The Granta Book of the American Short Story [Hardcover]

Richard Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1992

This selection from the best works of American short fiction published in the last fifty years is fast becoming one of the most important anthologies of contemporary writing. The collection begins in the 1940s with Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Paul Bowles, and ends in the 1990s with some of the most affecting stories written today, including work by Raymond Carver, John Updike, Tobias Wolff, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Academic anthologies, no matter how massive, tend to paint literature with a broad and representative brush. "Best-of" collections may dabble exclusively and exhaustively in a particular decade or school. Happily, Granta 's compendium of recent stories by American writers is neither. Culled from work published since 1944--the year Ford ( Rock Springs ) was born--the more than 40 stories in this 700-plus-page volume are an idiosyncratic array with few common threads connecting them. Apart from the 1944 cutoff date, Ford's only criteria, stated in his quirky, thoughtful introduction, are that the entries be "ones I like--stories that have altered my appreciation of what a short story might surprisingly contain or be about; stories that by their brilliance have seemed to sanction the entire endeavor of being a writer." A story can be almost anything in his book, and his notion of an American "allows an American to be anyone who persuasively claims to be one." Ford's liberal aesthetic sweeps us from (to name a very few) the Bowleses, Wallace Stegner and Grace Paley through the pivotal work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Robert Coover, to that of Jamaica Kincaid, Raymond Carver and Richard Bausch. This is hardly another case of rounding up the usual suspects; there are many surprises in the lineup--delightful ones.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books / Granta; First Edition edition (April 30, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670845272
• ISBN-13: 978-0670845279
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #370,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tasty American Buffet, March 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Granta Book of the American Short Story (Paperback)

A collection that clearly defines America's lasting contribution to the form. Richard Ford carefully canvasses the past fifty or so years of great, and often overlooked, writers. Missing, but not missed, are the staple short story writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. But, the brilliance of this collection is that it traces the trajectory of what these pillars of the form initiated. From Baldwin's jazzy, layered "Sonny's Blues" to the raw and devestating "What They Carried" by Tim O'Brien this is a must have for writers and lovers of great writing.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great fiction, great price!, April 8, 2008

By 

Marilyn Carder "Mara" (Mara) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Granta Book of the American Short Story (Paperback)

The short stories are wonderfully written, and, because they are from the last fifty years, no archaic words or phrases get in the way of good story-telling. As most of these stories aren't included in the "typical" anthology (though many of the authors are), the reading experience is like spring rain, encouraging a fresh joy in the written word. The price is excellent, really inexpensive for an anthology.