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.
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.
posted by rockslinga at 1:00 PM
5 Comments:
stories are as old as the sky and the sea! they can never be doomed :)
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...
So if not influenced, then you are Grace Paley's soul daughter... seriously.
Don't you wish we could be in a workshop with Alice Munro and Isaac Babel!
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.
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