Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19262 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"Always a sure bet for gripping, emotionally challenging reading." (San Diego Union-Tribuen )

About the Author
Heidi Pitlor is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin. Her fiction has been published in Ploughshares, and she is the author of the novel The Birthdays. She lives with her husband and twin son and daughter outside of Boston, Massachusetts.  

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was at the center of The Satanic Verses controversy, with protests from Muslims in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, with Rushdie facing death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, in February, 1989. In response to the call for him to be killed, Rushdie spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically, but was outspoken on the fatwa's censoring effect on him as an author and the threat to freedom of expression it embodied.

He was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to literature" in June 2007. He also holds the highest rank — Commandeur — in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. He began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007. In May 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest novel is The Enchantress of Florence, published in June 2008. In July 2008 Midnight's Children won a public vote to be named the Best of the Booker, the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the award's 40-year history.

Customer Reviews

Recommended
I look forward to this series every year, so it was with high hopes that I opened up this year's editon and began to read. The format is the same as it has been for years, with Ms. Pitlor cherry picking stories and handing over a hundred or so vetted stories to the guest editor. I don't get too caught up in who the guest editor is in any given year - I think Ms. Pitlor does a good job in gathering a pool of quality stories, but this year I thought the overall effort was slightly below the average.

Four of the stories in the collection come from Harper's Magazine, and while I was glad to see the series move away from being so New Yorker oriented, I subscribe to Harper's, so those stories weren't new to me. To of them deserved rereading anyway - the masterful Alice Munro with "Child's Play", and Nicole Krauss, "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky."

Two of the three stories from the New Yorker were also quite well done - "Puppy", by George Saunders, and "Nawabdin Electrician" by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Others that I felt really rose above were "Buying Lenin" by Miroslav Penkov, "Man and Wife," by Katie Chase, and "Straightaway," by Mark Wisniewski.

Four of the stories in this collection would fall under what I would loosely consider 'Fabulist' stories, and those are not really my thing, although I still enjoyed "Man and Wife." Perhaps that is a trend, because I don't remember as much of that in years past.

One of the things I've always enjoyed about this series is that it collects stories I'm sure I'd never get to see otherwise, and that always makes it worth it to me. This year, I would just have to say that not all of it was as interesting to me as other years. I would still definetly recommend it to anyone who enjoys short stories.

good variety of short stories
Bought at the airport for a Denver-Seattle trip, I found these stories ranged from fair to excellent, with plenty of very good ones. These tend toward moderately serious, with definite purpose and action, and minimal preaching, and are 20-30 pages apiece.

What else should a short-story review report to avoid any more "not useful" feedback? I like short stories, and have not come across such a good collection in my lackadaisical eclectic sampling for quite a few years. Several, including the ones about the guy on the motorcycle, the swimming girls, and the puppy adoption, remain on my mind still.

The brief biographies and authors' comments about their stories was a welcome addendum.

Good Read, Not as Amazing as Previous Years
I love this series, have been reading it for years. Definitely more stylistically trendy stories chosen for 2008, many by popular young writers.