Telling Tales

by Nadine Gordimer (Editor)

Overview

An extraordinary story collection selected by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, from which all proceeds will be donated to the fight against AIDS

Rarely have writers of such variety and distinction appeared together in the same anthology. Their stories capture the range of emotions and situations of our human universe: tragedy, comedy, fantasy, satire, dramas of sexual love and of war in different continents and cultures. They are not about HIV / AIDS. But all twenty-one writers have given their stories--chosen by themselves as representing some of the best of their lifetime work as storytellers--without any fee or royalty. This collection includes five Nobel Prize winners: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, Kenzaburo Oe, and Gunter Grass; along with other world-class writers such as Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Attwood, Chinua Achebe, and Susan Sontag.

Telling Tales is being published in more than twelve countries. The publisher's profits from the sales of this book will go to HIV / AIDS preventive education and for medical treatment for people living with the suffering this pandemic infection brings to our contemporary world. So when you buy this unique anthology of renowned storytellers as a gift or for your own reading pleasure, you are also making a gift to combat the plague of our new millennium.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312424046
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in a small South African town. Her first book, a collection of stories, was published when she was in her early twenties. Her ten books of stories include Something Out There (1984), and Jump and Other Stories (1991). Her novels include The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1975), Burger's Daughter (1979), July's People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Son's Story (1990), None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), Get a Life (2005), and No Time Like the Present (2012). A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, and Burger's Daughter were originally banned in South Africa. She published three books of literary and political essays: The Essential Gesture (1988); Writing and Being (1995), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures she gave at Harvard in 1994; and Living in Hope and History (1999).

Ms. Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and an honorary member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also a Commandeur de'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). She held fourteen honorary degrees from universities including Harvard, Yale, Smith College, the New School for Social Research, City College of New York, the University of Leuven in Belgium, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.

Ms. Gordimer won numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, both internationally and in South Africa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Bulldog by Arthur Miller

The Centaur by José Saramago

Down the Quiet Street by Es'kia Mphahlele

The Firebird's Nest by Salman Rushdie

Cell Phone by Ingo Schulze

Death Constant Beyond Love by Gabriel García Márquez

The Age of Lead by Margaret Atwood

Witnesses of an Era by Günter Grass

The Journey to the Dead by John Updike

Sugar Baby by Chinua Achebe

The Way of the Wind by Amos Oz

Warm Dogs by Paul Theroux

The Ass and The Ox by Michel Tournier

Death of a Son by Njabulo S. Ndebele

The Letter Scene by Susan Sontag

To Have Been by Claudio Magris

A Meeting, At Last by Hanif Kureishi

Associations in Blue by Christa Wolf
The Rejection by Woody Allen

The Ultimate Safari by Nadine Gordimer

Abandoned Children of This Planet by Kenzaburo Oe

The Contributors

Source Notes

Editorial Reviews

"The 21 stellar writers in this international short-story collection include five Nobel winners.... 'The Ultimate Safari, ' by Gordimer, who edited the anthology, is a searing, unforgettable account of a desperate refugee child hiding from the fancy tourists in a famous game park." --Booklist

"A stellar roster, including five Nobelists--Gordimer, Grass, Oe, Marquez, and Saramago--offers 21 stories in a fundraising effort for HIV and AIDS in southern Africa.... a variety of voices with important stories." --Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

A stellar roster, including five Nobelists-Gordimer, Grass, Oe, Marquez, and Saramago-offers 21 stories in a fundraising effort for HIV and AIDS in southern Africa. Chinua Achebe's "Sugar Baby" is a razor-edged retrospective look at one man's inability to adjust to deprivation in the midst of protracted war. Margaret Atwood's stunning "The Age of Lead" juxtaposes the narrator's watching news reports about a sailor frozen on an ill-fated Arctic expedition with memories of her lifelong friend, bonded since their teens by a desire for a "life without consequences." Now, Vincent is dead at 43 of "a mutated virus that didn't even have a name yet"-the consequence of "things you don't even know you've done." In the powerful "The Ultimate Safari," Gordimer's narrator, a young girl in Mozambique whose mother has disappeared and whose father is in the war, flees with their [HER?] grandparents. They walk for days through Kruger Park, "a kind of whole country of animals-elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles"-to a refugee camp, where they live for more than two years, so long that the grandmother, whose husband disappeared on the trek, feels there is no home to return to. "Bulldog," Arthur Miller's straightforward Brooklyn coming-of-age story, revolves around a seductive woman selling puppies, while Njabule S. Ndebele's heartbreaking "Death of a Son" chronicles the two weeks it takes for a young Johannesburg couple to get back their child's body, killed when soldiers and police patrolling the township began shooting. Saramago's "The Centaur" is the beautifully wrought parable of the last Centaur to survive, wandering for centuries until there is no longer a wilderness to hide in. JohnUpdike's ponderous "The Journey to the Dead," about a man's self-serving and increasingly awkward visits to a dying woman who was his ex-wife's best friend, is one of the few clinkers. By its nature more somber than not, a variety of voices with important stories. Tie-in with World AIDS Day December 1, 2004.

Kirkus Reviews