"In this cosmopolitan range of sensibilities, known authors such as Atwood, Colette, Boll, Borges, Dinesen, Lessing, and Calvino are joined by those we should know and will want to know better."
"This book pulses with the flare of fiction breaking out—a book of light, of lightning."
"A vital service on behalf of the short, the sweet, and sure, and the—uh—sudden. Bring on another volume!"
"Charles Baxter's liberating introduction alone is worth the price of admission. These tales can make you laugh, cry, and even feel exalted in the space of ten minutes."
Shapard and Thomas ( Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories ) gather 60 highly readable, very brief tales from 32 countries, including the U.S. In an astute introduction, Charles Baxter ( First Light ) points out that the shortest stories often have ``to do with a sudden crisis, in which the character does not act so much as react . . . . When a character reacts, the situation is larger and more powerful than that character is.'' In Colette's ``The Other Wife,'' a married couple enters a restaurant, where the man steers his wife away from a table occupied by his ex-wife; in ``One of These Days,'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a mayor in a totalitarian regime demands to have an infected tooth pulled, threatening to shoot the dentist if he refuses, and the dentist proceeds without anesthesia, saying, ``Now you'll pay for our twenty dead men.'' Many writers here (e.g., Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Jorge Luis Borges) are widely published; others, such as Poland's Slawomir Mrozek and India's Krishnan Varma, present foreign cultures in distinctive styles that invite further attention. (Oct.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
A follow-up to Sudden Fiction ( LJ 11/1/86), this anthology presents an enticing smorgasbord of 60 short-short stories (none longer than five pages) from every continent, including work from such rarely represented countries as Botswana, Guatemala, Cyprus, and Pakistan. Although a quarter of the stories are from the United States, where the short-short form now flourishes, the catalog of international writers is impressive: Cortazar, Kawabata, Boll, Colette, Dinesen, Gordimer, Garcia Marquez, Babal, Calvino, and splendid lesser-knowns such as Krishnan Varma. Not all these exotic delights will suit every palate--the stories range from realism to absurdist fantasy, poetic lyric to political allegory--but one is always left hungry enough to try another. The collection also includes commentaries by the writers and translators and is perhaps even better than the earlier book.--Peter Bricklebank, City Coll., CUNY
