Synopsis
John Updike selects stories by Hemingway, Faulkner, Cather, Cheever, Welty, Oates, Ozick, and more--55 stories in all, culled from the Best American Short Stories collections.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1999-11-11 | | Narrated by: | Jill McCorkle, Lorrie Moore, Rick Moody, Tim O'Brien | | Editor: | John Updike | | Edition Description: | Abridged |
| Size | | Height: | 7.3 in | | Width: | 3.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 5.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
For eighty-four years, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers and showcased the most compelling stories of each year. With coeditor Katrina Kenison, John Updike has chosen stories from these volumes that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Joyce Carol Oates, James Alan McPherson, Raymond Carver and scores of others. This audio edition features a wide variety of readers and stories; Updike reads several stories and his introduction, in which he explains, "(These) stories ... struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important."
Industry Reviews
"The reader should treat this centennial Best as an event of a season, not of an evening or two. The risk otherwise is esthetic shell shock."
Eder
"Finding wonderful stories that you don't already know is one of this collection's great pleasures....Updike has made some surprising--even striking--selections, and in consequence this collection seems far less predictable than it might have been....The book includes...almost nothing that I wouldn't care to read again...."
Gorra
The task had to be daunting, selecting the 55 stories that grace this volume. The title alone is daunting: the best? But the riches contained including a foreword by Kenison and a deft introduction from Updike prove the title accurate. Consider the resources mined: 2000 stories anthologized in annual best-of volumes since 1915. Although certain notable story writers, John O'Hara for one, never made it into the series and others who did have been crowded out of this volume, the stories excavated and displayed herein are gems.Often these are the gems one would expect such as John Cheever's balance of the magical and the sinister in "The Country Husband," about an inappropriate desire that floods a man after a plane crash. What story captures better than "Greenleaf" Flannery O'Connor's affrontery before Protestantism and her vision of unearned grace? And would readers expect anything less of Dorothy Parker than "Here We Are," a scathing yet poignant depiction of a newly married couple bickering like old retirees? Indeed, the volume includes such signature stories as Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, where Have You Been?," Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."But some stories here by the well-known are not necessarily the best known. Fitzgerald is represented not by "Babylon Revisited" but by "Crazy Sunday," about the perilous life of a screenwriter employed at a director's whim. The transient world captured in Eudora Welty's "The Hitch-Hikers" seems far removed from the homier gardens, parlors, and post offices familiar from her other fiction. And readers can be grateful that Updike chose not "The Magic Barrel" but Bernard Malamud's "The German Refugee," a tale that ends with a dark if O. Henry-like reversal.In Kenison's words, these stories are "an invaluable record of our century." The book opens with Benjamin Rosenblatt's "Zelig," a tale of an immigrant who longs against reason to return to Russia. Immigration is a recurring theme, picked up again in Alexander Godin's sadly ironic "My Dead Brother Comes to America," And that we are nearly all descendants of immigrants is as apparent in Willa Cather's "Double Birthday" or Saul Bellow's "A Silver Dish" as in Gish Jen's bitterly funny "Birthmates," about a Chinese-American as trapped by his self-definition as by the racism of others.In his introduction, Updike writes, "The American experience... has been brutal and hard." The stories bear this out. In Elizabeth Bishop's "The Farmer's Children," two boys freeze protecting their father's equipment, while in Grace Stone Coates's lovely "Wild Plums," a young girl is forbidden to gather fruit with a family her mother deems socially inferior. Life on this continent may be brutal, but this extraordinary collection offers up dazzling writing that salves the wounds, as well as stories full of the pleasures of life. (Apr.)
(03/08/1999)
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