Customer Reviews

Esquire's Big Book of Fiction

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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This is probably pound for pound the best literary anthology I've come across. A great mix of old (Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Nabokov) and new (Means, Foster Wallace). I wish I had this book in my undergraduate days--would've been great to have these stories all consolidated in one package as they are here. It also has the best cover I've ever seen for an anthology.

So much better than the Best American Stories of the Century. I took this book on vacation with me, and found it to be one of the greatest collections I've ever read.

If you want to read the very best short fiction ever written, then buy this book. Truly the very best this century's writers have to offer.

I got the book in time and in much better condition than what I expected. The entire experience of dealing with this vendor was very good and easy. I had questions about delivery which were promptly taken care of . I am very pleased with this transaction.

This amazing collection of short fiction was originally published in 2002. I came across it on a clearance table in October, 2009 in a Chapters bookstore in Canada. Having savored it over a period of three weeks, I now feel I should send Esquire the difference between the list price and clearance price I paid. It's 50 stories over roughly 800 pages is a delight and a challenge with much undiscovered terrain. There are classics, such as, The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemingway, The Things They Carried by O'Brien, and The Misfits by Miller.

It also includes some amazing work like DeLillo's In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century which paints such a vivid picture of the depravity of 1970's New York underlined with religious imagery and theory. Memento Mori by Nolan is the basis for the movie Memento. Russo's Monhegan Light is a tale of loss and lost time (I love all his work). The Last Generation by Williams has really stuck with me. The message that the influence of some people we run across in life can really jade us and send us on paths of eventual destruction is haunting. Soldier's Joy by Wolff really captures the loss of esteem experienced by the U.S. military following Vietnam. And Capote's Among the Paths to Eden is ghostlike and disturbing.

As a marketing and advertising professional, I did take certain delight in references to the field in several of the stories. Cheever's The Death of Justina features a copywriter who tackles the challenge of burying a loved one while meeting the demands of drafting a commercial for 'Elixircol'. McGuane's main character in Cutting losses rails against Leo Burnett's handling of the Sony account. And a character in The Eighty-Yard Run exclaims, "What has Brooks Brothers got that we haven't got? A name. No-more." Many of these stories were written in the late fifties and early sixties so were obviously influenced by the Mad Men advertising era while ironically building the stereotypes and iconography of the industry at the same time. I really enjoy that period and there are other stories like The B.A.R. Man, Neighbors, and I Look Out for Ed Wolfe that evoke the struggles and contradictions of the generation following the second world war.

Like another consumer review of this book, I too, enjoyed the beautiful cover design. Thanks to Esquire and their fiction editor, Adrienne Miller, for compiling this amazing collection.

There are some wonderful stories collected here, many of which are classics ("The Snows of Kilamanjaro," "The Things They Carried"). But what's disappointing is that the editor obviously selected many stories simply because of the stature of the author and not the story's merit. The most obvious example is the Fitzgerald story written just before his death, which is slight and cliched. And the choice of THREE stories by David Foster Wallace is just baffling.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wallace, Steinbeck, Nabokov...The list goes on and on. What more can you ask for? I spent the weekend with the book, and there are no duds here. Only some of the finest fiction from the 20th Century. It's also printed on high quality, thick paper, unlike so many other anthologies which are printed on paper so thin you can see through it.
It's also a beautiful book to have sitting on your coffee table.