The Best American Short Stories of the 80s - Softcover

Ravenel, Shannon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395522234 ISBN 13: 9780395522233

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990

Synopsis

An anthology of twenty of the finest short stories by American writers includes works by Peter Taylor, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Russell Banks

About this title

About the Author:

Shannon Ravenel, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, was series editor of The Best American Short Stories for fourteen years before she inaugurated the New Stories from the South series. She is director of Shannon Ravenel Books, an Algonquin imprint, and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ravenel picked these 20 pieces from 200 chosen by a decade's worth of guest editors of The Best American Short Stories , of which she is series editor, and rightly offers them as evidence of a renaissance of the short story. While the selection of 20 "best" stories of any given decade is a necessarily arbitrary endeavor, this anthology for the most part offers masterpieces, high points from long and influential careers--Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates and Cynthia Ozick--although several authors who earned their reputations during the past decade, such as Bharati Mukherjee, also are featured. The range of styles and subjects is astounding. In Carver's minimalist "Cathedral," a blind guest restores his host's capacity to notice the world around him. An eponymous shawl becomes a source of nourishment, protection, even communication for a mother and daughter in a concentration camp in Ozick's symbolic yet achingly realistic tale. However, the brief prefaces to each selection here are distracting and invasive--best read after the stories they introduce, if at all.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0395522234
• ISBN 13: 9780395522233
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 393