The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories

Rating:
Summary: Memoir of a student who doesn't want to sound pretentious
Review: After having to drag my I exhausted mind through a semester of english with this book as our choice reading material, I must say that I've become thouroghly disenchanted with this book's selected stories. This is not only because of the fact that most of these stories pull at your heartstrings but also are on topics that can be easily used as vessels to add depth or substance to story.
I was also disappointed that almost half the selected readings were either from the US or England.

Rating:
Summary: Collection of most profound literature I have encountered.
Review: I don't believe that I will ever uncover a more diverse, richly rewarding and profoundly influencing introduction to the higher planes of human endeavor than I have in this single book. The diversity of style from ultra modern to classical is extreme and deadly effective. Intellectual food for will be scarred for life with a painful awareness of the insanely limitless and tenuous boundaries which we think defines our inner psyche from our tangible world, and of the realms within human societies.To attempt to explore the works within this book is taking a major step in gaining an awareness that will only serve to further the cause of mankind, and serve as a weapon against those that would attempt to hold it back

Rating:
Summary: A real find
Review: I'm a teacher of a small short-stories course, and it is harder than you'd think to find a collection of short stories that shows true variety. _The Art of the Tale_ is one of those rare ones--it is truly international (most that claim to be are actually feature nearly all-American or all-British writers) and varied in subject (many collections are devoted to a theme--which is fine, but not suitable for my purposes). On top of that, it is HUGE, with over 80 stories, yet lightweight enough to carry around easily, and the price easily beats any other comparable collection. (The last one we used had 1/3 the stories for nearly triple the price.)

And even better, this is not yet another collection of all those "standard" stories that seem to appear again and again in every collection. Halpern did include many great authors, but for the most part he sought out less-well-known stories by those authors, so I can share the joy of discovery experienced by my students.