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An Introduction to Fiction
Kennedy/Gioia's An Introduction to Fiction, 10e continues to inspire students with a rich collection of fiction and engaging insights on reading, analyzing, and writing about stories. This bestselling anthology includes sixty-six superlative short stories, blending classic works and contemporary selections. Written by noted poets X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, the text reflects the authors' wit and contagious enthusiasm for their subject. Informative, accessible apparatus presents readable discussions of the literary devices, illustrated by apt works, and supported by interludes with the anthologized writers. This edition features 11 new stories, three new masterwork casebooks, extensively revised and expanded chapters on writing, and a fresh new design.
816 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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July 3, 2020
Note, July 2, 2020: When I read short story collections intermittently over a long period of time, my reactions are similarly written piecemeal, while they're fresh in my mind. That gives the reviews a choppy, and often repetitive, quality. Earlier this year, I had to condense and rearrange one of these into a unified whole because of Goodreads' length limit; and I was so pleased with the result that I decided to give every one of these a similar edit! Accordingly, I've now edited this one.
I was introduced to this collection in the mid 90s, since it was used as a textbook in a Bluefield College class I took in Creative Writing. Some of the material I'd read before; some I read during the course, and I finished reading most of the remainder in 2010. (In reviewing it, I have not commented on all of the included stories, just on a number of the most representative or memorable.)
Four selections here (though Jesus' parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15:11-32 isn't grouped with the others) are accurate written versions of oral fictional forms --folktale, fable, and parable-- that helpfully illustrate comparison and contrast between this tradition and literary fiction. These are followed by about two dozen stories divided between units on aspects of fiction like Plot, Character, Setting, Theme, etc., each introduced with an essay by the editors. These units are each followed by Suggestions for Writing, and all the stories in these sections are followed by intelligent questions that help the reader to interpret and appreciate them. Then one writer, devout Roman Catholic Flannery O'Connor, is singled out for in-depth study, with three stories and two nonfiction pieces by the author herself that help to explain her philosophy of writing. The best known of the stories is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which has a positive message (as O'Connor explains in one of the included critical pieces); but for me the horrific impact of the events of the story, even depicted without blood and gore, was so pervasive that the message was lost in it, and the climactic gesture that embodied it was just perceived as an odd anomaly and passed over. (Some of this was because I originally read it as a child of about ten --which is not the best age at which to encounter something like this.) It's one of the most horrifying tales in the English language, and the more so because, unlike tales of supernatural menaces, it's something that could really happen.
The other stories, for "Further Reading," follow the O'Connor section, and are arranged alphabetically by author. These are followed by a section made up of short snippets of literary-critical pieces by famous writers. The one by Poe has an intriguing insight --he argues that short stories, since they can be read at a sitting, allow the writer full scope to work an effect on the reader's mind, undiluted by the distractions that are inevitable when you have to read a work in several sittings instead of one. That makes short fiction a more effective medium for the literary art, in his opinion, than novels. The comments by other authors about the craft of fiction proved to be interesting --sometimes, as with Mansfield's, giving some insight into her own creative process, sometimes giving insight into fiction in general as with Henry James'. Faulkner's is a quote from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which I'd read years ago, but it's quite good and flies in the face of so much of the critical community's dominant attitudes today!
Finally, the editors gave brief descriptions of a number of critical approaches to literature --formalist, biographical, historical, etc.-- followed by short sections (mostly helpful) from critics of each stripe expanding on the method. My opinion is that there's some validity in almost ALL of these approaches, and they should be used together, like a carpenter' tools -any carpenter who insisted on building a shed using ONLY a saw, or ONLY a hammer, would soon find himself or herself very frustrated. The one exception to this is deconstructionist criticism, which I view as unadulterated tripe. (A good question for deconstructionists: if language can't communicate, why do you bother communicating your theory in language?)
In choosing the stories, the editors concentrated heavily on general fiction. A number of them are classics such as "The Lottery," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "The Yellow Wallpaper," "A Rose for Emily," "The Rocking-Horse Winner," and "To Build a Fire." Many of the writers represented were new to me, though I'd heard of all of them; often the selections were good, well-chosen introductions that whetted my appetite for more. Some of my own favorites here include Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart," Faulkner's "Barn Burning," Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation," Thurber's "The Catbird Seat," Cisneros' "Barbie-Q" and Alice Munro's "How I Met My Husband." Several stories are so heart-breaking that they couldn't be called "enjoyable" (and aren't supposed to be); but they serve to sensitize the reader to the sufferings of others --to awaken a compassion, not just for the suffering characters, but for real-life sufferers we may meet, and hopefully a heightened willingness to look for the suffering of others even if they don't loudly trumpet it. I'd put Chekhov's appropriately titled "Misery," Mansfield's "Miss Brill," Langston Hughes' "On the Road," and Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums" in this category.
Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" earned high marks from me. I'd read and greatly liked some of his other short stories before, and come to appreciate his unflinching and skillfully conveyed Christian moral vision. This selection, the story of the wasted life and lingering death of a Czarist Russian judge, a selfish and worldly man who's never considered ultimate reality and hardly ever had a thought or feeling in his adult life that was original or authentic, is of a piece with this body of work; it becomes a vehicle for driving home the universality of death, and raising the question of how we meet it. It isn't explicitly Christian in its message, but knowing where Tolstoy is coming from adds depth and context to the reader's understanding.
John Cheever's "The Five Forty-Eight" gives us a totally unlikable, morally repulsive protagonist. For me, that usually doesn't work in a story; but Cheever makes it work here. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" deal with, respectively, the urban and the rural American Black experience, and with issues of family dynamics, personal character and choices as well. Racism is a background in these stories, as in life, but the focus is on the black characters as determiners of their own destiny and makers of their own cultural world. (Baldwin's story tries to explain something of the dark psychology of drug addiction, which is a worthwhile literary subject but hard for me to relate to personally; and as a tone-deaf person, I probably get less benefit out of the role of blues music in the story than a blues fan would.) "Greasy Lake" by T. Coraghessan Boyle portrays the milieu of the socially, morally and culturally lost, stoned, egoistic, irresponsible delinquent youth of the 60s (and afterward) in the setting of a polluted lakeshore, the perfect symbol of nature defiled and perverted by a toxic culture. But he portrays it to expose and critique, not glorify, its defilement. The Baldwin and Boyle stories both have bad language, but IMO the dialogue in both is defensible as realistic in its setting.
"Paul's Case" is almost invariably the one Cather story that modern critics zero in on; it's a story with a teen protagonist --who can be viewed as the "hero" by the same critical school that treats Satan as the "hero" of Paradise Lost :-) -- who runs off to New York with stolen money. "Neighbor Rosicky" is a story I liked better, and if I'd been the editor here, would have selected that one instead; but this one isn't without its value, because Cather's portrayal of Paul is far from lionizing him or justifying what he does. Instead, her exploration of the social, moral and psychological ramifications of the character and his situation is nuanced, penetrating, balanced and thought provoking.
Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Amy Tan's "A Pair of Tickets" (the latter was either later incorporated in, or first written as part of, Tan's novel the Joy Luck Club, but can stand as a self- contained whole) are both powerfully evocative stories that draw very heavily on the writer's own life experiences: in Olsen's case, that of a working class woman abandoned by her husband with a child and having to raise her in the Depression and war years in rough circumstances, and in Tan's that of an American-born woman of Chinese extraction, coming to terms with the Chinese part of herself that she's inherited from her parents. Both of the narrators quickly became, to me, real people that I could empathize with, and see and feel through their eyes. Though my ethnicity is Swedish, not Chinese, and my specific family circumstances are very different (and I'm another generation removed from the old country), I could still see certain parallels in my own life. Olsen touches cords of feeling about the strains and misunderstandings between parent and child, and between siblings, that are part of many families' experience; and as is natural for a Marxist writer, she makes you acutely aware of the social injustice that shapes the lives of the working poor. (She and I don't agree on whether Marxism is the solution --though she doesn't argue for Marxism in the story-- but we'd agree that the system has to change.)
Lessing's "A Woman on a Roof" and Godimer's "The Defeated" are in the tradition of relatively unplotted stories that focus mainly on the character's inner perceptions of things; but they manage to do this in a constructive, involving way that holds interest (a feat most of the lesser authors in this school don't manage). Lessing's is a sobering look at the objectification of women in the minds of (too) many males; Gordimer's is an unflinching look at the way that some growing and grown kids fail to appreciate their parents or their roots, and the way human beings can take their hurt out on others without even understanding what they're doing. For readers who enjoy description, Gordimer's evocation of scenes in her native South Africa are as vivid and satisfying as any I ever read. Both stories, of course, have other dimensions as well; much could be written about them, and the same can be said for Hurston's "Sweat." That story is traditional plotted fiction, a masterpiece of a morality tale told with a stark, spare simplicity about characters so real they practically walk off the page.
Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews" and Frank O'Connor's "First Confession," though very different, have in common that they focus on the experience of young boys being reared in a kind of re ligiousity that's stifling, mean-spirited, obscurantist, intolerant and soul-crushing. You don't come away from these stories with the impression that this is how God really is, or that religious belief is inherently bunk; but you do come away with the realization that the perversion of religious belief too often foisted on kids is much worse than bunk. All of these stories exemplify general fiction the way it should be done!
Garcia Marquez' "The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock" strays into noir territory, though it doesn't have any explicit violence. The author avoids any resolution in the cop-out ending; and he milks every fleeting emotional nuance of the characters in a performance that comes across as something like a picture of a tree that concentrates so much on wood grain and leaf textures that it's hard to focus on the tree. But he does introduce you to two genuinely intriguing characters, in a really interesting and charged situation that invites all sorts of moral and psychological reflections.
Other selections didn't impress me as favorably, including Hemingway's "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" and Borges "The Gospel According to Mark." In Singer's "Gimpel the Fool", the protagonist's decision not to serve the townsfolk bread after he'd urinated in the kneading troughs, of course, is supposed to be a great moral epiphany, but it's overwhelmed by the sheer gross-out quality of the tasteless image. Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" is a darling of the critical community; and I know the point of it is supposed to be the narrator's learning to regard blind people in a less negative way. But for me, the gratuitous depiction of casual recreational dope use, treated in a way that seems designed to normalize and mainstream it, was disgusting enough to negate any positive message the rest of the story might have. Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," is repulsive, horrifying and disgusting (even without any explicit violence and gore). it deals with a 15-year-old girl who becomes the prey of two middle-aged psychopaths bent on rape. (Oates' reputation for ultra-dark, sick subject matter isn't undeserved.) Critics would say this is a brave exploration of the psychology of rapist psychopaths, and of the psyche of females who are often socialized to helplessly let themselves be victimized. But it was an exploration I didn't need, and it served only to remind me of why I much prefer to get my "horror" in the supernatural realm.
I did NOT read Kafka's "The Metamorphosis;" no doubt it's great literature; but I'm too repulsed by roaches to ever immerse myself in the story of a human being turned one. And I didn't read the part dealing with how to do academic writing about literature, because it no longer has any relation to anything that I'll do in the rest of my life; my school days are long behind me. But I've read the vast majority of the book, and feel qualified to review it. ("Everything That Rises Must Converge," Mason's "Shiloh," and Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" are stories I'm not sure I've fully understood and appreciated, and may read again.) [Note: I did read the Porter story again last year.]
This is, overall, a treasure trove of solid, quality reading for fans of short fiction, and a good introduction to serious literary study for readers interested in that sort of thing. It would fill its function as a college (or high school) textbook in a literature class very well.
I was introduced to this collection in the mid 90s, since it was used as a textbook in a Bluefield College class I took in Creative Writing. Some of the material I'd read before; some I read during the course, and I finished reading most of the remainder in 2010. (In reviewing it, I have not commented on all of the included stories, just on a number of the most representative or memorable.)
Four selections here (though Jesus' parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15:11-32 isn't grouped with the others) are accurate written versions of oral fictional forms --folktale, fable, and parable-- that helpfully illustrate comparison and contrast between this tradition and literary fiction. These are followed by about two dozen stories divided between units on aspects of fiction like Plot, Character, Setting, Theme, etc., each introduced with an essay by the editors. These units are each followed by Suggestions for Writing, and all the stories in these sections are followed by intelligent questions that help the reader to interpret and appreciate them. Then one writer, devout Roman Catholic Flannery O'Connor, is singled out for in-depth study, with three stories and two nonfiction pieces by the author herself that help to explain her philosophy of writing. The best known of the stories is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which has a positive message (as O'Connor explains in one of the included critical pieces); but for me the horrific impact of the events of the story, even depicted without blood and gore, was so pervasive that the message was lost in it, and the climactic gesture that embodied it was just perceived as an odd anomaly and passed over. (Some of this was because I originally read it as a child of about ten --which is not the best age at which to encounter something like this.) It's one of the most horrifying tales in the English language, and the more so because, unlike tales of supernatural menaces, it's something that could really happen.
The other stories, for "Further Reading," follow the O'Connor section, and are arranged alphabetically by author. These are followed by a section made up of short snippets of literary-critical pieces by famous writers. The one by Poe has an intriguing insight --he argues that short stories, since they can be read at a sitting, allow the writer full scope to work an effect on the reader's mind, undiluted by the distractions that are inevitable when you have to read a work in several sittings instead of one. That makes short fiction a more effective medium for the literary art, in his opinion, than novels. The comments by other authors about the craft of fiction proved to be interesting --sometimes, as with Mansfield's, giving some insight into her own creative process, sometimes giving insight into fiction in general as with Henry James'. Faulkner's is a quote from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which I'd read years ago, but it's quite good and flies in the face of so much of the critical community's dominant attitudes today!
Finally, the editors gave brief descriptions of a number of critical approaches to literature --formalist, biographical, historical, etc.-- followed by short sections (mostly helpful) from critics of each stripe expanding on the method. My opinion is that there's some validity in almost ALL of these approaches, and they should be used together, like a carpenter' tools -any carpenter who insisted on building a shed using ONLY a saw, or ONLY a hammer, would soon find himself or herself very frustrated. The one exception to this is deconstructionist criticism, which I view as unadulterated tripe. (A good question for deconstructionists: if language can't communicate, why do you bother communicating your theory in language?)
In choosing the stories, the editors concentrated heavily on general fiction. A number of them are classics such as "The Lottery," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "The Yellow Wallpaper," "A Rose for Emily," "The Rocking-Horse Winner," and "To Build a Fire." Many of the writers represented were new to me, though I'd heard of all of them; often the selections were good, well-chosen introductions that whetted my appetite for more. Some of my own favorites here include Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart," Faulkner's "Barn Burning," Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation," Thurber's "The Catbird Seat," Cisneros' "Barbie-Q" and Alice Munro's "How I Met My Husband." Several stories are so heart-breaking that they couldn't be called "enjoyable" (and aren't supposed to be); but they serve to sensitize the reader to the sufferings of others --to awaken a compassion, not just for the suffering characters, but for real-life sufferers we may meet, and hopefully a heightened willingness to look for the suffering of others even if they don't loudly trumpet it. I'd put Chekhov's appropriately titled "Misery," Mansfield's "Miss Brill," Langston Hughes' "On the Road," and Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums" in this category.
Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" earned high marks from me. I'd read and greatly liked some of his other short stories before, and come to appreciate his unflinching and skillfully conveyed Christian moral vision. This selection, the story of the wasted life and lingering death of a Czarist Russian judge, a selfish and worldly man who's never considered ultimate reality and hardly ever had a thought or feeling in his adult life that was original or authentic, is of a piece with this body of work; it becomes a vehicle for driving home the universality of death, and raising the question of how we meet it. It isn't explicitly Christian in its message, but knowing where Tolstoy is coming from adds depth and context to the reader's understanding.
John Cheever's "The Five Forty-Eight" gives us a totally unlikable, morally repulsive protagonist. For me, that usually doesn't work in a story; but Cheever makes it work here. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" deal with, respectively, the urban and the rural American Black experience, and with issues of family dynamics, personal character and choices as well. Racism is a background in these stories, as in life, but the focus is on the black characters as determiners of their own destiny and makers of their own cultural world. (Baldwin's story tries to explain something of the dark psychology of drug addiction, which is a worthwhile literary subject but hard for me to relate to personally; and as a tone-deaf person, I probably get less benefit out of the role of blues music in the story than a blues fan would.) "Greasy Lake" by T. Coraghessan Boyle portrays the milieu of the socially, morally and culturally lost, stoned, egoistic, irresponsible delinquent youth of the 60s (and afterward) in the setting of a polluted lakeshore, the perfect symbol of nature defiled and perverted by a toxic culture. But he portrays it to expose and critique, not glorify, its defilement. The Baldwin and Boyle stories both have bad language, but IMO the dialogue in both is defensible as realistic in its setting.
"Paul's Case" is almost invariably the one Cather story that modern critics zero in on; it's a story with a teen protagonist --who can be viewed as the "hero" by the same critical school that treats Satan as the "hero" of Paradise Lost :-) -- who runs off to New York with stolen money. "Neighbor Rosicky" is a story I liked better, and if I'd been the editor here, would have selected that one instead; but this one isn't without its value, because Cather's portrayal of Paul is far from lionizing him or justifying what he does. Instead, her exploration of the social, moral and psychological ramifications of the character and his situation is nuanced, penetrating, balanced and thought provoking.
Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Amy Tan's "A Pair of Tickets" (the latter was either later incorporated in, or first written as part of, Tan's novel the Joy Luck Club, but can stand as a self- contained whole) are both powerfully evocative stories that draw very heavily on the writer's own life experiences: in Olsen's case, that of a working class woman abandoned by her husband with a child and having to raise her in the Depression and war years in rough circumstances, and in Tan's that of an American-born woman of Chinese extraction, coming to terms with the Chinese part of herself that she's inherited from her parents. Both of the narrators quickly became, to me, real people that I could empathize with, and see and feel through their eyes. Though my ethnicity is Swedish, not Chinese, and my specific family circumstances are very different (and I'm another generation removed from the old country), I could still see certain parallels in my own life. Olsen touches cords of feeling about the strains and misunderstandings between parent and child, and between siblings, that are part of many families' experience; and as is natural for a Marxist writer, she makes you acutely aware of the social injustice that shapes the lives of the working poor. (She and I don't agree on whether Marxism is the solution --though she doesn't argue for Marxism in the story-- but we'd agree that the system has to change.)
Lessing's "A Woman on a Roof" and Godimer's "The Defeated" are in the tradition of relatively unplotted stories that focus mainly on the character's inner perceptions of things; but they manage to do this in a constructive, involving way that holds interest (a feat most of the lesser authors in this school don't manage). Lessing's is a sobering look at the objectification of women in the minds of (too) many males; Gordimer's is an unflinching look at the way that some growing and grown kids fail to appreciate their parents or their roots, and the way human beings can take their hurt out on others without even understanding what they're doing. For readers who enjoy description, Gordimer's evocation of scenes in her native South Africa are as vivid and satisfying as any I ever read. Both stories, of course, have other dimensions as well; much could be written about them, and the same can be said for Hurston's "Sweat." That story is traditional plotted fiction, a masterpiece of a morality tale told with a stark, spare simplicity about characters so real they practically walk off the page.
Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews" and Frank O'Connor's "First Confession," though very different, have in common that they focus on the experience of young boys being reared in a kind of re ligiousity that's stifling, mean-spirited, obscurantist, intolerant and soul-crushing. You don't come away from these stories with the impression that this is how God really is, or that religious belief is inherently bunk; but you do come away with the realization that the perversion of religious belief too often foisted on kids is much worse than bunk. All of these stories exemplify general fiction the way it should be done!
Garcia Marquez' "The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock" strays into noir territory, though it doesn't have any explicit violence. The author avoids any resolution in the cop-out ending; and he milks every fleeting emotional nuance of the characters in a performance that comes across as something like a picture of a tree that concentrates so much on wood grain and leaf textures that it's hard to focus on the tree. But he does introduce you to two genuinely intriguing characters, in a really interesting and charged situation that invites all sorts of moral and psychological reflections.
Other selections didn't impress me as favorably, including Hemingway's "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" and Borges "The Gospel According to Mark." In Singer's "Gimpel the Fool", the protagonist's decision not to serve the townsfolk bread after he'd urinated in the kneading troughs, of course, is supposed to be a great moral epiphany, but it's overwhelmed by the sheer gross-out quality of the tasteless image. Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" is a darling of the critical community; and I know the point of it is supposed to be the narrator's learning to regard blind people in a less negative way. But for me, the gratuitous depiction of casual recreational dope use, treated in a way that seems designed to normalize and mainstream it, was disgusting enough to negate any positive message the rest of the story might have. Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," is repulsive, horrifying and disgusting (even without any explicit violence and gore). it deals with a 15-year-old girl who becomes the prey of two middle-aged psychopaths bent on rape. (Oates' reputation for ultra-dark, sick subject matter isn't undeserved.) Critics would say this is a brave exploration of the psychology of rapist psychopaths, and of the psyche of females who are often socialized to helplessly let themselves be victimized. But it was an exploration I didn't need, and it served only to remind me of why I much prefer to get my "horror" in the supernatural realm.
I did NOT read Kafka's "The Metamorphosis;" no doubt it's great literature; but I'm too repulsed by roaches to ever immerse myself in the story of a human being turned one. And I didn't read the part dealing with how to do academic writing about literature, because it no longer has any relation to anything that I'll do in the rest of my life; my school days are long behind me. But I've read the vast majority of the book, and feel qualified to review it. ("Everything That Rises Must Converge," Mason's "Shiloh," and Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" are stories I'm not sure I've fully understood and appreciated, and may read again.) [Note: I did read the Porter story again last year.]
This is, overall, a treasure trove of solid, quality reading for fans of short fiction, and a good introduction to serious literary study for readers interested in that sort of thing. It would fill its function as a college (or high school) textbook in a literature class very well.
June 5, 2017
I loved reading this book. It is supposed to be a college level english class textbook, but I read it for fun.
There were over 50 entertaining short stories within the pages and I found almost all of them enjoyable.
There was also a chapter dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe, which I liked as well.
The differences between each writer and stories throughout was the best part because you get the chance to read many different styles and perspectives.
Plus, a short bibliography of each writer was given before their short story so you could get an in depth understanding of the writings.
Great read!
There were over 50 entertaining short stories within the pages and I found almost all of them enjoyable.
There was also a chapter dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe, which I liked as well.
The differences between each writer and stories throughout was the best part because you get the chance to read many different styles and perspectives.
Plus, a short bibliography of each writer was given before their short story so you could get an in depth understanding of the writings.
Great read!
May 11, 2009
One of my first and most improtant writing reference books. Kennedy's choice of stories to demonstrate and reveal the elements of writing are perfect.
August 19, 2010
The Kennedy and Gioia series of Introductions to Literature are amongst the best out there in terms of helpful notes, editorial commentary and guidance for writing essays. I love Kennedy and Gioia and their collaborative voice. BUT--and it is a big BUT....they are now on their 13th edition of their poetry book and it costs a bundle for students. Each edition becomes less academically rigorous and the best poems of the past are often removed in favor of a narcissistic ditty that was written yesterday.
If you don't need these books for a course, I would recommend getting an older edition at a used book store or used book web site. My mother had the second edition for a long time and it was an enormous pleasure to her.
If you don't need these books for a course, I would recommend getting an older edition at a used book store or used book web site. My mother had the second edition for a long time and it was an enormous pleasure to her.
March 22, 2012
Sebetulnya belum habis dibaca, tapi apa daya kalau ternyata waktu peminjaman buku sudah habis :(
Tapi dari yang saya baca, buku ini cukup jelas dalam memberikan pengertian mengenai fiksi (cenderung ke cerita pendek). Ditambah pula dengan puluhan cerpen penulis dunia sebagai contoh dalam pembentukan unsur cerpen.
Tapi dari yang saya baca, buku ini cukup jelas dalam memberikan pengertian mengenai fiksi (cenderung ke cerita pendek). Ditambah pula dengan puluhan cerpen penulis dunia sebagai contoh dalam pembentukan unsur cerpen.
December 17, 2012
A mix of short stories. Definitely college material. The stories are pretty intense other than that they do capture the reader to draw you into their story. A must read in their background before you start the story. It's a must!
So far have read:
A Rose for Emily
A Tell Tale Heart
To build a Fire
A Pair of Tickets
Barn Burning
The Open Boat
So far have read:
A Rose for Emily
A Tell Tale Heart
To build a Fire
A Pair of Tickets
Barn Burning
The Open Boat
November 22, 2015
This is such a resourceful book. It was handed to us during our 2nd year of college, and I've been going back to it ever since. I recommend it to anyone who's interested in literature, but has no idea where to start and what to buy. It introduced me to the fundamentals of fiction, poetry and drama, while providing a solid background and explanation about each genre.
April 19, 2015
I read this text for my study of fiction class and loved each story I read. I cannot recommend this collection enough, my particular favorites were The Storm by Kate Chopin and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
April 26, 2014
I read most of this book for college (i.e. the portions assigned by my class).
Want to read
April 5, 2017Great collection of varied stories.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews