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The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories
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About The Anchor Book Of New American Short Stories
Product Description “In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go. . . . If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them.” —Ben Marcus, from the Introduction Award-winning author of Notable American Women Ben Marcus brings us this engaging and comprehensive collection of short stories that explore the stylistic variety of the medium in America today. Sea Oak by George Saunders Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders by Aleksandar Hemon People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You by Gary Lutz Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri Down the Road by Stephen Dixon X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott Tiny, Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace The Sound Gun by Matthew Derby Short Talks by Anne Carson Field Events by Rick Bass Scarliotti and the Sinkhole by Padgett Powell Amazon.com Review The works that editor Ben Marcus has collected in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, while diverse in their stylistic methods, are uniformly accomplished. An almost confoundingly cerebral and brilliant novelist and short story writer, Marcus is a genre unto himself, a linguistic alchemist not primarily known for spinning yarns. It's to Marcus's credit that the stories in this anthology span a wide swath of American writing, not just the outer reaches of narrative invention. In his introduction, he calibrates our literary compass, proclaiming: Stories keep mattering by reimagining their own methods, manners, and techniques. A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling old ones. The collection includes 29 of these new ways of telling stories. Herein are experiments with form by David Foster Wallace and Joe Wenderoth, flawless executions of realism from Mark Richard and Jhumpa Lahiri, and stories that waver in what could most easily be described as parallel realities. The granddaddy of this latter category, George Saunders's "Sea Oak," brilliantly fuses the inherent humor of male stripping with the undead. Elsewhere Gary Lutz proves himself to be one of our foremost artists of the sentence in "People Shouldn't Have to Be the Ones to Tell You," and Christine Schutt serves up "You Drive," an elusive piece unsettling with undertones of father-daughter incest. The varied treasures in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories accelerate outward into new modes of American writing as if from a radiant nucleus. While each story is daring in its own right, the most daring feat of all might have been including them all under the same cover. --Ryan Boudinot From Booklist "Writers are reaffirming tradition, ignoring it, or subverting it," Marcus notes in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of stories from contemporary writers. Including writers such as Rick Bass, David Foster Wallace, and A. M. Homes, Marcus has collected quite a diverse group of talented authors. Jhumpa Lahiri's offering, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dinner," from her acclaimed collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), is the story of a how a young girl is deeply affected by Mr. Pirzada, a friend of her parents, and his separation from his wife and seven daughters, who are caught in the middle of the Indian-Pakistani conflict. In Lydia Davis' "The Old Dictionary," the narrat
