Friday, October 31, 2014

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links

Note that "Bill Crider: Texas Vigilante"
is not the title of this book...


Below, the links to this week's selections of insufficiently appreciated and overlooked books (with a few warnings mixed in), with the reviews and citations at the links below. Primary host Patti Abbott will be back to the task next week, if I'm not mistaken. And if I've missed your or someone else's item for this week, please let me know in comments. Thanks very much!

Sergio Angelini: Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White

Yvette Banek: Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James 

Joe Barone: To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey
aka Some Must Watch

Leigh Buchanan: Cemetery Dance  (courtesy Ed Gorman)

Brian Busby: Harlequins and the Current Canadian Crises: The Corpse Came Back by Amelia Long; Firebrand by Rosemary Aubert

Bill Crider: A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

Martin Edwards: Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne

Curt Evans: Suffer a Witch by Nigel Fitzgerald

Ray Garraty: Anarchaos by "Curt Clark" (Donald Westlake)

Ed Gorman: Patricia Highsmith writing for Fawcett Comics 

Rich Horton: Random Harvest by James Hilton

Jerry House: The Goddess of Ganymede by Mike Resnick

Randy Johnson: Blood Kin by Hank J. Kirby

Nick Jones: The Green Man and The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis

George Kelley: The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler

Margot Kinberg: The Dying Light by Alison Joseph

Rob Kitchin: Night Soldiers by Alan Furst

Kate Laity: Meaningful Conversations by Richard Godwin 

Heath Lowrance: John Constantine: Hellblazer by Jamie Delano et al.

B.V. Lawson: Murder Intercontinental edited by Cynthia Manson and Kathleen Halligan

November,. 1956
Evan Lewis: Wyatt Earp by Davis Lott (a Big Little Book television tie-in)

Steve Lewis: The Deadly Welcome by Ken Rothrock; Death Walks in Scarlet by Hugh Desmond

Barry Malzberg and Richard Moore: The Getaway Car by Donald Westlake

Neer: Books for Halloween; books about Indian royalty

John F. Norris: The Mask of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer

John O'Neill: Science Fiction magazine edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes 


James Reasoner: The Essential The Tomb of Dracula, Volume 1 by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan et al.

Karyn Reeves: Essays and Poems by G. K. Chesterton

Kelly Robinson: Books for Halloween

Richard Robinson: The Dragon of Lung Wang by "Marion Harvey" (Edward J. Clode)

Gerard Saylor: Eight Black Horses by "Ed McBain"; Rogue Officer by Garry Kilworth

April 1956
Ron Scheer: The Spinners' Book of Fiction, assembled by the Spinners Club (an impressive lot; see below) 

Dan Stumpf: Night of the Black Horror by Victor Norwood;  Warlock by Oakley Hall

Kevin Tipple: Texas Vigilante by Bill Crider

"TomCat": The Forest Spirit by Jakob van Schevichaven   

Prashant Trikannad: "The Day Time Stopped Moving" by "Bradner Bruckner" (Ed Earl Repp), Amazing Stories, October 1940

Tracy K: Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury 

David Vineyard: Courier to Marrakesh by Valentine Williams


 

 

 

 

THE

SPINNERS' BOOK OF FICTION

BY
Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin
Geraldine Bonner, Mary Halleck Foote
Eleanor Gates, James Hopper, Jack London
Bailey Millard, Miriam Michelson, W. C. Morrow
Frank Norris, Henry Milner Rideout
Charles Warren Stoddard, Isobel Strong
Richard Walton Tully and
Herman Whitaker
With a dedicatory poem by
George Sterling
COLLECTED BY THE
BOOK COMMITTEE OF THE
SPINNERS' CLUB
Illustrated by
Lillie V. O'Ryan, Maynard Dixon
Albertine Randall Wheelan, Merle Johnson
E. Almond Withrow and Gordon Ross
Initials and decorations by
Spencer Wright

PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
SAN FRANCISCO AND NEW YORK



Published in behalf
of The Spinners' Benefit Fund
Ina D. Coolbrith
First Beneficiary
———
Copyright, 1907
by Paul Elder and Company

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

 And this amounts to a Part 2 of the Catching-Up posted first last week, here.

Below, the links to the reviews and citations of (usually) audio/visual work overlooked or underappreciated (though not always, and sometimes only potentially...and a few citations every week are Useful Warnings...)

Yvette Banek: Hold That Ghost!; Anatomy of a Murder; Manhattan Murder Mystery

Steve Lewis: A Dangerous Profession; A Yank in Libya

Stephen Gallagher: "Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination"

Stephen Bowie: Bad TV criticism in the NYT and Shonda Rhimes; Jerry McNeely; Stanley Chase

Stacia Jones: Stonehearst Asylum; The Lusty Men; Force Majeure 

Sergio Angelini: The Return of the Thin Man; The Dragon Murder Case; Lone Star and Elizabeth Peña; The Empty Beach; Partners in Crime

Rod Lott: The WNUF Hallowe'en Special

Ron Scheer: Mystery Road; Wanted: Dead or Alive; Gunsmoke (radio); The Legend of the Reno Brothers

Rick: House of Dark Shadows; The Mummy (1959 film); The Atomic City; Smoke Signal; 1950s: Cinema's Most Important Decade

Randy Johnson: The Amazing Transparent Man; Kill or Be Killed, aka Uccidi o muori; Arizona Colt Returns, aka Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti!; Arizona ColtTwo Pistols and a Coward, aka Il pistolero segnato da Dio; Made for Each Other; The Relentless Four, aka I 4 inesorabil

Prashant Trikannad: Morgan Freeman; Diwali; The Claim (2000 film); The Quick and the Dead

Patti Abbott: Clean and Sober; movies you've been meaning to see; The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour; A Member of the Wedding; In the Mood for Love

Mystery Dave: Dracula Untold

Marty McKee: My Blood Runs Cold; The Beasts Are on the Streets

Martin Edwards: The Missing (BBC-TV); The Intruders (BBC-TV); Woman of Straw

Lucy Brown: The Lady Vanishes (1938 film); Swing Time

Laura: Boy Meets Girl; Outlaw Gold; Return of the Gunfighter; Rustlers; The Saint's Double Trouble

Kliph Nesteroff: Mason Williams on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour days

Juri Nummelin: The Shining (1980 film)

Jose Cruz: Dark Fantasy (radio): four episodes

Jonathan Lewis: Waterfront; Drum Beat

John Grant: Down Three Dark Streets; Den Som Frykter Ulven, aka Cry in the Woods

Jerry House: The Stranger (1946 film); The Eddie Arnold Show (radio)

James Reasoner: Don't Open the Door!; Breakfast at Tiffany's

Jake Hinkson: The Shootist; Gun Street

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Quincy, M.E.: "Murder on Ice"

Jackie Kashian: Debra DiGiovanni

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Hollywood Time Machine; Betrayed (1944 film); Glorifying the American Girl; Dixiana

Iba Dawson: Maps to the Stars; friends and family pick scary films; Life of Riley (2014 film) 

George Kelley: Universal Classic Monsters (dvd box set)

Evan Lewis: Tricky Dicks

Elizabeth Foxwell: Shadows on the Stairs

Ed Lynskey: Blood on the Moon

Ed Gorman: Act of Violence

David Vineyard: The Ghost Breakers

Dan Stumpf: Outlaw

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Brian Arnold: The Haunted Castle (1896 film); "If a Body Meets a Body"; BJ and the Bear: "BJ and the Witch"

Bill Crider: Family Business [trailer]

Anne Billson: My top ten zombie moves; female buddy-cop movies: Rare Birds

Friday, October 24, 2014

FFB consumer's advisory bonus: two quartets of horrors for the season...

The US reader (of English) is this year offered essentially four Best of the Year volumes collecting horror and related material...I have yet to crack my copies, but I have all four...

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Six 


The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014 

Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1 

Best New Horror: 25th Anniversary Edition 
  • Editor: Stephen Jones
  • Year: 2014-11-11
  • ISBN: 978-1-62873-818-6 [1-62873-818-9]
  • Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
  • Price: $15.95 
  • Pages: 608 

  • INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2013 The Editor 
  • WHO DARES WINS: ANNO DRACULA 1980 Kim Newman 
  • CLICK-CLACK THE RATTLEBAG Neil Gaiman 
  • DEAD END Nicholas Royle 
  • ISAAC'S ROOM Daniel Mills 
  • THE BURNING CIRCUS Angela Slatter 
  • HOLES FOR FACES Ramsey Campbell 
  • BY NIGHT HE COULD NOT SEE Joel Lane 
  • COME INTO MY PARLOUR Reggie Oliver 
  • THE MIDDLE PARK Michael Chislett 
  • INTO THE WATER Simon Kurt Unsworth 
  • THE BURNED HOUSE Lynda E. Rucker 
  • WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT Z— Lavie Tidhar 
  • FISHFLY SEASON Halli Villegas 
  • DOLL RE MI Tanith Lee 
  • A NIGHT'S WORK Clive Barker 
  • THE SIXTEENTH STEP Robert Shearman 
  • STEMMING THE TIDE Simon Strantzas 
  • THE GIST Michael Marshall Smith 
  • GUINEA PIG GIRL Thana Niveau 
  • MISS BALTIMORE CRABS: ANNO DRACULA 1990 Kim Newman 
  • WHITSTABLE Stephen Volk 
  • NECROLOGY: 2013 Stephen Jones & Kim Newman
  • USEFUL ADRESSES 
And...recently, I was seeking a pair of short novels for a new friend, a native speaker of Spanish who loves horror and wanted preferably short novels in English she could practice her Anglophone reading with...since she's a lover of horror film, as well, my favorite duo from 1959 came to mind first, even if one is a suspense novel rather than horror (and the other is arguably so as well, with difficulty):

























...and two more became pretty obvious next choices (in rather battered first editions pictured below):











Further suggestions?

("Impure" horror collections that also came to mind:
All The Stories of Muriel Spark and 
E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon)

(...and...and...)

FFB: books (and of course magazines) that greatly influenced me in my early reading...

This can be considered cheating, as it's an answer to a Facebook meme that came at me from at least two directions, from FFB founder and mainspring Patti Abbott, and from comedian and voracious reader Jackie Kashian, but nonetheless, here 'tis (with the links back to previous citations in the blog and elsewhere)...


Grimm's Fairy Tales To Read Aloud, a beginning reader's edition...along with Dr. Seuss and some Golden Books, the texts my parents taught me to read with, and the most elaborate and text-heavy (and even more fantasticated than Green Eggs and Ham and the Cat in the Hat books).

Children's Digest magazine, the first fiction/essay-heavy magazine I read, and another bounty of short fiction, comics (Tintin and others), etc. Set me on a path to being one of the rare sorts these days who still loves fiction magazines. Highlights for Children and Humpty Dumpty (the latter then CD's slightly younger-skewing stablemate) didn't hurt, but weren't as good to 5yo me.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, ghost-edited by Harold Q. Masur. Might not be the first of the anthologies edited by Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur in the various "Hitchcock" lines that I read, but it might be, and it was the first I owned a copy of. Eclectic and sophisticated range of all sorts of "dark" (including darkly comic) fiction, one of many volumes aimed at adults and a companion series aimed at YA readers...I inhaled them from about age 9 till I'd read them all...while also reading the series of anthologies taken from and associated with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which always had other editors. AHMM, for its part, was the first adult fiction magazine I read regularly.

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media, by Les Daniels...the mass media very much including literature...the first critical/historical pop-culture work I devoured, and assuredly not the last. Along with the pointers, as valuable as those on the Newbery Award shortlists to my young reading, it was also a fine anthology of short stories, alternating with the chapters of Daniels's text.

The better Time-Life Books, Science Service Books, and a galumphing big coffee-table book full of essays and great photography, Our Amazing World of Nature, definitely nudged me into a lifelong interest in the natural sciences...various encyclopedias and other multivolume sets didn't hurt. 


The American Heritage multi-volume set on the US presidents (and Famous Americans), for example, among other things helped fuel an early fascination with election statistics and related matters...

The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series 5, edited by Gerald W. Page. The first evidence I had that the horror fiction anthologies I'd been finding in libraries (and from Scholastic and similar book sales in and through the schools) were part of a continuing tradition. Other best of the year annuals were also fascinating. 

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (to which I've contributed in the most slight way) and Fantastic Stories and Whispers, perhaps the most beloved by me of the first wave of adult fiction magazines I started buying and reading in earnest in 1978. These three were the best and most popular fantasy fiction magazines I'd find, all eclectic in their remit (they'd even run the occasional story that was fantasy only by association, presumably because the editors thought they had a good story by a writer who usually wrote fantasy)...while I'd read the likes of Short Story International and Galaxy and Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine assiduously as well. I transitioned in my periodicals consumption from reading comics and Mad (and any National Lampoons I could obtain...and Boy's Life and Dynamite) to reading fiction magazines over the years from ages 10 to 13...and discovered that magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly still carried short stories, as well as sometimes fascinating articles. I'd been reading the short stories in Playboy for a while...while not letting the rest of the magazine alone, of course...

Dissent magazine was my first regular leftist read, soon joined by others ranging from The Nation to Rolling Stone's relevant material, and so on to such books as Vivian Gornick's Essays in Feminism (and Women in Science), Emma Goldman's Living My Life, and the notable anthology The Essential Works of Anarchism.. But I think Joanna Russ's essays, and her novel The Female Man, were among the biggest even earlier nudges I had in that direction. I certainly didn't like the antifeminist flavor of the writing of R. Bretnor nor (Miss rather than Ms.?) Raylyn Moore from early on... Our Generation magazine probably spoke to me most directly, along with Social Anarchism (to which I would eventually contribute) and, in a more broadly focused way, Harper's Magazine in the 1980s...

The Futurians by Damon Knight convinced me that I wanted to be an editor even more than I did a writer. And the critical writing of Knight, Russ, Gornick, John Simon, Harlan Ellison, Algis Budrys, James Blish, Anthony Burgess, bell hooks, Avram Davidson, Fritz Leiber, and others spoke to me profoundly.

And if I have to make a default choice as to my favorite book so far...well, I couldn't. But Avram Davidson's magisterial The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy might be it. Or Jorge Luis Borges's The Aleph, and Other Stories 1933-1969, or too many others...


Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books. I believe I'm set to host next week's selections...

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

Anne Bilson:  Preposterous thrillers; goth girl heroines; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Bill Crider: What's Up, Tiger Lily? [trailer]; The Hospital [trailer]; Straight Time [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Night of the Demons; Grave of the Vampire ...Countdown to Halloween; The Twilight Zone (second version): "Dealer's Choice"; The Gift of Winter and Witch's Night Out

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Dan Stumpf: Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead; Zorro (1950s tv)

David Vineyard: The Small Back Room

Ed Lynskey: The Naked Kiss; Man Bait; Mike Hammer (1950s tv)

Elizabeth Foxwell: "The Case of the Screaming Bishop"; From the Vault (Pacifica Radio): "Sorry, Wrong Number" with Shirley Knight and Ed Asner; Calling Philo Vance (1940 film); Great Lives: "Dorothy L. Sayers" (BBC Radio); Stage 7: "The Deceiving Eye"; Focus 580: "Evan Hunter/Ed McBain"; BackStory: "To Serve and Protect? A History of the Police [in the US]"

Evan Lewis: I, the Jury (1953 film); Breakdowns of 1936; Charlie Chan at the Opera 

Francis M. Nevins: Coronado 9; A Walk Among the Tombstones

George Kelley: The Damned United; The Grace Kelly Collection; The Bridge; Gotham; The Flash

How Did This Get Made?: Temptations: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor

Iba Dawson: The Innocents

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Caught; Death of a Salesman (1951 film); The Black Widow (1947 film serial); He Walked by Night

Jack Seabrook: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "Final Vow"; "I Saw the Whole Thing"
Yesterday Was a Lie

Jackie Kashian: Kipleigh Brown (Yesterday Was a Lie; Star Trek Continues); Eddie Pepitone; Sandra Daugherty

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Brute Force;  Katie Did It; Quincy, M.E.: "The Death Challenge"

Jake Hinkson: William Castle; The Thing from Another World;  Morocco

James Reasoner: Breakfast at Tiffany's; The Last Legion; Legionnaire

Jerry House: You Asked for It!; The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: "Todd Sweeney, Demon Barber" (radio); Dragnet: "The Big Hands" (1950s tv); Favorite Story: "Frankenstein" (radio); The House of Secrets

John Charles: Deranged; Motel Hell

John Grant: Death at Broadcasting House; The Crime Nobody Saw; Confessions of a Psycho Cat; Marked Man; La Boîte Noire

Jonathan Lewis: Cornered; Edge of Darkness (1943 film); Masterson of Kansas; Juke Girl; The Virginian (1946 film); The Baron of Arizona; Waterloo Bridge

Jose Cruz: Dark Fantasy (radio)

Kate Laity: Daniela Dooling at Esther Massry Gallery

Kelly Robinson: Sherlock, Jr.

Kliph Nesteroff: Will Jordan

Michael Shonk: Monsters Fighting Evil: television series

Steve Lewis: Trigger Fingers: The Last Ride; Western Union

Walter Albert: The Sea Hawk; William Powell

...there was much more to come tonight...except that this computer just crashed and ate about three hours' work on this installment. I don't like computers one bit at the moment. The balance of the week's (and previous weeks') citations to be included in the next installment...


 


Friday, October 17, 2014

FFB: the best short stories of 1978 (the year I started reading new short fiction in earnest) as judged by the annual editors...



I picked up (either purchased or found in libraries) all these volumes (with the exception of the Pushcart item) 
back when, and I was fascinated not only by the contents themselves but also by the choices made among the short fiction published in 1978, a good chunk of which I'd read as it was offered in the magazines and original anthologies. Looking at their contents now, I'm impressed, if not universally, any more than I was back then, by the quality of the selection--it was a good year to start reading new fiction, though it's usually if not always a good year to do so. It's rather telling that the fantasy (and horror) volumes have no overlap or shared stories, and neither do the eclectic/contemporary mimetic volumes, but the sf volumes certainly do. Also notable to me, as it was then, how certain books demonstrate, if not the desire to include Names at the cost of quality, then at least a certain kindness or nostalgia toward some of the writers...certainly Terry Carr, in the first two volumes of his fantasy annual, included two of the worst Stephen King stories I've read...at least Gerald Page and Ed Hoch selected rather better, though not Year's Best, stories from King for their books. The Stephen Donaldson story was also not up to most of the rest of the Carr fantasy selections. Lin Carter likewise could let nostalgia and desire to play up Conan and such overwhelm his annual, but Arthur Saha, who would inherit the series on his own after Carter's death, probably was already being felt in this volume in some of the more innovative choices.

Multiple appearances across several volumes include those of John Varley, with four appearances of two different stories (three reprints of "The Persistence of Vision"), four appearances with three different stories for Michael Bishop and three with three for Thomas Disch (the O. Henry volume was indexed for WorldCat by a proud fellow Minnesotan), three inclusions of two stories by Gregory Benford, likewise three inclusions for two stories by Joan D. Vinge, and, as noted, three appearances with three different stories by Stephen King. It really was a very good year for Disch and Bishop amd Janet Fox.

Among the particularly brilliant stories (among many) I remember are Dennis Etchison's "The Pitch" (Horror), Bill Pronzini's "Strangers in the Fog" (Detective),  Fox's "Demon and Demoiselle" (Carter/Saha Fantasy), and Gregory Benford's squicky "In Alien Flesh" (several). John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision" certainly blew me (and the award voters) away in 1978 and into the next year, though even from the first reading it struck me as more fantasy than sf, and perhaps in more than one way (though Varley's sexual libertinism certainly struck a chord with 13yo me, and I'm somewhat in sympathy with that attitude still, with certain reservations).  Look at all that established and emerging talent in the Pushcart...and all the others...

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII ed. Gerald W. Page (DAW 0-87997-476-1, Jul ’79, $1.95, 221pp, pb)

The Year’s Finest Fantasy Volume 2 ed. Terry Carr (Berkley 0-425-04155-7, Jul ’79, $1.95, 311pp, pb); Series continued with Fantasy Annual III.

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 5 ed. Lin Carter  and Arthur W. Saha (DAW 0-87997-510-5, Jan ’80, $1.95, 204pp, pb)

The 1979 Annual World’s Best SF ed. Donald A. Wollheim & Arthur W. Saha (DAW 0-87997-459-1, May ’79, $2.25, 268pp, pb)
  • 7 · Introduction · Donald A. Wollheim · in
  • 11 · Come to the Party · Frank Herbert & F. M. Busby · ss Analog Dec ’78
  • 37 · Creator · David Lake · nv Envisaged Worlds, ed. Paul Collins, Void, 1978
  • 64 · Dance Band on the Titanic · Jack L. Chalker · nv IASFM Jul/Aug ’78
  • 87 · Cassandra · C. J. Cherryh · ss F&SF Oct ’78
  • 96 · In Alien Flesh · Gregory Benford · nv F&SF Sep ’78
  • 122 · SQ · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss Cassandra Rising, ed. Alice Laurance, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978
  • 133 · The Persistence of Vision · John Varley · na F&SF Mar ’78
  • 181 · We Who Stole the Dream · James Tiptree, Jr. · nv Stellar #4, ed. Judy-Lynn del Rey, Ballantine, 1978
  • 206 · Scattershot · Greg Bear · nv Universe 8, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1978
  • 239 · Carruthers’ Last Stand · Dan Henderson · nv Analog Jun ’78

The Best Science Fiction of the Year # 8 ed. Terry Carr (Ballantine 0-345-28083-0, Jul ’79, $2.25, 372pp, pb)

The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 ed. Terry Carr (Ballantine, Sep ’79, 328pp, pb)

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (1978) ed. Gardner R. Dozois (Elsvier-Dutton, 1979, hc); Also in pb (Dell Aug ’80).

courtesy WorldCat: 

Best detective stories of the year, 1979 ; 33rd annual collection  
edited by Edward D. Hoch. 
New York : E.P. Dutton, 1979. 209 pages

Quitters, Inc. / Stephen King --
Little paradise / Zena Collier --
The man in the lake / Ernest Savage --
Strangers in the fog / Bill Pronzini --
Delayed mail / Jack Ritchie --
Filmflam / Francis M. Nevins --
The fire man / Elizabeth A. Lynn --
The adventure of the blind alley / Edward Wellen --
The cloud beneath the eaves / Barbara Owens --
The closed door / Thomas Walsh --
Truth will out / Ruth Rendell --
Checkpoint Charlie / Brian Garfield --
Rite of Spring / Jerry Jacobson --
The golden circle / Patricia L. Schulze --
Captain Leopold Incognito / Edward D. Hoch --
The leech / Frank Sisk.

courtesy Contento/Stephensen-Payne Miscellaneous Anthologies:

The Best American Short Stories 1979 

ed. Joyce Carol Oates & Shannon Ravenel (Houghton Mifflin, 1979, tp)

[This citation in WorldCat is annoyingly shorthanded...particularly where the writer's name isn't so obvious as with Herbert Gold or Alice Adams.]
 
Prize stories 1979 : the O. Henry Awards  edited and with an introduction by William Abrahams. 

"Includes story by Minnesota author Thomas M. Disch."

Weaver, G. Getting serious.--
Bromell, H. Travel stories.--
Hecht, J.I want you, I need you, I love you.--
Goldberg, L. Shy bearers.--
Heller, S. The summer game.--
Pfeil, F. The quality of light in Maine.--
Leaton, A. The passion of Marco Z--.--
Thomas, A. Coon hunt.--
Molyneux, T.W. Visiting the point.--
Oates, J.C. In the autumn of the year.--
Baumbach, J. Passion?--
Zelver, P. My father's jokes.--
Gold, H. The smallest part.--
Van Dyke, H. Du Côté de Chez Britz.--
Smith, L. Mrs. Darcy meets the blue-eyed stranger at the beach.--
Caputi, A. The derby hopeful.--
Schwartz, L.S. Rough strife.--
Yates, R. Oh, Joseph, I'm so tired.--
Peterson, M. Travelling.--
Disch, T.M. Xmas.--
Adams, A. The girl across the room.  

  The Pushcart prize, IV : best of the small presses  
edited by Bill Henderson.   591 pages


Introduction : about Pushcart Prize, IV --
Home / by Jayne Anne Phillips --
From laughing with one eye / by Gjertrud Schnackenberg Smyth --
A renewal of the word / by Barbara Myerhoff --
Ice / by AI --
In another country / by James Laughlin --
The daisy dolls / by Felisberto Hernández --
Snow owl / by Dave Smith --
Lot's wife / by Kristine Batey --
The stone crab : a love poem / by Robert Phillips --
Night flight to Stockholm / by Dallas Wiebe --
Literature and ecology: an experiment in ecocriticism / by William Rueckert --
Ghosts like them / by Shirley Ann Taggart --
Elegy / by David St. John --
The ritual of memories / by Tess Gallagher --
Plowing with elephants / by Lon Otto --
Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery / by Lorna Dee Cervantes --
A Jean-Marie cookbook / by Jeff Weinstein --
dg The politics of anti-realism / by Gerald Graff --
Winter sleep / by Mary Oliver --
Wildflower / by Stanley Plumly --
Letters from a father / by Mona Van Duyn --
Early winter / by Max Schott --
My work in California / by James B. Hall --
The ownership of the night / by Larry Levis --
The Spanish image of death / by César Vallejo --
For Papa (and Marcus Garvey) / by Thadious M. Davis --
A vision expressed by a series of false statements / by John Love --
Jeffrey, believe me / by Jane Smiley --
Sweetness, a thinking machine / by Joe Ashby Porter --
To Ed Sissman / by John Updike --
The man whose blood tilted the earth / by M.R. Doty --
Lawrence at Taos / by Shirley Kaufman --
Contemporary poetry and the metaphors for the poem / by Charles Molesworth --
Another Margot chapter / by R.C. Day --
Sitting up, standing, taking steps / by Ron Silliman --
Made connections / by Michael Harper --
Anonymous courtesan in a jade shroud / by Brenda Hillman -
A woman in love with a bottle / by Barbara Lovell ---
Proteus / by Judith Hoover --
Quinnapoxet / by Stanley Kunitz --
Things that happen where there aren't any people / by William Stafford --
Lechery / by Jayne Anne Phillips --
Civilization and isolation / by Vine Deloria --
from Kiss of the spider woman / by Manual Puig --
Running away from home / by Carolyn Kizer --
The biography man / by Gary Reilly --
The nerves of a midwife: contemporary American women's poetry / by Alicia Ostriker --
Forgive us / by George Venn --
The hat in the swamp / by Paul Metcalf --
These women / by Christine Schutt --
Johnny Appleseed / by Susan Schaefer Neville --
Some carry around this / by Susan Strayer Deal --
The stonecutter's horses / by Robert Bringhurst --
Grandmother (1895-1928) / by Cleopatra Mathis --
Rich / by Ellen Gilchrist --
Pig 311 / by Margaret Ryan --
American poetry: looking for a center / by Ishmael Reed-
I show the daffodils to the retarded kids / by Constance Sharp --
Dream / by John Willson --
Living with animals / by Margaret Kent --
The trial of Rozhdestvov / by Russian Samizdat --
Contributors notes --
Outstanding writers --
Outstanding small presses.


For more of this week's books, 
please see Patti Abbott's blog...