James B. Hall

This collection of short stories is very impressive in its scope and depth. It includes selections by writers from Russia, western Europe, England/ Ireland, and North America, from years that span the late 19th century though 1970. I appreciated the chance to read works by authors I was unfamiliar with, along with selections from authors that I knew only somewhat. The works are divided first by overall time frame, and subdivided by nationality. Among the authors represented are the following: Ambrose Bierce, Anton Chekhov, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Ted Hughes, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, D.H Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Leo Tolstoy, and Jean-Paul Sartre

While acknowledging the collection's ambitious scope, my reactions to the various selections were rather mixed, as is often the case with such collections. On a five-star scale, I ranked most with two to four stars, as indicated below. Significantly, the most recent stories (listed under the heading "New Dimensions" I found to be significantly lower in quality (or at least, not at all to my taste), with the notable exceptions of of Jackons' "The Lottery" (which any short story buff should know) and O’Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

This book may be hard to find, but at present, it can be checked out from an online library at the following web address: https://archive.org/details/realmoffiction6100hall/page/n3/mode/2up

Contents and my rankings are as follows:

The Older Masters
Russia:
A Living Relic (Turgenev) 1*
A Christmas Tree and a Wedding (Dostoevsky) 3*
The Story of Yemilyan and the Empty Drum (Tolstoy) 3*
The Bet (Chekhov) 3*

Europe:
Ritter Gluck (ETA Hoffman) --
The Taking of the Redoubt (P. Merimee) --
Consolation (G. Verga) --
The Piece of String (G. de Maupassant) 3.5*

England-Ireland:
The Traveler’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed (W. Collins) 3*
A Tradition of 1804 (T. Hardy) 3*
The Sisters Qita (A. Bennett) 3*
The Story of Muhhammad Din *
The Lord of the Dynamos (HG Wells) 3*
The Remarkable Rocket (O. Wilde) 2*
An Outpost of Progress (J. Conrad) 3*

United States:
Young Brown (Hawthorne) --
The Black Cat (Poe) 4*
Tennessee’s Partner B. Harte) *
A Psychological Shipwreck (A. Bierce) **
Jim Baker’s Blue-jay Yarn (M. Twain) --
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (Stephen Crane) 4*
A Deal in Wheat (F. Norris) 2*

The Later Accomplishment
Russia:
The Young Man Who Flew Past (Averchenko) 3.5*
The Awakening (Babel) 3.5*
Our Father Who Art in Heaven (Katayev) --

Europe:
Tobias Mindernickel (Mann) X
The Poet (Babel) --
Jackals and Arabs (Kafka) --
The Last Judgement (Capek) 4*
The Chronicle of an Old Rose Tree (Myriveles) 3*
The Wall (Sartre) 2*
England- Ireland:
Ivy Day in the Committee Room (Joyce) – (?)
The Blind Man (Lawrence) --
The Fly (Mansfield) *
The Other Side of the Hedge (Forster) --
The Duchess and the Jeweler (Woolf) 3*
Her Table Spread (Bowen) --
Brother (Greene) --
Christmas Morning (O’ Connor) 4*

United States:
“Europe” (James) --
While the Auto Waits (O. Henry) 3*
The Egg (S. Anderson) 4*
The Long Way Out (Fitzgerald) 3*
A Clean Well- Lighted Place (Hemingway) 2*
A Rose for Emily (Faulkner) 3*
Rope (Katherine Anne Porter) 3*
The Benefits of American Life (James T. Farrell) 3*
Astronomer’s Wife (Kay Boyle) 3*

New Dimensions
The Boar Hunt (Vasconcelos) --
The Secret Miracle (Borges) --
The Lottery (Jackson) 4*
The Jewbird (Malamud) --
The Life You Save May Be Your Own (Flannery O’Connor) 4*
The Brigadier (Rosenfeld) --
Happy Marriage (Cassill) --
Wedding Night (Landolfi) --
Snow (T. Hughes) X
Us He Devours (James B. Hall) --
A World Ends (Hildesheimer) X
The Secret Room (Robbe-Grillet) X
Stories and Texts for Nothing, III (Beckett) X… (plus d'informations)

I am not going to do a real review. Reviewing this type of book – a book that was assigned as part of a university-level English class I took back in 1970 – is a fool's game because the odds of you finding this particular book or even wanting to search out this particular book are quite low. Instead, I want to talk about why it might be worth your while to revisit the similar type of book I'm guessing you already own – a collection you were assigned in college, read a few pieces from (the ones that were required), maybe even read a few other selections because they sounded interesting, and then, after completing the class or maybe at graduation, you put into the stack of books that you just never got around to selling to the used book store.

Again, this is not a review. This, instead, is about revisiting the past and about remembering why certain authors are held in such high esteem

There are innumerable authors we "should" all read. And a large portion of them were force fed to us in high school and college in environments where we just weren't ready to understand anything going on within them. Some seemed dated, some seemed long, some seemed boring, and a good portion of them never spoke to us (nor could we figure out how they spoke to anybody else.) We read the books and barely passed the associated exams.

Of course there were exceptions. Those one or two authors who wrote "classics" that we found accessible or entertaining or brilliant or one way or another made it worth the read. You have yours; I have mine. And I guess that is the entire purpose for the inundation in the classics we all must endure – the hope that one or two things might stick.

But, as time passes, we become much more than we used to be. And what I have found is that it is worth going back and trying again. I have spent the last few years going back to authors I should have read and didn't. In some cases, I am less than impressed. But in others I suddenly understand what the hoopla is about. Had I not been willing to revisit I never would have understand why anyone would care about Maugham or Dickens or Conrad or Chandler or an increasingly large number of authors whose works I now actively seek out.

So, back to this collection (and back to similar collections you may have in your bookstacks – because bookshelves are too constraining.)

As I read this collection I was reminded why a number of these authors are considered "must reads". Here's a quick list of the authors whose works (just the works from this book) stuck with me: Dostoevsky, De Alarcon, De Maupassant, Chekov, Hawthorne, Bierce, Chesnutt, Crane, Capek, Sartre, Forster, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Hughes, Steinbeck, Bellow – you get the idea.

Some of those authors I didn't remember. Others I remembered as ones which did not impress me. Others have always impressed me. And others have only recently (last few years) impressed me.

Again, there is a reason famous authors receive that fame. (A quick aside – I do not mean the "famous at this point in time" fame that current best sellers or even of-the-moment, everyone-should-pay-attention-to-them authors currently have. The worst part of this book was the authors that were considered au courant when the book was published – 1970. Some were fine. Others had not held up and felt to be nothing more than failed experiments. Time had not had a chance to make a decision on quality.) If you are unaware of the authors who have rightly achieved historical fame, then it is worth going back and diving back in. There is already more reading than any of us can accomplish in multiple lifetimes. But it is always good to have more – that is, it is always good to have more quality reading.

You want to search this particular book out? It will be worth your while. However, I'm willing to bet you've already got one just like it. Dig it out, and dig into it.… (plus d'informations)