Anthologies

Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1952. Cover by Leo Ramon Summers. Contents include: The Sex Opposite [Theodore Sturgeon]; The Star Dummy [Anthony Boucher]; Man in the Dark [Roy Huggins]; Angels in the Jets [Jerome Bixby]; I'm Looking for "Jeff" [Fritz Leiber]; Beatrice [Dean Evans]; The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch [Eric Frank Russell]; Miriam [Truman Capote]; The Tell-Tale Heart [Edgar Allan Poe]

Some of the greatest storytellers of our time chronicle twentieth-century southern life. Rich in irony, sly humor, and vivid, dramatic imagery, the literature of the modern South is a vital amalgam of a once-rural society’s storytelling tradition and the painful contradictions and cultural clashes brought about by rapid change. The stories in this collection are as diverse as the region itself, yet they are all connected by a shared history and a uniquely southern strain of American language and narrative. Contributors include Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams.

Short stories by Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Stafford, Hortense Calisher, Jean Rhys, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Vladimir Nabokov, and Roger Angell offer distinctively individual visions of the aging process in man

A compilation of the debut published stories of some of the twentieth century's finest writers features the work of Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anne Tyler, John Updike, James Baldwin, and others

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile . Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity. Including these twenty-eight profiles: “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” by Joseph Mitchell “Secrets of the Magus” by Mark Singer “Isadora” by Janet Flanner “The Soloist” by Joan Acocella “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” by Walcott Gibbs “Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody” by Ian Frazier “The Mountains of Pi” by Richard Preston “Covering the Cops” by Calvin Trillin “Travels in Georgia” by John McPhee “The Man Who Walks on Air” by Calvin Tomkins “A House on Gramercy Park” by Geoffrey Hellman “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” by Lillian Ross “The Education of a Prince” by Alva Johnston “White Like Me” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Wunderkind” by A. J. Liebling “Fifteen Years of The Salto Mortale” by Kenneth Tynan “The Duke in His Domain” by Truman Capote “A Pryor Love” by Hilton Als “Gone for Good” by Roger Angell “Lady with a Pencil” by Nancy Franklin “Dealing with Roseanne” by John Lahr “The Coolhunt” by Malcolm Gladwell “Man Goes to See a Doctor” by Adam Gopnik “Show Dog” by Susan Orlean “Forty-One False Starts” by Janet Malcolm “The Redemption” by Nicholas Lemann “Gore Without a Script” by Nicholas Lemann “Delta Nights” by Bill Buford

For writers Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic “hall of mirrors,” Aldous Huxley a “city of dreadful joy.” Where Jack Kerouac found a “huge desert encampment,” David Thompson imagined “Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock.” In Writing Los Angeles , The Library of America presents a glittering panorama of the city, encompassing fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries by over seventy writers. This revelatory anthology brings to life the entrancing surfaces and unsettling contradictions of the City of Angels, from Raymond Chandler’s evocation of the murderous moods fed by the Santa Ana winds to John Gregory Dunne’s affectionate tribute to “the deceptive perspectives of the pale subtropical light.” Here are fascinating strata of Los Angeles’s cultural and social history, from the oil boom of the 1920s to the graffiti artists of the 1980s, from flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson to surf music genius Brian Wilson, from the German émigré intellectuals chronicled by Salka Viertel to the hard-bitten homicide cops tracked by James Ellroy. Here are its fragile ecosystems, its architectural splendors, and its social chasms, in the words of writers as various as M.F.K. Fisher, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Octavio Paz, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, and Mona Simpson. Art Pepper discovers Central Avenue in the heyday of the 1940s jazz scene; Charles Mingus describes an early encounter with the builder of the Watts Towers; screenwriter Robert Towne reflects on the origins of Chinatown; John McPhee powerfully conveys the devastation of Los Angeles mudslides; David Hockney teaches himself how to drive in record time; and Pico Iyer finds at Los Angeles International Airport “as clear an image as exists today of the world we are about to enter.” Writing Los Angeles is an incomparable literary tour guide to a city of shifting identities and endless surprises.

A concise anthology of short fiction exemplifying today's rich diversity of narrative styles. This gathering of twenty-four short stories shows the richness and vitality of the form. Each engaging, accessible story represents one of the many modes of storytelling now in our literature. Here are short stories in the guise of memoir or confession; written as a letter, a fable, a report; or accomplishing what we usually expect of a novel, an essay, a character study, a poem. A uniquely contemporary collection, yet with an eye on tradition, it includes long-revered as well as more recently heralded masters. Among them are Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Robert Olen Butler, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Ian Frazier, Randall Kenan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Tim O'Brien, ZZ Packer, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Joy Williams, and Richard Yates. An introduction provides historical background and elaborates on the idea that although there may be a limited number of stories to tell, there are countless ways to tell them. Illuminating notes on the author's life and work precede each story.