Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus

REVIEWS

A great resource for the teaching and reading of the short story.--Marcia Aldrich, editor, Fourth Genre and professor, Michigan State University

A stellar story anthology for the twenty-first century.--William Giraldi, fiction editor, AGNI and lecturer, Boston University

With Short Story Omnibus, the Great Books Foundation has attempted to update the way readers conceptualize the short story. Few organizations are as committed to canonization as Great Books, and the attempt here is admirable, if not entirely successful. Stories are followed by straightforward discussion questions and divided into four subgenres: short stories, sudden fiction (think flash fiction or short shorts), novellas, and graphic novels. The last subgenre is both the most ambitious and most problematic, as the three entries sit uncomfortably with Balzac, Melville, and Cheever. Jaime Hernandez's "Flies on the Ceiling" seems neither the same genre, nor nearly as good, though in an anthology as weighty as this, his burden is considerable. There are moving surprises like Grace Paley's "Wants" and Mary Gordon's "The Baby," but the deepest pleasures still come from the old masters. When Chekhov observes that "each individual existence is based on mystery, which is perhaps why civilized man makes such a neurotic fuss about having his privacy respected," he sounds every bit as relevant as his modern counterparts. --Kevin Clouther, Booklist

This collection offers thirty-nine selections, in four categories: short stories, sudden fiction, novellas, and graphic stories. These stories, spanning a century and a half, are among the greatest ever written.

Includes authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Melanie Rae Thon, Alison Bechdel, and more.