The classroom standard for readers and aspiring writers of fiction, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary stories in the field.
An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction is a great place to start to get a sense for the landscape of the short story historically and across continents. Sure, you might take issue with some inclusions (Why this story? Why this author?) and some exclusions, but there is plenty here to learn from and get exposed to, and I know that I made some discoveries having read this book.
Here are some of my favorite discoveries:
"Anna on the Neck" made me want to read more Anton Chekhov. A poorer woman fears marrying a bourgeois oafish men but then the table's turn.
In "A Wall of Fire Rising" by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian father wants to escape his rigid society, even if it's to the detriment of his family.
Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't" is basically a perfect story. A young man explains how someone's death got in the way of his first sexual encounter and haunted him thereafter.
In Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game," one struggling black man stakes everything on a cash prize at a bingo hall.
"The Conscience of the Court" by Zora Neale Hurston made me cry. A black woman, a servant of a white family avoiding its debt, stands trial in this story for beating a debt collector who comes to take away the white family's poverty. It's not clear whether the story will become tragedy or comedy, but when you reread you realize how smartly Hurston laid it out from the beginning to tip in one direction. It really is a beautiful, moving story.
Jhumpa Lahiri is awesome. Her story, "Hell-Heaven," is told from the perspective of an Indian-American girl whose mother suffers her love for another man in silence.
D.H. Lawrence is a weird sybarite, and that comes through in both the stories here, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," and "The Rocking-Horse Winner." I won't even spoil them. Lawrence is sensuous without being vulgar, sincere without being sentimental.
Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" made me want to hunt for all her stories and anything else she's written. The story is terrific but terrifically odd. A rich woman in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) decides she wants time away from her family and so decides to rent a room in a cheap hotel where she can sit and be alone with her thoughts. That's it. But the story winds up opening all sorts of avenues. Her life feels meaningless and she's wrestling with that.
(Real quick, John L'Heureux's "Brief Lives in California" and Amy Tan's "Rules of the Game" are stories I loved, but unfortunately for me these writers are primarily novelist and so I couldn't follow up and check out more of their stories, though we're lucky to have these.)
Bernard Malamud's "Angel Levine" is about finding angels among ordinary people. Malamud's stories are terrific. So are the stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, as you'll see with "Gimpel the Fool" about a rabbi who suffers as many trials as Job does and who must learn to accept his many misfortunes.
Guy De Maupassant is a classic master of the short story. Two of his stories are collected in this anthology and, although it could be my failure, I only liked one of his stories but liked it enough to get his collection. The story is called "An Adventure in Paris," about a woman who wants to have a wild time in sensuous Paris.
There are some stories I'm leaving out, but I'll finish here with two. John Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums" is as good as any story you'll ever read and so is Edith Wharton's "Xingu." The former is about a woman who feels a kind of awakening after a new encounter in the countryside and the latter is about the pretense of communities of intellectuals, so-called.
Oh, and honorable mention goes to Bobbie Anne Mason who writes about my hometown and the town adjacent where she grew up. The story in here by her is "Shiloh," and it's a fine story.
What follows is a list of further reading, collections of short stories I discovered after reading these authors and the above stories:
Simply because it became too much of a hassle to add each story individually:
Atwood, Margaret. "Death by Landscape." 3 stars. Finished 4/13/15. Bell, Madison Smartt. "Witness." 5 stars. Finished 3/23/15. Bradbury, Ray. "The Veldt." 5 stars. Finished 1/22/15. (science-fiction) Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case." 3 stars. Finished 2/25/15. Cheever, John. "The Enormous Radio." 3 stars. Finished 1/22/15. (science-fiction) Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." 4 stars. Finished 3/4/15. Cortázar, Julio. "A Continuity of Parks." 4 stars. Finished 2/18/15. (books-about-writing) Cortázar, Julio. "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris." 5 stars. Finished 2/18/15. (magic) Dodd, Susan. "Public Appearances." 4 stars. Finished 3/2/15. Dubus, Andre. "The Intruder." 3 stars. Finished 3/23/15. (teens-and-death) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 4 stars. Finished 2/21/15. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birthmark." 3 stars. Reread. (classics, monstrosity-themed, science-fiction) Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." 4 stars. Finished 1/28/15. (childhood-abuse, fantasy) Mansfield, Katherine. "Bliss." 4 stars. Finished 3/2/15. O'Brien, Tim. "The Things They Carried." 3 stars. Reread. (war-related) O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." 4 stars. Reread. (monstrosity-themed) O'Connor, Flannery. "Everything That Rises Must Converge." 3 stars. Finished 3/9/15. (african-american) Smith, Lee. "Intensive Care." 4 stars. Finished 4/26/15. Thurber, James. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." 3 stars. Finished 3/4/15. (movies) Tolstoy, Leo. "The Death of Ivan Ilych." 3 stars. Finished 4/19/15.
Ah yes, I found a fun and cute story, by Jean Shepherd, the author of the well known story," A Christmas Story," called, "Lost at C." It is told from the perspective of a kid and is hilariously funny. It reminded me of my school days.
Want to read more Flannery O'Connor. She has a nice southern story tellers voice. Read "A Good Man is Hard to Find." It was good, suspenseful, yet as with most short stories, has a disturbing ending!Doesn't anyone write short stories with satisfying, or positive endings?
Didn't like Richard Bausch's "Byron the Lyron." Boring. about a woman and her weird relationship with her son, and her son's weird relationship with her male P.T. Too emo!
I Liked Capote's "Miriam." It had great characters and an intriguing plot.
I liked Shirley Jackson's, "The Lottery," though it was a disturbing story of human cruelty.
Didn't like Bartholeme's "Me and Miss Mandible." Just too weird, a man in a sixth grade class room. That's a nightmare!
I will borrow this book from the library again in the future.
Please note: I read the sixth edition, published in 2000. I have no idea what stories might have been added or dropped from this seventh, or later editions.
I've been dipping in and out of this large tome of short fiction for over twenty years and finally finished it. It's a wonderful introduction to many classic, famous (and some forgotten) writers. A handful of highlights for me include:
"Sonny's Blues" by James Balwin. Recently read "The Rockpile" for discussion in the George Saunders Story Club (Substack). Balwin's fiction has an immediate vitality and is a joy to read.
"Heart of Darkness" by Joesph Conrad. It was easy to see how this novella inspired and served as a blueprint for the film "Apocalypse Now" and countless other stories, shows and films.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. The readable prose and humor cleared away any reservations to reading Moby Dick (which I did read and enjoy.)
"The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy. Halfway through this story I started to wonder why it is so well known. Within a few pages, I knew. ("Oh. Okay")
Also, during this finishing kick, the story "Intensive Care" by Lee Smith and an autobiographical piece "Becoming a Writer" by Gail Godwin (in the "Writers on Writing" appendix) got me to add a novel from each author to my "Want to Read" queue.
Pre-1900 The Fall of the House of Usher - Poe, 1840 The Birthmark - Hawthorne, 1846 Story of an Hour - Chopin, 1891 The Yellow Wallpaper - Perkins Gilman, 1892
Post-1900 The Metamorphosis - Kafka, 1915 Why I Live at the PO - Welty, 1941 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - Borges, 1944 The Lottery - Jackson, 1948 The Handsomest Drowned Man - Gracia Marquez, 1968 The Ones Who Walk Away - Le Guin, 1973 Me and Miss Mandible - Barthelme, 1981 In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried - Hempel, 1985
It took me almost 4 years to read all the short stories in this book. There were good ones and not so good ones. Pick it up and start reading you will enjoy Manet of the stories in it.
loved loved loved diving into this anthology for my fiction course. so many wonderful stories from so many great authors in this one. it'll stay on my bookshelf forever
anthologies, of course, are a great way to get introduced to writers you never heard of. this one is a little heavy on american writers, but i guess that's inevitable with two american editors. on the whole though, a nice broad coverage. there is an interesting section in the back called 'writers on writing': some of the featured writers thoughts on the craft through essays or interviews. another neat feature is a cross referencing of related materials: after a story, you are referred to another writer's comments on that particular story, or that writer's comments on someone else's work.
a fantastic array of authors (tim o'brien, capote, faulkner, chopin, etc) - it's a good way to dip into authors you've been interested in reading. i enjoyed the selection of stories by authors i'd read before, and was pleasantly satisfied with the ones i hadn't.
definitely a "good read".
also, i'll always have a special place in my heart for norton's.
All I get to read these days is what I'm teaching, and I'm so lucky to get to teach a senior elective on reading and writing short stories. We're going to read as much of this book as possible, and I don't think there's a story in it that doesn't belong. I'd add thousands more, but this is as good a place as any for them to get a real taste of my favorite art form.
Yet another in my collection of Norton Anthologies—a veritable mountain of them at his point. This one is the standard for a reason…everything you're looking for that is in the mainstream (i.e., not esoteric or too-arthouse) is in this anthology. For everything else (too-new, too avant-garde), look somewhere else.
I've read less than a quarter of this anthology, but I'll already say that it's brilliant. Or, perhaps every anthology of fiction is this brilliant. It's got bits of everything.
Highlights:
Gabriel García Márquez's story The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World is a masterpiece. It's like One Hundred Years of Solitude distilled into its purest spirit, fit onto just a few pages.
Great anthology. Definitely something for every type and kind of reader. Some from authors you'll recognize and others you may not be familiar with yet. Loved that the authors are in alphabetical order - means you can read the stories without them being framed in a time period or by gender or genre or any other designation. Worthwhile to have on your shelf and read again and again.
One of those college text books I just couldn't sell back- this collection is made up of some of the most notable pieces of literature I have studied and loved throughout my life including Young Goodman Brown, The Littoral Zone, Snow, The Dead, and the list goes on.
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction by Richard Bausch - I still occasionally pick one of these up fondly now that I'm not getting graded on them! Happy Reading!