"The Understanding Secretary" is an interestingly not-quite-complex "middlebrow" story about an upper-level executive in a mid-century US aircraft corporation, and how he and his secretary/working partner of many years understand all too well what is important in helping them
both keep on with the demands of their jobs, and how the slight or not so
slight pleasures of a certain motivational program they run for the corporation helps them and the rest of the workforce keep at the work. I'm not sure it's worth a SEP subscription to read on its own,
but it is interesting enough (not that anyone would buy a sub for a
single story...I think).
...the next year, Ms. Tufts was also honored by another, similar poetry prize, both administered at Claremont Graduate University.
| This issue is only available at the Internet Archive, at least, for those who have difficulties with print media. A subscription to the current magazine will gain one access to their archive. As a fan of Lewis Lapham, my favorite editor of Harper's among other work, and whose early career was spent at the SE Post (as was a notable early job of SSW host Patti Nase [soon Abbott] starting a few years later), I decided to give it a go to see what I could see. The magazine continues to publish, and to publish new short fiction.
The Saturday Evening Post [v226 #1, July 4, 1953] (15¢, 10½″ x 13½″, cover by Ben Prins) [] (Full Text)--but only to those with print disabilities, Details taken from www.more-magazines.com I've read before, or have chosen to read for today's purposes. Evelyn Waugh's "The Man Who Liked Dickens" wasn't quite a chapter excerpted from A Handful of Dust, as the previous-publication crediting in the magazine issue suggests, but instead first was published as a short story and rather mildly rewritten to fit into the novel, published a year later, in 1934, than this 1933 Cosmopolitan story...and rereading it for today's roundelay was useful, as I'd conflated too much of Joan Aiken's "Marmalade Wine" with this story...it's still pretty clear that Aiken chose to work a variation on Waugh's story for her purposes, making it, if anything, more brutal, but it isn't quite the near beat for beat copy that I misremembered it as, earlier in this blog and elsewhere. Also, it isn't a fantasy, but a crime story, a deeply ironic one. Editor Howard Browne was primarily a crime-fiction writer, and between the three stories from this issue I cover today, he was doing his damnedest to remake Fantastic from a fantasy and some sf magazine to an outre but genuine cf journal. Theodore Sturgeon's "The Dark Room" (Sturgeon noted in his collection The Golden Helix, where I first read this one decades ago, that there's nothing all that dark about the room in question, but I guess Browne liked the foreboding sound of the title he changed it to)...this one is eventually not so much a crime story as a genuine sinister fantasy, but only becomes clearly so toward its end. As frequently with Sturgeon, exploration of sexual urges, romantic jealousy and related matters play a major role in this story, as well as scoring some points against all-t00-human hypocrisy. Robert Sheckley's "The Altar" is an early (in his career), reasonably deftly-written, mildly clever story about how we can't Really know the suburbs we might live in till we look at them from among All the inhabitants. While it won't remind you Too much of, say, Rosemary's Baby, it explores somewhat similar territory...while, as noted, barely verging into the Necessarily fantastic. For more of today's short fiction, please see Patti Abbott's blog.  Esquire [v39 #6, No. 235, June 1953] (10″ x 13″, cover by Henry Wolf) [] (Full Text) Details supplied by Gordon Hobley from an online copy at the Internet Archive. |
The September 1958 issue of the UK magazine Suspense, the first publication site of Joan Aiken's "Marmalade Wine".
The September 1933 Cosmopolitan, featuring "The Man Who Liked Dickens" by Evelyn Waugh:
