The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

by Ann Charters

Ann Charters has an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom and knows that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. For those who want a smaller, less expensive anthology, the compact edition of The Story and Its Writer is the most comprehensive, diverse — the best-selling — introduction to fiction available, notable for its student appeal as well as its quality and range. To complement the stories, Charters includes her lasting innovation: an array of the writers’ own commentaries on the craft and traditions of fiction. For in-depth, illustrated studies of particular writers, her Casebooks provide unparalleled opportunities for discussion and writing.

 

For a shorter, more affordable option, the compact edition offers all the editorial features of the full edition with about half the stories and commentaries.

Genres: Short Stories

926 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[marcel · Rating 5 out of 5]

By rating this a 5, I don't mean to say I found every single story here amazing (though many, many of them legitimately are), but as an introduction to short fiction, this book knocks it out of the park. I found it used for $6 and have chipped away at it, among other reads, for the last three months. (The compact edition I have is printed with tiny font on Biblically thin paper, so it has been great value, weight- and volume-wise, to bring on my travels in S America, Europe, and SE Asia.) There are sixty short stories included, which span the first 80% of the book. This book introduced me to so many authors whose collections I want to look out for now. It also gave me a taste of different styles and genres of literary fiction, so I have a greater sense of what kind of stories I like to read. The second part, Commentaries, is also wonderful for fleshing out this canon of stories that Charters has established, since we get perspectives on the context behind the stories, sometimes from the author themself or from other short-story writers. I appreciated how page links were inserted before stories to their relevant commentaries, so that you can read the commentary with the story fresh in mind. This meant that I read a lot of this book out of order, leaving pencil checkmarks to indicate that I'd read a piece. I think this is the best way to consume the book, since going alphabetically, sometimes a story pops up that you're not in the mood for. But of course afterwards I had to do a left-to-right sweep of the rest of the book. Part Three is a case study of Raymond Carver's fiction, and it reads a lot like Part 2, mostly commentaries on his work by Carver himself and by other authors.

Then there are a bunch of appendices that are far less gripping but must be useful to a student (there is even an in-depth guide to writing essays about short stories). They were dry but I read them out of a sense of moral duty, and will put them to good use when I inevitably have a crisis and go back to school to study literature.