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Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Fiction
A collection of stories with literary merit, Fiction 100 illustrates the development of short fiction from the early 19th Century to the present day, and features both traditional and contemporary works.
1531 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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April 11, 2021
100 short stories back from my undergrad days! Borges, Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut, and so many more!
I was struck, as I worked through these works in order, how powerfully early-20th century so many choices were--and the thinking which inspired them. At the time I first studied them--the early 1980s--they felt comfortable, and to be sure the much earlier works (Chekhov, London, Tolstoy) still have that flavor of essentiality. But the more contemporary European and American choices can't help but seem uninspired, even misfired (two different works by Welty? really?).
I am not complaining about the overall quality of the works themselves--each finds a meaningful corner of quick insight in its way--but the philosophy of selection itself. Maybe it is because I am also reading Morrison's Playing in the Dark at the same time: our idea of criticism itself is limited in how it reads and makes meaning.
Nevertheless, glad that I revisited these works which I may never have run into again without a deliberate act.
I was struck, as I worked through these works in order, how powerfully early-20th century so many choices were--and the thinking which inspired them. At the time I first studied them--the early 1980s--they felt comfortable, and to be sure the much earlier works (Chekhov, London, Tolstoy) still have that flavor of essentiality. But the more contemporary European and American choices can't help but seem uninspired, even misfired (two different works by Welty? really?).
I am not complaining about the overall quality of the works themselves--each finds a meaningful corner of quick insight in its way--but the philosophy of selection itself. Maybe it is because I am also reading Morrison's Playing in the Dark at the same time: our idea of criticism itself is limited in how it reads and makes meaning.
Nevertheless, glad that I revisited these works which I may never have run into again without a deliberate act.
June 3, 2017
A pick up from the transfer station. Somebody's old college textbook. This is the Third Edition and has a Picasso picture on the cover and is not shown in this lookup. From the table of contents I see that I've read maybe 10% of the MANY stories already. Starting tonight...
I only got as far as the three intros. Apparently the story selection has shifted around from edition to edition. Here goes...
1-"The Egg" by Sherwood Anderson: Read before... droll with a sad, bitter undertone.
2-"This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" by James Baldwin: Part of "Going to Meet the Man". Interesting tale of a black man returning to the craziness of America after years of relative sanity in Paris. I didn't like the bit about a black man feeling justified(or something... validated?)by having a relationship with a white woman. I imagine some black women having trouble with it too... Seemed to wander off at the end. Somewhat afflicted by the archness(?) of 40's-50's American writing style.
3-"Lost In the Fun House" by John Barth: No fun for me. Couldn't read it. My brain isn't set up for post-modern fiction. Thanks anyway...
4-"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme: see previous entry...
5-"Looking for Mr. Green" by Saul Bellow. MUCH BETTER(and pretty modern and mysterious too!)...
6-"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. I never had read this one though I did see the French movie on TV many years ago on that Rod Serling show - the one hour one after The Twilight Zone. Vivid stuff by an interesting writer.
7-"A Summer Tragedy" by Arna Bontemps. I have a vague recollection of having read this one before. Good story. Short and bitter...
8-"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges... Well written but not my cup of tea. I guess it's in the "magical" vein. Meh...
- I just noticed that this edition has "only" 1113 pages...
9-"The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen: A good Twlight Zone episode...
10-"The Astronomer's Wife" by Kay Boyle: poetic and funny tale of a woman's plight and her possible escape from it.
11-"August 2002: Night Meeting" by Ray Bradbury: seems like I might have read this long ago. Solid Sci-Fi from "The Martian Chronicles".
12-"The Faithfull Wife" by Morley Callaghan: abrupt and strange tale of turning the tables.
13-"The Guest" by Albert Camus: nicely done tale of Algeria-set psychic/cultural dysfunction and isolation. Obviously metaphoric...
14-"The Country Husband" by John Cheever: a great writer packs a lot into this tale of mid-life crisis in a suburban prison/marriage/family.
15-"The Darling" and "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov. The first multiple entries. There'll be more. AC is so observant of the emotional realities of life. Great stuff...
16-"Athenaise: A Story of a Temperment" by Kate Chopin: I don't recall ever reading any of the author's work before. This one's pretty good with excellent period New Orleans/Lousiana flavor.
17-"The Disappearence of Mr. Davenheim" by Agatha Christie: Again, have read very little if any of this famous author's stuff. Entertaing if not all that mysterious.
18-"The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke: I may have read this one before. Kind of a standard "discovery moment" sci-fi story. Comes from "The Nine Billion Names of God" collection.
19-"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" by Mark Twain: Good stuff and good writing but hampered by Twain's usual too-heavy hand on the wink-wink and obvious irony. A LONG story which might have been a bit shorter. As usual the author is dead serious underneath the humorous
exterior.
20-"The Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad: I'm pretty I sure I read this back in high school. Long ago... For once I couldn't finish a story in one night. Not enough time... Conrad's a great writer of course and very poetic in his descriptive prose. Maybe a little too poetic? Another day... Still in the middle of this one and hope to finish tonight. Obviously Conrad doesn't think much of Western "progress" and sees it mostly as morally corrupt, hypocritical, violent and focused on the spiritual dead-end of wealth gathering via exploitation and destruction. A relted story is "An Outpost of Progress". Now done with an impressive piece of writing though the emotional impact is lessened by the passing of years and the events of history - so many "Horrors". What ever Conrad was talking about beyond the anti-colonialism is a mystery to me but Eliot's "The Hollow Men" might give a clue.
21-"The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad: A short "psychological" story and beautifully written of course. What it all means is a mystery...
22-"The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane: Male craziness in a Nebraska blizzard. About telling the truth no matter what.
23-"The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens: pretty good ghost story but I didn't quite get what he was saying at the end. Twilight Zone material.
24-"The Grand Inquisitor" by Fedor Dostoevski: I only read about half of it. You can read the rest for me. Blah... Blah... Blah. I have several FD novel's on my shelves but is this is any indication they'll be unreadable. "Crime and Punishment" was a trial(uncompleted) for my in high school.This one's all about some philosophical-theological claptrap and irrelevancy. Human beings are ANIMALS and are most clearly understood and seen through that lens. God has nothing to do with it...
25-"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:A Sherlock Holmes mystery as told by Watson. Pretty entertaining but nothing special.
26-"'Repent Harlequin!'" Said the Ticktockman" by Harlan Ellison: One I've read before at least a couple of times but I'll read it again. Much anthologized, obviously... Read last night. A short and sweet dystopian take. A classic...
27-"King of the Bingo Game" by Ralph Ellison: An intense, dreamlike take on being powerless(w/o money) black man in America.
28, 29, 30-"Dry September", "A Rose for Emily", and "That Evening Sun" by William Faulkner: A trio of differnt stories about white violence, black hopelessness and Southern gothic stuff. All in slightly different styles. Faulkner's an ace of course! Seemed to be a whiff of Gertude Steinism in the third story - repetitive modernism.
31-"Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I realized I'd already read this one before. Fairly recently I think. I very nice evocation of despair over the passing of youth and the consequence of a bad decision. An early appearance of a Daisy-like character in Judy Jones.
32-"The Road from Colonus" by E.M. Forster: Not bad at all. A bit mysterious and all. Mr. Lucas has an Oedipus-like spiritual awakening but lets it go in favor of his ugly, aging-English middle class life. Spiritual death. Oedipus paid with his life but had peace(???) until then.
33-"Aura" by Carlos Fuentes: pretty creepy for sure but I'm not really into that Latin American magical realism stuff. Don't ask me to do too much thinking! Feeling? OK...
34-"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass - From what I understand WHG is GOD to some people and I can see that I guess. A very personal and poetic prose writer. He goes back and forth across the boundary. I have read this story before but the only part I really remembered distinctly aside from the part I quoted for "my" quotes was the part about the woman killing the dog. This poem reminds me of a less fastidious kind of "Prufrock" thing. Bemused, sarcastic observations about small-town Midwest culture. He likes cats - like Eliot. Also reminiscent of Whitman - very emotional/spiritual stuff.
35-"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Spookey tale of a mental breakdown and the cluelessness of husbands in general. Goes well with the following story.
36-"A Sorrowful Woman" by Gail Goodwin - Another breakdown tale with a more modern and overarching "sexual-political" theme. Bitter and funny.
37-"The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol: A classic. Arch, bitter, sardonic and ironic social/political criticism/satire.
- I just realized last night(10/1/2013) that a recent story in "The New Yorker had the same basic plot as this. The story is "By Fire" by Tahar Ben Jaloun - 9/16/13...
38-"The Train from Rhodesia" by Nadine Gordimer. My first reading of NG as far as I can recall. Nicely described tale of male-female trouble in a bedraggled post-colonial world.
39-"They Can Only Hang You Once" by Dashiell Hammett - Brisk and deadly as Sam Spade solves a double murder in no time flat.
40-"The Three Strangers" by Thomas Hardy - Sort of wry and amusing and ironic. Plus the great descriptive writing by the master.
41-"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" by Nathaniel Hawthorne - A strange tale that's ultimately all about politics in Colonial Boston and environs. I had to read the questions at the end to get it.
42-"Young Goodman Brown" by Hawthorne - more weirdness from Natty Haw... I've read this at least three times now. Not a favorite but nicely written. What's it about? Moral and religious hypocrisy??? Failure to accept human reality??? Fear of the natural world/wilderness??? Kind of similar set-up to "My Kinsman..."
43-"Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway - Ernest is not(so far) a big favorite of mine. I need to read a novel as I've only read short stories so far. This one's OK. The operation? I read that he had a lover once who had or offered to have an episiotomy to "accomodate" him better, but this seems to be more about hysterectomy. Also about the dissolution of a romance of course.
44-"Three Halves of a House" by Hugh Hood(a Canadian I think)- Kind of like Alice Munro but more dreamy and poetic. Overwrought... overwritten... perhaps a bit. Making the emotional lives and histories of common folk more interesting than they really are? Also reminds of "Housekeeping". Lots of symbolism.
45-"Rip van Winkle" by W. Irving - Another re-read but still fun.
46-"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson - Another re-read and a classic but one I'm not that crazy about. It's kind of creepy and shocking but a bit forced.
47-"The Beast in the Jungle" by Henry James. And yet another re-read. I attempted to read this in school long ago. I can't imagine a school kid trying to wade through James' "jungle" of words. It was hard enough for me last night. HJ is the worst "great" writer ever. It's not that what he's writing about is not compelling, it's that his way of telling the story is so verbose and unnecessarily complicated. I liked the overall effect of the story but man... it could've been done way better by Jane Austen. And the next two stories are also by James. Have Mercy! Notes:
- What's the guy's problem? Is he gay("You help me pass as a man like any other") or just consumed by fear of emotion/trust/love/ passion/sex. The latter I guess.
- It's theme is kind of similar to "A Christmas Carol" but without the redemption.
48-"Four Meetings" by H. James - Much easier to read so far. I had to leave it last night and go to bed but I'm dying to find out what's going on with "La Comtesse". Now done with this bitter story. The device of the concerned but aloof narrator is interesting. Have I read this before? It rings a vague bell.
49-"The Tree of Knowledge" by H. James. Another re-read from not that long ago. The typical subtle middle-class ephemera of emotion and intellect and smart talk. Good stuff though a bit vague at the end(for me at least). The recent Tobias Wolff story in The New Yorker has a kind of similar feel to it - keeping secrets to keep a relationship "healthy".
50 - "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett - Good, lyrical stuff by one of Maine's own.
51 - "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" by Dorothy M. Johnson - A short and sweet/bitter history of complicated relationships. The movie fleshed it all out quite a bit.
52 - "Araby" by James Joyce - Beautiful. I had the same experience as a 9-year old but with less humiliation at the end. My parents got divorced and I didn't come back to Menemsha for a number of years. That girl was a goddess... Never spoke to her that I can recall. I would have spontaneously combusted if I got within 5 feet of her!
53 - "The Dead" By J. Joyce - Never saw the movie. Great writing indeed. The descriptions of the party were marvelous as was the comedown at the end.
54 - "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" by Joyce - More excellence within a tight setting. Astute and bitter political/cultural observation but a bit difficult to understand with all the Irish jargon.
55 - "The Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka - Possibly my first Kafka read. Not all that thrilling. The whole things an allegory(?).
56 - "They" by Rudyard Kipling - Another ghost story... I didn't "get" the ending though. Nice atmosphere...
57 - "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" by D.H. Lawrence - Another re-read though I didn't remember it all that well. Very intense and sort of mystical and depressing. Strange "falling in love" story.
58 - "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence - A story made famous by the movie. Never seen it... It's about an afflicted child. His primary affliction is his parents.
59 - "Nine Lives" - by Ursula K. LeGuin - A nice sci-fi tale from 1969 with an advance look at cloning and what it means to be human. This story first appeared in Playboy so I likely did read it long ago but have no memory of it. Maybe this is the one they wanted her to use a different(man's) name for.
60 - "One off the Short List: by Doris Lessing - I don't recall reading any of her writing before but it's likely I did. This one's like a New Yorker story from the 60's or 70's. Kind of an uncomfortable read for men as the protagonist is such an woman-using/abusing, manipulative, bullying, selfish, immature and obnoxious shithead. I wonder if she was portraying(and getting revenge upon) someone specific?
I'm well past half-way now. Next up is "To Build a Fire". Has any English-reading boy of middle age and older NOT read that story???
61 - "To Build a Fire" by Jack London - This famous story is still very effective as nature punishes the clueless a la "Into the Wild". The tenderfoot pays the ultimate price for his lack of imagination just as they did in "Call of the Wild". T.C. Boyle likely has this story in mind while writing parts of "Drop City".
62 - "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" by Carson McCullers - And very different territory than Jack London's. I think I read this one before too. It's in a collection I read a few years ago. No clear memory though... McCullers was a genius of course.
63 - "The Magic Barrel" by Bernard Malamud - Another re-read for me and just as funny and mysterious and moving as the first time. I don't know what praying for the dead means though.
64 - "Mario and the Magician: by Thomas Mann - Might be the first read of this author for me. A great story and probably allegorical considering the political situation in Italy and Germany at the time. It's kind of funny and kind of crazy and mysterious. Very European, whatever that means.
65 - "The Man Without a Temperment" by Katherine Mansfield - The meaning of this went by me so maybe I'll read it again. I was pretty tired when I read it. So... I did read it again when I was more with it mentally and it did have a greater impact. It's a pretty interesting story...
66 - "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. A classic tale which I probably have read already but don't remember. One problem with the impact of the ending. The author clearly states that the original necklace was diamond. I "get" why he did it the way he did but it makes the ending kind of phony if you think about it logically. A couple of pertinent questions might be asked!
67 - "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville - A perfect example of a great piece of literature I could only barely connect with when I read it in High School. So... what was UP with Bartleby anyway? Out of gas... terminally depressed... to far down to even kill himself...
- misprint on p. 759...
68 - "Patriotism" by Yukio Mishima - The author was a semi-certifiable right-wing wack-job but also apparently a talented writer and Nobel nominee multiple times. Committed seppuku in 1970 when a right-wing coup attempt failed. This story is also certifiably insane unless you like reading graphic accounts of self-disembowelment. The suspense is over in the first paragraph. All the rest is description. The husband's lack of understanding of his wife is poignant but her sacrifice is needless to say the least. The movie "Double Suicide" is not based on this story.
69 - "Thanks for the Ride" by Alice Munro - A fairly old story by the greatest living writer in English. Excellent of course, with the typical bitter bite of the author. I LOVE ALICE MUNRO!
70 - "Sredni Vashtar" by H.H. Munro(Saki) - An amusing and gruesome tale of liberation and revenge against a clueless, bullying female oppressor. Reminds one a bit of Ken Kesey's "position" expressed in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": female need for control oppresses the spirits of men...
71 - "Four Summers" by Joyce Carol Oates - Another visit to Oateslandia, a very dysfunctional and dreary place indeed. The lost souls of the "Greatest Generation" and their damaged offspring. Dad's a drinker - I can relate... Typical JCO semi-hysteria and nastiness.
72 - "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" - a story I might have read before and familiar also from the movie "Smooth Talk" which was based on this. Again with the horrible, scary, crazy, deadly world of JCO... Also reminiscent of the Starkweather-Fugate thing back in the late 50's.
73 - "The Artificial Nigger" by Flannery O'Connor - The New Yorker had an aricle about this writer recently but I didn't really get into it. A genius for sure but rather weird. Kind of like Carson McCullers. Must be that Southern culture. This story has what I take to be the typically uneasy mixture of comedy and horror(or at least major discomfort). The title's pretty daring, of course.
74 - "Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor. More Southern strangeness. Why wasn't that big black woman arrested? I find that I'm much more interested in the personal than any "messagy" stuff about the changing South etc.
75 - "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" - Grandmother finds a man in this story but he shore ain't a good un. A famous tale but I don't think I'd ever read it. The craziest of the three and black, black comedy. What is it about? Beats me... Reminiscent of all those tales of deadly misfits; especially "Outer Dark". Also "Kalifornia", "Badlands", "Natural Born Killers" and on and on.
Is this "Southern Gothic"?????
76 - "First Confession" by Frank O'Connor. An amusing tale...
77 - "A Conversation with My Father" by Grace Paley. The author is not much known to me. The "story" is about Dad and about writing. A bit experimental and free-form... and interesting.
78 - "Big Blonde" - Dorothy Parker. Another writer known to me mostly by history and reputation. A bitter tale... no sweet here!
79 - "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe - A classic. Short and sweet...
80 - "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Poe - Probably the third time reading this one. Impressively creepy... Found out today that the setting is Scotland. Where does it say that?
81 - "The Purloined Letter" by Poe - All about logic and intuition applied to police work. A bit over-done perhaps or perhaps Poe felt the need to REALLY explain his modern ideas since it was still the early-ish 19th century. The final quote is still murky. I'm not sure I get the relevance. My own logic and understanding is faulty!
82 - "The Grave" by Katherine Anne Porter - Short and sweet. Reminds of another dead rabbit babies story: "Jesus' Son"... What it's about is a bit of a mystery - one's girl's intense moments of experience and understanding.
I only got as far as the three intros. Apparently the story selection has shifted around from edition to edition. Here goes...
1-"The Egg" by Sherwood Anderson: Read before... droll with a sad, bitter undertone.
2-"This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" by James Baldwin: Part of "Going to Meet the Man". Interesting tale of a black man returning to the craziness of America after years of relative sanity in Paris. I didn't like the bit about a black man feeling justified(or something... validated?)by having a relationship with a white woman. I imagine some black women having trouble with it too... Seemed to wander off at the end. Somewhat afflicted by the archness(?) of 40's-50's American writing style.
3-"Lost In the Fun House" by John Barth: No fun for me. Couldn't read it. My brain isn't set up for post-modern fiction. Thanks anyway...
4-"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme: see previous entry...
5-"Looking for Mr. Green" by Saul Bellow. MUCH BETTER(and pretty modern and mysterious too!)...
6-"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. I never had read this one though I did see the French movie on TV many years ago on that Rod Serling show - the one hour one after The Twilight Zone. Vivid stuff by an interesting writer.
7-"A Summer Tragedy" by Arna Bontemps. I have a vague recollection of having read this one before. Good story. Short and bitter...
8-"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges... Well written but not my cup of tea. I guess it's in the "magical" vein. Meh...
- I just noticed that this edition has "only" 1113 pages...
9-"The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen: A good Twlight Zone episode...
10-"The Astronomer's Wife" by Kay Boyle: poetic and funny tale of a woman's plight and her possible escape from it.
11-"August 2002: Night Meeting" by Ray Bradbury: seems like I might have read this long ago. Solid Sci-Fi from "The Martian Chronicles".
12-"The Faithfull Wife" by Morley Callaghan: abrupt and strange tale of turning the tables.
13-"The Guest" by Albert Camus: nicely done tale of Algeria-set psychic/cultural dysfunction and isolation. Obviously metaphoric...
14-"The Country Husband" by John Cheever: a great writer packs a lot into this tale of mid-life crisis in a suburban prison/marriage/family.
15-"The Darling" and "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov. The first multiple entries. There'll be more. AC is so observant of the emotional realities of life. Great stuff...
16-"Athenaise: A Story of a Temperment" by Kate Chopin: I don't recall ever reading any of the author's work before. This one's pretty good with excellent period New Orleans/Lousiana flavor.
17-"The Disappearence of Mr. Davenheim" by Agatha Christie: Again, have read very little if any of this famous author's stuff. Entertaing if not all that mysterious.
18-"The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke: I may have read this one before. Kind of a standard "discovery moment" sci-fi story. Comes from "The Nine Billion Names of God" collection.
19-"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" by Mark Twain: Good stuff and good writing but hampered by Twain's usual too-heavy hand on the wink-wink and obvious irony. A LONG story which might have been a bit shorter. As usual the author is dead serious underneath the humorous
exterior.
20-"The Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad: I'm pretty I sure I read this back in high school. Long ago... For once I couldn't finish a story in one night. Not enough time... Conrad's a great writer of course and very poetic in his descriptive prose. Maybe a little too poetic? Another day... Still in the middle of this one and hope to finish tonight. Obviously Conrad doesn't think much of Western "progress" and sees it mostly as morally corrupt, hypocritical, violent and focused on the spiritual dead-end of wealth gathering via exploitation and destruction. A relted story is "An Outpost of Progress". Now done with an impressive piece of writing though the emotional impact is lessened by the passing of years and the events of history - so many "Horrors". What ever Conrad was talking about beyond the anti-colonialism is a mystery to me but Eliot's "The Hollow Men" might give a clue.
21-"The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad: A short "psychological" story and beautifully written of course. What it all means is a mystery...
22-"The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane: Male craziness in a Nebraska blizzard. About telling the truth no matter what.
23-"The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens: pretty good ghost story but I didn't quite get what he was saying at the end. Twilight Zone material.
24-"The Grand Inquisitor" by Fedor Dostoevski: I only read about half of it. You can read the rest for me. Blah... Blah... Blah. I have several FD novel's on my shelves but is this is any indication they'll be unreadable. "Crime and Punishment" was a trial(uncompleted) for my in high school.This one's all about some philosophical-theological claptrap and irrelevancy. Human beings are ANIMALS and are most clearly understood and seen through that lens. God has nothing to do with it...
25-"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:A Sherlock Holmes mystery as told by Watson. Pretty entertaining but nothing special.
26-"'Repent Harlequin!'" Said the Ticktockman" by Harlan Ellison: One I've read before at least a couple of times but I'll read it again. Much anthologized, obviously... Read last night. A short and sweet dystopian take. A classic...
27-"King of the Bingo Game" by Ralph Ellison: An intense, dreamlike take on being powerless(w/o money) black man in America.
28, 29, 30-"Dry September", "A Rose for Emily", and "That Evening Sun" by William Faulkner: A trio of differnt stories about white violence, black hopelessness and Southern gothic stuff. All in slightly different styles. Faulkner's an ace of course! Seemed to be a whiff of Gertude Steinism in the third story - repetitive modernism.
31-"Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I realized I'd already read this one before. Fairly recently I think. I very nice evocation of despair over the passing of youth and the consequence of a bad decision. An early appearance of a Daisy-like character in Judy Jones.
32-"The Road from Colonus" by E.M. Forster: Not bad at all. A bit mysterious and all. Mr. Lucas has an Oedipus-like spiritual awakening but lets it go in favor of his ugly, aging-English middle class life. Spiritual death. Oedipus paid with his life but had peace(???) until then.
33-"Aura" by Carlos Fuentes: pretty creepy for sure but I'm not really into that Latin American magical realism stuff. Don't ask me to do too much thinking! Feeling? OK...
34-"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass - From what I understand WHG is GOD to some people and I can see that I guess. A very personal and poetic prose writer. He goes back and forth across the boundary. I have read this story before but the only part I really remembered distinctly aside from the part I quoted for "my" quotes was the part about the woman killing the dog. This poem reminds me of a less fastidious kind of "Prufrock" thing. Bemused, sarcastic observations about small-town Midwest culture. He likes cats - like Eliot. Also reminiscent of Whitman - very emotional/spiritual stuff.
35-"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Spookey tale of a mental breakdown and the cluelessness of husbands in general. Goes well with the following story.
36-"A Sorrowful Woman" by Gail Goodwin - Another breakdown tale with a more modern and overarching "sexual-political" theme. Bitter and funny.
37-"The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol: A classic. Arch, bitter, sardonic and ironic social/political criticism/satire.
- I just realized last night(10/1/2013) that a recent story in "The New Yorker had the same basic plot as this. The story is "By Fire" by Tahar Ben Jaloun - 9/16/13...
38-"The Train from Rhodesia" by Nadine Gordimer. My first reading of NG as far as I can recall. Nicely described tale of male-female trouble in a bedraggled post-colonial world.
39-"They Can Only Hang You Once" by Dashiell Hammett - Brisk and deadly as Sam Spade solves a double murder in no time flat.
40-"The Three Strangers" by Thomas Hardy - Sort of wry and amusing and ironic. Plus the great descriptive writing by the master.
41-"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" by Nathaniel Hawthorne - A strange tale that's ultimately all about politics in Colonial Boston and environs. I had to read the questions at the end to get it.
42-"Young Goodman Brown" by Hawthorne - more weirdness from Natty Haw... I've read this at least three times now. Not a favorite but nicely written. What's it about? Moral and religious hypocrisy??? Failure to accept human reality??? Fear of the natural world/wilderness??? Kind of similar set-up to "My Kinsman..."
43-"Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway - Ernest is not(so far) a big favorite of mine. I need to read a novel as I've only read short stories so far. This one's OK. The operation? I read that he had a lover once who had or offered to have an episiotomy to "accomodate" him better, but this seems to be more about hysterectomy. Also about the dissolution of a romance of course.
44-"Three Halves of a House" by Hugh Hood(a Canadian I think)- Kind of like Alice Munro but more dreamy and poetic. Overwrought... overwritten... perhaps a bit. Making the emotional lives and histories of common folk more interesting than they really are? Also reminds of "Housekeeping". Lots of symbolism.
45-"Rip van Winkle" by W. Irving - Another re-read but still fun.
46-"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson - Another re-read and a classic but one I'm not that crazy about. It's kind of creepy and shocking but a bit forced.
47-"The Beast in the Jungle" by Henry James. And yet another re-read. I attempted to read this in school long ago. I can't imagine a school kid trying to wade through James' "jungle" of words. It was hard enough for me last night. HJ is the worst "great" writer ever. It's not that what he's writing about is not compelling, it's that his way of telling the story is so verbose and unnecessarily complicated. I liked the overall effect of the story but man... it could've been done way better by Jane Austen. And the next two stories are also by James. Have Mercy! Notes:
- What's the guy's problem? Is he gay("You help me pass as a man like any other") or just consumed by fear of emotion/trust/love/ passion/sex. The latter I guess.
- It's theme is kind of similar to "A Christmas Carol" but without the redemption.
48-"Four Meetings" by H. James - Much easier to read so far. I had to leave it last night and go to bed but I'm dying to find out what's going on with "La Comtesse". Now done with this bitter story. The device of the concerned but aloof narrator is interesting. Have I read this before? It rings a vague bell.
49-"The Tree of Knowledge" by H. James. Another re-read from not that long ago. The typical subtle middle-class ephemera of emotion and intellect and smart talk. Good stuff though a bit vague at the end(for me at least). The recent Tobias Wolff story in The New Yorker has a kind of similar feel to it - keeping secrets to keep a relationship "healthy".
50 - "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett - Good, lyrical stuff by one of Maine's own.
51 - "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" by Dorothy M. Johnson - A short and sweet/bitter history of complicated relationships. The movie fleshed it all out quite a bit.
52 - "Araby" by James Joyce - Beautiful. I had the same experience as a 9-year old but with less humiliation at the end. My parents got divorced and I didn't come back to Menemsha for a number of years. That girl was a goddess... Never spoke to her that I can recall. I would have spontaneously combusted if I got within 5 feet of her!
53 - "The Dead" By J. Joyce - Never saw the movie. Great writing indeed. The descriptions of the party were marvelous as was the comedown at the end.
54 - "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" by Joyce - More excellence within a tight setting. Astute and bitter political/cultural observation but a bit difficult to understand with all the Irish jargon.
55 - "The Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka - Possibly my first Kafka read. Not all that thrilling. The whole things an allegory(?).
56 - "They" by Rudyard Kipling - Another ghost story... I didn't "get" the ending though. Nice atmosphere...
57 - "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" by D.H. Lawrence - Another re-read though I didn't remember it all that well. Very intense and sort of mystical and depressing. Strange "falling in love" story.
58 - "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence - A story made famous by the movie. Never seen it... It's about an afflicted child. His primary affliction is his parents.
59 - "Nine Lives" - by Ursula K. LeGuin - A nice sci-fi tale from 1969 with an advance look at cloning and what it means to be human. This story first appeared in Playboy so I likely did read it long ago but have no memory of it. Maybe this is the one they wanted her to use a different(man's) name for.
60 - "One off the Short List: by Doris Lessing - I don't recall reading any of her writing before but it's likely I did. This one's like a New Yorker story from the 60's or 70's. Kind of an uncomfortable read for men as the protagonist is such an woman-using/abusing, manipulative, bullying, selfish, immature and obnoxious shithead. I wonder if she was portraying(and getting revenge upon) someone specific?
I'm well past half-way now. Next up is "To Build a Fire". Has any English-reading boy of middle age and older NOT read that story???
61 - "To Build a Fire" by Jack London - This famous story is still very effective as nature punishes the clueless a la "Into the Wild". The tenderfoot pays the ultimate price for his lack of imagination just as they did in "Call of the Wild". T.C. Boyle likely has this story in mind while writing parts of "Drop City".
62 - "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" by Carson McCullers - And very different territory than Jack London's. I think I read this one before too. It's in a collection I read a few years ago. No clear memory though... McCullers was a genius of course.
63 - "The Magic Barrel" by Bernard Malamud - Another re-read for me and just as funny and mysterious and moving as the first time. I don't know what praying for the dead means though.
64 - "Mario and the Magician: by Thomas Mann - Might be the first read of this author for me. A great story and probably allegorical considering the political situation in Italy and Germany at the time. It's kind of funny and kind of crazy and mysterious. Very European, whatever that means.
65 - "The Man Without a Temperment" by Katherine Mansfield - The meaning of this went by me so maybe I'll read it again. I was pretty tired when I read it. So... I did read it again when I was more with it mentally and it did have a greater impact. It's a pretty interesting story...
66 - "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. A classic tale which I probably have read already but don't remember. One problem with the impact of the ending. The author clearly states that the original necklace was diamond. I "get" why he did it the way he did but it makes the ending kind of phony if you think about it logically. A couple of pertinent questions might be asked!
67 - "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville - A perfect example of a great piece of literature I could only barely connect with when I read it in High School. So... what was UP with Bartleby anyway? Out of gas... terminally depressed... to far down to even kill himself...
- misprint on p. 759...
68 - "Patriotism" by Yukio Mishima - The author was a semi-certifiable right-wing wack-job but also apparently a talented writer and Nobel nominee multiple times. Committed seppuku in 1970 when a right-wing coup attempt failed. This story is also certifiably insane unless you like reading graphic accounts of self-disembowelment. The suspense is over in the first paragraph. All the rest is description. The husband's lack of understanding of his wife is poignant but her sacrifice is needless to say the least. The movie "Double Suicide" is not based on this story.
69 - "Thanks for the Ride" by Alice Munro - A fairly old story by the greatest living writer in English. Excellent of course, with the typical bitter bite of the author. I LOVE ALICE MUNRO!
70 - "Sredni Vashtar" by H.H. Munro(Saki) - An amusing and gruesome tale of liberation and revenge against a clueless, bullying female oppressor. Reminds one a bit of Ken Kesey's "position" expressed in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": female need for control oppresses the spirits of men...
71 - "Four Summers" by Joyce Carol Oates - Another visit to Oateslandia, a very dysfunctional and dreary place indeed. The lost souls of the "Greatest Generation" and their damaged offspring. Dad's a drinker - I can relate... Typical JCO semi-hysteria and nastiness.
72 - "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" - a story I might have read before and familiar also from the movie "Smooth Talk" which was based on this. Again with the horrible, scary, crazy, deadly world of JCO... Also reminiscent of the Starkweather-Fugate thing back in the late 50's.
73 - "The Artificial Nigger" by Flannery O'Connor - The New Yorker had an aricle about this writer recently but I didn't really get into it. A genius for sure but rather weird. Kind of like Carson McCullers. Must be that Southern culture. This story has what I take to be the typically uneasy mixture of comedy and horror(or at least major discomfort). The title's pretty daring, of course.
74 - "Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor. More Southern strangeness. Why wasn't that big black woman arrested? I find that I'm much more interested in the personal than any "messagy" stuff about the changing South etc.
75 - "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" - Grandmother finds a man in this story but he shore ain't a good un. A famous tale but I don't think I'd ever read it. The craziest of the three and black, black comedy. What is it about? Beats me... Reminiscent of all those tales of deadly misfits; especially "Outer Dark". Also "Kalifornia", "Badlands", "Natural Born Killers" and on and on.
Is this "Southern Gothic"?????
76 - "First Confession" by Frank O'Connor. An amusing tale...
77 - "A Conversation with My Father" by Grace Paley. The author is not much known to me. The "story" is about Dad and about writing. A bit experimental and free-form... and interesting.
78 - "Big Blonde" - Dorothy Parker. Another writer known to me mostly by history and reputation. A bitter tale... no sweet here!
79 - "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe - A classic. Short and sweet...
80 - "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Poe - Probably the third time reading this one. Impressively creepy... Found out today that the setting is Scotland. Where does it say that?
81 - "The Purloined Letter" by Poe - All about logic and intuition applied to police work. A bit over-done perhaps or perhaps Poe felt the need to REALLY explain his modern ideas since it was still the early-ish 19th century. The final quote is still murky. I'm not sure I get the relevance. My own logic and understanding is faulty!
82 - "The Grave" by Katherine Anne Porter - Short and sweet. Reminds of another dead rabbit babies story: "Jesus' Son"... What it's about is a bit of a mystery - one's girl's intense moments of experience and understanding.
July 29, 2012
I found this book at a remainder book shop that my brother worked at.
We would take turns with it.
What I remember most about it was the section on Chaucer.
The book is a good introduction for those who are just starting to get interested in literature.
We would take turns with it.
What I remember most about it was the section on Chaucer.
The book is a good introduction for those who are just starting to get interested in literature.
May 13, 2017
An excellent anthology including not only short stories but also several novellas. I read the fifth, 1988 edition of the anthology but the most recent edition I found referenced on Amazon is the thirteenth (2011).
The anthology originally contained 100 stories. By the fifth edition ten additional stories had been added as lagniappe; by the thirteenth edition the anthology included 128 stories.
From what one can glean from the web, this anthology is widely used in US college courses and was presumably compiled with this market in mind. Fortunately the anthology does not limit itself to US writers (55) but also includes British (10), Irish (4), Canadian (1), South African (1), Rhodesian(1), and New Zealand(1) writers and even stories in translation by Russian (5), French (2), German(1), Czech(1), Polish (1 -if you count Isaac Bashevis Singer as Polish), Argentinian (1), Colombian (1), Mexican (1) and Japanese(1, "Patriotism" by Mishima, a really poor choice in my opinion and fortunately dropped some time after the fifth edition) authors. From a worldwide point of view there are glaring omissions, no stories by black African writers, gross under-representation of Asian writers -merely one story by Yukio Mishima, no Indian or Chinese authors for example, nothing from the Near East-, no Australian author, under-representation of British, French, German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-american (3) authors.
Of course you can always criticize any far-reaching anthology on what or who is omitted and what or who is included. Evidently the anthology is written with the US undergraduate student in mind, and apparently one of main criteria is introducing such students to good literature by providing appealing stories, and at least pointing out that the genre is not not limited to the US and to stories originally written in English.
I find it interesting to compare the table of contents of the fifth edition with that of the thirteenth edition. Only 55 stories are included in both editions, and thirteen additional authors are included but with different stories.
Surprisingly -I would even say, inexcusably- stories by such authors as Kafka, Camus, Thomas Mann, Carlos Fuentes, and Yukio Mishima, completely disappear. The fifth edition includes a number of classic detective and science fiction writers who also, inexplicably disappear by the thirteenth edition (Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., H. G. Wells. Inexplicably (copyright issues?), Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is dropped and the far weaker “Hills like White Elephants” is kept”), and I wonder at the elimination of Woody Allen, Bernard Malamud, Max Apple (“The Oranging of America”), Walter Van Tilburg Clark (“The Indian Well”), Dorothy M. Johnson (“The Man who Shot Liberty Vallance”), while keeping such bland fare as E. M. Forster’s “The Road from Colonus”, Thomas Hardy’s “The Three Strangers”, and Rudyard Kipling’s “They”, who have written much better stories than the ones presumably included in nine consecutive editions.
All is not loss though, several banal stories have been dropped along the way, some selections by certain authors improved and noteworthy authors such as Louisa May Alcott (possibly due to a revival of interest in her stories), Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Sandra Cisneros, Charles Dickens, E. L. Doctorow, Bret Harte, W. W. Jacobs, Ha Jin, Jamaica Kincaid, Annie Proulx, Irwin Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Tan, Edith Wharton, and William Carlos Williams have been included. The proportion of works by women writers has increased, but the proportion of foreign writers decreased.
I also wonder why O’Henry, Ring Lardner or J. D. Salinger to mention just three “classic” US storytellers remain unrepresented and why such brilliant authors as Narayana, Julio Cortázar, Stanislav Lem, Hermann Hesse, Italo Calvino, Graham Greene, V. S. Pritchett, Milan Kunders, Kawabata, Tanizaki, Monterroso, Pirandello, J. D. Salinger, Clarice Lispector, Patrick White, Solzhenitsyn, Victor Hugo, Isak Dinesen, Stephen Leacock and Colette are not included.
However I really want to end on a bright note. The proportion of outstanding and unforgettable stories in the fifth edition is extremely high, and I really enjoyed reading or re-reading as the case may be the following 56 works of art. Sherwood Anderson’s “the Egg”, Woodie Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode”, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, Saul Bellow’s “Looking for Mr. Green”, Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Albert Camus’ “The Guest”, John Cheever’s “The Country Husband”, Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling”, Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Indian Well”, Samuel L. Clemens, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (pity “The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg” isn’t included as well), Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “Youth”, Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of teh Speckled Band”, Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game”, all three stories by William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes’ “Aura”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”, Nickolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, Henry James’ “Daisy Miller”, Dorothy M. Johnson’s “The Man who Shot Liberty Vallance”, James Joyce’s “Araby” and “A Little Cloud”, Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and “Metamorphosis”, D. H. Lawrence’s “A Rocking Horse Winner”, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives”, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel”, Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician”, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (but good riddance to “Benito Cereno”!), Alice Munro’s “How I met my husband”, H. H. Munro’s (“Saki”), “The Schartz-Metterklume Method”, Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”, the three stories by Flannery O’ Connor, Frank O’Connor, “Guests of the Nation” and the three classic stories by Egar Allen Poe (a pity “The Purloined Letter” is dropped from the thirteenth edition), Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”, John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums”, James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat”, Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, John Updike’s “A&P” and “Separating”, Alice Walker’s “To Hell with Dying”, Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” and “Why I live at the P.O.”, Tobias Wolfe’s “Maiden Voyage”, and Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”.
It makes me hunger for the thirteenth edition in order to come across new -to me- masterpieces by known authors and discover fascinating stories by authors I am not familiar with.
The anthology originally contained 100 stories. By the fifth edition ten additional stories had been added as lagniappe; by the thirteenth edition the anthology included 128 stories.
From what one can glean from the web, this anthology is widely used in US college courses and was presumably compiled with this market in mind. Fortunately the anthology does not limit itself to US writers (55) but also includes British (10), Irish (4), Canadian (1), South African (1), Rhodesian(1), and New Zealand(1) writers and even stories in translation by Russian (5), French (2), German(1), Czech(1), Polish (1 -if you count Isaac Bashevis Singer as Polish), Argentinian (1), Colombian (1), Mexican (1) and Japanese(1, "Patriotism" by Mishima, a really poor choice in my opinion and fortunately dropped some time after the fifth edition) authors. From a worldwide point of view there are glaring omissions, no stories by black African writers, gross under-representation of Asian writers -merely one story by Yukio Mishima, no Indian or Chinese authors for example, nothing from the Near East-, no Australian author, under-representation of British, French, German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-american (3) authors.
Of course you can always criticize any far-reaching anthology on what or who is omitted and what or who is included. Evidently the anthology is written with the US undergraduate student in mind, and apparently one of main criteria is introducing such students to good literature by providing appealing stories, and at least pointing out that the genre is not not limited to the US and to stories originally written in English.
I find it interesting to compare the table of contents of the fifth edition with that of the thirteenth edition. Only 55 stories are included in both editions, and thirteen additional authors are included but with different stories.
Surprisingly -I would even say, inexcusably- stories by such authors as Kafka, Camus, Thomas Mann, Carlos Fuentes, and Yukio Mishima, completely disappear. The fifth edition includes a number of classic detective and science fiction writers who also, inexplicably disappear by the thirteenth edition (Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., H. G. Wells. Inexplicably (copyright issues?), Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is dropped and the far weaker “Hills like White Elephants” is kept”), and I wonder at the elimination of Woody Allen, Bernard Malamud, Max Apple (“The Oranging of America”), Walter Van Tilburg Clark (“The Indian Well”), Dorothy M. Johnson (“The Man who Shot Liberty Vallance”), while keeping such bland fare as E. M. Forster’s “The Road from Colonus”, Thomas Hardy’s “The Three Strangers”, and Rudyard Kipling’s “They”, who have written much better stories than the ones presumably included in nine consecutive editions.
All is not loss though, several banal stories have been dropped along the way, some selections by certain authors improved and noteworthy authors such as Louisa May Alcott (possibly due to a revival of interest in her stories), Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Sandra Cisneros, Charles Dickens, E. L. Doctorow, Bret Harte, W. W. Jacobs, Ha Jin, Jamaica Kincaid, Annie Proulx, Irwin Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Tan, Edith Wharton, and William Carlos Williams have been included. The proportion of works by women writers has increased, but the proportion of foreign writers decreased.
I also wonder why O’Henry, Ring Lardner or J. D. Salinger to mention just three “classic” US storytellers remain unrepresented and why such brilliant authors as Narayana, Julio Cortázar, Stanislav Lem, Hermann Hesse, Italo Calvino, Graham Greene, V. S. Pritchett, Milan Kunders, Kawabata, Tanizaki, Monterroso, Pirandello, J. D. Salinger, Clarice Lispector, Patrick White, Solzhenitsyn, Victor Hugo, Isak Dinesen, Stephen Leacock and Colette are not included.
However I really want to end on a bright note. The proportion of outstanding and unforgettable stories in the fifth edition is extremely high, and I really enjoyed reading or re-reading as the case may be the following 56 works of art. Sherwood Anderson’s “the Egg”, Woodie Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode”, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, Saul Bellow’s “Looking for Mr. Green”, Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Albert Camus’ “The Guest”, John Cheever’s “The Country Husband”, Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling”, Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Indian Well”, Samuel L. Clemens, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (pity “The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg” isn’t included as well), Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “Youth”, Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of teh Speckled Band”, Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game”, all three stories by William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes’ “Aura”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”, Nickolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, Henry James’ “Daisy Miller”, Dorothy M. Johnson’s “The Man who Shot Liberty Vallance”, James Joyce’s “Araby” and “A Little Cloud”, Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and “Metamorphosis”, D. H. Lawrence’s “A Rocking Horse Winner”, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives”, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel”, Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician”, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (but good riddance to “Benito Cereno”!), Alice Munro’s “How I met my husband”, H. H. Munro’s (“Saki”), “The Schartz-Metterklume Method”, Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”, the three stories by Flannery O’ Connor, Frank O’Connor, “Guests of the Nation” and the three classic stories by Egar Allen Poe (a pity “The Purloined Letter” is dropped from the thirteenth edition), Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”, John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums”, James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat”, Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, John Updike’s “A&P” and “Separating”, Alice Walker’s “To Hell with Dying”, Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” and “Why I live at the P.O.”, Tobias Wolfe’s “Maiden Voyage”, and Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”.
It makes me hunger for the thirteenth edition in order to come across new -to me- masterpieces by known authors and discover fascinating stories by authors I am not familiar with.
July 23, 2014
I suspected I would I run out of review room and I did and have had to open a new version of the same book so I could finish. Getting near the end now... My edition has only 1113 pages so the story selection is probably/possibly different. Maybe it's just the layout/format/ print size...
83 - "The Secret Room" by Alain Robbe-Grillet - A writer I've sort of heard of but I don't know in what context. It's been a while for sure. Maybe a movie? Anyway, this one's impressively creepy, gloomy and mysterious. About painting? ... a painting?
84 - "Defender of the Faith" by Philip Roth - An early story from PR and a good one. Two equi-dominant themes united in the question of what it means to be Jewish in America. Good stuff and funny too.
85 - "We're Very Poor" by Juan Rulfo - A writer I'd never heard of that I recall. Another short and sweet/bitter tale about a cow, a flood and a poor girl's prospects from a child's point of view.
86 - "Absolutely Elsewhere" by Dorothy L. Sayers. Kind of a well-polished whodunit. Seems very familiar. Lord Peter's brain at the center along with telephones. Maybe I read this one before... or something very like it.
87 - "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" by Alan Sillitoe - I saw the movie way back when. In the early sixties the Brits were producing a lot of gritty real-life movies and this was one of them. Very good writing indeed. Mr. Sillitoe went on to have a nice career. This is the emotional/spiritual embodiment of class warfare/alienation. Smith reminded me at times of Lionel Asbo...
88 - "Gimpel the Fool" by Isaac Bashevis Singer - One I might have read long ago. The title sounds familiar. A story with a spiritual/ philosophical message, though I'm not sure what it is.
89 - "The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck - JS takes us back to the Salinas Valley for something short and bitter. An unsatisfactory life. I wonder if Steinbeck has a thing for female discontent. Part of "The Long Valley".
90 - "The Catbird Seat" by James Thurber - Read long ago(high school) as part of the Stegner's collection I think. I also think that JT does NOT like loud, boorish, overbearing women!
91 - "The Death of Ivan Ilych" - by Leo Tolstoy - A classic for sure and possibly the first Tolstoy I've read. What's it about? Death, Life, how we live our lives(choices), the constraints of culture/society etc. Seems to go on a bit long but... it IS a condensed version of one man's exisitence and passing. And painful second thoughts.
92 - "Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr" by Miguel de Unamuno - This one's different for sure but what it's about I'm not sure. Something to do with religion/truth/spirituality/sacrifice. Marilynne Robinson would love it!
93 - "A & P" by John Updike - A amusing shortie I must've read long ago because I did read the collection "Pigeon Feathers". It's about boy-girl youthful empathy stuff and it's about youthful impulsiveness and idealism. Kinda funny too...
94 - "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" by Kurt Vonnegut - Another one I probably read a long time ago as it's part of the "Welcome to the Monkey House..." collection and I know I read at least some of that... maybe. This one contains the usual quirky and moralistic KV take on the sins of mankind.
95 - "The Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells - I'm still in the middle of this longish tale. Pretty interesting and dramatically written. My Wells experience is pretty small. Some say this all a dream of the injured and dying Nunez. He was described the same way(injured and bleeding) at the end of the tale as he was before he descended into the Valley???
96 - "Petrified Man" by Eudora Welty - An ode to American shallowness and crassness. Pretty funny dialogue, though. I'm not sure what the P. Man is supposed to symbolize, though.
97 - "Why I live at the PO" by Eudora Welty - One I read not that long ago but read this time with a bit of a different understanding. All sympathy to the narrator in this tale of family craziness.
98 - "The Second Tree from the Corner" by E. B. White - E.B. Was Roger Angell's step-father I believe. This tale is about what exactly? Sanity/insanity in a difficult world? A bit of enlightenment comes to Trexler as he looks at a tree... Life's a mystery??? I just re-read this very brief story after reading a biography of White. I paid better attention to the story the second time around. Yes, I would say it's about the undefinable. The challenge of living.
99 - "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" by Richard Wright - Another head-shaker to me. About hopelessness and poverty perhaps? Great dialogue. Ironic that it's cheek-by-jowl with Eudora Welty who does the same thing with white southern people.
So that's it except that I missed a story somewhere - there's supposed to be a hundred I think. I'm gonna check right now!
83 - "The Secret Room" by Alain Robbe-Grillet - A writer I've sort of heard of but I don't know in what context. It's been a while for sure. Maybe a movie? Anyway, this one's impressively creepy, gloomy and mysterious. About painting? ... a painting?
84 - "Defender of the Faith" by Philip Roth - An early story from PR and a good one. Two equi-dominant themes united in the question of what it means to be Jewish in America. Good stuff and funny too.
85 - "We're Very Poor" by Juan Rulfo - A writer I'd never heard of that I recall. Another short and sweet/bitter tale about a cow, a flood and a poor girl's prospects from a child's point of view.
86 - "Absolutely Elsewhere" by Dorothy L. Sayers. Kind of a well-polished whodunit. Seems very familiar. Lord Peter's brain at the center along with telephones. Maybe I read this one before... or something very like it.
87 - "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" by Alan Sillitoe - I saw the movie way back when. In the early sixties the Brits were producing a lot of gritty real-life movies and this was one of them. Very good writing indeed. Mr. Sillitoe went on to have a nice career. This is the emotional/spiritual embodiment of class warfare/alienation. Smith reminded me at times of Lionel Asbo...
88 - "Gimpel the Fool" by Isaac Bashevis Singer - One I might have read long ago. The title sounds familiar. A story with a spiritual/ philosophical message, though I'm not sure what it is.
89 - "The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck - JS takes us back to the Salinas Valley for something short and bitter. An unsatisfactory life. I wonder if Steinbeck has a thing for female discontent. Part of "The Long Valley".
90 - "The Catbird Seat" by James Thurber - Read long ago(high school) as part of the Stegner's collection I think. I also think that JT does NOT like loud, boorish, overbearing women!
91 - "The Death of Ivan Ilych" - by Leo Tolstoy - A classic for sure and possibly the first Tolstoy I've read. What's it about? Death, Life, how we live our lives(choices), the constraints of culture/society etc. Seems to go on a bit long but... it IS a condensed version of one man's exisitence and passing. And painful second thoughts.
92 - "Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr" by Miguel de Unamuno - This one's different for sure but what it's about I'm not sure. Something to do with religion/truth/spirituality/sacrifice. Marilynne Robinson would love it!
93 - "A & P" by John Updike - A amusing shortie I must've read long ago because I did read the collection "Pigeon Feathers". It's about boy-girl youthful empathy stuff and it's about youthful impulsiveness and idealism. Kinda funny too...
94 - "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" by Kurt Vonnegut - Another one I probably read a long time ago as it's part of the "Welcome to the Monkey House..." collection and I know I read at least some of that... maybe. This one contains the usual quirky and moralistic KV take on the sins of mankind.
95 - "The Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells - I'm still in the middle of this longish tale. Pretty interesting and dramatically written. My Wells experience is pretty small. Some say this all a dream of the injured and dying Nunez. He was described the same way(injured and bleeding) at the end of the tale as he was before he descended into the Valley???
96 - "Petrified Man" by Eudora Welty - An ode to American shallowness and crassness. Pretty funny dialogue, though. I'm not sure what the P. Man is supposed to symbolize, though.
97 - "Why I live at the PO" by Eudora Welty - One I read not that long ago but read this time with a bit of a different understanding. All sympathy to the narrator in this tale of family craziness.
98 - "The Second Tree from the Corner" by E. B. White - E.B. Was Roger Angell's step-father I believe. This tale is about what exactly? Sanity/insanity in a difficult world? A bit of enlightenment comes to Trexler as he looks at a tree... Life's a mystery??? I just re-read this very brief story after reading a biography of White. I paid better attention to the story the second time around. Yes, I would say it's about the undefinable. The challenge of living.
99 - "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" by Richard Wright - Another head-shaker to me. About hopelessness and poverty perhaps? Great dialogue. Ironic that it's cheek-by-jowl with Eudora Welty who does the same thing with white southern people.
So that's it except that I missed a story somewhere - there's supposed to be a hundred I think. I'm gonna check right now!
February 13, 2009
meh. do we really need to continue anthologizing "a good man is hard to find"? more importantly, do my professors really need to keep making me read it? also, did you really have to make a footnote defining Harlem? and Martin Luther King Jr.? i mean seriously, pickering.
i must say thanks though, for at least including a lorrie moore story that wasn't from self-help.
i must say thanks though, for at least including a lorrie moore story that wasn't from self-help.
November 11, 2007
This collection of short stories is my most trustworthy source of textual consolation. With more than one hundred works by modern authors, it never disappoints me.
May 14, 2011
Excellent garage sale find. Daisy Miller, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Parker and tons more. Is it too late to go back and be an English major?
September 23, 2019
As the title might suggest, "Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories" is a textbook, probably for high school students, that brings together 100 works of short fiction. It comes complete with questions to ponder at the end of each story, a glossary of literary terms, bibliographies of the authors and, yes, footnotes too! One can tell how out of date this book is (published in 1985) by noting a footnote to a Woody Allen story that mentions O.J. Simpson - the latter is described as an ex-football player who more recently was known for television ads. That said, it’s kind of nice to have a book containing a lot of great authors, from Alice Adams to Richard Wright, and everything in-between. Curiously, the stories are ordered alphabetically by author’s last name, certainly something I have never seen before! Not a book to read cover-to-cover, but one to dip into from time to time when you have 15 or 20 free minutes.
December 3, 2020
This was an excellent compilation of short stories. Good variety of authors, topics, themes. There are discussion questions at the end of each story, which, even though I didn't have anyone to discuss them with, I felt aided my understanding and expanded my thinking about the stories, as they gave me a new perspective to consider. Tally of individual story ratings:
***** 5 stories
**** 32 stories
*** 43 stories
** 23 stories
* 6 stories
DNF (skimmed) 1 story
Overall a worthwhile endeavor for a well-rounded literary experience.
***** 5 stories
**** 32 stories
*** 43 stories
** 23 stories
* 6 stories
DNF (skimmed) 1 story
Overall a worthwhile endeavor for a well-rounded literary experience.
September 3, 2018
Some great classic stories in here, some of which I re-read for the pure pleasure of it. Ah Poe, will I ever tire of your spooky prose? Also quite a few unreadable stories, several of which I gave up on, because life is too short, James Joyce.
Mostly what I want to record for posterity is: I finished it! 1060 pages, in tiny font, in a supersized book, and I finished it! Woo!
Mostly what I want to record for posterity is: I finished it! 1060 pages, in tiny font, in a supersized book, and I finished it! Woo!
April 13, 2023
I have to admit I did not read every story in this 1200 page anthology, but the ones I have read have been fantastic- great mix of fiction from various genres in short stories that each pack a punch. I specifically enjoyed The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce and Nineteen Fifty Five by Alice Walker.
Read
December 17, 2012This will be the book I weeded out from the other anthologies to give to my intro to fiction students. Is it great? Nah, but it is a solid collection of short stories from a fairly diverse set of writers. You could do far worse for one of these mondo collections, especially when building a class with a focus that the smaller collections don't address, but it will never compare to something a little smaller and more focused collections, like Doubletakes, when teaching the craft of writing.
December 6, 2011
Have to confess that I haven't read this book cover to cover yet. It is a really big book. This book was my text book from Into to fiction in college. I kept it because the value I get from actually reading it is a lot more than the bookstore was going to buy it back for.
I did read a lot of it. Most of it. Really. I was suprised at how many of my favorite authors had stories in here and also how many stories were mystery and Science fiction.
I did read a lot of it. Most of it. Really. I was suprised at how many of my favorite authors had stories in here and also how many stories were mystery and Science fiction.
June 10, 2015
Though certainly one only needs a certain amount of readings, this anthology is superior (in my opinion) to "updated" anthologies due to the fact that is has nearly the same stories, but also some more obscure that often get left out of today's anthologies. Definitely worth a pick up!
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