Customer Reviews

The Longman Masters of Short Fiction

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This book has a great collection of stories and profound themes. One way to use this book is to pair up the stories. For example, one can look at "The Misfit's Misguided Quest for Love" by studying "Bartleby" by Melville and "The Overcoat" by Gogol.

Another good pairing is to study "Lost Love and Alcohol" by looking at "Babylon Revisted" by Fitzgerald and "The Swimmer" by John Cheever. In both stories the characters lose free will as their self-destructiveness reaches a point of no return.

The power of empathy to remove blindness can be found by looking at Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing" and "Cathedral." Another great story about the power of empathy is Richard Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."

Also take a look at "Gimpel the Fool" by Singer and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" to study the love and widsom of fools.

The dangers of intellectual pride are dramatized in Flanner O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

Yet another fine pairing can be found by studying the conflict between romantic, personal love and public responsibility in Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog" and John Updike's "Separating."

One of my favorite pairings is to study "The Love of the Tribe over the Love of Humanity" by studying "Those Who Walked Away from Omelas" and "The Lottery."

There are even far more stories than the ones I've mentioned. But these pairings give you an idea of how many themes you can study in a collection as rich as this one.

I chose this text from a variety of anthologies for an introductory class. It has a good selection of short story masters (including Kafka, Borges, and others in translation), but the main selling points for me were the section explaining the Elements of Short fiction (plot, characterization, etc.); the explanation of various Critical Approaches to Literature (complete with a short example essay specific to stories in the text), and after each story, there is an "Author's Perspective", sometimes related directly to the story just read, or about writing in general. Overall, an exceptional text for teaching.