Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite
American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers
to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories
selected. On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he
asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can
read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by
forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American
short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are
personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story
selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the
essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the
writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as
James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver,
Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book
also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known
practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle,
Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen,
Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass,
and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore,
Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P.
Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or
bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the
contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard
Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass,
Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice
McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan
Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R.
Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of
Maryland.
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