Hi all.
I'm teaching a fiction workshop in the spring, and would be interested in book recommendations. Book as in some sort of anthology or compilation (preferably not ridiculously thick and expensive). I was always one of those "seat of the pants" type instructors at Iowa, making copies week to week of whatever stories I felt like teaching. Unfortunately, I've discovered other institutions don't have the freewheelin' copy policies of the Dey House.
So, anyway: books. Any you've used that are good? Tips appreciated.
4 comments:
I'm using an anthology edited by Nadine Gordimer called "Telling Tales". It's got stories by five Nobel Prize winners (Marquez, Oe, Grass, Gordimer, Saramago), as well as Arthur Miller, Rushdie, Atwood, Woody Allen, Susan Sontag, Updike, and even some odd African names I don't recognize other than Chinua Achebe. Shortish stories, which tend to go over better than the longish sort. PLUS all the proceeds go to fight HIV/AIDs in Africa. So if you order twenty copies . . . I'm also using Ben Marcus's Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, if just for some Saunders and Sam Lipsyte and Jhumpa, et al.
I have used the Anchor Book, with mixed results. The stories are fun to read, but hard to teach in an introductory-level course in my opinion. Also, I felt really uncool while teaching it; like, I just wasn't up to the damn trendiness of it all. Grrr.
Thanks for the suggestions. And, Kiki, thanks for your warning. As you know, I am one hundred percent not cool, so that could be a problem.
Anyone else?
Oh, how I miss the Dey House copy machine.
Hi Mike! I've been using the Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Stories Since 1970 (ISBN: 0684857960). It has some standbys like Junot Diaz and Lorrie Moore and Donald Barthelme, but also some not so well-knowns, like Stephanie Vaughn. I taught it in my two classes this fall, and all the stories were well-liked...
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