Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Stories
Shapard and Thomas ( Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories ) gather 60 highly readable, very brief tales from 32 countries, including the U.S. In an astute introduction, Charles Baxter ( First Light ) points out that the shortest stories often have "to do with a sudden crisis, in which the character does not act so much as react . . . . When a character reacts, the situation is larger and more powerful than that character is." In Colette's "The Other Wife," a married couple enters a restaurant, where the man steers his wife away from a table occupied by his ex-wife; in "One of These Days," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a mayor in a totalitarian regime demands to have an infected tooth pulled, threatening to shoot the dentist if he refuses, and the dentist proceeds without anesthesia, saying, "Now you'll pay for our twenty dead men." Many writers here (e.g., Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Jorge Luis Borges) are widely published; others, such as Poland's Slawomir Mrozek and India's Krishnan Varma, present foreign cultures in distinctive styles that invite further attention.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.