OurColony.net

A Wonderful Story Collection

Customer Rating:
Take a trip around the world with some of your old favorite authors and find some new favorites. From China to Wales, these stories take you around the globe.

A wonderful collection

Customer Rating:
This is a wonderful collection of short stories. Many of them are from small literary magazines, and I would have not encountered these stories and authors if Barbara Kingsolver had not assembled this great collection. In addition to some of my longtime favorite writers (John Updike, Alice Monro, Rick Bass), I met some new favorites: Roy Parvin, Annette Sanford, Peter Orner. The geographic scope of this collection is amazing--stories set in China, Russia, the Himalayas, Wales, just to mention a few. The diversity in narrative styles is pretty impressive too. This is now one of my best-loved collections of short stories.

Practice what you preach, Katrina

Customer Rating:
I'm always on the look-out for a good short story - either for my own enjoyment or to use in my reading classes, or to recommend to a friend. So, every year, I buy "The Best American Short Stories." My anticipation grew as I read this year's introduction, "brevity is the soul of everything" Barbara Kingsolver adamantly insisted. Great! I thought. Some short short stories with punch. Humph! Kingsolver then proceeded to select a 43 page novella as her first choice. And it was down hill from there on in. Oh well, there's always next year!

Not experimental but worthwhile

Customer Rating:
Kingsolver's introduction is well worth reading (much more thoughtful than Sue Miller's to the newest edition of B.A.S.S.). As always the collection is inconsistent, but there are some real winners: "Servants of the Map" by Andrea Barrett is a tour de force of a narrative with enough ideas and subtleties for a short novel; Rick Bass's "The Fireman" is heartbreakingly compelling; and a pair of stories about married couples and fertility (Elizabeth Graver's "The Mourning Door" and Marisa Silver's "What I Saw From Where I Stood") provide insight and feeling into an oft-experienced situation. Some clunker stories, of course, and very little experimental fiction at all, probably not a surprise given that Kingsolver made the choices. One piece of experimentation is "Boys" by Rick Moody, a clever but ultimately annoying tale that purports to follow the lives of twin boys but manages to cling to overly familiar stereotypes of male behavior. The collection is worth a read.

Welcome to the world of fantasies - It is fiction!

Customer Rating:
Fiction writing is indeed an art. If there is an absolute freedom in any form of writing, its definitely in fiction writing. The point where your own situations could be made, your own characters could be created and where emotions, humour, pain, happiness and much more becomes one... it is fiction. One can write a novel as well as a short story... this book covers many short stories from various writers. Since it has multiple short stories one can never get bored because if not one, the other definitely interests the reader. Since this book serves such diversity and quality in short stories it can soon become 'the bible' or a writer. One can use this book over and over again to see how various writers express the same situation in different ways and how small things like dialouge and setting can make huge difference to a fiction. This book is an interesting cruise... one that could well be called 'a roller-coaster ride' of fiction writing!