Showing posts with label contemporary-mimetic fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contemporary-mimetic fiction. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

SSW: MIDNIGHT GRAFFITI edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise (Warner Books 1992); THE WAYS WE LIVE NOW: CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION FROM THE ONTARIO REVIEW edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press 1986): Short Story Wednesday



Executive summary:
Anthologies from two of the more notable little magazines of their era; OR having lasted a third of a century, and this, the only anthology from it so far, drawing on its first dozen years, the magazine ending with the death of its editor and co-publisher Raymond Smith, as cofounder and widow Joyce Carol Oates chose not to continue it. MG having been more of a mayfly in the horror small press, but having gathered an impressive roster of contributors, with the editors and publisher continuing their writing careers afterward, if perhaps not robustly (not sure if their romantic/domestic partnership continues, another parallel); the book apparently includes reprints from the magazine and fiction perhaps still in inventory after the last issue of the initial run was published in 1992, or solicited for the book--with one story already a reprint when published in the magazine, and another possibly resold to Pulphouse after MG's long delays in publishing (two more issues, one a 1994 "special" and the 1997 other one apparently mostly nonfiction, sporadically followed the book's publication); for its part, the OR book includes a Margaret Drabble story (and not a hundred-word vignette) published two years before in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan, but not previously in North America. Both books rather neglected, even at time of release, with only two editions each...hardcover and apparently trade paperback editions of the Smith volume released by OR Press, and a mass market paperback original release from Warner Books and a Doubleday Book Clubs edition in hardcover for the MG volume. In their introductions, Raymond J. Smith and Jessica Horsting go out of their way to note how very much concerned with the world of today the fiction in their magazines has tended to be, perhaps even more so than that of most comparable magazines in the eclectic literary magazine and the horror and suspense fields (both magazines with dollops of satirical and other sorts of fantasy included), with these selections perhaps highlighting that tendency, which might even be why they seemed a good pair for an essay about just that (Raymond Smith even revising Trollope's novel's title to fit his anthology's tendencies); it's not as if, say, Conjunctions nor Whispers was oblivious to such concerns, but perhaps not quite as intent on being attuned to them. Also notable is the degree to which talented writers, from those who never need worry where their next meal was coming from to rather new and usually promising professionals, would place work with the magazines which presumably paid modestly if at a reasonable going rate. Smith is relatively restrained in presentation, running the stories alphabetically by author, and offering only brief contributor notes in the last pages, including the datum that Oates "helps edit" OR; Horsting is more intent on curation, breaking stories into themed batches, each with a brief introduction by her; each story also has an uncredited headnote, where perhaps an invisible hand of Van Hise is felt. Also notable is how starkly textual how both books feel, compared to the imagery, illustration, photography or otherwise, their magazines featured in each issue.

Both magazines leaned toward shorter fiction, rather than novellas or serialized or even excerpted novels; when one removes the dust jackets from both the hardcover volumes, one finds that the OR volume is red with black lettering on the spine, the MG black with red lettering, making for a sort of visual harkening to Stendhal jointly and severally. Unsurprisingly, Ways is a better-built volume, sewn in cloth-covered boards on better paper but with slightly less easy-to-read typesetting;  the book club edition of the other has a then-typical D-day glue binding on less sturdy boards containing slightly cheaper paper, but also depends on the more thoroughly professional typeface choices in play at Warner Books, and with fewer words per page, probably has about as much content as the thinner volume.

Neither book was too thoroughly reviewed, as far as I can tell, at time of release...the OR volume seems not to have been reviewed in such a way that I've found indexes for those reviews at all, while MG received a number of mostly unimpressive Goodreads responses and not too much more, though Will Errickson's womanfriend Ashley Louise did guest-review it for his blog in 2010.


Midnight Graffiti

edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press, 1986; 0-86538-054-6, x+301pp, hc; 978-0865380554 tp)
        Details supplied by Dennis Lien, augmented by TM.
    • ix · Preface · Raymond J. Smith
    • 1 · Molly’s Dog · Alice Adams · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 12 · The Man from Mars · Margaret Atwood · ss The Ontario Review 6, Spring/Summer 1977
    • 29 · Saving the Boat People · Joe David Bellamy · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 45 · Town Smokes · Pinckney Benedict · ss The Ontario Review 25, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 58 · My Life as a West African Gray Parrot · Leigh Buchanan Bienen · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 69 · At the Krungthep Plaza · Paul Bowles · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 74 · The Black Queen · Barry Callaghan · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 77 · Homework · Margaret Drabble · ss Cosmopolitan (UK) November 1975; The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 84 · Death’s Midwives · Margareta Ekström · ss; translated by Linda Schenck, The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 93 · Fruit of the Month · Abby Frucht · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 102 · A Pure Soul · Carlos Fuentes · ss; translated by Margaret S. Peden, The Ontario Review 12, Spring/Summer 1980 
    • 116 · The Harvest · Tess Gallagher · ss The Ontario Review 19, Fall 1983/Winter 1984
    • 129 · Some Gifts · Reginald Gibbons · ss The Ontario Review 5, Fall 1976
    • 137 · Black Cotton · William Goyen · ss The Ontario Review 17, Fall 1982/Winter 1983
    • 144 · Any Sport · William Heyen · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 152 · The Mango Community · Josephine Jacobsen · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 168 · A Metamorphosis · Greg Johnson · ss The Ontario Review 8, Spring/Summer 1978
    • 178 · On This Short Day of Frost and Sun · Maxine Kumin · ss The Ontario Review 5, 1976
    • 185 · Baby · Joyce Carol Oates · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 199 · Confessions of a Bad Girl · Bette Pesetsky · ss The Ontario Review 23, Spring/Summer 1985
    • 209 · Tea Party · Sarah Rossiter · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 221 · Shadow Bands · Jeanne Schinto · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1985/Winter 1986
    • 235 · Rough Strife · Lynne Sharon Schwartz · ss The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 252 · The Girl Who Loved Horses · Elizabeth Spencer · ss The Ontario Review 10, Spring/Summer 1979
    • 267 · The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: A Story · Daniel Stern · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 273 · Mourning · Robert Taylor, Jr. · ss The Ontario Review 14, Spring/Summer 1981
    • 281 · Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans · John Updike · vi series 
    •     281 · The Counselor · vi The Ontario Review 12,  Spring/ Summer 1980
    •     283 · The Widow · vi The Ontario Review 16, Spring/Summer 1982
    •     285 · The Undertaker · vi The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/ Winter 1982
    • 287 · A Lesson in the Classics · Gloria Whelan · ss The Ontario Review 18, Spring/Summer 1983
    • 299 · Contributors · Anon · bi

  • The stories: as too often, life has been less cooperative than I'd like in rereading the stories in either volume over the last week, but among those I refreshed my memory of, it's amusing to compare the fantasy stories "My Life as a West African Gray Parrot" by Leigh Buchanan Bienen and "Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland" by Joe Lansdale (the book never gives him his middle initial); the Buchanan Bienen, by a writer who had been and remains primarily a lawyer (particularly involved with women's rights cases, which informs the story), professor and author of legal volumes, as well as contributor of short fiction and critical essays to little magazines, involves said parrot, being as many non-human animals in the story a karmic? reincarnation of a human, recounting her less that joyous life with a human married couple who looked upon their purchased bird as  more conversation piece and investment than pet; all the reincarnated animals in the story, such as her keepers' tomcat, can converse with each other (somehow), but apparently another non-human animal she interacts with has not been blessed with reincarnation from human form nor a common language. While the Lansdale involves a present of a wife to a husband of an inflatable T. rex toy, which upon inflation begins to act like a young child, not altogether like Pinocchio, but unsurprising in this to its new "parents"...the plastic dinosaur quickly becomes obsessed with the prospect of going to the original Disney theme park and meeting the cartoon characters and the like, an excursion Bob's parents enable with perhaps surprising results. Animal/toy fantasy, a bird with an old soul awaiting its next incarnation and an artificial youngster recapitulating human childhood and adolescence. The Lansdale is funnier, if slighter, and has been reprinted more often; the Buchanan Bienen was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume for 1983, and both are a bit eccentric even for their first publication sites. 

Both books have a triptych of short fictions, the OR example by John Updike (arguably the "biggest name" in the Smith volume--though Oates, Margaret Atwood and Carlos Fuentes are among the many potential challengers there, particularly in 2024) and the MG being three of four stories by R. V. Branham, not quite a "discovery" of the horror/dark fantasy magazine (he'd gone through the Writers of the Future program and had sold several stories to Gardner Dozois's editorship of Asimov's Science Fiction), but the only fiction contributor to have two distinct entries in the Horsting/Van Hise volume. Not even Neil Gaiman, much less at time of the anthology's publication Lansdale, was as close as they are now to being nearly as prominent as Stephen King among the MG volume's contributors, which does have a rather lopsided representation of male to female contributors, vs. that of the OR.

  • Jessica Horsting



James Van Hise






















Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates


To read some individual issues and contents of those issues, please see
and

For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


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Wednesday, November 15, 2023

SSW: "Dead Women" by Allie Mariano, PHILADELPHIA STORIES, Fall 2020; Fiction Editor: Teresa Sari FitzPatrick

Can be read here: https://philadelphiastories.org/article/the-dead-women-second-place-winner-of-the-marguerite-mcglinn-prize-for-fiction/













The FictionMags discussion list had a bit of a discussion of Marguerite Young a few weeks back, sparked by a New Yorker "rediscovery" of her most ridiculously long novel (half a decade ago, The Paris Review likewise took a whack). Given how Young tended to be drawn to subjects that I am also, I was moved to search for her shorter work I thought I might've read over the years, and "The Dead Women" (collected in the Dalkey Archive retrospective Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews, 1994) proved elusive (if easier to find when one isn't catching something, but instead recovering), but this story, with a similar title, popped up, and given I've not mentioned anything from Philadelphia Stories for a while...

Allie Mariano's story is deftly-written, a relatively slow burn as it contrasts a youngish academic's unwise affair with a married man (riddled with the usual character's [and people's?] fantasies of How Everything Will Surely Go Swimmingly) and a party being thrown by elder fellow academics who set her up, to some degree, with an Appropriate Young Male Relative, as the dinner  conversation is dominated by recent revelations, in this New Orleans-set story, of a string of murders of young women sex workers. Everything, including a lonely middle-aged male highway patrolman pulling her over on her way home to her paramour after the party, touches on the potential menace of contemporary life, invited and otherwise, and while it's not a revelation of a story, I'll take a look at further work by Mariano. 

Philadelphia Stories is a freely-distributed slim print magazine, as well as web presence, that has been visible in the city and environs for more than two decades, and more power to it. For more of today's short stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, where these are gathered weekly.

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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

SSW: early stories, by Theodore Sturgeon and Don DeLillo, and stories by Dennis Lynds and Lord Dunsany; from ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, February 1964, edited by Frederic Dannay (Clayton Rawson, Managing Editor) and EPOCH, Winter 1960, edited by Baxter Hathaway, Neil Brennan and others (with Assistant Editors Abigail Carson, Sandra Leff, C. Michael Curtis et al.): Short Story Wednesday

Epoch, v. X, #2, Winter 1960, edited by Baxter Hathaway, Morris Bishop, Walter Slatoff, James McConkey, Neil Brennan, Forrest Read; assistant editors Leigh Buchanan, Robert Gillespie, C. Michael Curtis, Abigail Carson, S. David Schacker, Sandra Leff (Epoch Associates, 75c. 64pp, + covers, tall digest, saddle-stapled)

* 66 * Contributors * uncredited * editorial/biographical blurbs
* 66 * The Stoic * Richard McDougall * pm (reprinted from previous issue due to erratum)
* 67 * At the Crossing * Jan Wahl * ss
* 78 * Wasingham * M. Travis Lane * pm
* 80 * The Laughing Picnic * Janice Vos * ss
* 93 * Two Poems * Parm Meyer * gp
    * 93 * City Rooster * pm
    * 94 * Sermon with a Purled Ending * pm
* 96 * How to Make Love * Neil Weiss * pm
* 97 * A Young Man Sat in Central Park * Dennis Lynds * ss
* 104 * To a Lady * Ralph J. Salisbury * pm
* 105 * The River Jordan * Donald R. DeLillo * ss
* 121 * Two Poems * Charles Gullans * gp
   * 121 * St. John's Hampstead * pm
   * 122 * O Saisons, O Chateaux * pm
* 123 * The Slow Harvest * David Ray * pm
* 124 * Notes, Reviews, Speculations * column
   * 124 * The Mansion by William Faulkner (Random House, 1959)                          *  Walter J. Slatoff * br
   * 125 * New Campus Writing No. 3 edited by Nolan Miller and                                    Judson  Jerome (Grove Press, 1959) 
                * Leigh M. Buchanan * br
   * 126 * Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac (Grove Press, 1959) *                       Baxter Hathaway * br
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [v43 #2, Whole No. 243, February 1964] ed. "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay); Clayton Rawson, Managing Editor (Davis Publications, Inc., 50¢, 164pp, digest) 
Details supplied by Douglas Greene.
Unfortunately, as far as I see, neither of these have been archived online, though at least one enterprising dealer will sell you a copy of the Epoch issue for $288, presumably excluding postage.

The early stories cited in the column header today are Don DeLillo's more formally-bylined first published story, "The Jordan River", which he has not had reprinted, and a story by Theodore Sturgeon which Frederic Dannay's blurb suggests was found mixed in with the manuscript of a very old story that Sturgeon had sold in the '40s, as he hadn't this one--which is gathered in The Sturgeon Project Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon as a 1964 story, but I can't put my hands on my copy at the moment to see if there is further explication as to its probable date of composition...John Boston has informed me that, in checking his copy of the proper Complete Stories volume, there is no documentation of this story's origin beyond quoting an edited form of the Dannay blurb)...it definitely reads like a very young Sturgeon's work, which in his first years as a selling pro writer did tend to focus on short crime-fiction stories, often with nautical background, as he was in the Merchant Marine and selling much of his work to the McClure newspaper syndicate, which David Pringle has noted (from information provided to him by Patrick Nielsen Hayden) was (cozily) owned and run, by that time, by Sturgeon's uncle Richard Waldo (though McClure would've been looking for mostly shorter stories than this one). Dannay in his blurb suggests it reminds him of the stories of the '20s, when such series as the Ellery Queen stories were first published; I'd suggest he's more accurate in suggesting it also feels like a story from the heyday of Street and Smith's Detective Story Magazine, perhaps a decade later, given the non-explicit sense of this story being set during the Great Depression. The exploration of the anxieties of its protagonist, a young waitress named Gladys McGonnigle but always called "Happy" or "Hap" by her doting boss, as she takes care of a lonely nightshift at his cafe while he's away at a local neighborhood watch meeting (a rash of robberies at small eateries of late...leaving one to wonder why she might be best left alone for a night shift); leaving that gaping plot-hole barely papered over, her cleverness in handling the eventual skullduggery is amusing enough...and the focus on her indomitability in the face of bad odds feels like the more assured Sturgeon stories to come by the early '40s and throughout his career. 

While DeLillo's first published story, "The River Jordan", is a bit more like what one might expect from its author, if not quite up to his later work (probably why he's never sought to reprint the story); the rather (to various degrees) obsessed small bunch of constituents of the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, essentially a quartet: Burke, the would-be prophet and chiefest advocate of the new faith, McAndrew, increasingly grudgingly willing to foot the bill for their activities; and two more or less supportive hangers-on and assistants (a woman and a man), along with Burke's rather passive wife. None of their activities manages to inspire too many converts, so much as inspiring hecklers at their impromptu attempts at outreach and pitying mild hostility on the part of those they manage to offend. As with many young writers at the turn of the '60s, DeLillo's day job was with an advertising agency; one can see how that plays into this story in few ways.

Dennis Lynds was already a few years into his remarkably productive career (mostly as "Michael Collins", but also writing under house names and publishing early fantasy, sf and cf as "Jack Douglas"--not to be confused with comedy/humor writer and memoirist Jack Douglas, most active in the '50s and '60s as well--among other personal pseudonyms as well as placing stories under his legal name) when "A Young Man Sat in Central Park" was published, and it shows a writer more fully in control of his work already than the earliest Sturgeon or DeLillo, as it slowly fills in the details of a married couple, discussing as they walk through the park the trip to Europe the husband is about to take, while the wife, taking some time to recuperate from a stress-induced breakdown, hopes to join him in a few months' time (he intends to continue his work as a studio-artist painter while on his own Over There). Among the people and things that catch their eye is the titular young man, and they speculate together about whether his outfit suggests he's a writer or simply a would-be bohemian, etc., till they briefly engage him in conversation, get what they can from that, and move on, getting down to brass tacks about what they want from each other. It's a graceful story, though not one his website features (at least not too clearly, unless the 1986 story "In the Park" is an update/revisitation of this relatively early work). 

Another crossover writer between EQMM and Epoch might be Janice Vos, whom in the Contributors' notes in the issue of the latter under discussion here is cited as reporting she had sold a story to Queen's before placing her story with Epoch, but I haven't yet found a late '50s Janice Vos story in EQMM...inasmuch as her fuller name was Janice L. Vos, I wondered idly if she might be Janice Law, but Law seems a rather younger writer than Vos, who retired from the Chicago Public School system, in the only other datum I've found so far, in 1969. 

Meanwhile, in the EQMM issue, Dannay and the Lady Dunsany between them couldn't find a previous publication credit for the fine and amusing Lord Dunsany fantasy vignette, retitled after, as Douglas Greene notes above, it appeared in the The Smart Set in 1915...a particularly ironic omission, given that to help defray the expenses of H. L. Mencken's and George Jean Nathan's The Smart Set ("the magazine of cleverness" didn't draw newsstand browsers as readily as hoped), they launched a pulp magazine called (originally) The Black Mask (after the domin0-mask in The Smart Set logo), which narrowed its focus from various adventure fiction to crime fiction (and dropped "The" from the title) and reached its greatest influence and audience with contributions from such Smart Set veterans as Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich (writing in different and pathbreaking modes)...and when Mencken, initially with Nathan's help, established a new magazine, The American Mercury, a 1941 addition to its publishers' stable was another cf magazine, EQMM...which in '64 was, as it would, off and on, throughout a number of years, make the table-of-contents claim that it Incorporated Black Mask).  The Dunsany story is a deft but not altogether surprising fable, about a shop where one can...eventually...find someone to trade one's least desired traits with...


For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog...

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Wednesday, July 5, 2023

"Filipina Baby" by Gene Wolfe, THE LAUREL REVIEW, Spring 1969, edited by Willis H. Austin: Short Story Wednesday

This is a brief, and all but "lost" story rediscovered. It's not Absolutely yet proven it's by the Gene Wolfe who was a notable fantasy and sf and historical fiction writer, but it sure reads like his work, and the dealing with Roman Catholic matters in its short focus (unsurprising in a story set, essentially, in the Philippines) doesn't disqualify it from being his in any way. 

It's not quite as short as a vignette, as it concerns a Filipina-born widow of a US sailor, returning to her birth-city of Zamboanga after the death of her husband, having lived with him in the States for most of the years since their marriage, apparently just after World War 2's conclusion (he is cited as having commanded the Kusunoki, a Japanese vessel turned over to the Allies after Japan's surrender, and mostly used to repatriate Japanese citizens from the Philippines and probably elsewhere through 1947).  She is observing a year of mourning, and took a long sea voyage back to Mindanao on a craft commanded by an old colleague of her husband's, and shortly after landing, she meets an old flame of hers from back in the day, who reminds her of her brothers' threats (presumably for marrying a Yank, in the resumption of US occupation briefly after "liberation" from the Japanese), though the severity of the threat and the reasons for it are not made explicit.  A good work to read, if not quite a key work of Wolfe's, and apparently he didn't think of it as such, himself, but it does have me wondering what inspired it. 

I'm not sure this is posted anywhere that one can access directly (I haven't searched for it on Archive.org as yet, though there are citations of its Laurel Review issue in other texts collected there); the copy I read was procured via interlibrary transmission from the Michigan State University library. 

For more Short Story Wednesday items, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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Wednesday, January 26, 2022

SSW/FFB: First Installment: WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988); THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday 1989); DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell 1993)


Some of the titles of the stories collected in these volumes use, for critical purposes, epithets.

WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988; G. K. Hall 1990)
Introduction * Edward Gorman (in) ** (**noting originally published in this volume) --and each item below with a headnote by Gorman
The Sun Stood Still * "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) (ss) The American Magazine December 1934
Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses * "Mark Twain" (Samuel Clemens) (ar) North American Review July 1895
The Return of a Private * Hamlin Garland (ss) The Arena, V.3 N.1 (January?) 1891
The Idyl of Red Gulch * Bret Harte (ss) Overland Monthly December 1869 
The Lonesome Road * "O. Henry" (William Porter) (ss) Ainslee’s Magazine September 1903
One Dash—Horses (aka Horses) * Stephen Crane (ss) The New Review #81, February 1896 (and newspaper syndication in the U.S. in January of that year)
The Streets of Laredo * "Will Henry" (Henry Allen) (ss) Western Roundup--a WWA anthology editorially attributed to Nelson Nye (Macmillan 1961)
The Hard Way * Elmore Leonard (ss) Zane Grey’s Western Magazine August 1953
Mago's Bride * Loren D. Estleman  ** 
All the Long Years * Bill Pronzini **
The Damned * Greg Tobin **
Wolf Night * Bill Crider **
Liberty * Al Sarrantonio **
Trains Not Taken * Joe R. Lansdale (ss) RE:AL: Regarding Arts & Letters Spring 1987
Whores in the Pulpit * Thomas Sullivan **
Guild and the Indian Woman * Edward Gorman **
A Cowboy for a Madam * Barbara Beman **
One Night at Medicine Tail *  Chad Oliver **
The Time of the Wolves * Marcia Muller **
Hacendado * James M. Reasoner **
The Battle of Reno's Bend * L. J. Washburn **

Index revised and corrected from the WorldCat Index, with links to ISFDB, the FictionMags Index and other databases. Page numbers differ between the two editions.



THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday/Double D 1989)
(Doubleday 0-385-24569-6, May ’89, $12.95, 180pp, hc) Original western anthology of 18 stories and a poem with an introduction by Lansdale and an afterword to a “lost” "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) story by William F. Nolan. At least four of the stories are also fantasy.
Slightly augmented from the currently offline Locus Index.


 DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell/Laurel 1993) 

1 * Introduction(s) * Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (in)
15 * Sweetheart * Kathleen Alcalá (ex) Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist Calyx Books 1992
Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams / Rudolfo A. Anaya --
Heartwood / Rick Bass --
The Snowies, the Judiths / Mary Clearman Blew --
Bigfoot Stole My Wife; I am Bigfoot / Ron Carlson --
Paraiso: an Elegy / Rick DeMarinis --
Winter of '19 / Ivan Doig --
Science Meets Prophecy / David James Duncan --
Cry About a Nickel / Percival Everett --
Optimists / Richard Ford --
Girls / Tess Gallagher --
Personal Silence / Molly Gloss --
Nebraska / Ron Hansen --
Friends and Fortunes / Linda Hogan --
A Family Resemblance / James D. Houston --
Rock Garden / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston --
The Flower Girls / Lawson Fusao Inada --
Death by Browsing / Karen Karbo--
I Could Love You (If I Wanted) / John Keeble --
Why I am a Danger to the Public / Barbara Kingsolver --
Do You Hear Your Mother Talking? / William Kittredge --
Nevada Dreams / David Kranes --
Eggs ; Absences : Cicadas ; Growing Tomatoes / Alex Kuo --
Sleepwalkers / Ursula K. Le Guin --
Mint / Craig Lesley --
The Interior of North Dakota / Barry Lopez --
The Woman Who Would Eat Flowers / Colleen McElroy --
Dropping Anchor / Valerie Miner --
Idaho Man / John Rember --
Slaughterhouse / Greg Sarris --
Whitney and Tracie / Carolyn See --
Emerald City: Third & Pike / Charlotte Watson Sherman --
It's Come to This / Annick Smith --
Sea Animals / Tom Spanbauer --
The Room / Katheryn Stavrakis --
Pragmatists / Robert Stubblefield --
Migrants / Elizabeth Tallent --
Double Face / Amy Tan --
Boat People / Joyce Thompson --
Talking to the Dead / Sylvia A. Watanabe --
The Indian Lawyer / James Welch --
Buried Poems / Terry Tempest Williams

Slightly corrected (and soon to be augmented) from the WorldCat index.


***Stupid publisher tricks: 
Westeryear--the first edition jacket from M. Evans (immediately above); even G. K. Hall's generic large-print-line wrap (at top of post) is a step up.

The New Frontier--jacket copy referring to Neal Barrett, Jr. as "a new discovery" in 1989, a quarter-century or so into his career; also, a jacket at least as generic if not quite as clumsy as the Evans cover for the Gorman book or D-day's package for Lansdale's previous western originals anthology, Best of the West.

Dreamers and Desperadoes--managing to leave co-editor Stavrakis's name off nearly every aspect of the packaging, save the title page, though at least the table of contents does include her introduction. Also not quite stupid but perhaps not the best choice: the reasonably handsome cover for this trade-paperback original apparently doesn't photograph too well, at least on most of the photos and scans I've seen. Hence the current slightly blurry image above...and the cover isn't the easiest to read even in the handheld presence of the potential reader (poor color choices for legibility).

And none of these received the publisher push they deserved by any means, even if the Gorman did get a second edition for large-print readers.

Contents:
Westeryear's stories are, to say the least, an interesting mix of classics and contemporaries of classics, and new fiction from some of the best writers in western fiction (among work in other fields) active at time of assembly...a quality it shares with the Lansdale and Stavrakis/Lesley  volumes...even if each book has its own share of work that might fall on either side of the line established some years back by the Western Writers of America, porously between western fiction and fiction of the west (both of which they embraced). 

And then there's the Twain essay, perhaps the most famous KTF review in at least the US canon, and persuasive enough to me at age nine that I never sought out too much of Cooper's fiction, and what little I did seemed to conform to the Clemens assessment. Twain goes to a few lengths to ensure you can read his survey for humor, but nonetheless it tells, and enrages Cooper fans to this day. Editor Gorman himself isn't beyond pointing out the warts in the older reprints he offers here, or in the other work by their contributors, in his headnotes, but the stories do help add a certain perspective and none of them are difficult reading, and clearly are part of the development of the range of western fiction all the relatively contemporary writers included in all three volumes have drawn upon and reacted to. 

"Max Brand" (Frederick Faust)'s "The Sun Stood Still" is a good example of his graceful, tense writing; Gorman notes that its wit and appreciation of life as it was lived by the everyday people of the old West wasn't as widely shared by his peers (nor some of his successors), giving his work more of a contemporary if not quite timeless quality than that of many who wrote for the pulp magazines and higher-budget and yet still prone to tropism "slick" magazines in the first half of the previous century. For those who want even early western fiction to lack subtlety and a certain dramatic verisimilitude, even when the mythos of western fiction was already being employed (not too much in this decidedly unglamorized account of farmhand life), Brand doesn't help their case too much.

Hamlin Garland made a poor showing for himself (with the help of those hoping to Reach Yet Instruct Our Youth) with such widely-distributed work as his poem "Do You Fear the Force of the Wind?", unless one was looking for simpleminded machismo. But a similar devotion to simpleminded machismo on the part of, say Hemingway or Mailer (and far too many others, even if these two more flagrantly than most) didn't stop them from having a certain dalliance, at least, with social justice causes, and Garland particularly in his early career was throwing in with agrarian socialists, Populists, progressives and other troublemakers, and his fiction about, particularly, the travails of Civil War veterans and others trying to make a life in the hardscrabble, highly Gilded Age-distorted farming country of the Midwest (perhaps a bit too much like today's), struck a chord, and that's on offer with "The Return of a Private"; it's not subtle, but, as Gorman notes, Garland had an excellent eye for the small details and challenges of life.

"The Idyl of Red Gulch", being as it is a Bret Harte story, tries to couch itself as a fable perhaps a bit too much more than is good for it, but nonetheless gets across a fine account of how even in the far western U. S., the unfortunate prejudices can shoot through society once it asserts itself as post-pioneering country. Definitely romanticized, but also making its points. 

"The Lonesome Road", being as It is an "O. Henry" story, is also not quite a fable, but doesn't, unlike the Harte, call attention to its attempt at being of Great Import with every line, but rather more casually and mildly humorously gives the account of two old hell-raising friends, one of whom has now settled into a happy marriage and a more quiet life, finding themselves together having to deal with old adversaries. An interesting weighing of what makes for an actually good life, with a  rather straightforward account of what a chaotic, unromantic thing a gunfight tends to be. Gorman is particularly annoyed in his headnote about how readily Porter's work these years is condescended to as glib and mechanical, and this story helps make his case (and, fwiw, the Doubleday/Anchor folks are still branding their best stories of the year annual in his memory).

More to come. (More distractions as other parts of the ever-collapsing  house and life demand attention, not least the cat. Don't buy a century-old house. Just don't. Unless you have the money, skill or both to keep replacing everything.)




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