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.

A female professor has been teaching a course on the literature of love with a younger male colleague.

ComedyCharacters: 1 male, 2 female

Interior Set

An efficient suburban matron, chairing an evening meeting, finds that she has to cope with a strange, offstage intruder who claims he knows her. The meeting degenerates step by step into a wild party, even as the intruder becomes increasingly insistent and insulting to the leader. Ultimately, the lady finds herself confessing to the lure of a liaison with this representative from the under side of society, and by going off with him, she manages to appease whatever it is that tears groups apart.

Three men and three women portray a wide, diverse range of characters - from little boys to grandfathers, from giggling girls to housemaids - in this brilliantly structured play. The action takes place in an upper middle-class American dining-room, the hub of social family life, comprising a mosaic of interrelated scenes, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes rueful, which together create a profound study of the decaying mores of the American WASP.3 women, 3 men

With a mixture of gentle comic poignancy and dramatic tension, one of America's leading contemporary playwrights here examines the problems which arise when John, a leading playwright, returns home to ask his parent's permission to produce his latest work, a play about his family. The Cocktail Hour had a long and successful run in New York and successful tours in both the UK and Australia.2 women, 2 men