A return to the anthologies detailed in this post:
In which I begin with some of my favorites, taken from the fiction volumes (I may drop in some discussion of some of the plays eventually, or in another post).
"Blurred View" by John D. MacDonald, first published in the newspaper Sunday supplement magazine This Week (a bit like a more wide-ranging version of Parade), the 23 February 1964 fiction special, and can be read as collected and headnoted here by Peter Haining in his 1996 anthology The Orion Book of Murder; first read by me in "Anthony Boucher" (William White)'s Best Detective Stories of the Year: 20th Annual Collection
"Blurred View" is a relatively brief and brisk take on how a cad finds himself blackmailed after a murder he was quite sure was well-staged as accidental death; it's deftly written and very neatly thought out, if still a bit slight. I suspect annual editor Boucher was drawn to the neatness, as well as happy to have a reason to include a MacDonald story. (Not All That) Oddly enough, Judith Merril's sf and fantasy annual for '65 has a better, supernatural story by JDM, "The Legend of Joe Lee".
Further looking into the Merril annual, the first of these volumes I was to find and read (in 1978, at the Nashua, NH library, where I would also first find several of the others indexed in the earlier post), brings to mind some stories that made a stronger impact than either of these particular two MacDonald items, such as the lead-off story, "Automatic Tiger" by Kit Reed...a fantasy that was one of her earlier contributions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), and perhaps the first story of hers to gain her widespread attention, as she built her career with fairly equal emphasis on crime fiction, fantasy and some sf, and contemporary/mimetic fiction over the next several decades (having been a professional newspaper reporter before beginning to publish fiction, with a good story in F&SF a few years earlier); "Automatic Tiger" the story is mostly about keeping what's most important in one's life front and center, as well as taking some nicely-aimed chill-shots at what we too often mistake for what's important. Among those also to make a strong impression on me was Mack Reynolds's canny political sf story "Pacifist", about whether sustained peace can ever be achieved through violence, no matter how "surgical" (Reynolds was particularly fascinated by this kind of question, as once a Socialist Labor Party member who had served as speech-writer and general assistant for his father Verne's presidential run as the candidate of this extremely doctrinaire Marxist party, whose founder Daniel De Leon had criticized Marx for the latter's own "deviations" in his later political writing).
Another yet was the Australian writer Frank Roberts, with the grim "It Could Be You", a dystopian slight exacerbation of how life was barely lived/survived (and sometimes not for long) in a very near-future Australia (or elsewhere in the "First World")--a more sophisticated early precursor to Mad Max, reprinted from the Oz news/analysis/arts/some fiction magazine The Bulletin, in the 3 March 1962 issue; Merril first read it in a 1964 issue of the then-new Short Story International magazine, which she loved...which folded after a couple of years, but was revived in time for me to find 1978 issues on newsstands and enjoy it for a number of years, not realizing that it hadn't been continually published when picking up my first issue. (I have belatedly realized I gave this story, and its complicated publishing history, its own SSW entry here).
As I look at the two most venerable eclectic (if mostly contemporary-mimetic fiction) US/North American Anglophone anthologies for '65, the O. Henry and the Best American Short Stories, probably the most widely-read of the stories collected in both in recent years is the fantasy short story, one of only a relative few at shorter than novel-length (and many of those gathered in the volume The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances) by Peter Beagle, "Come Lady Death"...albeit this was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, opening some doors in '64 that would be closed to fiction from more fantasy-heavy magazines. A few of the other stories might come closer some of their cohabitants to sustained audiences/readership nearly as widespread, but I doubt that any are read nearly as often over the decades as the Beagle is...even when the other contributors (many more prolific than Beagle) have among their catalogs at least a few stories at least within shouting/staged reading distance, such as Joyce Carol (or, as she signs herself in the '65 annual, J. C.) Oates and her earlier "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"...with a mythic quality, though not fantasy per se, of its own.
For more of today's Short Story Wednesday posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Australia's second-oldest literary magazine, Meanjin Quarterly, folds, as does the annual volume Best American Poetry: Lit Mag News
Adam Pearson: "The People Imagine a Vain Thing", Metropolitan Review, 9 August 2025
