Bridges: Literature Across Cultures

This book was published in 1994 and contains nearly 300 works by 215 writers. There were 14 plays, 46 short stories and 231 poems. The plays comprised about half the book's 1,000 pages, with the rest divided nearly equally between the short stories and poems. Slightly more than half the writers came from the United States, another fifth from the West's other English-speaking nations, and the remainder from the rest of the world, mainly Continental Europe and Latin America. For the U.S. writers, great care was taken to choose writers who were female and/or from various ethnic minorities (African-American, Hispanic, Native Indian, Asian-American), and these comprised about 40% of all the writers. As the compilers stated in their introduction, they wished to blend classic favorites with selections from other American cultures and cultures from around the world. Authors for whom several works were selected included Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Louise Erdrich, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton. More than three-quarters of all the pieces were from the 20th century. From earlier times, a few selections were included from Ancient Egypt and Greece -- though not Rome -- the Elizabethans, and major Metaphysical and Romantic poets. The works were grouped according to five themes shared by writers from all cultures and periods: children/families, women/men, caste/class, war/peace and faith/doubt, themes that point to people's common humanity. Some of the short stories in particular were excellent illustrations of each theme: for example, R. K. Narayan's "Mother and Son," Yussef Idriss' "A House of Flesh," John A. Williams' "Son in the Afternoon," Mishima's "Patriotism" and Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." And with the plays, for instance, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," Shakespeare's "Othello," August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," and Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex." English-language poets included Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, Shelley, the Brownings, Whitman, Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Sandburg, Dylan Thomas, Auden and Spender. Prose writers included Poe, Hawthorne, Chopin, Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Welty, O'Connor, Carver, Shirley Jackson, Lessing, Munro, Alice Walker, Gordimer, Hansberry, August Wilson, Roth, Judith Wright, Achebe and Soyinka. Authors from other cultures included Aristophanes, Sophocles, Pushkin, Chekhov, Akhmatova, Babel, Forugh Farrokhzad, Kawabata, Mishima, Senghor, Borges, Valenzuela, Marquez, I. B. Singer, Kafka and Ricarda Huch. Of the plays, standouts for me included Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex." I enjoyed the poetry less than the stories and plays, but there was certainly a wide range of interesting poetry that should appeal to many readers: besides those already listed, from Ancient Egypt and Moorish Spain to Swift, Arnold, Mohan Singh, Roque Dalton,

I really like some of the poems, stories, and one act plays in this book, but some just aren't quite as good. I highly recommend The Lottery and a poem called Pied Beauty. If you're looking for a book to last a while.