 collections of true and fictional stories for children published between 1889 and 1913 by Andrew Lang and his wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne. The best known books of the series are the 12 collections of fairy tales also known as Andrew Lang's "Coloured" Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors. In all, the volumes feature 798 stories, besides the 153 poems in The Blue Poetry Book.
The Great Automatic Grammatizator is a collection of thirteen short stories written by British author Roald Dahl. The stories were selected for teenagers from Dahl's adult works. All the stories included were published elsewhere originally; their sources are noted below. The stories, with the exception of the war story "Katina", possess a deadpan, ironic, bizarre, or even macabre sense of humor. They generally end with unexpected plot twists.
The View from Castle Rock is a book of short stories by Canadian author Alice Munro, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, which was published in 2006 by McClelland and Stewart.
Tales Beyond Time: From Fantasy to Science Fiction is an anthology of fantasy and science fiction short stories, edited by L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp. It was first published in hardcover by Lothrop Lee & Shepard in 1973, and in paperback by William Morrow; a large print edition followed from G. K. Hall & Co. in 1974. It was the second such anthology assembled by the de Camps, following their earlier 3000 Years of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1972).
Lee Henderson is a Canadian writer, the author of The Broken Record Technique, The Man Game, and The Road Narrows As You Go. The Broken Record Technique won the 2003 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, which recognizes a first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author writing in English. The Man Game was shortlisted for the 2008 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and won the 2009 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize as well as the 2009 City of Vancouver Book Award.
A Gift Of Dragons is a 2002 collection of short fiction by the American-Irish author Anne McCaffrey. All four stories are set on the fictional planet Pern; the book is one of two collections in the science fiction series Dragonriders of Pern by Anne and her son Todd McCaffrey.
Patrick Eugene Ryan is an American novelist and short story writer. His books include The Dream Life of Astronauts and Send Me, as well as three novels for young adults: Saints of Augustine, In Mike We Trust, and Gemini Bites.
Dead Girls is a Canadian short story collection by author Nancy Lee and was originally published in 2002 by McCelland & Stewart Ltd. Each story in the collection stars different characters, and all deal with the themes of eroticism, destruction, power, and loss. Dead Girls is Lee's debut novel and draws its inspiration from the missing women of Vancouver between 1978 and 2001.
"The Adjuster" is a short story written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story appears in Fitzgerald's third collection of short stories All the Sad Young Men, published by Scribners in February 1926. The story depicts the troubled relationship of married couple Luella and Charles Hemple, living in New York City in 1925.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
