| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Synopsis
Contains forty-one stories arranged by various points of view such as dramatic monologue or detached autobiography and written by authors such as Lewis, Dostoevski, Capote, Poe, and Steinbeck.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Mass Market Paperback
This venerable anthology (the original dates from 1966) is a good old gallimaufry whose contents - and this is its distinctive feature - are arranged by 'narrative technique', eleven in total. It's not rocket science - the first is interior monologue, the second epistolary - but it concentrates the mind and, more important perhaps, encourages the inclusion of unusual bedfellows. In category (a) we get The Lady's Maid, a moving Katherine Mansfield not among her anthology pieces, while (b) brings us Henry James's quite delicious A Bundle of Letters to show us the master had a sense of humour. [Of a family dispute]: 'father.. has nothing but theories. Mother and I, however, have, fortunately, a great deal of *practice*'; 'Madame de Maisonrouge.. is what they call here a *belle femme*, which means that she is a tall, ugly woman with style'. Sara Jeannette Duncan did it better, but she had the advantage of being a woman. (A category the editors miss is gender-crossing, but maybe this is more prevalent in poetry; poets can have a stab at far more personae.) Finally, 'it is.. under the influence of irritation that the French character most completely expresses itself'. There's a Jamesian howler in the French(p87), but bruler ses vaisseaux (for burn one's boats) was new to me.
Frank O'Connor is not my favourite brand of Oirishry (I prefer the bleakness of Mary Lavin; I might have picked the one about the children viewing a corpse - once read, never forgotten) but this is the best story collection I've read since the stellar Close Company (Virago '87). I confess to skipping the multicultural and lowlife unknowns, though - at my age I'm as 'diverse' as I'm going to get - though it was an excuse to sneakily sneak in a chapter of The Joy Luck Club (if you don't know it, read it). But after (my first, pointlessly Hopperish) Raymond Carver we take a nosedive. I guess the collection's American slant doesn't help, but that Cheever really stinks! Who else would I put in? Sylvia Townsend Warner (Scenes of Childhood); Clare Boylan (A Nail on the Head); Mary Scott (Nudists May be Encountered - all these are volume titles, incidentally); possibly something from Anne Enright's Portable Virgin and/or Karen Karbo's Trespassers Welcome Here - I'm getting way off message here, but I must just say that amazon lists both Mary Scott's titles simply under 'Scott'; the miraculously still extant Serpent's Tail was both her and Karbo's publisher (gad what a list they've had - 25 years and still going strong, now as part of Profile)
Frank O'Connor is not my favourite brand of Oirishry (I prefer the bleakness of Mary Lavin; I might have picked the one about the children viewing a corpse - once read, never forgotten) but this is the best story collection I've read since the stellar Close Company (Virago '87). I confess to skipping the multicultural and lowlife unknowns, though - at my age I'm as 'diverse' as I'm going to get - though it was an excuse to sneakily sneak in a chapter of The Joy Luck Club (if you don't know it, read it). But after (my first, pointlessly Hopperish) Raymond Carver we take a nosedive. I guess the collection's American slant doesn't help, but that Cheever really stinks! Who else would I put in? Sylvia Townsend Warner (Scenes of Childhood); Clare Boylan (A Nail on the Head); Mary Scott (Nudists May be Encountered - all these are volume titles, incidentally); possibly something from Anne Enright's Portable Virgin and/or Karen Karbo's Trespassers Welcome Here - I'm getting way off message here, but I must just say that amazon lists both Mary Scott's titles simply under 'Scott'; the miraculously still extant Serpent's Tail was both her and Karbo's publisher (gad what a list they've had - 25 years and still going strong, now as part of Profile)
Format:Mass Market Paperback
This book uses a wonderfully varied selection of stories to teach the reader about different Point of View's (pov) and how they effect the tone and content of a story. As a wanna-be writer I have found this one of my most effective books I make frequent reference to.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Why revise and update a collection of short stories that included some of the best examples of craft from the last 150 years? To be inclusive, to be fair, to be PC.... What is the ultimate effect of that intent? An ardent wish that the first edition be put back into print alongside this second edition, so that the PC crowd could have their book, while the rest of us, who aren't scared of good reading, could have the other. But even if this egalitarian scenario were to be enacted, this current edition would be worth a look-see for the new gems that the editors managed to include, especially "Doby's Gone" by Ann Petry. Yes, it's true that stories have been neglected in the past due to stifling notions about race and gender. But what this collection demonstrates is that stories are still neglected due to stifling notions about race and gender. What has suffered this time around is craft & quality (not to mention representation from more qualified authors). Most of the excellent selections are holdovers from the first edition. Many of the rest (but certainly not all) are politically correct and not much else.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Anthologies
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
