Why I Like This Story - by Jackson R Bryer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A thoughtful collection. . . . The authors do a fantastic job of explaining their relationship to the stories that resonate with them and why. . . . Reading this made me feel like I was back in English class, getting life and literature lessons from the best teachers ever.-- "THE OKLAHOMAN"

Insightful and personal (but not academic), these essays should be warmly welcomed by any fan of short fiction.-- "LIBRARY JOURNAL"

It is hard for an Englishman to confess, but Americans excel at the short story, and here is the proof. And what better guide could you have than fellow writers who explain why each story deserves our attention, in the process crucially revealing something of themselves. These are not critics deconstructing a text but authors explaining why, for them, each story lives on the pulse, and why, therefore, it might for us. Is a short story less compelling than a novel? You might as well ask whether a sonnet is less powerful than a narrative poem. It is the very form, the discipline, the intensity, which, as in the case of this remarkable collection, engraves it on the mind.----Christopher Bigsby, novelist, biographer, and critic