75 Short Masterpieces

by Roger Goodman, Roger B. Goodman, Editor Roger B. Goodman

Book Overview

The seventy-five short masterpieces of fiction in this volume represent the finest accomplishments in a difficult and special art form. Each creates a microcosm in which the very compactness of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553251414
• ISBN13: 9780553251418
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

And what about an anthology of the short short short story?

I decided that I would read a story every night before going to sleep. I picked up the Goodman Anthology of 'Seventy Five Short Short stories' I read one each night for seventy- five nights. I do not remember which bored me and which excited me and which seemed so important to me that they tempted me to change my life. If I remember rightly there was not even one single story which said "This is what a story should be, what it must be.This is the one story you would write if you could write one story' There was no such story. But there was entertainment and a variety of events and incidents. And there was too the wonder if perhaps a slightly larger space was needed to create a character for which one had real human sympathy . And this when I could think of how in various stories or novels a character had come to life in a single line or paragraph. Anyway I know no other anthology of seventy- five short - short stories. So for the time being if you want to read one short- short story a night for seventy- five nights this is the one. As for me when I reread myself to sleep tonight I will take Singer's ' Gimpel the Fool' or Hemingway's " A Clean- Lighted Place " or Salinger's "From Esme with Love and Squalor" and read that. It may be that ' short short' is simply not long enough.

what a fantastic group of stories

I was just cleaning out my bookcase and found an old, tattered copy of this great book. I am so glad i found it again and ecstatic that I can order a fresh copy as the old one is practically a collection of loose, brittle paper at this point. All the stories are quite short (buy it and put it in the bathroom) and all are lovely reads. A wonderful example of what can be achieved in a handful of pages.

A MUST READ !!!!!

What a glorious collection of some of the best short stories in the world. My father was an English teacher before going into law and this is one of the books I "borrowed" (heh heh...never seem to return anything you "borrow" from your parents, do you?!) from him years ago. I'm 29 now, married and with 7 and 4 year-old sons and I dug through one of my bookcases so that I could read them THE BOY WHO DREW CATS by Lafcadio Hearn and especially CHARLES, a short story by Shirley Jackson that should be a prerequisite read for **ALL** parents of children entering kindergarten! From THE SNIPER by Liam O'Flaherty and THE LOTTERY TICKET by Ventura Calderon to THE SCOOP by James Farrell and THE HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS TREE by Fyodor Dostoevsky, this book contains stories that are an honest reminder of human nature, refreshingly unclouded by most of the politically-correct rhetoric often found today that does nothing but obscure the truth and then attempt to re-serve it in the designer, p.c. soup-de-jour. Bah! -- the stuff taught now in Academia by English "professors" pales by comparison! THIS is a timeless collection of substantival "reads"; the title is an accurate description of what's within.

one of the best collections ever done

What a delight to see this back in print. The stories are VERY short and delightfully blend works by classic and contemporary writers both from the U.S. and abroad. There are other collections more famous, but none better.