Short Stories from the Literary Magazines [antikvár]

Teachers of "Modern" literature have become increasingly aware that there is a "Contemporary" literature which needs to become part of the course of study. This contemporary literature that has been accumulating in the last twenty years is not likely to replace what has become recognizable as the modern "classics"—Faulkner, Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Joyce, Lawrence—but it does bear the same relation to the 1970's that the classics once did to the 1950's. It is not unreasonable to assume that some of the writers represented in this anthology will come to occupy reputations that last more than a decade or two. The stories here are, the editors feel, some of the very finest that have been printed in recent years, in both the better- and the lesser-known literary magazines. A look at the table of contents will reveal names that have come into considerable prominence in the last twenty years—among them Flan- nery O'Connor, Howard Nemerov, and Peter Taylor—but there are others who have more recently moved into wider circles of recognition—for in- stance, W. H. Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Stanley Elkin, and Leonard Michaels— and there are others relatively unknown whose excellence, if one can judge by their stories in this collection, will push them shortly into a wider fame. Although the contemporaneity of the stories (and the appended Direc- tory of Literary Magazines) will make this anthology useful in classes in the writing of fiction, the editors see it centrally as a text (supplementary, perhaps, to such widely used anthologies as Jarvis Thurston's Reading Modern Short Stories, Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton Patrick's American Short Stories, and related anthologies by Robert Penn Warren, Richard Poirier, Mark Schorer, Robert Heilman, Ray B. West, Jr., and Arthur Mizener) for all those classes in which the study of the short story needs to take into account the postmodern, and all those classes in close reading and introduction to genres in which the teacher desires fresh and significant material that has not been endlessly scrutinized in print.