The Story and Its Writer

One autumn, over a period of about four months, I worked my way through the anthology The Story and Its Writer: Fifth Edition. It contains something like 140 short stories, plus some essays and commentary that I'm currently working through. The stories in the volume are, to any extent, the best of Western Literature with a slight mixture of authors from farther East. Of course I found most stories to be, on a personal scale, mediocre, but I don't think that diminishes their worthiness to be included in such an anthology. No one could possibly be fundamentally affected by every story in a 140-story volume. But just on a personal note, these are the stories that for some reason resonated deeply with me:

Peaches by Abe Akira
River of Names by Dorothy Allison (more than any other)
An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
That Evening Sun by William Faulkner
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My Kinsman, Major Molineux by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (arguably the most important)
The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates


The stories people thought I would love that I actually hated or felt mild distaste for:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
On with the Story by John Barth (I've talked about this before)
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
How to Become a Writer by Lorrie Moore
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

Right now I won't go through each one and what I loved about it. Anyone who has read most of the stories in the first category will know a lot of them deal with something supernatural or with temporal dissonance. But they do so rather cleverly. Anyway, I was just anthologizing a little myself.

P.S.  I hate Blogger's new layout.  Hate it.