from: Houghton Mifflin
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Type of bind: Audio Cassette
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780618013210
Format: Abridged, Audiobook, Unabridged
ISBN number: 0618013210
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Quantity: 4
Printing Date: November 11, 1999
Publishing house: Houghton Mifflin
Sale Popularity Level: 1743633
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
For eighty-four years, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers and showcased the most compelling stories of each year. Editor John Updike has chosen selections from these volumes that have endured the test of time, and the result is a 'spectacular tapestry of fictional achievement' (Entertainment Weekly). This audio edition of The Best American Short Stories of the Century features a wide variety of beloved readers and dazzling stories that will take listeners on a trip through 'America and the 20th century -- at its best' (Wall Street Journal). Contents: Wild Plums by Grace Stone Coates, read by Ashley Warlick. Here We Are by Dorothy Parker, read by Meg Wolitzer. Christmas Gift by Robert Penn Warren, read by Christopher Tilghman. The Hitch-Hikers by Eudora Welty, read by Jill McCorkle. The Second Tree from the Corner by E. B. White, read by Donald Hall. The German Refugee by Bernard Malamud, read by Alan Cheuse. A City of Churches by Donald Barthelme, read by Rick Moody. Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver, read by Charles Baxter. You're Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore, read by Lorrie Moore. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, read by Tim O'Brien. Proper Library by Carolyn Ferrell, read by Carolyn Ferrell.
Amazon.com Review:
At age 67, the perennially youthful John Updike may at last qualify as something of an elder statesman. But the Best American Short Stories annual--whose greatest hits package Updike has now assembled--is almost a generation older, having commenced publication in 1915. This staying power allows the hefty Best American Short Stories of the Century to perform double duty. It is, on the one hand, a priceless compendium of American manners and morals--a decade-by-decade survey of how we lived then, and how we live now. Yet Updike very consciously avoided the sociological angle in making his selection. 'I tried not to select stories because they illustrated a theme or portion of the national experience,' he writes in his introduction, 'but because they struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important.' In this he succeeded: the 55 fictions that made the grade are most notable for their human (rather than merely historical) interest.
So who got in? There are a good number of cut-and-dried classics here, including Hemingway's 'The Killers,' Faulkner's 'That Evening Sun Go Down,' and Philip Roth's acidic spin on religious connivance, 'Defender of the Faith.' In other cases, major authors are represented by relatively minor works. Yet it's hard to quibble with the inclusion of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, J.F. Powers, Eudora Welty--particularly when you take into account that their second-tier creations are fully the equal of anybody else's masterpieces. And the final third of the book really does constitute an honor roll of contemporary American fiction, with brilliant entries by Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov. (For the latter, Updike actually succumbed to his own idolatry and bent the rules for admission--but nobody who reads the hallucinatory 'That in Aleppo Once...' will regret it.) It goes without saying that fiction fans will be complaining about the editor's sins of omission well into the next century. But no matter how you slice it, this remains an elegant and essential advertisement for the short form. --James Marcus
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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I selected this audio book because I liked the idea of listening to a selection of well read stories and I thought the variety of stories looked interesting. The stories themselves are fine, but the audio book is marred by a selection of readers who lack expression and whose voice qualities are not sufficiently professional for an audio book. I expected the quality of reading to be comparable to that heard in NPR's "Selected Shorts." This isn't even close. The very first story was fine, I cringed through the second, felt mildly frustrated with the reading of the third, and gave up by the 4th. Perhaps it gets better since each story is read by a different person, but I couldn't spend 12 hours finding out. For me, it was like chalk squeaking on chalkboard (if anyone remembers that) and I could listen no more.
Rated by buyers 
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I am part of a short story group that meets weekly. We read two stories each week. We've read the very first 12 stories so far. I can't tell you how much I am enjoying this opportunity to sample authors that "somehow" I completely missed even though I have a master's degree in language arts. Even if I don't care for a story, I am glad to sample the writing. It also gives me an opportunity to decide which artists to delve further into. An example: After reading Willa Cather's Double Birthday I am now reading My Antonia.
Rated by buyers 
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Only unknown authors to me. I was expecting some works by Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry and/or Agatha Christie (maybe I ordered the wrong volume!). Also, some of the stories are quite dull and end as if the author didn't know how to end it! Quite disappointing!
Rated by buyers 
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I read "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" to get a broad overview of the contemporary American short story genre. John Updike edited the collection. The introduction, written by Updike, is an interesting essay on the difficulties inherent in assembling any best-of collection. I suppose I would have liked to have read more of his thoughts on the form, its progress over the century and perhaps its place in contemporary fiction rather than his struggle in selecting pieces. But taken together with the forward, written by co-editor Katrina Kenison, the two essays offer an interesting look into the fickleness of publishing tastes and how those tastes can be influenced by only a few people. It makes the current consolidation of the publishing world seem slightly less troubling.
In any event, there are many people I would have included in the collection that are absent--John Edger Wideman comes quickly to mind, and Latino writers seem strikingly absent. And similarly, though I would not even pretend to know all that one needs to know to authoritatively assemble a collection with such a presumptuous title, I would nonetheless exclude more than one or two pieces that were included in the anthology. But as I reflect on the collection, it occurs to me that it was written more for the general reading public and less for a person interested in the diversity of the form and its practitioners. There are some great stories in the collection, however, I suspect that it more closely represents a particular writer's tastes than a true overview of the form.
The most interesting pieces for me were those written by writers who I associate with other genres. Robert Penn Warren's "Christmas Gift" is a beautifully raw and sensual story. And although it has been some years since I've read Warren's work, my vision of him was always that of a country gentlemen poet living the gentlemanly life in semi-rural Connecticut. The "Christmas Gift" rivals Faulkner or O'Connor in the evocation of the rough-knuckled rural life. The language of the piece and the structure of the lines felt fresh and new. The images were so unique and evocative that I must make a point not to mimic them in my own writing. The opening paragraph is wonderful, his attention to the details of the place and its people comes out with poetic precision that is at once authentic for the place and yet far, far above the circumstances of anybody involved. In this sense it brought to mind Steinbeck (another writer who didn't make the cut) yet his prose seemed even more carefully measured.
I have always admired E.B. White's essays and now, after having read the short story, "The Second Tree from the Corner," I have come to appreciate his abilities as a fiction writer. It has inspired me to track down some of his fiction--other than that written for children, though those stories are also good. "The Second Tree from the Corner" was somewhat unexpected. It's a decidedly non-country story--a far cry from many of the essays I have read. Its protagonist is a patient who is undergoing therapy--another surprise. However when I think about many of his essays, even the most well known essays written at the height of the war, essays that were intended to bring some measure of comfort to a society and culture that could not escape the general sense that they were indeed fighting for their very survival, I still find in these essays a certain sense of existential angst, of an uncertainty that seems thoroughly modern and non-sentimental.
When I hear people talk about White's well-known essay, "Once More to the Lake," it seems almost as though the last lines are forgotten. There is so much talk of lake weather, farm-girls, and berry pies that that final line seems to somehow not stick to memory. But what a line--the entire piece is informed by that last line. The last two paragraphs keep the essay from become a simple, shallow reflection on the American way of life. It was almost as though, despite the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese Emperor, White could not help but feel almost desperately modern. When he wrote, "As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death," he rescued the essay from the slash pile of Americana.
And just as he rescued "Once More to the Lake," he may have condemned "The Second Tree from the Corner." Though it is a good short story, it is not at all the warm and fuzzy piece that some may expect from White. And again, in the story White waits to put the last nail in the emotional structure of the piece, which could until the final line go in any one of a number of directions. The final direction of the piece is not nearly as comfortable as it perhaps could be. He closes: "He crossed the Madison, boarded the downtown bus, and rode all the way to Fifty-second Street before he had a thought that could rightly have ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
To reduce the boredom of exercise I decided to listen to audio books. Short stories work well as I'm inclined to keep moving until the end.
This audio CD collection is very good and really well done. Many of the stories are read by their authors. The sound is crisp and clean, and (with rare exception) the diction fluid and natural. The stories themselves are varied and high-quality.
One thing to note, though, is that the audio version does not contain all the stories from the print version. That may seem obvious, but if you are expecting to hear one or anther of the stories from the book, know that the CD set only includes 22 stories.
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