Friends,
I put out a call for your perfect anthology in 50 stories. The only rule is that you cannot repeat an author. Diana answered the call (check it out, if you can get past the pictures of Dahlia without "Aww"-ing yourself in a coma...what, the cat's adorable), [EDIT: The Mighty Tom Flynn has also answered the bell...and Jorge is answering it...and Ande has completed it as well...in an order too..and the wonderful Danielle has completed a list too!].
I figured I should post mine and I expect answers from you other writerly types in the blogosphere...Mattie Vercant, Jorge, Ande, Tom, Danielle, Catherine, Natalie, Jessica, Sethie, Michael, and the whole damn lot of you.
I will, preemptively, call this exercise a complete and total failure for me. Why? I couldn't come up with 50 stories that I particularly loved enough to slap into a collection that would be a definitive anthology for me. I have read plenty more than 50 short stories in my day, but not nearly enough has stuck with me like I assumed they would. I am pretty well amazed at myself about this. Anyway, here's my list, in no particular order,...and when I can get this list up to 50, I'll repost this thing.
1. Tony Earley - The Prophet from Jupiter
2. Rick Bass - Mexico
3. Barry Hannah - Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?
4. Denis Johnson - Emergency
5. Robert Stone - Helping
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A Very Old Man with Enormus Wings
7. Karen Russell - St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
8. Richard Ford - Rock Springs
9. Raymond Carver - Cathedral
10. Sandra Cisneros - The Monkey Garden
11. Stuart Dybek - We Didn't
12. Russell Banks - Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story
13. Thom Jones - The Pugilist at Rest
14. Tim O'Brien - How to Tell a True War Story
15. Cynthia Ozick - The Shawl
16. ZZ Packer - Brownies
17. James Baldwin - Sonny's Blues
18. Bobbie Ann Mason - Shiloh
19. Tobias Wolff - Bullet in the Brain
20.Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find
21. John Updike - A&P
22. Isaac Bashevis Singer - Gimpel the Fool
23. John Cheever - The Swimmer
24. James Thurber - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
25. Sherman Alexie - What You Pawn I Will Redeem
26. Ernest Hemingway - The Killers
27. Shirley Jackson - The Lottery
28. Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
29. Junot Diaz- How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie
30. Chris Offut - The Leaving One
31. Lorrie Moore - How to Become a Writer
32. Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain
33. Carolyn Forche - The Colonel*
34. Anne Enright - Natalie
35. T.C. Boyle - The Hector Quesadilla Story
36. Michael Chabon - Along the Frontage Road
37. Don DeLilo - Videotape
38. Michael Cunningham - White Angel
39.Padgett Powell - Wayne in Love **
40. Jamacia Kincaid - Girl ***
And that's all I have right now. It's a damned shame. I guess I could pad it by adding I Stand Here Ironing or Rose for Emily or Ethan Frome, but nuts to that. I'm only half-committed to a couple stories on this list as it is (I'm looking at you The Shawl), so I don't need more like that. Bah! And also, looking for that list, I got more second-person stories on there than I thought I would have. Turns out I kind of like that ugly cousin of Point of Views after all...sure's she ugly, but she does have that winning personality.
Also, looking over that list, I know what I'm missing. But, it's been too long since I've read a Chekov story, and while I keep threatening myself to read that Munro book Runaway, I haven't got around to that...or my Borges collection...or my William S. Burroughs collection for that matter...and I got a feeling there's at least one good story by Russo in his Whore's Child collection, but I haven't read that yet either. Oh, if I only had a thousand more years just to read, then I think I might feel caught up.
Viva el mustache.
*does this one count as fiction, or is this poetry? I'm keeping it on this list, not so much because I'm 100% confident it is prose, but it's more interesting that I don't know. It's awesome and doesn't worry about line breaks, so it's good enough for me.
** I know with Barry Hannah on the list, I probably don't need Padgett Powell as well, but this story has one of the more compelling descriptions of a vagina I have read. However, if I had my druthers, I'd pick this short story I heard him read about Charles Dickens & Janis Joplin being in the same school and having a little romance in the bushes...but it doesn't seem to have been published anywhere.
*** Yes, that has been in every fiction anthology ever produced, but that doesn't mean it's not good.
December 19, 2007
My (Incomplete) Anthology
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
7 comments:
I will make said list sometime soon (computer access limited in the great state of Illinois). But I will warn you, I am going to mix in some poems because poems tell as much of a story.
Nice list, 'Stache. Mine's up now too. After reading yours, I'm aware of some glaring omissions in mine (Daniel Johnson, Cisneros, Banks, Kafka), but that's the nature of a list, I suppose. Also struck by several crossovers from yours mine, and Diana's. Thanks for the challenge.
Re "The Colonel."
It's a tricky one, yes, blurring genres, too prose-y to be a poem, too poem-y to be a story. It's a piece that swings both ways, put in the fiction section or the poetry section depending on the whims of an anthology's particular editor.
That is a very nice list but who in the hell is Ernest Hemingway
Hey, we have some cross-overs.
But now I feel stupid that I haven't read Barry Hannah...okay, I will. Remind me.
Just to let you know I was kidding about Hemingway remark I obviously know who he is. He was a hell of a baseball player.
Rob, I figured you were joking. Emily was the one the one that had to ask. And I always thought Hemingway was a better singer than a baseball player.
Post a Comment