Saturday, October 21, 2017

Short Story Extravaganza

I've been thinking of pulling together a post like this for some time, where I keep track of the various short story collections I intend to read (or have recently read), thus I am not going to list Donald Barthelme or Raymond Carver as I read those all years ago (or straying further afield Kafka or Borges or Garcia Marquez).  I usually sprinkle a few story collections in with all the other novels on my reading list, though I still favor novels. At some point in the relatively near future (2019?), I may set aside a long stretch of time to go through a bunch of story collections.  Clearly, there are a lot that I would like to go through!

Kinglsey Amis
    Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

Margaret Atwood
    Dancing Girls (1977)
    Bluebeard's Egg (1983)
    Wilderness Tips (1991)
    Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)
    Moral Disorder (2006)
    Stone Mattress (2014)

James Baldwin
    Going to Meet the Man

Honore de Balzac
    The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (NYRB)

Ann Beattie
    Park City: New and Selected Stories

Neil Bissoondath
    Digging Up Mountains (1987)
    On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1991)

Elizabeth Bowen
    Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929)
    The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934)
    Look At All Those Roses (1941)
    The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)
    A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965)
    (All included in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen)
    The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008)

Jane Bowles
     Stories collected in either Collected Writings (LOA) or My Sister's Hand in Mine

Paul Bowles
    The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950)
    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962)
    The Time of Friendship (1967)
    In the Red Room (1981)
    Points in Time (1982)
    Midnight Mass (1985)
    (In Collected Stories and Later Writings (LOA))

T.C. Boyle
    Descent of Man (1979)
    Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)
    If the River Was Whiskey (1989)
    Without a Hero (1994)
    (included in Stories)
    After The Plague (2001)
    Tooth and Claw (2005)
    Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)
    (included in Stories II)
    The Relive Box & Other Stories (2017)

Angela Carter
    Fireworks (1974)
    The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)
    Black Venus (1985)
    American Ghosts (1993)
    (All gathered in Burning Your Boats)

Isek Dinesen
    Seven Gothic Tales (1934)
    Winter's Tales (1942)
    Last Tales (1957)
    Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) (including Babette's Feast)

Deborah Eisenberg
    Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986)
    Under the 82nd Airborne (1992)
    (both collected in The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg)
    All Around Atlantis (1997)
    Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)
    (all 4 collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg)

John Fante
    The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories (including all of Dago Red)
    The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959

William Faulkner
     Collected Stories
     Uncollected Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald
     Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Bruccoli)
     (I will write separately on Fitzgerald, but this is a fine place to start)

Ellen Gilchrist
    Collected Stories (2001)

Ernest Hemingway
    Complete Short Stories (Finca Vigia Edition)

Nagai Kafu
    American Stories

Yasunari Kawabata
    Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri
    Unaccustomed Earth (2008)

Dorris Lessing
    The Habit of Loving (1957)
    A Man and Two Women (1963)
    African Stories (1964)
    Winter in July (1966)
    The Black Madonna (1966)
    The Story of a Non-Marrying Man/The Temptation of Jack Orkney (1972)
    (Essentially all are in Stories or African Stories) 

Clarice Lispector
    Complete Short Stories

Bernard Malamud
    The Magic Barrel (1958)
    Idiots First (1963)
    Rembrandt's Hat (1974)
    (The Complete Stories (1997) also includes Pictures of Fidelman (1969) and various uncollected stories but not the unfinished novel The People)

Guy de Maupassant
    Selected Short Stories (Penguin)

Alice Munro
    Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
    Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
    Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
    Who Do You Think You Are?  aka The Beggar Maid (1978)
    The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
    The Progress of Love (1986)
    Friend of My Youth (1990)
    Open Secrets (1994)
    The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
    Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)
    Runaway (2004)
    The View from Castle Rock (2006)
    Too Much Happiness (2009)
    Dear Life (2012)

R.K. Narayan
    There is so much overlap with Narayan's various collections that it is a chore to keep it straight.
    Probably the best approach is to read Malgudi Days (1982) , Under the Banyan Tree (1985) and The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1993).  But that still leaves a handful of stories such as "A Night of Cyclone" and "The Performing Child" and perhaps a few others to track down.

Edna O'Brien
    The Love Object and Other Stories (1968)
    A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974)
    Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978)
    Returning (1982)
    A Fanatic Heart (1985)
    Lantern Slides (1990)
    Saints and Sinners (2011)

Silvina Ocampo
    Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories

Flannery O'Connor
    A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)
    Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

John O'Hara
    Sermons and Soda Water: A Trilogy of Three Novellas (1960)
    The Hat on the Bed (1963)
    The Horse Knows the Way (1964)
    Waiting for Winter (1966)
    The Time Element and Other Stories (1972)
    Good Samaritan and Other Stories (1974)
    (Collected Stories (LOA) contains many but is not in fact "complete")

Katherine Anne Porter
    Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935)
    Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939)
    The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944)
    (included in Collected Stories and Other Writings (LOA))

J.F. Powers
    The Stories of J.F. Powers

Jean Rhys
    The Collected Short Stories

Alexei Sayle
    Barcelona Plates (2000)
    The Dog Catcher (2001)

Carol Shields
    Various Miracles (1985)
    The Orange Fish (1989)
    Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000)

Tess Slesinger
    On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover, and Other Stories

Elizabeth Taylor
    Hester Lilly (1954)
    The Blush and Other Stories (1958)
    A Dedicated Man and Other Stories (1965)
    The Devastating Boys (1972)
    Dangerous Calm (1995)
    (included in Complete Short Stories)

Tatyana Tolstaya
    White Walls: Collected Stories

William Trevor
    The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967)
    The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (1972)
    The Last Lunch of the Season (1973)
    Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1975)
    Lovers of their Time (1978)
    Beyond the Pale (1981)
    The News from Ireland and Other Stories (1986)
    Family Sins and Other Stories (1989)
    After Rain (1996)
    Cocktails at Doney's (1996)
    The Hill Bachelors (2000)
    A Bit On the Side (2004)
    Cheating at Canasta (2007)
    (These should all be contained in The Collected Stories and Selected Stories)

Anthony Trollope
    Tales of All Countries (1863)
    Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories (1867)
    An Editor's Tales (1870)
    Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices (1882)

John Updike
    The Afterlife
    Licks of Love
    Olinger Stories
    Henry Bech stories
    Collected Stories (2 vol LOA set)

Guy Vanderhaeghe
    Man Descending (1982)
    The Trouble With Heroes (1983) (very sour stories that I didn't care much for)
    Things As They Are? (1992)
    Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (2015)

Evelyn Waugh
    Complete Short Stories

Eudora Welty
    A Curtain of Green (1941)
    The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943)
    The Golden Apples (1949)
    The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955)   
    (in The Collected Stories (HBJ) or Stories, Essays and Memoirs (LOA))

Joy Williams
    Taking Care (1982)
    Escapes (1990)
    Honored Guest (2004)
    99 Stories of God (2013)    
    The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (2015)
    Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael (2024)

Edit (Jan 2023)
I'm not sure why I didn't add Katherine Mansfield to the list.  

Katherine Mansfield
    In a German Pension (1911)
    Bliss and Other Stories (1920)
    The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) 
    The Doves' Nest and Other Stories (1923) 
    Something Childish and Other Stories (1924)

Mansfield is generally considered one of the best short story writers of her generation and one of the first modernist writers.  Indeed, she had a somewhat intense rivalry with Virginia Woolf.  I may at one point have owned a copy of her Collected Stories, but it seems to have vanished.*  I recently picked up an e-book edition of her complete stories (and poetry), but I find I'm still a lot more likely to read deeply in a printed book, so I've ordered the Selected Stories from Oxford, which seems fine aside from not listing the source of the stories in a single location, so you have to go traipsing through the notes at the back.



Edit (Aug 2023) * And then Mansfield's Collected Stories turned up of course...

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