BiblioVault - Books about Short Stories (single author)

Under a Glass Bell

Anaïs Nin

Ohio University Press, 2013

Although Under a Glass Bell is now considered one of Anaïs Nin’s finest collections of stories, it was initially deemed unpublishable. Refusing to give up on her vision, in 1944 Nin founded her own press and brought out the first edition, illustrated with striking black-and-white engravings by her husband, Hugh Guiler. Shortly thereafter, it caught the attention of literary critic Edmund Wilson, who reviewed the collection in the New Yorker. The first printing sold out in three weeks. This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by noted modernist scholar Elizabeth Podnieks, as well as editor Gunther Stuhlmann’s erudite but controversial foreword to the 1995 edition. Together, they place the collection in its historical context and sort out the individuals and events recorded in the diary that served as its inspiration. The new Swallow Press edition also restores the thirteen stories to the order Nin specified for the first commercial edition in 1948.

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Underground Women

Jesse Lee Kercheval

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

A newlywed gazes upon the wreckage of the Titanic. A young woman becomes the protégé of a Parisian hotelier. An old woman meets an angel in a ghost town. Underground Women is a compilation of short stories by multitalented writer Jesse Lee Kercheval. The heart of the volume is a reissue of narratives first published as the The Dogeater, winner of the AWP Short Fiction Award in 1987. With arresting imagery and heart-wrenching storylines, Kercheval’s work uses humor and imagination to weave together themes of loss, dignity, tenacity and acceptance. These surreal and powerful vignettes will resonate with readers today as much as they did when first published.

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Unmarried Women

Stories

Matilde Serao

Northwestern University Press, 2007

Matilde Serao is widely regarded as the most successful Italian woman journalist of the nineteenth century as well as being an important writer of fiction. A great observer of life, Serao focused her writing directly on the most pressing problems of a newly unified Italy, urban poverty, and the North/South divide. Historian and critic Benedetto Croce said of her that she had an "imagination that is limpid and alive"; Nobel Laureate Giosuè Carducci called her the greatest woman writer in Italy; and Gabriele D'Annunzio dedicated a novel to her. She was apparently on the short list for the Nobel Prize in 1926, which ultimately went to the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda.

This collection, the first to make Serao’s short stories available in English translation, reflects this naturalistic writer’s interest in the everyday drama of the lives of women in the Italy of her day. In Serao’s spare and simple prose, the young women of turn-of-the-century Naples come to life, negotiating the details of school and work, church and marriage, in a world circumscribed by fathers and chaperones, fiancés and bosses. Infused with the writer’s deep sense of humanity, their quietly involving stories—at once so poetic and so ordinary—attest to the transformative power of literature, and to the promise that even the most humble life holds.

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Unruly Creatures

Stories

Jennifer Caloyeras

West Virginia University Press, 2017

Independent Publisher’s Book Awards, Silver Medal, Short Story Fiction

In this collection rife with humor and pathos, alienated characters struggle to subvert, contain, control, and even escape their bodies. A teenage girl grapples with pubic hair grown wild, a biologist finds herself in love with a gorilla, a prisoner yearns to escape her biological destiny.

In some stories, the bodies have surrogates: a high-school girl babysits an elderly woman’s plastic doll while negotiating her own sexual awakening, and a young man finds that he can only receive affection from his father when he is in costume. Dark humor and magical realism put in sharp relief the everyday trials of Americans in a story collection that asks, in what way are we more than the sum of our parts?

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Updike in Cincinnati

A Literary Performance

James Schiff

Ohio University Press, 2007

For two spring days in 2001, John Updike visited Cincinnati, Ohio, engaging and charming his audiences, reading from his fiction, fielding questions, sitting for an interview, participating in a panel discussion, and touring the Queen City.

Successful writers typically spend a portion of their lives traveling the country to give readings and lectures. While a significant experience for author and audience alike, this public spectacle, once covered in detailed newspaper accounts, now is barely noticed by the media. Updike in Cincinnati—composed of a wealth of materials, including session transcripts, short stories discussed and read by the author, photographs, and anecdotal observations about Updike's performance and personal interactions--is unique in its comprehensive coverage of a literary visit by a major American author.

Updike's eloquence, intelligence, improvisational skills, and gift for comedy are all on display. With natural grace, he discusses a range of topics, including his novels and short stories, his mother and oldest son as writers, Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Nobel Prize, his appearance on The Simpsons, the Cold War, and Hamlet.

Augmented with commentary by critics W. H. Pritchard and Donald Greiner, and an introduction and interview by James Schiff, Updike in Cincinnati provides an engaging and detailed portrait of one of America's contemporary literary giants.

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