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This ought have been called the "Best American Short Stories About New York WASPs, Jewish Males and the Dark South." From Flannery O' Connor we get "Greenleaf", a questionable and surely non-representative selection; from Hemingway "The Killers", probably among the lesser third from The Snows of Kilmanjaro. Also, I'm pretty sure Alice Munro is Canadian, yet John O' Hara finds no place here (both are semi-explained in Updike's introduction--the former hailing from "Anglophone Canada" (how does th...
A good anthology but where was O. Henry, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Max Steele?
Updike's The Best American Short Stories of the Century underrepresents humor and "genre" fiction, and for every drop of optimism there is a bucket of pessimism - so, it's a typical literary fiction collection. These are not the best-told stories, nor the most interesting stories. Those Updike selects are chosen for their literary value, their intellectual depth and understanding of more delicate elements of the craft, like religious allusions or flexible voice. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzge...
This is a truly amazing collection! My mom and I each had a copy and read it at roughly the same time. (My mom, of course, finished first!) I eagerly await each yearly edition of the Best American Short Stories, so this volume was a special treat for me. One of the things that surprised me about this book was just how 'American' it is. John Updike notes in his introduction that he tried not just to choose stories written in America, but stories that truly tell us something ABOUT America. I think...
A better title would be: "John Updike's Random Short Story Roulette"There a few great short stories here, but most of them are mediocre at best. This is most definitely NOT a collection of the best American short stories.If you are looking for a great short story collection, I recommend looking elsewhere.
Echoing other reviews - this collection of short stories is not even close to meeting its title's promise. But, there were some solid stories in here (as well as some very plain ones). My favorite kind of short story usually includes twists at the end (RE: Roald Dahl). However, what this collection lacked in excitement it made up for in its broad overview of humanity.It was rich in its viewpoints, and included a story about a janitor learning about people from their trash, a story about dying pe...
An incredibly un-putdownable selection of the best short fiction writing of the 20th century. It’s rare I consider short story collections page turners, but there was just one masterful read after another. Of course, there were a couple of clunkers, but I loved over 90% of the stories and considering this collection is a door stopper, that’s pretty good!! Bravo John Updike (RIP) for a superb job editing this anthology. It can’t be easy choosing 56 stories to call the “best” spanning 100 years.
Short stories! What could be better reading material for someone with a head cold, mild general malaise, and the attention span of a five-year-old? There actually is an answer to this question, and it's "comic books." But I'm fresh out, so Updike's favorites will have to tide me over.
It can't be easy to choose the best American short stories of the 20th Century. Even if you have over 700 pages to fill (like this collection) classic stories are bound to be left out. Although there are plenty of good stories here from canonical writers, I had a few problems with this anthology. First of all, some of the stories were not very good, and I can't help feeling that they were chosen because they fit some kind of needed token representation. It's a crime that Shirley Jackson's "The L...
Many of my favorite authors were in here, Ernest hemingway, William Faulkner, Joyce carol Oates, Richard Wright, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren and many more I plan on reading in the future. This was a wonderful collection of short stories from crime, love, illness, death, racism, and humor.
What I learned from this book... Edward O'Brien, who started the annual Best American Short Stories, saw the virtue in our diversity as a nation being represented so well in a distinctly American literature. So from the intro I learned that the short story form is an American genre (think Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, etc) and it has been mostly dismissed by the rest of the literary world for lacking "sophistication and technique". The introductions are given by the year's guest editor and...
If you only read one of these stories, read "I Want to Live!" By Thom Jones.
The title is a misnomer. Not that there aren't some wonderful stories here, but they were never really chosen because they're the best American short stories of the 20th century. Rather, these are Updike's 56 picks out of the 2,000 stories originally chosen in the 84 volumes of a yearly anthology published from 1915 through 1999. If a story was never published in Best American Stories they weren't available to be selected. Updike couldn't select "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather, "Are These Actual M...
OK I know it's cliche to rate this five stars but for the record I normally don't rate BASS and BAE that well.. BUT here I got a chance to read writer's I've long heard so much about but hadn't really read - like Joyce Carol Oates (ridonculous, time-less story in here, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, about a pretty girl who gets lots of attention but it eventually gets her in a jam), and F. Scott Fitzgerald, because really I'd long been in the camp who'd read Gatsby and nothing else o...
I would be hard-pressed to say anything negative about a collection of short stories selected by John Updike. This collection of stories are character and era-defining, stunning classics of American short story literature. With pieces from classic American authors like Faulkner, O'Brian, and Lardner, it does not disappoint. I was excited to read and reread each story to pick up differnt details and subtlities; each author had his/her own way of expressing the period sentiment. My opinion of this...
Some of these stories were amazing, and others were amazingly depressing.
The Best American Short Stories of the CenturyThis collection was put together in 1999 based on a century of the Best American Short Stories Annuals. The editors, led by Updike, chose the fifty-five that they felt were the best of the best. Of course there is no single book that includes all the greatest American short stories but this is what they set out to do. With these caveats here are the 15 stories that I considered the best of this volume — five star material. Each of these stories blew
This book has been my occasional bedtime reading material since the middle of September (OK, there was a while when I wasn’t reading before going to sleep). The Best American Short Story volumes have been publishing the best American short stories for each year since 1915; and this volume contains the editors’ opinion of the best fifty-five stories, from “Zelig” by Benjamin Rosenblatt in 1915 to “The Half-Skinned Steer” by Annie Proulx in 1998. Some of these stories I have encountered before in
Technically all the stories were written perfectly. However, I was disappointed that the majority of them were depressing. In addition, it seemed as if some of the authors were more interested in writing techniques than creating characters or stories that drew you in. This is unfortunate because there's not much room in a short story for development of plot or character depth. I was surprised I didn't care for some stories written by big names, while others I was relieved that they came through
First you should know I've always loved short stories. The really great ones seem to have all the richness and plot and feeling of a novel, but wrapped up in a few short pages. So it's a challenging genre to do well, sort of like the famous apology from Blaise Pascal for writing a long letter because he "lacked the time to make it short." This book is specifically American stories published in the 20th century, and you can imagine the process they must have gone through to narrow down the list.