You've Got To Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them In Awe (1994) - Plot & Excerpts
just received this from Paul Bryant - thanks. It's massive (600 big p) - I can see this taking up most of February. Looks tasty, but the Biblical style of the book (Awe), the weight, puts me off reading it in public. a bunch of fantastic stories on the whole. Will do a proper review soon. (Tomorrow I hope).Where to start? This review will be a work in progress as it'll take me a couple of days (United are on tonight). Firstly I'd read half-ish of the stories (17), but thought I'd re-read all but in the end I couldn't be fucked to re-read Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Joyce (The Dead), Kafka (Penal colony) and Tolstoy (Master and Man): felt like too many stairs to climb. We can all agree they're great but not in the right head space for 'em, man. Two things to say about the Dickens though: the only Englishman, and isn't CC a novella (Don't really want to get into that though?). Secondly I didn't read all the introductions, the bits where they explain why these stories made their knees go weak, cuz they too often gave the plot away. I did afterwards, in post-coital bliss sometimes share a cigarette with them.I'll just go through them one by one:James Agee- A Mother's Tale.weird, a tale from within the cattle community, their myths of the 'final journay', very well sustained piece, takes the logic to is own ends and done well, but wasn't that enamoured. The one that comes back from slaughterhouse, his hide flung backward from his naked muscles by the wind of his moving reminds me of that Annie Proulx story the half something steer. (Wyoming Tales?). It didn't flag but allegory isn't my bag.Isaac Babel - Guy de Maupassant (already read (r))I love Babel, his Red Cavalry is one of my touchstones (whatever they are), to me (I probably heard this somewhere) he is the Goya of literature, full of sharp detail, visceral when need be, brutal, but full of hints and subtlety too. A beautiful writer (in translation, probably even more so in Russian). Not sure if this is his best, but it's certainly brilliant and mysterious.James Baldwin - Sonny's Blues (r)Baldwin is someone I only started reading recently. Don't know why it took me so long, but this one is great, properly earns its celebrated last line the image of the drink of Scotch and milk on top of the piano: it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling.Donald Barthelme - The Schoola 'list' story, funny and surreal (a little glib?). Not my sort of thing but has the virtue of brevity.Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph (r)I appreciate its acuity and sensitivity, its rigour, its perfection. The small thing (two or three centimeters) containing everything I saw the heavy laden sea; I saw the dawn and the dusk; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver plated cobweb at the centre of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London). For some reason though I haven't felt like reading Borges for years and still don't.Jane Bowles - A Day in the OpenDon't know, I felt little after reading it. Paul Bowles - A Distant EpisodeA 'descent' story. I love em. The linguistics professor in North Africa (I assume) who falls into the hands of the communities he tries to survey and record and ends up brutalised and tongueless and another thing altogether, a fool dressed in tincans and dancing to the command of villagers. This may be a comment on colonisation and civilisation but I liked it for the story, its relentless dive into the abyss, done with such calm, assured prose. Frightening.Mary Caponegro - The Star CafeNo thanks.Angela Carter - ReflectionsNot a great Carter fan. I was fairly intrigued by the mirror world in this, but bored by the rest of it.Raymond Carver - Cathedral (r)A relief to read this again and find it still great. One of his best.John Cheever - Goodbye, My Brother (r)Ditto. Also another great last line.Anton Chekhov - Gooseberries (r)Ditto. Hard to explain why Chekhov is so good. Is it because he achieves so much, such insight and awareness of character and yet achieves it so quietly, without insistence?Dickens - couldn't be bothered. (r)Molly Giles - Pie DanceI liked this from its intriguing opening: I don't know what to do about my husband's new wife. She won't come in. She sits on the front porch and smokes. to the appearance of said husband. (even though I don't like dogs I might have danced with this one).Lars Gustafsson - Greatness Strikes Where it PleasesIt strikes this story right in the smacker. At first I couldn't make it out then I realised I was in the position of the vulnerable protagonist whose life we follow from his first school (the woodshed) to his abandoned old age heavy and huge like a boulder in the woods, he sat in his chair, moving it with effort a few inches every hour so that it always remained in the patch of sun. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - The InterviewI loved this story, maybe because the hero is so like me in 'interview' situations. Not sure at first if it was 'great', it is competent, I thought, it is economically described, but then I thought it is also moving and profound and brings real life, flawed and pampered life, into the room, so perhaps it is.James Joyce - The Dead (r) didn't readKafka - In the Penal Colony (r) dittoJamaica Kincaid - Girla short short, a mother's instructions (thus a 'list' story) and admonishments to a daughter:don't throw stones at blackbirds because it might not be a blackbird at all. Perfect in its way.Clarice Lispector - The Smallest Woman in the WorldThe woman the explorer finds is joyous because she was experiencing the ineffable sensation of not having been eaten yet. I was joyous because I found her in this story. A treat.Katherine Mansfield - Daughters of the Late Colonel (r)first read this at school 'O' level and although I kind of liked it I didn't know why. Read a lot more Mansfield since, and get her now. This meditation on death and its releases, its freedoms as well as its grief is probably one of her best. Alice Munro - Labor Day Dinner (r)A good Munro story (not hard to find), confusing at first, so many people and their spouses, partners and ex partners and children and children's boyfriends, but Munro is able to take you through all the tensions and comedy and underlying grudges and urges and needs in her skilled, unobtrusive manner. I have a writer friend (one - the only one) who thinks that Munro is contrived and sometimes I agree with her. Not here though.more later...later..Vladimir Nabokov - Spring in Fialta (r)I read a lot of Nabokov in the late 70s at college, and of course he was one of my heroes. Haven't read him much since, so interesting to read again. You marvel straight away at his ability to describe, to apprehend: A pantless infant of the male sex, with a taut mud-gray little belly..waddled off bow legged, trying to carry three oranges at once, but continuously dropping the variable thrid, until he fell himself,. Sometimes I feel the sentences are overstuffed (why not boy instead of infant of the male sex?), but there is usually a reason, an accumulating power in his choice of image and everything knits togther. Glad I re-read him, and I'll re-read more. Nabokov will always be, like this narrator's wife and children an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being.. (Only my north probably a bit foggy).Incidentally same end as Munro's but with a different outcome. Both look at fate ticking away in the background of any life and relationship, only in the Munro we only know this at the end, here it is clear from the beginning with chance meetings running the plot.Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried (r)Another 'list' story, and one of the most effective and powerful I've ever read.Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find (r)Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. My second favourite of the book. Read it once, as a young man (long time ago), reading it again now stopped my heart, not literally, my writing/reading heart. A story that starts out as one thing and evolves perfectly into another, so that the shock is smoothly absorbed but stabs deeper. Everyone who hasn't read it should. Now.Tillie Olsen - I Stand Here IroningStrong stuff about a mother admitting to bad feelings towards one of her children. I admired it rather than loved.Grace Paley - Wants (r)another favourite writer of mine. Like the introducer (Janet Kauffman) I learnt from her that 'fiction doesn't need, even if it wants, large events or epiphanies or dramatic turns.'Delmore Schwartz - In Dreams Begin ResponsibilitiesDon't know, quite intrigued by this, a man watching the history of his parents as a film in a dream, but don't think I got it. Will read again.Leslie Marmon Silko - The Man to Send Rain Cloudsumm, another one to re-read I think.Robert Stone - Helping (r)fascinating story of a veteran who counsels, but it turns out he needs the help, as an alcoholic about to fall off the wagon in front of his long suffering wife Grace. Exhilerating sequences, especially out in the snow at the end with his neighbour who skis up to him, unbearably sober and in control (the neighbour that is).Leo Tolstoy - Master and Man (r) - skippedJohn Updike - Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car (r)An early Updike, I like his early stories, stuffed with acute observation and aching with love. This is a lovely piece about how wear and tear are signs of care and beauty, our marks upon the world.Alice Walker - FlowersFirst time I've read her, although I've seen the Colour Purple and know a lot about her. This is one of those that starts about one thing and becomes somethng else, a tiny piece that truly does expand in your mind and bring history, oppression and horror in from a summer day of birdsong and flowers. A minor miracle of compression and economy.Eudora Welty - No Place for You, My Love (r)I adore this story. I worship it. That's because I am over forty, according to the introduction (Russell Banks). I first read it in 1997ish when I was 42, just old enough to appreciate, and it inspired me to write a story, a manky mangled homage to this one that I abandoned but recently took out again to try and salvage it. This one, a thing of beauty and grace has two strangers meet at a party in New Orleans and drive off together in the Louisiana heat to the edge of the continent. Mine has two strangers meet and drive from Birmingham (UK) to Mid-Wales in the drizzle. Not quite the same. Anyway the re-reading confirmed its place as number one.Jerome Wilson - Paper GardenOne of those with one defining image to carry it in your mind, in this case the titular garden. It was a good story, lively and reminded me of the impact a new teacher can make on a pupil (see my review on Professor Branestawm).I thought how proud Wilson must be to be in such exalted company with his first published story, at the age of 24 (when this book came out).So, I did enjoy this on the whole, introduced me to 8 great new stories and re-affirmed my pleasure in many others. One or two I wouldn't have included, but personal taste plays a part in taht. Scores just under The Penguin Book of International Short Stories, 1945-85 in which I first read the Welty story. It's got an even higher hit rate than this one. I think in the States it's known as 'Art of the Tale.' (The Penguin Book I mean, not 'You've Got to read This').
This is the book that I have been reading before I go to bed, for a month or so, and I am very glad to have read this book, as all the stories are good, and some are even great.Among the stories in this collection that I had read before are “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien (arguably the best Vietnam War story ever written) and “No Place for You, My Love” by Eudora Welty. I loved some of the stories I read here for the first time, such as “A Mother’s Tale” by James Agee, “The School” by Donald Barthelme, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” by Katherine Mansfield, “Master and Man” by Leo Tolstoy, and “The Flowers” by Alice Walker. Each of the stories in this collection is introduced by a writer; I found that it was best to read the introduction after reading each story, especially for stories that were not already familiar to me.I loved reading this collection of short stories, and I am very glad that I have this book to keep on my own book shelves.
What do You think about You've Got To Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them In Awe (1994)?
A very good, even excellent, anthology that has pretty strong selections, some classics and some less well-known. The element that sets it above many similar anthologies are the prefaces to each story, written by a leading contemporary author. The preface to John Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" by Allan Gurganus is a marvelous piece of writing in its own right, and as good of a preface/encomium as I've found.One important note: read the story before you read the preface. Most of them have spoilers, which I suppose would make them more appropriate as afterwords.
—Hung
Short stories are the three minute singles of the literary world and anyone who has been pasted to the wall by the furious power of 19th Nervous Breakdown or the limpid beauty of Waterloo Sunset and yet hasn't managed to keep awake during an entire Stones or Kinks album will know what I mean. A great short story has a pungency and a pure serendipity. Alas, though, for every Paint It Black there are a couple of Angies (ouch) and for every Lola there's a few Plasticmen (ecch). So it is with every short story collection, even ones like this which announce that every story in it has tore down somebody's life and rebuilt it from the basement up. There are some of my favourites here like Borges' The Aleph (oh who could not love that one) and Molly Giles' Pie Dance and Lars Gustafsson's Greatness Strikes Where it Pleases (what a title) and there are a whole lot where you have to think that you don't get them, I mean, they're okay and all, but not THAT great. Having grown up with science fiction, which is essentially a short story genre no matter what the bookshops heaving with three-volume series may imply, I remained a low-level short story addict, but it's a lonely obsession since while you can chat about novels with your pals, short stories fly under most readers' radar. So it's little use me complaining about something like Angela Carter's Reflections - what kind of shit is that? You got to be kidding me! or Mary Caponegro's The Star Cafe - what kind of shit is that? Now I KNOW you're kidding me! Us short story readers learn to shrug, spit in the dust, move our haversack of expectations to our other shoulder, and walk on.
—Paul Bryant
YOU'VE GOT TO READ THISIf you love, I mean love, you some short stories, then you've got to read this! It's a collection of short stories selected by established writers at the time of this book's printing. It first caught my attention when I learned it was being used as an ad hoc textbook for the undergraduate creative writing students at Iowa University. My thinking was, "Hey, good enough for the Iowa Workshop, good enough for me." And it was! This collection really speaks to what the short story form is capable of. Perhaps you've read a short story in a recent popular magazine and thought...mmmeeeh, okay, I guess. These aren't those kinds of short stories. You read these and then you put your socks back on. But keep in mind, they're, at times, challenging in theme, structure and vocabulary.My favorite is Guy de Maupassant by Isaac Babel. This short story epitomizes the absolute frenzy and awkwardness of the libido of a male intellecutal better and in fewer pages than anything I've read. The Aleph is a close second and In the Penal Colony...oh, don't get me started.
—David Fleming
