The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories [Paperback]

Ben Marcus (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 10, 2004

“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 however, we go. . . . If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them.” —Ben Marcus, from the Introduction

Award-winning author of Notable American Women Ben Marcus brings us this engaging and comprehensive collection of short stories that explore the stylistic variety of the medium in America today.

Sea Oak by George Saunders
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr
The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis
The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro
The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders by Aleksandar Hemon
People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You by Gary Lutz
Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri
Down the Road by Stephen Dixon
X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott
Tiny, Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
The Sound Gun by Matthew Derby
Short Talks by Anne Carson
Field Events by Rick Bass
Scarliotti and the Sinkhole by Padgett Powell

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The works that editor Ben Marcus has collected in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, while diverse in their stylistic methods, are uniformly accomplished. An almost confoundingly cerebral and brilliant novelist and short story writer, Marcus is a genre unto himself, a linguistic alchemist not primarily known for spinning yarns. It's to Marcus's credit that the stories in this anthology span a wide swath of American writing, not just the outer reaches of narrative invention. In his introduction, he calibrates our literary compass, proclaiming:

Stories keep mattering by reimagining their own methods, manners, and techniques. A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling old ones.

The collection includes 29 of these new ways of telling stories. Herein are experiments with form by David Foster Wallace and Joe Wenderoth, flawless executions of realism from Mark Richard and Jhumpa Lahiri, and stories that waver in what could most easily be described as parallel realities. The granddaddy of this latter category, George Saunders's "Sea Oak," brilliantly fuses the inherent humor of male stripping with the undead. Elsewhere Gary Lutz proves himself to be one of our foremost artists of the sentence in "People Shouldn't Have to Be the Ones to Tell You," and Christine Schutt serves up "You Drive," an elusive piece unsettling with undertones of father-daughter incest.

The varied treasures in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories accelerate outward into new modes of American writing as if from a radiant nucleus. While each story is daring in its own right, the most daring feat of all might have been including them all under the same cover. --Ryan Boudinot

From Booklist

"Writers are reaffirming tradition, ignoring it, or subverting it," Marcus notes in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of stories from contemporary writers. Including writers such as Rick Bass, David Foster Wallace, and A. M. Homes, Marcus has collected quite a diverse group of talented authors. Jhumpa Lahiri's offering, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dinner," from her acclaimed collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), is the story of a how a young girl is deeply affected by Mr. Pirzada, a friend of her parents, and his separation from his wife and seven daughters, who are caught in the middle of the Indian-Pakistani conflict. In Lydia Davis' "The Old Dictionary," the narrator realizes she handles a delicate old dictionary more carefully than her own young son. In Stephen Dixon's "Down the Road," a man tries to carry his lover when they both can barely continue their long journey. Different readers will likely prefer some selections to others, but all will have to agree that Marcus has collected a respectable sampling of some of today's finest writers. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (August 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400034825
• ISBN-13: 978-1400034826
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,113 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. His new novel, The Flame Alphabet, will be published by Knopf in January 2012. Marcus has published stories, essays, and reviews in numerous publications, including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, Conjunctions, Grand Street, and Tin House. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and for several years he was the fiction editor of Fence. He is a 2009 recipient of a grant for Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2008 he received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has also received a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fiction fellowship from the Howard Foundation of Brown University. Since 2000 he has been on the faculty at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he is an associate professor.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best of the Best, August 18, 2004

By 

Rick Whitaker (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (Paperback)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some stars, some real clunkers., January 14, 2005

By 

a. "devoted reader" (NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (Paperback)

Interspersed with some very excellent, sensitive, edgy fiction, are several oddball pieces that seem to have been included because 1) they are impossible to understand, or, 2) their authors are famous. That said, the rest of the stories make the book worth reading. I just wish the clunkers had been left out. The editor explains in his introduction that he was looking for a new definition of plot, saying, among other things, "The story, then, is what the story is hiding, and the hide is indeed a piece of skin, whose effect is to conceal the body." Dude, what does that mean? Theorize less, read more.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and Innovative Fiction, October 18, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (Paperback)

In this anthology, editor Ben Marcus aims to show us the power in "the way our few stories are told", and he largely succeeds. The fiction he has gathered embraces a wide range of approaches: experimentalism and traditionalism; formalism and conversationalism; realism and surrealism. Remarkably, all establish unique emotional territories that linger after their reading. Some are darkly serious (Kate Braverman's "Histories of the Undead"), while others are boldly hilarious ("The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders" by Aleksandar Hemon). Some are long, intricate explorations ("When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" by Jhumpa Lahiri) while others are merely fictional flashes (Dawn Raffel's "Up the Old Goat Road"). Not one is reminiscent of another - and that makes for lively reading, especially when settling down for a long evening of one fiction after another.

The stunning landscape and primitive world evoked in "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" (Wells Tower) assaults the senses and the mind as the story descends into brutal violence and then emerges with an understanding of the love that comes out of it. The story is simply brilliant. Another standout is William Gay's "The Paperhanger", also a story about love and murder, where a child disappears after her mother argues with the paperhanger working on her unfinished house. More outrageously, George Saunders's "Sea Oak" brings back the dead in the form of a furious, ambitious, decaying corpse who orders her deadbeat relatives to make something of themselves.

The problem with such a varied collection is the effect on the more staid voices. Kate Braverman and Jhumpa Lahiri, both excellent writers, cannot stand up to the innovation surrounding them. Their careful storytelling seems boring in comparison to that of their more boundary-pushing colleagues. That's not to say that all the experimental stories succeed; Joe Wenderoth's "Letters to Wendy's" left me wondering why it was included. Despite the few missteps, with writers such as Stephen Dixon, Padgett Powell, Rick Bass, and A.M. Homes, readers should find several, if not most, stories to their liking.