Kathy Kiernan

I have been dipping in and out of this volume for nearly a year. Yesterday I sat down determined to finish. There are quite a few well-known authors represented, and also some I never heard of. This reminds me of my favorite music CDs – movie soundtracks. I get a nice sampling of an extremely wide-ranging variety of music. Many times, it pushes me back to the music store to get more CDs by a single artist. Sometimes it reminds me how much I detest certain styles (read Country Western).
There were also some odd selections. Al Franken reprinted a NYT review blasting his book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot. He also included a letter he wrote to the NYT responding to the review and Jean Kirkpatrick’s response to his letter. Pretty funny.
The entry by Joyce Carol Oates (one of my all-time favorite writers) was chilling and her head note offered some insight into the spate of books revolving around violence. Natalie Angier’s “Confessions of a Lonely Atheist” was wonderful, as were selections by Anne Tyler, Doris Lessing, David Sedaris, and Arianna Huffington, along with many others. Five stars!
--Jim, 6/15/07… (mais)

Contains:
So help me / Nelson Algren --
The war in the bathroom / Margaret Atwood --
Previous condition / James Baldwin --
The state of grace / Harold Brodkey --
Aftermath of a lengthy rejection slip / Charles Bukowski --
Miriam / Truman Capote --
Furious seasons / Raymond Carver --
Expelled / John Cheever --
Landing in luck / William Faulkner --
Babes in the woods / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
Albergo Empedocle / E.M. Forster --
The end of the party / Graham Greene --
Because of the waters of the flood / Mark Helprin --
In our time / Ernest Hemingway --
Crazy in the stir / Chester B. Himes --
After you, my dear Alphonse / Shirley Jackson --
Territory / David Leavitt --
April in Paris / Ursula K. Le Guin --
The pig / Doris Lessing --
Cruel and barbarous treatment / Mary McCarthy --
Wunderkind / Carson McCullers --
The greatest thing in the world / Norman Mailer --
Benefit performance / Bernard Malamud --
Mademoiselle Claude / Henry Miller --
A basket of strawberries / Alice Munro --
In the old world / Joyce Carol Oates --
The geranium / Flannery O'Connor --
Goodbye and good luck / Grace Paley --
Such a pretty little picture / Dorothy Parker --
The day it snowed / Philip Roth --
The daring young man on the flying trapeze / William Saroyan --
Flash in the pan / Irwin Shaw --
Gimpel the fool / Isaac Bashevis Singer --
And baby makes three / Jane Smiley --
The seraph and the Zambesi / Muriel Spark --
Oil field vignettes / Jim Thompson --
Friends from Philadelphia / John Updike --
Report on theBarnhouse Effect / Kurt Vonnegut --
To hell with dying / Alice Walker --
Death of a traveling salesman / Eudora Welty --
The vengeance of Nitocris / Tennessee Williams.… (mais)