Ron Hansen - Youve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe

YOU'VE GOT

TO READ THIS

C O N T E M P O R A R Y A M E R I C A N

W R I T E R S I N T R O D U C E

S T O R I E S T H A T H E L D T H E M

I N A W E

E D I T E D B Y

R O N H A N S E N AND J I M S H E P A R D

mm Perennial

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, pages 629-30 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS. Copyright 1994 by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY

10022.

FIRST EDITION

Reprinted in Perennial 2000.

Designed by Alma Hocbhauser Orenstein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data You've got to read this: contemporary American writers introduce stories that held them in awe / edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard.

1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-055358-8ISBN 0-06-098202-0 (pbk.)

1. Short stories. 2. Short stories. I. Hansen, Ron, 1927-II. Shepard, Jim.

PN6120.2.Y68 1994

813'.0108dc20 94-14460

94 95 96 97 98 /HC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

00 01 02 /HC 22 21 20 19 (pbk.)

Contents

James Agee, A Mother's Tale 1

Introduced by Annie Dillard

Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant 19

Introduced by Francine Prose

James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues 29

Introduced by Kenneth A. McClane

Donald Barthelme, The School 57

Introduced by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph 63

Introduced by Oscar Hijuelos

Jane Bowles, A Day in the Open 77

Introduced by Joy Williams

Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode 87

Introduced by John L'Heureux

Mary Caponegro, The Star Cafe 101

Introduced by John Hawkes

Angela Carter, Reflections 119

Introduced by Robert Coover

Raymond Carver, Cathedral 135

Introduced by Tobias Wolff

V

vi CONTENTS

John Cheever, Goodbye, My Brother 151

Introduced by Allan Gurganus

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries 175

Introduced by Eudora Welty

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 187

Introduced by John Irving

Molly Giles, Pie Dance 249

Introduced by Amy Tan

Lars Gustafsson, Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases 257

Introduced by Charles Baxter

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Interview 271

Introduced by Jane Smiley

James Joyce, The Dead 283

Introduced by Mary Gordon

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony 319

Introduced by Joyce Carol Oates

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl 343

Introduced by Stephanie Vaughn

Clarice Lispector, The Smallest Woman in the World 349

Introduced by Julia Alvarez

Katherine Mansfield, The Daughters of the Late Colonel 359

Introduced by Deborah Eisenberg

Alice Munro, Labor Day Dinner 379

Introduced by David Leavitt

Vladimir Nabokov, Spring in Fialta 401

Introduced by Jim Shepard

CONTENTS vii

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried 421

Introduced by Bobbie Ann Mason

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find 439

Introduced by Sue Miller

Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing 457

Introduced by Amy Hempel

Grace Paley, Wants 467

Introduced by Janet Kauffman

Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities 471

Introduced by Tim O'Brien

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Man to Send Rain Clouds 481

Introduced by Louis Owens

Robert Stone, Helping 489

Introduced by Louise Erdrich

Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man 513

Introduced by Ron Hansen

John Updike, Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car 559

Introduced by Lorrie Moore

Alice Walker, The Flowers 579

Introduced by Edward P. Jones

Eudora Welty, No Place for You, My Love 585

Introduced by Russell Banks

Jerome Wilson, Paper Garden 603

Introduced by Al Young

About the Authors

Introduction

We were far into the old have-you-ever-read? questions. We were sitting on the shaded second-floor porch of a house at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, talking about great short stories, the kind that hold you spellbound, make your hair stand on end, that you finish with the feeling of being wrung out, transported, and far better off than you were when you began reading. We lobbed titles at Tim O'Brien, who lobbed a few of his own back. We mentioned "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" by Delmore Schwartz, "A Distant Episode"

by Paul Bowles, Jack London's "To Build a Fire," Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." We were two fiction writers on staff at the conference, and university professors in English departments otherwise, so we had read a fair share of the short story masterpieces that find their way into anthologies, but there were so many others that were too little known. We'd both had the experience of having a friend say, "You've got to read this," as he or she handed us a story we'd never heard of, and on finishing it we'd often wondered how we'd felt complete without it. And countless times we and other writers we knew had been asked in question-and-answer sessions after fiction readings, What are your favorite stories? What do you recommend?

Wouldn't it be great, we thought, if there were an anthology based upon the stories that other writers feel passionate about?

Which is where this book began. We compiled a long list of our favorite writers and shortened it to a manageable size by confining it to American citizens. Then we wrote to ask if they'd introduce a story in English or English translation that left them breathless, held them in awe, or otherwise enthralled them when they first read it. We offered a wide latitude in these introductions: teacherly comments, reminiscences of that first encounter, anything that would provide an intriguing entrance into the story for the uninitiated. We approached some very famous and busy people so it was no surprise that a good many begged off, but a far greater number were pleased to have been asked and supplied us with a roster of one or three or six or nine stories they'd be happy to introduce.

We were then faced with hard choices, some of them frankly financial but others having to do with balance and variety and our own highly subjective judgment of which were the greater masterpieces.

Often the decisions were painful. We could fill another anthology with the stories we had to reject or could not afford, but what we have ix

X " INTRODUCTION

here is just what we wanted. Look at the contents page and you'll find the familiar and the unfamiliar, the hundred-years-old and the just-yesterday, stories that are symphonies of emotion and stories that are the simplest of melodies, beautifully played.

You may want to hold off on reading an introduction if you have not read a particular story before, in case it includes those passages a first reader would most want hidden for the sake of surprise and suspense.

Other stories may be well known to you. Then you may want to try a fresh reading with the introduction sitting helpfully beside you, like a friend. However you dip into this book, you'll be rewarded. There are riches everywhere. Wherever you wander you'll find an introducing author stepping forward with something he or she is passionate about, giving you the news about the way we live now, and saying to you: Here.