Customer Reviews

75 Short Masterpieces

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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.

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.

An anthology is always an exercise in personal taste. But since anthologists mostly rely on picking the best material they find in anthologies edited by other people, it could be said that an anthology also reflects the taste of, if not a society, perhaps a generation or two. (This recycling explains one of the charms of the genre, familiarity; and one of its weaknesses, repetition). I suppose this is why these books become dated so fast: while their original readers may regard them with affection or even deem them inevitable, later readers tend to see older anthologies as redundant or preposterous - either way, as irrelevant. Roger Goodman's 75 Short Masterpieces, published in 1960, still lingers on, and this "later reader" cannot help wondering why. Judging from its lifelessness and its lack of focus this anthology's only uses seem to be offering a slice of the past or abetting nostalgia.

In his fittingly short preface Goodman introduces the "rediscovered short short story" (2 to 7 pages long), which he describes as "a tiny, highly polished gem of narration, more fully rounded and developed than the ancient parables and tales". Emerson once declared contradiction to be merely the hobgoblin of little minds; Goodman agrees: the lip service he pays to his contemporaries does not prevent him from including ancient parables and tales into this anthology too. And it is no surprise that they are the most memorable pieces of the bunch, along with those that manage to capture their spirit, like Tolstoy's "The Three Hermits", Bjornson's "The Father", or E.M. Forster's "Mr. Andrews". (Nor is it surprising that the some of worst pieces are those who try to capture it and fail, like Saroyan's "The Shepherd's Daughter".)

Nevertheless, more than half the stories are definitely not ancient and were written between the beginning of WWI and the end of WWII, when multicultural and politically conscious writers began to gain attention but were still not widespread. These were times of change, so we get gleefully P.I. pieces like "Señor Payroll" rubbing shoulders with good tear-eyed when-will-social-injustice-end? stories like "I See You Never", "The Fard", "Daugher", or "The Test". Both of these sit uncomfortably next to the older material, be it Strindberg's "An Attempt At Reform" (which feminists will loath and the rest will yawn through) or Villiers De L'Isle-Adams's impossibly heavy-handed indictment against the perils of science, "The Doctor's Heroism".

As for the other "gems of narration", I'm afraid they do not shine very brightly. They seem to catch the short-story form at its awkward adolescent phase, unable to offer the childlike simplicity of days gone nor the mature complexity of days to come. (I do not necessarily speak in terms of strict chronology when I say days to come; the unforgivably excluded "short short" stories of Kafta and Hemingway, for example, were written before many of the stories here and yet were decades ahead in terms of form and content.)

Of course, we get the perfunctory Poe, Maupassant, and other anthological habitués, but they are engulfed by the drabness that surrounds them or stumped by bad material. In fact, sometimes Goodman comes off as a sort of anti-anthologist: he brings the worst out of the best writers. Bierce is reduced to the predictable "A Psychological Shipwreck"; Chekhov, to "A Wicked Boy"; Melville, to "The Fiddler"... Drowsiness abounds; the only vivid prose in the whole book, besides Twain's, is Saki's. ("Never be a pioneer. It's the earliest Christian that gets the fattest lion"; "I always say beauty is only sin deep".) Even Meatloaf would agree that two out of seventy-five IS bad.

All in all, I found only a third of these 75 "masterpieces" to be good, half of those I already knew, and by now the other half I half forgot. This would be irrelevant if the book were more than the sum of its parts; it is less. Given the better and equally cheap anthologies out there it seems hard to recommend this one. It is disorderly, simplistic, corny, and colorless - all flaws that in this case probably do not reflect of a generation's taste as much as the clumsiness of a single anthologist who chose to glean fleeting bores rather than short masterpieces.

This would be fine for those who want to keep a book on them while waiting in line or in the waiting room of a doctor's office. I wasn't that impressed with this anthology, although I'm sure it contains some nice pieces of literature. However, I wouldn't call any of them "masterpieces."

I had bought and read some of this book years ago but work and college got in the way of reading it completely. That accomplished, it really is a treasure trove of tight tales. The short story is perhaps under-rated for it's impact. In this collection, The Heavenly Christmas Tree stands apart and will grip you instantly and your eyes will be "leaking" before you finish it--a tragic story of a freezing homeless child in a frigid and uncharitable Russian winter. Both times I read it I was feeling the same strong emotions. Some stories left me puzzled but most were good to very good.

I'm not a big fan of the great novel - I prefer the short stories, hands down. This book has many very good shorts and I'm pleased that I added it to my own library.

Here is a book which I read over the course of a couple of years exclusively in the bathroom of our family's cabin at Lake of the Woods, Oregon.

The gimmick is that these are "short masterpieces" but the reality is that they are basically very short stories by writers you may have heard of for their better, longer short stories. In other words not many masterpieces but a lot of short two to five page stories. Fun!

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.

I read all of the short stories thinking they had to get better. Guess what? They don't. The publisher should be sued for false advertising...Masterpieces???? A complete waste of paper.

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.