edited by Deborah Treisman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 14, 2010
Like the magazine, the collection doesn’t distinguish between short stories and novel excerpts, but each piece can be...
Though many lament the decline of short fiction (and magazines that publish it), we seem to have entered a golden age of the short-story anthology, if the proliferation of annual and themed collections is any indication.
The latest addition to the short-fiction bookshelf proceeds from the provocative premise of the New Yorker’s annual summer fiction issue of June 2010—which found the future of American fiction in the hands of its 20 most promising practitioners younger than 40. Inevitably, the selection invited controversy, as did the age limit. Writes fiction editor Treisman, “We will inevitably look back, in a decade or so, and see that we missed a writer—or even several. But for now, for us, these twenty women and men dazzlingly represent the multiple strands of inventiveness and creativity at play in the best fiction being written today.” They also represent a departure from what was long considered the prototypical “New Yorker story,” one that pondered contemporary, upper-middle-class, Caucasian ennui. The inclusions are international in scope (and authorship, though all have some ties to North America), occasionally historical, and feature far more narrative propulsion than navel gazing. Joining those who have already experienced critical success and some measure of commercial breakthrough—Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss (married to J.S. Foer, the anthology's power couple), ZZ Packer and Gary Shteyngart among them—are writers on the verge of a greater readership, the discoveries that highlight such collections. The youngest, 24-year-old Téa Obreht, has already appeared in two of the year’s “best of” anthologies and will publish her debut novel in 2011. The Ethiopian Dinaw Mengestu contributes a vivid story about the power of storytelling, and Yiyun Li shows tonal command in her narrative of a reticent Chinese immigrant who sees herself as “who she was in other people’s eyes,” while inventing stories to shape that perception.
Like the magazine, the collection doesn’t distinguish between short stories and novel excerpts, but each piece can be savored as a self-contained whole.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-53287-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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by Walter Hopps with Deborah Treisman & Anne Doran
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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