The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus and Christine Schutt

Book Overview

"In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400034825
• ISBN13: 9781400034826
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Amazing

This book came out a long long time ago, but is probably one of the best short story collections I've read. A lot of the writers have gone on to become somewhat famous novelists. Get your hands on this.

Fantastic!

The book is in near perfect condition! I needed it for one of my classes and it showed up just in time.

The Best Anthology of Contemporary Fiction to Date

This is the best anthology of contemporary fiction. It presents stories that are the best kind of stories: stories with strong ideas executed well. These are not the idea-free duds of the Best New American Voices series, nor the snoozefest "technical perfections" of the Best American general selections. Instead, there's one fantastic story right after another. Mercifully, the few misses in here are short enough to forgive, and there's otherwise no real failures (some pieces are impenetrable, but still fun), and there are many whopping successes, care of George Saunders, Wells Tower, Rick Bass, Padgett Powell, Mary Caponegro--scads of others. It's through and through a stunning and enjoyable--let me repeat, enjoyable, a word too often forgotten in contemporary fiction--collection of short stories.

Not the dead art form many claim

The poor short story has, over the last few years, suffered greatly. From being neglected by not only popular magazines that used to promote and publish some of this country's great writers, to a general lack of interest by the public, this truly American art form has seen better days. Or so it would seem. Enter THE ANCHOR BOOK OF NEW AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. This is only one of a handful of collections that are truly worthy of praise. The other two that come to mind are the O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2003 and THE CHILDREN'S CORNER by Jackson McCrae. All of these are excellent, but what makes the ANCHOR stand out is the incredible individuality of each story and yet the even-handedness in the way the collection is paced. Some of the writing in this anthology is gorgeous and these little gems are worth the price of admission. The authors and their work represent a wide variety of styles and traditions, from surrealism to conversationalism, and the emotional territory covered in this collection is staggering. Also recommended: O. HENRY PRIZE STORES 2003 and THE CHILDREN'S CORNER by Jackson McCrae.

The Best of the Best

In the typically trenchant prose of his Introduction (his own superb fiction-not included in the anthology-is packed with ideas and inventions), editor Ben Marcus writes, "The question I wanted to ask, as I read the stories that would fill this book, was not: What is the plot, but rather, What is the story plotting for? Not: What is it about, but how is it going about its business, whatever its business might be? What is the story's tactic of mattering, its strategy to last inside a reader? How is it scheming to be something I might care about?" Marcus is out to prove, with this authoritative selection, that reading and writing prose fiction are still among our most exciting, affecting mental activities, and probably will continue to be for as long as we remain people more or less like we've been for a long time now. Artificial intelligence could never have written these stories. Only a real person, with an unconscious and a gut-wrenching ambition to do hard creative work could come up with sentences like the ones gathered in this invaluable, dazzling anthology. The allure of the individual stories is in almost inverse relation to the fame and hoopla surrounding each of the writers. The Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri is represented by the dullest story in the book. The excerpts from David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men could conceivably by made worth reading if condensed into much briefer "interviews." On the other hand, the story called "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," by a writer I had never heard of before (and who has not yet published a book of fiction) with the promisingly evocative name of Wells Tower, is one of the finest short stories I've ever read. About brutal pirates on the North Sea raping and robbing and killing, and aching with ambivalence about going home to their wives and beds, it is a perfectly executed, fully imagined, moving work of art. Most of the stories in this major collection are representative of the very best short fiction by Americans in the last fifteen or so years. The only theme common to all the best of them is a commitment to be anything but boring; they grab hold of the reader's attention fast and do all they can to keep it fully engaged even beyond the final words of the story. These fictions are meant to be haunting and unforgettable, and most of them are.