More Stories We Tell
The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women
Author: Wendy Martin
These 28 stories explore the diverse terrain of women's experiences as mothers, daughters, wives, lovers, artists, and friends. Ellen Gilchrist's "Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle" chronicles the touching romance between a young schoolteacher from Arkansas and an earnest Chinese medical student; Alice McDermott's "Enough" introduces us to a woman with an insatiable desire for ice cream. Here, too, are stories by such classic practitioners of the form as Sandra Cisneros, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Joyce Carol Oates, and by writers more recently arrived on the literary scene, including Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, and Marisa Silver. In her introduction, Wendy Martin describes this anthology as "wrestling with the cultural and social prohibitions that have been with us for centuries." Taken together, these stories provide a collective mirror of the remarkable transformations that have occurred in the lives of women in the final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
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Summary
These 28 stories explore the diverse terrain of women's experiences as mothers, daughters, wives, lovers, artists, and friends. Ellen Gilchrist's "Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle" chronicles the touching romance between a young schoolteacher from Arkansas and an earnest Chinese medical student; Alice McDermott's "Enough" introduces us to a woman with an insatiable desire for ice cream. Here, too, are stories by such classic practitioners of the form as Sandra Cisneros, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Joyce Carol Oates, and by writers more recently arrived on the literary scene, including Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, and Marisa Silver. In her introduction, Wendy Martin describes this anthology as "wrestling with the cultural and social prohibitions that have been with us for centuries." Taken together, these stories provide a collective mirror of the remarkable transformations that have occurred in the lives of women in the final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
Description
Should be displayed with any and all literary fiction that is front-of-store.The second collectiondrawn together by editor Wendy Martin, these twenty-four exquisiteexamples of contemporary writing feature stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gaitskill, Sandra Cisneros, and Lorrie Moore (to name a few).We Are the Stories We Tell is also available from Pantheon.
Critic Reviews
“"This is a masterly collection of the work of writers who almost invariably deliver the deep pleasures of first-rate literature. It is a joy and a privilege simply to hold it in one's hands." --Vivian Gornick ”
“This is a masterly collection of the work of writers who almost invariably deliver the deep pleasures of first-rate literature. It is a joy and a privilege simply to hold it in one’s hands.”
—Vivian Gornick
“Engrossing, inventive, inspiring, the stories gathered here testify to the range and richness of women’s literary traditions as they have triumphantly moved into the twenty-first century. Wendy Martin’s shrewd selections document contemporary complexities along with the enduring powers of the authorial imagination. Read and rejoice.”
—Sandra M. Gilbert, author of The Madwoman in the Attic
“Reading these sparkling stories by contemporary masters is pure pleasure. No sooner did I finish one than I was drawn into the next. Together they constitute an eloquent tribute to the fine art of American short fiction.”
—Alix Kates Shulman, author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
“This wonderful collection gives us a rich sense of the varieties of female experience, allowing us to experience nuanced, insightful, gripping, and sometimes humorous accounts of the emotional and cultural-political worlds in which women create their lives.”
—Nancy J. Chodorow, author of The Reproduction of Mothering
“More Stories We Tell builds a many-chambered honeycomb out of myriad female experiences, and the whole is subtly greater than the sum of the intricate parts. The anthology is a pleasure to read from beginning to end—expertly selected fiction that would be at home in any ‘Best Of’ collection. A book to give as well as to savor.”
—Diane Middlebrook, author of Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage
About the Author
WENDY MARTIN is chair of the Department of English at Claremont Graduate University. She is also the editor of We Are the Stories We Tell (available from Pantheon). She lives in Berkeley, California.
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