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The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

List Price: $13.00
Your Price: $9.75
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Best of the Best
Review:
In the typically trenchant prose of his Introduction (his own superb fiction-not included in the anthology-is packed with ideas and inventions), editor Ben Marcus writes, "The question I wanted to ask, as I read the stories that would fill this book, was not: What is the plot, but rather, What is the story plotting for? Not: What is it about, but how is it going about its business, whatever its business might be? What is the story's tactic of mattering, its strategy to last inside a reader? How is it scheming to be something I might care about?"

Marcus is out to prove, with this authoritative selection, that reading and writing prose fiction are still among our most exciting, affecting mental activities, and probably will continue to be for as long as we remain people more or less like we've been for a long time now. Artificial intelligence could never have written these stories. Only a real person, with an unconscious and a gut-wrenching ambition to do hard creative work could come up with sentences like the ones gathered in this invaluable, dazzling anthology.

The allure of the individual stories is in almost inverse relation to the fame and hoopla surrounding each of the writers. The Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri is represented by the dullest story in the book. The excerpts from David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men could conceivably by made worth reading if condensed into much briefer "interviews."

On the other hand, the story called "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," by a writer I had never heard of before (and who has not yet published a book of fiction) with the promisingly evocative name of Wells Tower, is one of the finest short stories I've ever read. About brutal pirates on the North Sea raping and robbing and killing, and aching with ambivalence about going home to their wives and beds, it is a perfectly executed, fully imagined, moving work of art.

Most of the stories in this major collection are representative of the very best short fiction by Americans in the last fifteen or so years. The only theme common to all the best of them is a commitment to be anything but boring; they grab hold of the reader's attention fast and do all they can to keep it fully engaged even beyond the final words of the story. These fictions are meant to be haunting and unforgettable, and most of them are.


Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Excellent and Innovative Fiction
Review: In this anthology, editor Ben Marcus aims to show us the power in "the way our few stories are told", and he largely succeeds. The fiction he has gathered embraces a wide range of approaches: experimentalism and traditionalism; formalism and conversationalism; realism and surrealism. Remarkably, all establish unique emotional territories that linger after their reading. Some are darkly serious (Kate Braverman's "Histories of the Undead"), while others are boldly hilarious ("The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders" by Aleksandar Hemon). Some are long, intricate explorations ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" by Jhumpa Lahiri) while others are merely fictional flashes (Dawn Raffel's "Up the Old Goat Road"). Not one is reminiscent of another - and that makes for lively reading, especially when settling down for a long evening of one fiction after another.

The stunning landscape and primitive world evoked in "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" (Wells Tower) assaults the senses and the mind as the story descends into brutal violence and then emerges with an understanding of the love that comes out of it. The story is simply brilliant. Another standout is William Gay's "The Paperhanger", also a story about love and murder, where a child disappears after her mother argues with the paperhanger working on her unfinished house. More outrageously, George Saunders's "Sea Oak" brings back the dead in the form of a furious, ambitious, decaying corpse who orders her deadbeat relatives to make something of themselves.

The problem with such a varied collection is the effect on the more staid voices. Kate Braverman and Jhumpa Lahiri, both excellent writers, cannot stand up to the innovation surrounding them. Their careful storytelling seems boring in comparison to that of their more boundary-pushing colleagues. That's not to say that all the experimental stories succeed; Joe Wenderoth's "Letters to Wendy's" left me wondering why it was included. Despite the few missteps, with writers such as Stephen Dixon, Padgett Powell, Rick Bass, and A.M. Homes, readers should find several, if not most, stories to their liking.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Some stars, some real clunkers.
Review: Interspersed with some very excellent, sensitive, edgy fiction, are several oddball pieces that seem to have been included because 1) they are impossible to understand, or, 2) their authors are famous. That said, the rest of the stories make the book worth reading. I just wish the clunkers had been left out. The editor explains in his introduction that he was looking for a new definition of plot, saying, among other things, "The story, then, is what the story is hiding, and the hide is indeed a piece of skin, whose effect is to conceal the body." Dude, what does that mean? Theorize less, read more.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Not the dead art form many claim
Review: The poor short story has, over the last few years, suffered greatly. From being neglected by not only popular magazines that used to promote and publish some of this country's great writers, to a general lack of interest by the public, this truly American art form has seen better days. Or so it would seem. Enter THE ANCHOR BOOK OF NEW AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. This is only one of a handful of collections that are truly worthy of praise. The other two that come to mind are the O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2003 and THE CHILDREN'S CORNER by Jackson McCrae. All of these are excellent, but what makes the ANCHOR stand out is the incredible individuality of each story and yet the even-handedness in the way the collection is paced. Some of the writing in this anthology is gorgeous and these little gems are worth the price of admission. The authors and their work represent a wide variety of styles and traditions, from surrealism to conversationalism, and the emotional territory covered in this collection is staggering.

Also recommended: O. HENRY PRIZE STORES 2003 and THE CHILDREN'S CORNER by Jackson McCrae.


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