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A Girl With a Monkey: New and Selected Stories 2 reviews
Leonard Michaels
Mercury House, 2000
A Refreshing Change
+ Thank you, Leonard Michaels
What's amazing about Michaels is how seamlessly he transitioned from an experimental realist to a master of the realistic short story form. His early stories are marked by a linguistic self-apparency, though he's funny enough to keep it interesting. And, unlike others in this vein, his style is ...
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The Lime Twig (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
John Hawkes
Penguin Classics, 1996
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The Floating Opera and The End of the Road 9 reviews
John Barth
Anchor, 1997
The Satire of a Genius
+ Men are attracted to the bon mot, not the mot juste
+ Barth 101 & 102: An Introduction to the Master
+ One of the great American comic novels--with a twist!!
+ Two takes on the same grim story
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Herzog (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) 65 reviews
Saul Bellow
Penguin Classics, 1996
Great book for the tragically self-aware
+ A Book of Introspection
+ A brilliant, gripping study of value, intellect and breakdown
+ Herzog The Pain King.
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The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics)4 reviews
J.F. Powers
NYRB Classics, 2000
Great stories by an American original
+ Thirty stories gathered from three volumes: mid 1940s-70s
+ America's greatest writer
These wonderful stories mine the whole of American life, but Powers was at his best when he wrote about the very narrow slice of life that confines, constricts and defines the lives of Catholic priests. The comedy inherent in parish and church politics, the worldliness of men who have supposedly ...
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The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter14 reviews
Katherine Anne Porter
Harvest Books, 1979
Nobody Writes Like Porter: Incredible
+ A Master Prose Stylist
+ Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
+ Dazzling, thought provoking, profound
+ An awesome collection of literary gems
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The Emigrants40 reviews
W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997
The trail of the butterfly man: homage to Vladimir Dimitrovich
+ Literature like none else in desolation and despair
+ The Emigrants
+ Shadows of the past
+ Memorable
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The Complete Stories11 reviews
Bernard Malamud
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998
Even better than his novels
+ "The Last Mohican"
+ Master of the Short Story
+ Beautiful short story anthology
+ A very good story writer
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Sixty Stories18 reviews
Donald Barthelme
Penguin (Non-Classics), 1993
Brilliant but not for Everyone
+ MR BARTHELME
+ A Collection of the Highest Order
+ Me and Mrs. Mandible
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The Stories of John Cheever55 reviews
John Cheever
Vintage, 2000
Cheever, A grand story teller!
+ Quantity over quality
+ J. Cheever
John Cheever tells his short, thought bending stories with the eye of a pained man. In the swimmer he outlines the deapths of alcoholism with an eye to detail and a symbolism that provkes great loss.
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Goodbye, Columbus : And Five Short Stories (Vintage International)53 reviews
Philip Roth
Vintage, 1993
Reality
+ Brilliant
+ Great stories, even better if read retrospectively
+ "I sat down on my Brooks Brothers shirt and pronounced my own name out loud."
+ Relevant and moving
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The End of the Story (High Risk Books)9 reviews
Lydia Davis
Serpent's Tail, 1996
Spectacularly abstract
+ Simply a great novel
+ Lydia Davis, Where Language is Down
This is an astonishing novel. I have more or less given up writing reviews for Amazon, because (as Nicholson Baker points out) they don't seem to add to anything or create any kind of community, they just sink into the general accumulation of texts. (He was comparing Amazon with Wikipedia, where ...
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Pigeon Feathers11 reviews
John Updike
Ballantine Books, 1996
Top of his craft
+ Incredible!
+ Is there a better book of stories anywhere?
+ short stories
+ To Discover it again...
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)74 reviews
Anne Tyler
Ballantine Books, 1996
The trademark flaws of their lives
+ Great character development
Anne Tyler's ninth novel is dominated by a presence--the strong-willed, harried Pearl Tull, mother of three--and an absence--her husband Beck, who has abandoned them. Theirs is a perpetually incomplete family, and the "surviving" four family members spend the remainder of their lives with a ...
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The Sportswriter 106 reviews
Richard Ford
Vintage, 1995
sports for the mind
Last night I finished reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I read it a couple years after reading Independence Day. Although I didn't love Independence Day, I was curious to get back to the main character of both books, Frank Bascombe, and see what he had done earlier in his life.
I think ...
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The End of the Story (High Risk Books)9 reviews
Lydia Davis
Serpent's Tail, 1996
Spectacularly abstract
+ Simply a great novel
+ Lydia Davis, Where Language is Down
This is an astonishing novel. I have more or less given up writing reviews for Amazon, because (as Nicholson Baker points out) they don't seem to add to anything or create any kind of community, they just sink into the general accumulation of texts. (He was comparing Amazon with Wikipedia, where ...
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A Girl With a Monkey: New and Selected Stories2 reviews
Leonard Michaels
Mercury House, 2000
A Refreshing Change
+ Thank you, Leonard Michaels
What's amazing about Michaels is how seamlessly he transitioned from an experimental realist to a master of the realistic short story form. His early stories are marked by a linguistic self-apparency, though he's funny enough to keep it interesting. And, unlike others in this vein, his style is ...
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The Lime Twig (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
John Hawkes
Penguin Classics, 1996
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Pigeon Feathers11 reviews
John Updike
Ballantine Books, 1996
Top of his craft
+ Incredible!
+ Is there a better book of stories anywhere?
+ short stories
+ To Discover it again...
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The Emigrants40 reviews
W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997
The trail of the butterfly man: homage to Vladimir Dimitrovich
+ Literature like none else in desolation and despair
+ The Emigrants
+ Shadows of the past
+ Memorable
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