Sadie Stein

I truly enjoyed the format of this anthology and it exposed me to some writers I had never encountered before such as Jane Bowles and Mary-Beth Hughes, who I believe have some of the strongest stories in this anthology. The introductions are at times helpful to an interpretation or at least expectation of the stories to follow but they are wildly variant. Dave Eggers outlines a couple key points about the strengths of James Salter's story "Bangkok" that serves as a benchmark, at least to me, at what the other authors should have contributed in order to present the "object lesson" of each story clearly for the reader. Overall if you're looking for an anthology to dip into this is a good one, or you know just read The Paris Review.… (mehr)

This book is similar in format to the 2000 anthology "You've Got to Read This" (highly recommended), and also to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (highly, wildly, hysterically, frantically recommended). Twenty authors were asked to select a short story (by some other author) and to write a brief introductory comment for it. The stories were chosen from the archives of the noted literary fiction journal "The Paris Review."

Being literary fiction, these stories don't have pat endings or pat plots or pat characters. They don't follow those writing rules you may have read about in "The Idiot's Guide to Writing Best-Selling Fiction for Dummies." They are sometimes mysterious, often quirky, at times experimental, and occasionally packed to the gills with WTF. I found a few of them too opaquely obscure to be enjoyable, and I expect some other readers will also have that experience (though perhaps tripping over different stories than I did). But other stories I found delightfully funny, wickedly clever, tear-jerkingly sad, or simply exquisite examples of the art of short fiction.

The joy in an anthology like this is in discovery. Finding a story that's an amazing read; that makes you want to look further into the author's work, thus perhaps leading to many more amazing reads. For me, the discoveries included James Salter's compressed and brilliant "Bangkok" (evidently something of a classic in lit-fic short story circles, so I'm probably blowing my credibility by admitting that I hadn't read it before), Mary-Beth Hughes' wrenchingly painful "Pelican Song," and Mary Robison's just-plain-wonderful "Likely Lake."

And so on. If you have any affinity for literary fiction short stories, I'm sure you will have your own discoveries as you read through this book. So quit wasting time with this review and buy the book and start reading. Wonderful discoveries and amazing reads await you.

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Appendix:
I have a gripe with how this book is promoted. On its front cover, its back cover, and in the product description here on the Amazon page, lists of authors are shown. But there's no indication as to whether the book has a story by any given author, or just one of the introductory comments. Thus, for example, despite the implied promise on the front cover you'll find no stories in here by Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, Jonathan Lethem, or several other notable authors listed.

But that was just a stupid and dishonest marketing decision (Is there any other kind of marketing decision?), and it doesn't affect the quality of the book's contents.

You can use the Amazon page's "Look Inside" feature to see the book's table of contents, but as a quick alternative, here's a list of contributors, divided up into story-contributors and comment-contributors:

Stories by: Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Jane Bowles, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, Evan S. Connell, Bernard Cooper, Guy Davenport, Lydia Davis, Thomas Glynn, Mary-Beth Hughes, Denis Johnson, Leonard Michaels, Steven Millhauser, Craig Nova, Mary Robison, Norman Rush, James Salter, Dallas Wiebe, Joy Williams

Comments by: Daniel Alarcon, Ann Beattie, David Bezmozgis, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill, Aleksandar Hemon, Amy Hempel, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, David Means, Lorrie Moore, Daniel Orozco, Norman Rush, Mona Simpson, Ali Smith, Wells Tower, Joy Williams… (mehr)