Worlds of Fiction

Great collection of short stories, by well known authors, for those times when you run out of something to read.

This book was first published in 1993. The 1,428-page first edition, the version I read, is the one my comments refer to. The collection contained works by 126 authors, comprising 124 short stories and two short novels. About two-thirds of the pieces were by North American and European writers, both well known and less familiar. The remaining stories came from writers from Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. With the exception of a selection from the Thousand and One Nights and a tale by the Brothers Grimm, the pieces were written between 1840 and 1990. The 19th century was represented by Bierce, Chekhov, Chopin, Conrad, Crane, Flaubert, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gogol, the Brothers Grimm, Hawthorne, James, Jewett, Maupassant, Melville, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Poe, Tolstoy and Twain. Habitual readers of anthologies have probably read many of these famous stories. The period between 1900 and the end of World War II was represented by Akutagawa, Anand, Anderson, Babel, Borges, Cather, Colette, Dinesen, Ellison, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Susan Glaspell, Hemingway, Hurston, Joyce, Kafka, Lu Xun, Mann, Mansfield, Maugham, Porter, Steinbeck, Welty and Wharton. A number of these great stories may also be familiar. Younger readers encountering them for the first time are in for a treat. More than four-fifths of all the stories in the collection were from the 20th century, and more than half were published after 1960. It's in the selection of these most recent writers that the editors showed, in my opinion, the greatest degree of originality, trying to strike a balance between the West and other regions, older and younger writers, and better- and less-known ones. As a result, this anthology stands somewhere between collections mainly of Western writers such as the Oxford Book of Short Stories and collections focused mostly or entirely on contemporary non-Western writers such as Global Voices or Global Cultures. The anthology contained relatively few writers from the United Kingdom, France, Russia, the Middle East and Australia. On the other hand, it included a number from Latin America (12), Africa (10) and Asia (12) and, from Europe, several writers from the Scandinavian countries. No country within a region appeared in any depth other than the United States. The selection of American writers for the most recent years --- from the 1980s --- took great care to represent writers from various social/racial/sexual groups. Most of the stories in the collection were in the realistic or psychologically realistic mode: there was nothing relatively experimental like Beckett, Nabokov, Barthelme, Coover, Angela Carter or Rushdie. Magic realism was represented mainly by Kafka, Borges, Buzzati, Calvino and Fuentes. Few stories could be called satirical or politically satiric, though all the ones that were included were striking: one by Lu Xun about the social and political meanings communicated by the ways hair was w

I used this text while teaching a World Literature Survey at the college level. The editors have done an excellent job of providing a truly international collection. Most anthologies try to include many different genres. By limiting themselves to one genre, the short-story, the editors have kept the size reasonable--I was able to cover enough of the stuff in here to not make me feel as though I was making students buy three times more book than they needed.The selections are well thought out, with inclusions leaning heavily in favor of modern works. Some of European authors (Flaubert, De Maupassant, for example) go back a ways, but there aren't any classical or pre-renaissance texts except for a selection from Arabian Nights. The prefatory material (biographies/introductions) is brief but helpful, especially for some less familiar (to western readers) authors. If you are interested in world literature, this book is a great buffet, giving you a taste of Allende, Naipul, Borges, Achebe, Gordimer, Head, Akutagawa, Mahfouz, Fuentes, Flaubert, Camus, Kafka, Tolstoy, Langervist, and many, many others. There is a nice mix of old and new. Read a story by a master and discover which authors you like and whose books you would like to investigate.