John Dugdale
Well-Made Tales
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story
By Richard Ford (ed)
Granta 756pp £25
This is a fine collection with a ludicrous title. If it’s not immediately obvious why its pretence of being a ‘Book of the American Short Story’ merits a Trades Descriptions investigation, simply compare its line-up of authors with that of Joyce Carol Oates’s Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Oates picks Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Baldwin and Bellow – all the names you’d expect. Not one of them wins a place in Ford’s squad.
His original Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992) at least suggested that ‘Postwar’ had been absent-mindedly left out of the intended title. The decades between 1945 and 1990 were more or less evenly represented, with a phalanx of now largely forgotten figures. Fifteen years on, as far as
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner