"Intelligence, compassion and artistry are alive and well in America."--Donna Seaman, Booklist The winner of honors from the National Book Critics Circle, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers , and... This description may be from another edition of this product.
In a literary culture as fragmented as ours, these anthologies are about the best way to get a feel for what we're all up to. I love 'em, the Pushcarts, the O'Henry's, the Best American Stories, Mysteries, Essays, Sports Writing, so on. You don't have to love every story in these to profit from the reading. Occasionally I'm required to make long commutes to Manhattan for weeks at a time, and there's no better reading than these anthologies in general and the Pushcarts in particular. Of this edition, I'd make special mention of Wells Tower, Lydia Peelee and Beena Kamlani as especial fun to discover. And in general sense, using this book as a thermometer of what's going on in literature, I'd comment that we seem to be having problems with endings. There were really very few stories with completely satisfying endings. Rather than a negative, I take this as informative and interesting. You can analyze it as a technical problem, a social one, or a spiritual one, but it's definitely there. Personally, I suspect a lot of these fine writers have forgot (or decided to ignore) the fundamentals of storytelling. They -- and we -- would gain from a little merging of the genre folk with the literary ones.
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