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	The Best American Short Stories 1999 (The Best American Series (TM)) from Houghton Mifflin
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Product Details Binding Audio Cassette Dewey Decimal Number 813 EAN 9780618013531 Format Audiobook, Unabridged ISBN 0618013539 Manufacturer Houghton Mifflin Number Of Items 4 Number Of Pages 5 Publication Date November 22, 1999 Publisher Houghton Mifflin UPC 046442013536 Availability Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks Product Description In making her selections for this year's volume of The Best American Short Stories, Amy Tan was drawn to stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child. In this vibrant audio collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in works by veteran writers as well as by accomplished new voices. Each tale, read here by its author, offers a rich journey into a different world. A great story gets its hooks into you right from the start; you know you're in the hands of a good writer when the very first sentence transports you wholly into another world. 'Mother preferred Zulu servants.' 'It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring.' 'Who would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn in its fury against the fools of Chelm?' The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. 'I'm not a bad guy,' pleads the narrator of 'The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,' and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Díaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, 'A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'') 'Real Estate,' by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: 'The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog.' Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's 'Save the Reaper,' a kind of 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, 'The Hermit's Story'; and Tim Gautreax's 'The Piano Tuner,' about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--'help us live interesting lives.' --Chloe Byrne Despite increasing competition, this annual collection remains the place to find the most compelling short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. Guest editor Tan comments that many of her 21 choices carry 'an exotic flavor.... Either the narrators were ethnic or the settings outside America.' Especially noteworthy are several stories with South Asian locations or characters. In Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Interpreter of Maladies' an Indian tour guide finds himself at first puzzled by an Indian-American family, and later drawn to its frustrated mother and wife. James Spencer's 'The Robbers of Karnataka' follows Americans who visit South India seeking an enlightened swami, and encounter armed bandits instead. Other strong entries come from such stellar names as Alice Munro ('Save the Reaper'), Rick Bass ('The Hermit's Story') and Lorrie Moore ('Real Estate'). But much exciting work here emanates from young writers. The evocative 'The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,' by Junot D!az, follows a troubled New York City Latino couple to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where 'the entire history of late-20th-century automobiles swarm[s] across every flat stretch of ground, a cosmology of battered cars, battered motorcycles, battered trucks, and battered buses... ' Nathan Englander combines Yiddish folktale and Nazi-era horror in 'The Tumblers,' as a group of Hasids performs a grotesque acrobatic act in the heart of Berlin. Hester Kaplan's 'Live Life King-Sized' also merges comedy with mortality: the owner of a Caribbean resort must accommodate a guest who asks that he be allowed to die on the island. The selection draws on 17 journals, from the New Yorker to the Clackamas Literary Review; and many of the stories have published in such collections of the authors' work as For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Birds of America and Welding with Children. Such a high caliber of literary excellence speaks well for the state of short fiction. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. In her choices for this edition of an enduring series, Tan discloses a bias for certain kinds of storytelling: a strong narrative voice, a thought or perception that signals a change for the protagonist, and elements of fairy tales and the grotesque. The fantistical is certainly in evidence. In Nathan Englander's 'The Tumblers,' the residents of a mythical Jewish village cannot escape the effects of the Holocaust. Readers enter the Twilight Zone in George Harrar's 'The 5:22,' as a man's daily routine skews into the surreal. And Annie Proulx's 'The Bunchgrass End of the World' features a talking tractor. Also evident is the increasing diversity of our culture, as a significant proportion of the stories feature non-Anglo characters and/or authors. Recommended for academic and public libraries.AChristine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. [Editor Note: The following is a combined review with THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY.]--Each year a guest editor carefully selects the best stories from the nation's literary magazines to be published together in The Best American Short Stories. One does not envy John Updike the agonizing task of choosing the best of the best--the most enduring stories from the 84 annual volumes published through 1999. Happily, he ably fielded the challenge, selecting the work of authors running the gamut from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson to Tim O'Brien and Lorrie Moore. Late authors are read by other writers; living authors read their own works. Cynthia Ozick's 2,000-word masterpiece of the Holocaust, 'The Shawl,' combines stark brutality with story elements that border on magical realism. Ozick's flat, unrelenting reading, in a tone that echoes the very experience of physical and spiritual starvation, sears this story into one's soul. Rosellen Brown, who often writes of love and dysfunction in family life, reads 'How to Win,' a mother's perspective on her clinically hyperactive child. (Anyone thinking of becoming a new parent should either avoid this story--or listen to it right away.) Brown reads with the intensity of one trying to bridge the unfathomable distance among us all--even mother and child. It's always an ego boost when several of one's own favorite stories over the year make it into the next Best American anthology. The Best American Short Stories 1999, a not-to-be-missed collection, features Rick Bass narrating his luminous winter tale, 'The Hermit's Story.' His reading adds a hypnotic dimension to this story-within-a-story. In contrast, Junot Díaz's raw reading of 'The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars' captures all the macho vulnerability of the young New Jersey Latino whose girlfriend is breaking up with him. Chitra Divakaruni's lilting narration of 'Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter' spins an unhappy tale of clashing cultures with a surprising ending that lifts the heart. Writing and literature teachers eager to use these stories in the classroom will need to screen them--as some of the language, while accurately reflecting character and setting, is not appropriate below the college level. E.K.D. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Following previous guest editors, Tan explains her selections by discussing literary taste, which she contends is the result of our 'emotional obsessions' and what we 'want to know' about the world, things which differ vastly among us, and which consequently vitiate the claims of would-be expert arbiters. Her 21 selections (made 'blindly') include familiar and unfamiliar writers, and, most impressively, come from 17 different magazines. There are possible worlds beneath worlds here, or the same world suddenly seen quite differently. In Rick Bass' 'The Hermit's Story,' a dog trainer detours, in a storm, through a frozen lake's ice cavity, whose screening of the above world's clarity lingers in her imagination as a metaphor for another way of sensing--her dog's way, perhaps. In Hester Kaplan's 'Live Life King-Sized,' the proprietor of an island resort eventually embraces one guest's death and dying over the insular, orchestrated pleasantness he usually furnishes his guests. There are other remarkable stories in this collection that, once again, is an extraordinary starting point for anyone who wants to know what is happening in short fiction today. James O'Laughlin paper 0-395-92684-X The latest in this 85-year-old series continues the tradition of putting the timely and new into a kind of yearbook of the American literary scene, this time with Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995, etc.) picking the sides and calling the shots. The best stories do change us, writes Tan. They help us live interesting lives. Thats a pretty tall order, especially nowadays, when literary fiction in general and the short story in particular become increasingly self-referential and esoteric. But theres still some life to be found on these pages. Rick Bass, in The Hermits Story, takes us into Jack London territory with an old-fashioned campfire yarn about a dog trainer and her frozen passage through the snows of Canada with her sledding team. At the other extreme (in The Sun, the Moon, the Stars), Junot Daz heads from New Jersey to Santo Domingo, where Dominican narrator Yunior takes his Nuyorican girlfriend Magdalena on a doomed holiday in the hope of patching up their shaky relationship. The best stories here, in fact, all tend to be regional: Ha Jin portrays the metaphoric claustrophobia of a Communist boarding school (In the Kindergarten), while A. Hemons family portrait (Islands) offers a microcosmic study of the survivors of Stalins gulags. Domestic life American-style doesnt seem to have the same resonance: Heidi Julavitss deconstruction of a wedding album (Marry the One Who Gets There First) is too clever by half, whereas Lorrie Moores Real Estate does nothing very original with the tired theme of the malcontent woman looking for her dream house. Similarly, Stephen Dobynss interior fantasy Kansas (the hero reimagines the storys end over and over) becomes quickly tedious, while Tim Gatreauxs more straightforward account of loneliness redeemed through art (The Piano Tuner) succeeds with less commotion. Perhaps less is more, after all: the more ambitious pieces here disappoint almost without exception, whereas the authors who are old-fashioned enough to want to tell a story usually manage to do just thatand quite nicely, too. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. 'An annual . . . heartening and fascinating.' In making her selections for this year's volume of The Best American Short Stories, Amy Tan was drawn to stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child. In this vibrant audio collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in works by veteran writers as well as by accomplished new voices. Each tale, read here by its author, offers a rich journey into a different world. RICK BASS is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit's Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass's stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories. Amy Tan won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her first novel, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, which was made into a successful film in 1993. Her other books include THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE and THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES. Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. She lives in New York with her husband and son. George Harrar is the author of several novels and numerous short stories, one of which was chosen for the 1999 edition of The Best American Short Stories. Harrar lives in Wayland, Massachusetts, with his wife, Linda, a documentary filmmaker. Customers who bought this item also bought The Best American Short Stories 1998 (The Best American Series (TM)) The Best American Short Stories 2000 (The Best American Series) The Best American Short Stories 2001 (The Best American Series) The Best American Short Stories 2004 (The Best American Series) The Best American Short Stories 2002 (The Best American Series) Customer Reviews for: The Best American Short Stories 1999 (The Best American Series (TM)) Rating - Both Wheat and Chaff.... It's probably not good for the anthology that the piece I most enjoyed was Amy Tan's introduction; I thought that by itself was worth checking the book out. The actual stories left me wanting something more, with the exception of "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" by Junot Diaz, "Real Estate" by Lorrie Moore, "The 5:22" by George Harrar, and an honorable mention to Heidi Julavits' "Marry the One Who Gets There First". These stories all combined great writing with great insight, all in the framework of good narrative flow. The ... Read More Rating - Black sheep of the family Every year I anxiously look forward to the arrival of the newest addition to my favorite book series, and every year my patience is rewarded and my appetite for a wonderful collection of short stories is entirely satisfied... that is until this 1999 edition of The Best American Short Stories. The compilation of short stories selected by Amy Tan this year has sadly disappointed me. Furthermore, my disappointment is escalated when one must consider the fact that Amy Tan is among my favorite authors. The combination of my favorite ... Read More Rating - Did I miss something? I am a big fan of the Best American Short Stories series, but this one was a huge diappointment. I like stories that have some meat; they should resonate with depth a long time after being read. This collection offers few such stories. Then again, I wasn't expecting much more from Amy Tan. Try '98 or '00 instead. Rating - A fine collection I found this to be an excellent, thoughtfully assembled collection of stories. I must especially disagree with the reviewer who felt that having a b writer like Pam Houston in a collection with Rick Bass ammounts to a literary injustice. Quite to the contrary, Houston's story is the best in the book and bears re-reading. (And, if you've checked out John Updike's Best Short Stories of the Century, you'll note that her story was one of the few tales from the nineties to be included.) This is a slow, collection, certainly, which ... Read More Rating - A diverse collection of voices and stories Amy Tan has done a good job selecting 1999's batch of stories for "Best American Short Stories"; I've read better volumes, but I've also read worse. My favorite story was Tim Gautreaux's "The Piano Tuner," a hilarious, unnerving tale about the advantages and disadvanages of "fine-tuning" another person's character through the use of drugs or other modern methods. The next-best story, in my opinion, was Chitra Divakaruni's delightful and wistful "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," another story about trying to change one's character ... Read More see more reviews See More Houghton Mifflin products

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