The Granta Book of the American Short Story - Softcover

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9781847086792: The Granta Book of the American Short Story

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847086799 ISBN 13: 9781847086792

Publisher: Granta Books, 2012

Richard Ford, who is among the finest of American novelists and short-story writers, edits and introduces this volume. First published by Granta Books in 1992, it became the definitive anthology of American short fiction written in the last half of the twentieth century - an 'exemplary choice' in the words of the Washington Post - with stories by writers such as Eudora Welty, John Cheever and Raymond Carver (and forty others) demonstrating how much memorable power can lie in the briefest narration. Along with The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, this book constitutes an important reflection and judgement of recent American writing - as well as the superb pleasure yielded by the stories themselves.

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About the Author:

Richard Ford's story collections include Rock Springs, Women Without Men, and A Multitude of Sins. His novel Independence Day was the first novel to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel, The Lay of the Land, was published in 2006.

From Publishers Weekly:

Academic anthologies, no matter how massive, tend to paint literature with a broad and representative brush. "Best-of" collections may dabble exclusively and exhaustively in a particular decade or school. Happily, Granta 's compendium of recent stories by American writers is neither. Culled from work published since 1944--the year Ford ( Rock Springs ) was born--the more than 40 stories in this 700-plus-page volume are an idiosyncratic array with few common threads connecting them. Apart from the 1944 cutoff date, Ford's only criteria, stated in his quirky, thoughtful introduction, are that the entries be "ones I like--stories that have altered my appreciation of what a short story might surprisingly contain or be about; stories that by their brilliance have seemed to sanction the entire endeavor of being a writer." A story can be almost anything in his book, and his notion of an American "allows an American to be anyone who persuasively claims to be one." Ford's liberal aesthetic sweeps us from (to name a very few) the Bowleses, Wallace Stegner and Grace Paley through the pivotal work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Robert Coover, to that of Jamaica Kincaid, Raymond Carver and Richard Bausch. This is hardly another case of rounding up the usual suspects; there are many surprises in the lineup--delightful ones.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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