Friday, May 30, 2008

For the love of story collections

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I've never read any fiction by Grace Paley. So I went out and bought her collected works last week, only to leave the book in the seat pocket in front of me on an airplane. I wonder who has it now, or if it ended up in the trash?

I've been thinking of story collections, about which collections have influenced me, and which I still love.

I love the stories of Kafka, Sherman Alexie, Alice Munro, Joyce, Gogol, Lorrie Moore, Katherine Mansfield, Isaac Babel, Borges, Nabokov, Salwa Bakr...my list can go on and on.

A writer I know recently said they saw collections as "MFA writing." When did this happen? Are stories doomed? I know this is a really old question, but I'm just now starting to feel sad about it.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

stories are as old as the sky and the sea! they can never be doomed :)

11:52 AM  
Blogger Leila Abu-Saba said...

I think you would LOVE Grace Paley. Get her books from the library. She has such an amazing, hilarious voice. I would have thought that you had read her in fact... your Alexandria crazy girl howling at the moon story seems influenced...

10:15 PM  
Blogger Leila Abu-Saba said...

So if not influenced, then you are Grace Paley's soul daughter... seriously.

10:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't you wish we could be in a workshop with Alice Munro and Isaac Babel!

7:09 PM  
Blogger rockslinga said...

The library! That would be so awesomely Paley-ish of me. I'm excited now, Leila!

And Dana: Babel would be so drunk and hot for us. He liked the sexy ladies.

10:36 AM  

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