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.