Saturday, April 18, 2026

The 1961 Club (and Friday's "Forgotten" Books and [in advance] Wednesday's Short Stories): Jorge Luis Borges: ANTOLOGIA PERSONAL (1961)/A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY (1967 translation), actually a collection of Borges favorites among his own work, as translated/edited by Anthony Kerrigan, with Alastair Reid, in the English-language edition; COAST TO COAST 1959-1960: AUSTRALIAN SHORT FICTION OF TODAY edited by Cecil Hadgraft (1961; first of a biannual series of Austrailian short stories of the previous 24 months' publication); BEST DETECTIVE STORIES OF THE YEAR: 19TH EDITION edited by "Brett Halliday"/Davis Dresser; ELLERY QUEEN"S 16TH MYSTERY ANNUAL edited by "Ellery Queen"/Frederic Dannay (the ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE editor of the two cousins who wrote EQ and other fiction together)

A few notes on the books (at least partially) indexed below: I'm still reading some of these for the first time, and others I'm rereading after so many years that at least some of their contents feel new, and more might strike a bit differently after decades. 

Coast to Coast had as at least a decades-long run, apparently starting in the 1940s, but for most of its volumes it was a kind of biannual correspondent to such US annuals as Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards...this is the earliest volume I've found thus far in paper or on a screen, and it, with the first several stories. starts engagingly. I'm putting together an index for it as I go along, but, as noted below, the volume itself has relatively sparse previous publication credits. 


1961 volume contents:

1 The Dragon of Kashmir, Mena Abdullah and Ray Mathew, ss Meanjin vol. 15 no. 3 Spring 195 p. 277-281
6 Cubby, Thea Astley, ss Currency
12 Long Ago Summer, Hugh Atkinson, ss Quadrant vol. 4 no. 1 Summer 1959  pp. 13-20
21 Frugal, Clive Barry, ss/war literature 
The Bulletin vol. 77 no. 4007, 28 November 1956  pg. 20-34
30 Keep 'Em Moving, J. P. Carroll, ss/humour The Bulletin vol. 80 no. 4164, 2 December 1959 pp. 11 and 58
35 Orchard for Sale, C. B. Christesen ss Meanjin vol. 15 no. 3. Spring   1956 pp. 277-281
41 That Barambah Mob, David Forrest ss/humour Overland no. 15 Winter 1959
50 The Penman, Jack Lusby ss from The Bulletin
56 Darby and Joan, ​David Martin ss  
60 Come Back, John Morrison ss from Meanjin
69 The Nurse, Nancy Phelan
80 Fiend and Friend,​ Hal Porter ss from Southerly
94 Aid and Comfort, E.O. Schlunke ss from The Bulletin
101 A List of All People,​ Peter Shrubb  ss Stanford Short Stories edited by Wallace Stegner (Stanford University Press, 1958; a volume of an annual series for several years; Shrubb was an Australian fellow at Stanford's writing program)
110 The Nightmare, Lane Stevens
116 Taste, Dal Stivens ss from The Bulletin
119 Pianoforte, A.E. Sturges  ss from The Bulletin
126 The Fish-Scales, Colin Thiele ss from The Bulletin
131 A Family Christmas, Keith Thomas ss
135 Red Andy's Gift, Margaret Trist ss from The Bulletin
143 The Bell Place,​ M.G. Vincent ss from The Bulletin
157 Peppercorn Rental,​ Amy Witting ss from Southerly
161 In the Park,​ Judith Wright ss from The Bulletin

(more complete sources when I find a means to access AustLit beyond the trial stage...)



Judith Merril (nee Zissman) was one of the most prominent women writers and editors in US sf and fantasy publishing by the mid-1950s, and her annual best-of series of short fiction in those fields began as a project largely initiated with the paperback house Dell Books, with a hardcover edition offered by the small-press specialist publisher Gnome Press with the 1956 volume, gathering fiction published in 1955, S-F: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy. After the fourth volume, issued in 1958, Gnome Press had run out of financial magic, and Merril and Dell sought a new hardcover partner, and were taken up on that by Simon and Schuster. Despite having a much sounder financial structure and an established reputation as a reasonably prestigious mainline publisher, the S&S editors took a condescending view of Merril, and demanded she provide them a long-list of potential contents for each of their volumes, from which they would make a final selection--despite Merril having done an interesting and profitable job of the previous volumes. S&S prevailed, and the 1961 was produced in this manner...but nonetheless remained Merril's book and made for an engaging reading experience. (It should be noted that there had been a "year's best" short science fiction annual from the small commercial publisher Frederick Fell before Merril's annual began, but that one ended one volume after Fell closed shop, with its last volume published by the sf fan-run small press Advent: Publishers, which otherwise devoted itself to critical and historical works about sf and fantasy...it had been founded to publish Damon Knight's 1956 (first edition) collection of fantasy and science fiction literary criticism, In Search of Wonder. Knight, like Merril, was a writer and one of the members of the largely successfully aspiring group of increasingly pro writers and editors, the Futurians, based in New York City--members also included James Blish, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, Donald Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson and less well-remembered members such as Doris Baumgardner/"Leslie Perri" and John Michel).









































Anthology Title: The 6th Annual of the Year's Best S-F • [The Year's Best S-F • 6] • (1961) • anthology edited by Judith Merril (paperback issued 1962) (paperback edition on Archive.org)

Contents (view Concise Listing)

Even with her S&S editors looking hard over her shoulder and vetoing some of her most dear selections, the eclecticism and openess to work on the edge of what might normally be thought of as fantasy or sf  remained--her "S-F" designation was supposed to suggest the widest range of what could be termed "science-fantasy", the latter term these years usually citing art that includes elements of fantasy and science fiction, ranging from a few Jorge Luis Borges stories to some C. S. Lewis, Marion Zimmer Bradley, J. G.Ballard, and Jack Vance fiction, to Star Wars films and related-media works.

Notable also that Merril opens this volume with the only story by Holley Cantine known to be published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction or other f/sf media, a clever fantasy--with sf elements. Merril was a feminist and Trotskyist in the '40s in NYC and in the Futurians, the latter being a politically eclectic bunch, including CP USA members, conservatives (C. M. Kornbluth, whose novelet "The Marching Morons" was essentially plagiarized in simplified fashion by the film Idiocracy two decades ago), a few more or less centrist Republicans and New Deal Democrats, and James Blish willing to say that he liked the theory of fascism a lot better than its practice. So, it's interesting but unsurprising to note her sympathy with this rather clever fantasy by (Mr.) Cantine, the co-editor and -publisher (with his wife) of the anarchist political and literary magazine Retort. (Retort was famously [in their circles] "in conversation" with Audrey Goodfriend and Dorothy Rogers' Why? and Dwight Macdonald's increasingly anarcho-pacifist Politics magazines through the late Depression, WW2, and perhaps just into the post-war years.)  

I believe this to be the only volume of the Merril annual to include full musical notation as well as lyrics for several songs, but should check.








































                Collection Title: A Personal Anthology • collection by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. of Antología personal 1961)

Contents (view Concise Listing)


I first read Borges's fiction, when I was 8yo, in a Scholastic Book Services anthology edited by Betty M. Owen, one of a handful of horror-plus anthologies she edited for their young-readers book line, a translation of "The Garden of Forking Paths" as reprinted from the Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd translated collection Ficciones, published in the US by Grove Press in 1962. One or two others crossed my path, but my doors were finally blown off by The Book of Sand, one of Borges's last collections and published in translation by Borges and Norman Thomas diGiovanni by Dutton in the US in 1977 as part of their series of Borges volumes. I went quickly onto The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933-1969, and all the rest I could find, but came to the translation of A Personal Anthology rather late, after taking a course (at George Mason University in 1987, I believe) with visiting professor Alastair Reid, a long-time scholar and translator of Borges work--Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Reid's survey anthology of Borges's work in translation, Borges: A Reader, was our primary text...which led to the co-translated (by Reid) A Personal Anthology. I did well in the class even though my translation of a Borges story didn't impress him or me...I was taking a large load of credits and kept putting it off in favor of work that would seem less of a working vacation.


This volume doesn't seem to be currently online, though a number of the issues of EQMM this was drawn from are (if fewer than I expected, between Archive.org and the Luminist Archives) and I'll hope to link to those which can be read, along with other publications also including at least most of the stories.

This and other More to Come...



https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2009/08/fridays-forgotten-book-best-detective.html


Now, this is the story of a snit Frederic Dannay got into, when the fifteen-volume and founding editor of Year's Best Detective Stories, David C. Cooke, had stepped down, and Davis Dresser (more famous as "Brett Halliday", the creator of Michael Shayne and nominal editor of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, was asked to take on the task...Dannay, the magazine-editing half of "Ellery Queen" (fiction-writing collaborator and cousin Manfred B. Lee mostly let Dannay do all that sort of thing) was Not Having It, and refused to let the Dutton annual reprint any stories from EQMM, for the only time this occurred (Dresser wouldn't choose to continue)...this making this 16th annual best-of EQMM perhaps more useful or valuable than those which came before it, to get anyone's sense of what the best work EQMM published in 1960 and the first cover-dated '61 issue...albeit someone less disinterested than Dresser in this wise. 



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