The Best American Short Stories 1976 [antikvár]

Foreword "He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions." Ever since I was a child I have cherished that description in a Stephen Leacock nonsense novel but never did I feel like Lord Ronald until this year when I tried to decide the trend of American short stories. Their variety is astonishing. They can be innovative or traditional, realistic or romantic, light-hearted or tragic, concise as a fable or long as a novella. By the thousands they have been published in weeklies, monthlies, bimonthlies, quarterlies and semiannuals, ranging in format from cheap, unbound newsprint pages through more conventional layouts to sumptuous productions on quality paper with stitched bindings and lavish illustrations. Their authors are equally various. They may be world-famous men and women or promising young beginners but only merit wins them a place in the literary magazines. Unfortunately most people never see these magazines because few ever appear on newsstands, owing to a monopolistic distribution system and the usurpadon of all the media by advertisers in the last half-century. The invisibility of the good magazines, with their abundance of fine reading, fiction and non-fiction, has resulted in a widespread impression that short stories and the novel are dying. Some reviewers, isolated on the East Coast, have been led to encourage the false assumption. This when there is greater literary activity throughout the entire United States than ever before! Stories are timeless. The Jakata, an anthology published in 483 b.c. in India, includes five hundred short stories. With our Western one-hemisphere minds we forget there were civilizations with great