The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories [Paperback]

Daniel Halpern (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2000

Following the immense success of The Art of the Tale, Daniel Halpern has assembled the next generation of short-story writers--those born after 1937--to create a companion volume, The Art of the Story. Attesting to the depth, range, and continued popularity of short fiction, this collection includes seventy-eight contributors from thirty-five countries. The Art of the Story combines the best of the established masters as well as the fresh, new voices of writers whose work has seldom been translated into English.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A reader doesn't want to love every story in an anthology. A collection of short fiction by various authors should be just that: various. We want all the stories to be admirable, but not necessarily lovable. This is how anthologies do their job, which is to teach us to love new forms of fiction. And this is how Daniel Halpern, editor of The Art of the Story, does his job. Halpern previously brought us the successful and far-reaching collection The Art of the Tale. Now he has taken upon himself the task of creating an international sampling of the contemporary short story. Seventy-eight writers from 35 countries--including Banana Yoshimoto, Junot Díaz, Peter Hoeg, Julian Barnes, T.C. Boyle, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Edwidge Danticat, and Tatyana Tolstaya--demonstrate that the story still brims with unrest and disharmony and, well, variousness. The classical form, the story that implies the world in a truncated scene or two, that implies a life in a single moment, is amply represented in this collection by writers like Ann Beattie ("In Amalfi") and Raymond Carver ("Are These Actual Miles?"). But the new story ranges farther than the personal, making inroads into the parodic, the fantastic, the speculative. As Halpern writes in the preface, "There seems to be a more investigative nature to the fiction of these stories written so close to the end of this century, a tendency, especially among writers from emerging nations, to use the story as a means of orientation, to restate for themselves their position--politically, socially, and artistically--as if for these writers there is radically less separation between reality and the imagination." Certainly this is an apt description of the fiction of Nigeria's Booker Prize winner Ben Okri ("In the Shadow of War") and of American newcomer Nathan Englander, whose "The Twenty-Seventh Man" describes the slaughter of Yiddish writers and contains the unforgettable dictate, "Never outlive your language." --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A decade after Halpern's Art of the Tale anthology comes a hefty companion volume, this one collecting 78 international, contemporary authors, those born between 1938 and 1970. The new book elegantly shrugs off the dictates of political and cultural theorists to answer the demands of literary aesthetics. Yet the stories represented here, written by authors from 35 countries, are rife with honest social commentary: Haruki Murakami's suburban fantasy "The Elephant Vanishes" is told by a bourgeois Japanese man living outside Tokyo; the characters in Bobbie Ann Mason's "Wish" are poor tobacco farmers with crocheted pillows, sour stomachs and dirt yards; "Escort" by Abdulrazak Gurnah tells of a Tanzanian who returns briefly from England, where he is a teacher and a scholar of poetry, and becomes unwillingly involved with his taxi driver, a meticulously evil lapsed Muslim named Salim. The philosophy guiding Halpern's choices, as he points out in a refreshingly brief introduction, is that contemporary authors, unlike the early moderns collected in his previous anthology, are essentially reactionary: they respond conservatively, critically and satirically to the effluvia of current popular media. Though claiming to be an international selection, the majority of these stories were written in English, and many are by the usual suspects for such a collection: Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver. The international scene is represented by well-known writers-in-translation like Banana Yoshimoto, Patrick Chamoiseau and Peter Esterhazy, along with some distinguished voices not yet discovered by mainstream American readers. Halpern selected these stories with great intelligence and zero trendiness, and the anthology is a true pleasure at every turn. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 1 edition (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140296387
• ISBN-13: 978-0140296389
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Superb sampling of short fiction, September 26, 2002

By 

Steven Reynolds (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (Paperback)

Gone are the days when a writer could earn a living publishing short stories in magazines because gone, too, are the days when most people read them. That's a shame, as this anthology demonstrates, because short fiction offers pleasures to the reader, and challenges to the writer, which are unavailable in longer forms. Like shots of liqueur, they can pack a mighty punch. "Short" doesn't mean a story can't be complex or moving, or can't address expansive themes. Indeed, that the better short stories achieve precisely those things is one measure of their greatness. Daniel Halpern's selections here prove it. His anthology not only gives hours of reading pleasure, but also provides an indispensable resource for aspiring writers: these stories display such an amazing range of themes, styles and narrative structures, they make it a veritable showcase of approaches to storytelling. For the student of literature, they offer condensed examples of how writers do their work. Of course, not everything can appeal in a volume of this size, but for me there were some highpoints: "Dharma", a moving ghost story by Vikram Chandra; the cleverly historical "The Green Man" by Jeanette Winterson; the almost casually powerful "Talking Dog" by Francine Prose; "Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet", a Vietnam memoir by Barry Hannah; "Everything in This Country Must", a child's perspective on Northern Ireland, by Colum McCann; "The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor" by Deborah Eisenberg and "The Lifeguard" by Mary Morris, both of which deal with death and adolescence; the immensely moving "Evermore" by Julian Barnes; the domestic suspense of "A Family Dinner" by Kazuo Ishiguro; and the heartbreaking lament of "Intimacy" by Hanif Kureishi - which, I assume, is the seed which grew into his novel of the same name. Ironically, Kureishi's story shows precisely what can be achieved in the short form: for my money, it's better than his novel.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent textbook for writing course, January 25, 2004

By 

B. Stabenow "nutrition nut" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (Paperback)

I have been using this book for over a year now for the story writing course I tutor online. The very wide range and style of stories makes it ideal for this purpose and helps to stimulate discussion. I have also had very positive feedback from students: None regretted purchasing the book. The most popular story without a doubt proved to be Nicola Barker's "G-String". :)

There are some very strong showings here from Al-Shaykh, Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle, Olen Butler, Peter Carey, Lydia Davis, N. Englander, Richard Ford, Pawel Huelle, Edward P. Jones, C. McCann, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Morris, H. Murakami, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Tatyana Tolstaya, L. Valenzuela, Tobias Wolff ... and others.

A few stories made me scratch my head as to why they had been selected; but overall this is a challenging, diverse, high-voltage anthology. Even if you read short stories compulsively, you're bound to discover some new writers or rediscover a writer you thought you knew.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a worthy companion, March 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (Paperback)

i checked this out of the libary and both my husband and i have thoroughly ravaged its pages. i carried it about a month; he carried it for another. we incurred almost more overdue fines than the book (hardcover) cost. we liked it so much we are purchasing it to bring back home to new york. the selection is insightful and appreciated, and if any thread unites the stories it is that they succeed as the best writing ought -- in acting as instant portals/transporters to another time, place, world, of life or ideas, psychology or thought. i read a lot of (mostly american) short stories and literary magazines, but this anthology truly had at least 3 of the best stories i've ever read. also, i appreciated that these stories were not just personal sketches of ethic/outsider subjectivity or sex born of the blandness of suburbia or alienation of the city, etc.: the author steps aside, the story tells itself. the stories are artful, masterly, probably the epitome of each writer's writing career (they read like those gems, with a few exceptions). you feel this in the reading. word by word, the stories unfold, unravel, draw you magnetically down the line of prose and make you lean back at the end of a story and marvel that you're still sitting where you were how many minutes ago? and it was only 3 pages? let me read that again. truly successful writing; truly well-selected anthology. buy it.