The Art of the Story [antikvár]

PREFACE Its been fifteen years since I began compiling The Art of the Tale, the prede- l^ti cessor to this collection of international short stories. That anthology included ' stories published after 1945, by writers born in the twentieth century (all but i twelve before 1938, the cutoff for this book), with the exceptions of Jorge Luis i ' i Borges, Isak Dinesen, Yasunari Kawabata, and Vladimir Nabokov, each bom within five years of this century. It was my goal then, as it is now, at the end of the twentieth century, to take a look at what writers are doing with the short story around the world. When I queried the writers from the previous collection, the major influence, by a very large margin, were the stories of Anton Chekhov. The model for the contemporary story—at least for those included here—is different in a number of ways, as I think will be evident. Reading through the stories again, I find the work very much in sync with contemporary themes and modes of expression. These are stories sensitive to tlie moves of a popular culture that imprints with vigor something more current, more "of the moment" culturally, stories less in "the classical mode" and more reactive to the media in all its venues. These younger writers have distanced themselves—sometimes subtly, sometimes less so—from the influential writers practicing during the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, not to mention nineteenth-century models. This was not the case for the majority of writers, now over age sixty-five, from The Art of the Tale, who seem clearly to have emerged via their literary inheritance. I began the current enterprise by considering wefl over three hundred writ- ^ ers bom after 1932, relying heavily on a network of writers, editors, agents, and friends to suggest stories that might have escaped my attention. Unlike i'- reading for tlie first antliology, where the estabhshed masters—Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, R. K. Narayan, Isaac Basbevis Singer, William Trevor, John Updike, and Eu-dora Welty, to name a small handful of tlie worthy—were givens, I thought, foolishly perhaps, that finding as many as fifty writers from around the world who had produced some kind of accomplished body of work would be more difficult. So 1 initially set the birth date for inclusion at 1933. I was soon