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The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
 
 
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The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Paperback)

by Frank O'Connor (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £14.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Melville House (April 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 097186599X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0971865990
  • Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.8 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 263,402 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Submerged populations and other useful inventions, 12 Jan 2009
By Jim O'Donoghue (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
It is odd that The Lonely Voice is recommended as a kind of guide for short story writers. There are other, more practical books that allow writers to see into the techniques needed for writing to the short form more from the inside. But for someone who wants a handle on how the mainly modernist short story writers of the period between the first and second world wars approached their art, this is a great place to start. It should also be read alongside Frank O'Connor's own fiction output, which it certainly illuminates - although it would not prepare a new reader for the almost anarchistic vitality of his stories.

The writers featured in this book, including Lawrence, Joyce, Kipling, Hemingway, Mansfield, and the Russians Chekhov and Babel, are now very distant eminences compared to where they were placed when O'Connor wrote this book. But his take on Hemingway, for instance, which is in places fabulously damning, explains quite a lot about the limitations of Hemingway's subsequent imitators. Some of the descriptions of writers' oeuvres, always remarkably concise, are descriptions of dead ends - how Joyce never wrote another short story after Dubliners, for example, or Lawrence gave up realism. These also help us to understand why the short story has developed strongly in some directions and not in others, although it must be said that O'Connor nowhere foresees the rise of a writer such as Barthelme or Stanley Elkin. The flavour of the month at the time he wrote The Lonely Voice was Salinger, who ran into a dead end of his own soon afterwards.

But O'Connor's blindspots are revealing too. While this book is often compared with Forster's Aspects of the Novel and shares some of its deliberate amateurishness, it in no way shares Aspects' feyness and intentional silliness. It is also very funny in places, especially on the subject of Kipling, who is brilliantly dismissed in the space of a few pages.
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4.0 out of 5 stars The best primer on the short story., 17 May 2009
Frank O'Connor is famous for his own short stories and it is only fitting
that he should elucidate us as to mysteries and conventions of the form
of its greatest practitioners.His favorite is Chekhov,but he is excellent on Turgenev,Hemingway,Lawrence,Babel,Maupassant and gives a good reason why Joyce,though starting off well no longer represented the submerged population necessary for the short story,the people whose identity is determined by their circumstances(characters rather tha personalities).I've read the hard back edition that came out years ago
and was struck by his mature,considered verdicts and beautiful writing.
However the Melville House Classic paperback edition seems to have a few
typographical errors, drops some quotation marks or there are some
syntactical mistakes,which slightly marrs the overall effect as if a
copyreader had not perfectly transferred from the original.However as
this publication is a rare event after the book being unobtainable for so
many years and as this ranks with Forster's Aspects of the Novel and
Pounds ABC of Reading, I suggest you rush out and get it.Then when able
follow it up with his study of the novel,The Mirror in the Roadway.
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