What do you think?
Rate this book
Story: Fictions Past and Present
Book by Litsinger, Boyd, Oates, Joyce Carol
1152 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1984
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 3, 2024
This is a doorstop textbook for college literature classes. It purports to be a selection of short stories that offers “pleasures accessible to new readers” and a “renewal of delights to the more experienced.” The works are chronologically arranged from those defined as “classic” up to the more modern fiction as of the publication date of 1985.
I guess I don’t measure up to either reader category, for some of the stories I have read previously now seem unnecessarily somber, if not a bit silly, and a few began so morbidly that I did not finish them (yes, even the classics: Hawthorn, Gogol, Poe, Melville, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy).
Mark Twain - The entry is an early short story that a Clemens biographer claimed even the author came to opine was his least favorite of his own writings.
Henry James - why does the narrator sounds so snobbish?
etc., etc. I confess to not finishing (or even starting) them all, but only one of the many dozens did I find inspirational: James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues. The rest were the exact opposite of “pleasures” and certainly not “delights.” They were depressive to the point of making me wonder at the personal psychology of all those famous writers.
I guess I don’t measure up to either reader category, for some of the stories I have read previously now seem unnecessarily somber, if not a bit silly, and a few began so morbidly that I did not finish them (yes, even the classics: Hawthorn, Gogol, Poe, Melville, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy).
Mark Twain - The entry is an early short story that a Clemens biographer claimed even the author came to opine was his least favorite of his own writings.
Henry James - why does the narrator sounds so snobbish?
etc., etc. I confess to not finishing (or even starting) them all, but only one of the many dozens did I find inspirational: James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues. The rest were the exact opposite of “pleasures” and certainly not “delights.” They were depressive to the point of making me wonder at the personal psychology of all those famous writers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review