The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

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Overview


"How ironic," Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, "that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies." Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? "Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something ...
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More About This Book

Overview


"How ironic," Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, "that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies." Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? "Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?"
In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," and Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," a story that reveals a darker side to his humor ("That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy"). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction." From Flannery O'Connor we find "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," and from John Cheever, "The Death of Justina," one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.
This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

The American short story--as seen through the eyes of a major American writer. Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction in this collection of 56 tales which combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems. Alongside classics from Hemingway and Poe are little-known stories from Twain, Melville, Cheever, and O'Connor, as well as works from contemporary writers such as Amy Tan and Louise Erdrich.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal
In these lean times, it is difficult to imagine many libraries champing at the bit to purchase yet another anthology of American short stories. But institutions seeking to expand the diversity of their holdings in this area may find this collection the perfect choice. ``Familiar names, unfamiliar titles'' is the raison d'etre for this new volume. Along with some old chestnuts such as ``The Tell-Tale Heart'' and ``A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,'' editor Oates presents many fresh selections such as Edith Wharton's ``The Journey'' and John Cheever's ``The Death of Justina.'' She includes lesser-known minority and women writers such as Jean Toomer and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman alongside stories by newcomers Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and David Leavitt. Each author is given a brief biographical introduction. Recommended for serious literary collections.-- Rita Ciresi, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780195092622
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • Publication date: 9/1/1994
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 784
  • Sales rank: 128,378
  • Product dimensions: 8.44 (w) x 5.50 (h) x 1.38 (d)

Meet the Author

Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's preeminent writers. Since 1978, she has been on the faculty of Princeton University and is a co-editor of The Ontario Review.

Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.

A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college -- a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.

Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor -- from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize -- and her fiction turns up with regularity on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books.

On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades – familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence – she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."

Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.

Good To Know

When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.

Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s.

In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club.

    1. Also Known As:
      Rosamond Smith
    2. Hometown:
      Princeton, New Jersey
    1. Date of Birth:
      June 16, 1938
    2. Place of Birth:
      Lockport, New York
    1. Education:
      B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Table of Contents

Stories include:
1. Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving
2. The Wives of the Dead, Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, Herman Melville
4. The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe
5. The Ghost in the Mill, Harriet Beecher Stowe
6. Cannibalism in the Cars, Mark Twain
7. The Storm, Kate Chopin
8. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Gilman Perkins
9. The Middle Years, Henry James
10. In a Far Country, Jack London
11. The Little Regiment, Stephen Crane
12. A Journey, Edith Wharton
13. A Death in the Desert, Willa Carter
14. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway
15. An Alcoholic Case, F. Scott Fitzgerald
16. The Girl with the Pimply Face, William Carlos Williams
17. He, Katherine Anne Porter
18. Red-Headed Baby, Langston Hughes
19. A Late Encounter with the Enemy, Flannery O'Connor
20. Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin
21. There will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury
22. Where is the Voice Coming From, Eudora Welty
23. The Lecture, Isaac Beshevis Singer
24. My Son the Murderer, Bernard Malamud
25. Something to Remember Me By, Saul Bellow
26. The Death of Justina, John Cheever
27. Texts, Ursula Le Guin
28. The Persistence of Desire, John Updike
29. Are These Actual Miles?, Raymond Carver
30. Heat, Joyce Carol Oates

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 4 Customer Reviews

  • Posted December 27, 2008

    more from this reviewer

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    9780671865276

    A Wonderful Read

    This book is full of good stories. It makes for an amazing read. Every anthology will inevitably leave something out or include something you could do without. As a book of great American short stories, I find it strange that they should have left out Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find". Apart from that, this book is a wonderful collection of the best writers America has produced. A MUST read!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 21, 2005

    Strangely Excellent

    There is a beautiful strangeness to each of these stories that Joyce has melded into an unsettling yet perfect whole. Any professor of an MFA program will do well to expose his or her students to these neglected gems. The anthology takes the reader/writer off the beaten path and opens his imagination to the ghostly jungle of possibility.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 11, 2005

    Who knew the classics could weaken a collection?

    The one drawback to Joyce Carol Oates's original and thorough approach to creating an anthology is that she does not always follow her own cardinal rule: to sample lesser-known but well-written American short stories. Her efforts introduce readers to gems like Hawthorne's 'The Wives of the Dead,' Crane's 'The Little Regiment,' and Barthelme's 'The School.' Where Oates falls short, however, is in including such familiar works as 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and 'Sonny's Blues.' I was sorely disappointed to see such texts here--not because they aren't extraordinary but rather because they contradict Oates's stated intentions for her anthology and because the professor who wishes to adhere to Oates's own goals must supplement the anthology to do so.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted February 16, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

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