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Why I Like This Story (Hardcover)
Jackson R. Bryer; Contributions by A.R. Gurney, Alan Cheuse, Alice McDermott, Andre Dubus, …
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R1,267
Discovery Miles 12 670
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
Wanted: Woman to talk to. Three nights a week. Three hundred
dollars a night. Skin Deep is about the unusual young woman who
answers this ad. Martha Ward is twenty -eight, an ex-topless
waitress, and part-time mother of an eight-year-old. She drives to
Malibu for her new job and discovers she must dress entirely in
blue --body, hand, hair, even face, completely covered-- and talk
to a man named Dr. Hamilton. He wants to talk about beauty. This
startling novel depicts the compelling and poignant story of a
young woman's obsession with her looks. Defining herself by the
reactions of the various and unforgettable men in her life --her
father who speaks only in aphorisms and platitudes, her pyromanical
stepfather, her dramatically different boyfriend-- Martha becomes
more an more absorbed in the demands of being physically
attractive. Through their eyes, she begins to see her life of
solitude and independence as one of lonliness and desperate
routine. Only in her nightly sessions with the remarkable but
deeply disturbed Dr. Hamilton can she gain control of her own point
of view. Only with the one man who cannot see her, can she learn to
see herself. Skin Deep is Diana Wagman's first novel. She writes
with deep feeling and with an accurate tough. As she examines
Martha Ward's compulsion to be beautiful, she strikes a nerv so
responsive that many readers will wince. Wagman's intense but
sensitive exploration of Marth Ward's fixation with outward beauty
focuses on a painful subject that affects many women. Diana Wagman
is a screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles. For her work she has
received the Mary Pickford Award and the Silver Eagle Award from
the Chicago Film Festival.
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