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A great collection, but only if you're a writer seeking out information on the short story format. For anyone else, the stories are compelling, but you'll find the writer interviews extremely tedious and dull.
A great book for writers. You get 12 solid stories and interviews with their authors about their creation. While some are a bit erudite for my taste, there is much to be gleaned about the creative writing process, both the mystery and deliberation of crafting a memorable short story.
The stories were good, but the interviews with the writers were great because I got to see the techniques the writers used with varying degrees of success.
It's always great to read interviews with authors, just to see where their head was at and what their processes are. As a writer it helps to understand all these variations on craft.
I truly enjoyed the interview portions; quite enlightening.
So far some of the stories seem more competent and topical than enduring.
Loved this book - it's so good. The interviews and the 12 short stories: really engaging. I want to assign this to every fiction class I teach from here on in but I think it's out of print. Which is criminal!
An excellent compendium with wonderful authors. Personally, my top three stories from this collection is Lahiri's "Third and Final Continent," Johnson's "China," and Garrett's "A Record as Long as Your Arm," but all are worthy of a read.The editor, Paul Mandelbaum, arranged the stories into pairs with each pair exemplifying character, plot, POV/voice, setting, structure, or theme. Of course, all good stories will address all of these, but some highlight areas more predominantly than others.Wheth...
Honestly, I was rather disappointed by this one. I'm an addict when it comes to actual writers talking about the nitty-gritty details of their process, which I thought this book would offer. Instead, we get the author's story--only about half of which did I find good/enlightening--followed by an interview between them and Mandelbaum.Sure, some of them were rather instructive, but often, I just wanted the author to have a chance to express themself fully. I don't know, maybe I'm just picky. Or pe...