Ford Granta Ford
I'm a little slow getting to The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford, but he should have quit while he was ahead with the original GBASS, which he did in 1992, including 43 post-'44 writers.
The territory for the new one is vast—756 pages all told—but a little vague. He starts off with Eudora Welty, for no apparent reason. (She used to live down the road from him.)
Continues with Flannery O'Connor's "Artificial Nigger"—why include that chestnut and not others, esp. since he seems so eager to avoid the iconic, for example, picking Carver's Chekhov story "Errand" rather than something more Carveresque.
Mostly, Ford's down with his own generation (and persuasion)—long, talky, downbeat, lots of drinking. Nothing flash. Or wack.
His taste in younger writers is way off—Kevin Canty, Tom Franklin, Nell Freudenberger, Julie Orringer, Steve Yarbrough...give me a break.
At least he includes Nathan Englander's "The Tumblers" and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" by George Saunders.
What I liked best was Donald Barthelme's 1961 story "Me and Miss Mandible," which is set in Horace Greeley Elementary, my alma mater (actually, I went to the one in Chappaqua and, to be perfectly honest, I once played softball against Barthelme's future wife).
The territory for the new one is vast—756 pages all told—but a little vague. He starts off with Eudora Welty, for no apparent reason. (She used to live down the road from him.)
Continues with Flannery O'Connor's "Artificial Nigger"—why include that chestnut and not others, esp. since he seems so eager to avoid the iconic, for example, picking Carver's Chekhov story "Errand" rather than something more Carveresque.
Mostly, Ford's down with his own generation (and persuasion)—long, talky, downbeat, lots of drinking. Nothing flash. Or wack.
His taste in younger writers is way off—Kevin Canty, Tom Franklin, Nell Freudenberger, Julie Orringer, Steve Yarbrough...give me a break.
At least he includes Nathan Englander's "The Tumblers" and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" by George Saunders.
What I liked best was Donald Barthelme's 1961 story "Me and Miss Mandible," which is set in Horace Greeley Elementary, my alma mater (actually, I went to the one in Chappaqua and, to be perfectly honest, I once played softball against Barthelme's future wife).
posted by Howard Junker at 6:00 AM
2 Comments:
What's wrong with Tom Franklin? I enjoyed "Poachers." I thought the novella that ended the collection was a fine piece of Southern Gothic.
"The Rest of Her Life" by Steve Yarbrough is better than anything I've read in ZYZZYVA by a long shot. (I don't know which Yarbrough story is in the Granta anthology.)
I used to like Donald Barthelme...back in the '70s. I can't stomach reading him these days.
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