The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories
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Price: $12.49
You Save: $9.51 (43%)
List Price:
Price: $12.49
You Save: $9.51 (43%)
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Halpern Daniel
The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories
 List Price: Price: $11.92 You Save: $9.08 (43%) DescriptionFollowing the immense success of The Art of the Tale, Daniel Halpern has assembled the next generation of short-story writers--those born after 1937--to create a companion volume, The Art of the Story. Attesting to the depth, range, and continued popularity of short fiction, this collection includes seventy-eight contributors from thirty-five countries. The Art of the Story combines the best of the established masters as well as the fresh, new voices of writers whose work has seldom been translated into English. A reader doesn't want to love every story in an anthology. A collection of short fiction by various authors should be just that: various. We want all the stories to be admirable, but not necessarily lovable. This is how anthologies do their job, which is to teach us to love new forms of fiction. And this is how Daniel Halpern, editor of The Art of the Story, does his job. Halpern previously brought us the successful and far-reaching collection The Art of the Tale. Now he has taken upon himself the task of creating an international sampling of the contemporary short story. Seventy-eight writers from 35 countries--including Banana Yoshimoto, Junot Díaz, Peter Hoeg, Julian Barnes, T.C. Boyle, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Edwidge Danticat, and Tatyana Tolstaya--demonstrate that the story still brims with unrest and disharmony and, well, variousness. The classical form, the story that implies the world in a truncated scene or two, that implies a life in a single moment, is amply represented in this collection by writers like Ann Beattie ("In Amalfi") and Raymond Carver ("Are These Actual Miles?"). But the new story ranges farther than the personal, making inroads into the parodic, the fantastic, the speculative. As Halpern writes in the preface, "There seems to be a more investigative nature to the fiction of these stories written so close to the end of this century, a tendency, especially among writers from emerging nations, to use the story as a means of orientation, to restate for themselves their position--politically, socially, and artistically--as if for these writers there is radically less separation between reality and the imagination." Certainly this is an apt description of the fiction of Nigeria's Booker Prize winner Ben Okri ("In the Shadow of War") and of American newcomer Nathan Englander, whose "The Twenty-Seventh Man" describes the slaughter of Yiddish writers and contains the unforgettable dictate, "Never outlive your language." --Claire Dederer
Writers on Artists
 List Price: Price: $60.84 DescriptionDaniel Halpern has gathered together essays by over forty distinguished writers who discuss artists, works, or genres of visual art that have profoundly inspired or disturbed them. Now available in paperback, this volume covers a broad spectrum of world art history, ranging from Italian Renaissance painting to the abstract modern art of the twentieth century. Here one finds Ford Madox Ford writing on Holbein, Sartre on Tintoretto, Genet on Rembrandt, Proust on Chardin, Elizabeth Bishop on Gregorio Valdes, Randall Jarrell on abstract expressionism, and many other stimulating combinations. Each selection is accompanied by a full-page reproduction of the artist's work.
Something Shining: Poems
 List Price: Price: $7.80 You Save: $7.20 (48%) DescriptionWidely praised for his earlier collections, Daniel Halpern has grown steadily in stature and attainment. Now, with Something Shining, his first collection of new poems in seven years, he gives us an ambitious, wide-ranging meditation on birth, love, and maturity, marking a turning point in both his life and his work.These beautifully crafted poems explore relations between lovers, between friends, between fathers and children. Written by the light of a young daughter's presence, in the distinctive lyrical language that Ted Hughes described as "so free and effortless and unerring," these poems ponder the fading of the body and the struggle that consciousness wages to keep the self afloat. And into this intimate world also enter a surprising array of characters: ancient Chinese poets and modern Cuban musicians, Charlie Parker, Chekhov, and the dervish mystic Rumi. But it is the poet's awareness of his own frailty ("the days run out--no longer oneself," he writes in "Fugue"), that, together with the extraordinary beauty he discovers in environments familiar and exotic, unifies this collection. The work of a poet at the top of his form, Something Shining confirms Halpern's place in our national literature.
Reading the Fights: The Best Writing About the Most Controversial of Sports
 List Price: Price: $48.90 DescriptionHalpern Daniel News
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