Douglas Angus

I picked this book up at a thrift store for 50 cents a few years ago. I read through it during the summer I worked as a parking lot attendant at SeaWorld and it was a great introduction to many authors I had never heard of. All the stories in this collection are examples of the best that can be done with a short story but the few that I think are the standouts are Frank O'Connor's Judas, Lawrence Sargent Hall's The Ledge, D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner and Sherwood Anderson's show more Sophistication. I still go back and read many of these stories over and over again, and have even gone out and bought larger selections of some of the author's works. It is a great introduction to the short story form. show less

A nearly perfect book. This is a book I first read from the Westerville, Ohio public library around 1966 or so. I then never saw it again, despite searching every bookstore I entered, until I ordered it through an internet search 33 years later. I was overjoyed to find that it was as warm and funny and true a coming-of-age story as I remembered. A simply-written and engaging story of a group of boys in a small slowly-dying town, and how their refusal to allow bitterness and defeat to show more overcome them inspires their elders. Reminds me of Saroyan's "The Human Comedy", but less ambitious and possibly better-written. A beautiful book that I am ecstatic to make the acquaintance of again. show less

Collecting stories disseminated in the 60s, this feels like taking the pulse if America during a transformative time. Racism, sexism, general confrontations with the status quo resound from story to story.

Contributors include Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, John Updike, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and more.

The view from within of debilitating dementia in "Tell me a Riddle" by Tillie Olson reminds me of State of Siege.

The stories collected here are well-known, if only by reputation. Many of them I read in junior high and thus remember them with awe, especially "A Rose for Emily" and "The Lottery", as well as "The Rocking Horse Winner". The Russian stories (Chekhov and Babel) I had read in college and grad school, and are very familiar to me -- though I wonder that the editor chose 2 stories that are part of group of stories that go together, and whether it makes a difference in one's interpretation, if show more you haven't read the accompanying stories from which it came. I would think some of the context for the stories is not apparent to the first-time reader.

Most of the other stories were ones I had heard of at some point and was glad to read them, though there was one, read for the first time here and never having heard mention of it, called "Of This Time, Of This Place." I don't understand why it deserves a place here. It is about a college professor who begins to think one of his students is insane -- though, frankly, as a one-time college teacher myself, the student comes across to me as simply slightly eccentric.
Includes:
The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe
The Jewels, de Maupassant
Gooseberries, Chekhov
The Tree of Knowledge, James
The Cat, the Goldfinch, and the Stars, Pirandello
Youth, Conrad
The Rocking Horse Winner, Lawrence
Bliss, Mansfield
The Dead, Joyce
Little Herr Friedemann, Mann
Sophistication, Anderson
The Story of My Dovecot, Babel
The Devil and Daniel Webster, Benet
A Rose for Emily, Faulkner
The Metamorphosis (Part 1), Kafka
The Wall, Sartre
Judas, O'Connor
Of This Time, Of That Place, Trilling
The Lottery, Jackson
The Ledge, Hall show less