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The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

ISBN: 9780195092622 | 0195092627

Edition: Reprint
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 9/1/1994

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Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

"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 ... MOREagain 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.

One of our greatest living writers offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction. Joyce Carol Oates' collection of 56 tales combines classic works by writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe with many "different, unexpected" gems, inviting readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers.

Introduction	p. 3
Rip Van Winkle	p. 17
Peter Rugg, the Missing Man	p. 33
The Wives of the Dead	p. 62
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids	p. 69
The Tell-Tale Heart	p. 91
The Ghost in the Mill	p. 97
Cannibalism in the Cars	p. 109
A White Heron	p. 118
The Storm	p. 129
The... MORE Sheriff's Children	p. 136
The Yellow Wallpaper	p. 153
The Middle Years	p. 170
In a Far Country	p. 190
Old Woman Magoun	p. 206
The Little Regiment	p. 225
A Journey	p. 244
The Strength of God	p. 256
A Death in the Desert	p. 264
Blood-Burning Moon	p. 285
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place	p. 295
An Alcoholic Case	p. 301
The Girl with a Pimply Face	p. 310
He	p. 323
That Evening Sun	p. 334
Sweat	p. 352
Red-Headed Baby	p. 365
The Man Who Was Almost a Man	p. 371
A Distant Episode	p. 384
A Late Encounter with the Enemy	p. 397
Sonny's Blues	p. 408
Battle Royal	p. 440
There Will Come Soft Rains	p. 456
Rain in the Heart	p. 463
Where Is the Voice Coming From?	p. 481
The Lecture	p. 488
My Son the Murderer	p. 504
Something To Remember Me By	p. 511
The Death of Justina	p. 541
Texts	p. 552
The School	p. 556
The Persistence of Desire	p. 560
Alaska	p. 571
Are These Actual Miles?	p. 582
Yellow Woman	p. 591
The Shawl	p. 601
Heat	p. 607
Hunters in the Snow	p. 620
The Things They Carried	p. 636
Big Bertha Stories	p. 655
Fever	p. 671
The Management of Grief	p. 697
Two Kinds	p. 714
Fleur	p. 727
Gravity	p. 741
The House on Mango Street	p. 746
What Sally Said	p. 748
Linoleum Roses	p. 749
A House of My Own	p. 749
Town Smokes	p. 750
Author Index	p. 765
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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.

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