|
老少咸宜的短篇佳作 《牛津美国短篇小说选》（The Oxford Book of American Short Stories）不乏优秀的候选作家，乔伊斯·卡罗尔·欧茨便是其中之一。她是1992年第一版及今年新版小说选的供稿人和编辑。这一次，欧茨说，她“很高兴能够从美国经典作家的作品中发现一些不为人知、却引人入胜的佳作”。也就是说，第一版收录了厄内斯特·海明威的著作《一个干净明亮的地方》（A Clean, Well-Lighted Place），今年的新版则会收录其相对而言不那么出名的作品《白象似的群山》（Hills Like White Elephants）。这篇小说出版于1927年，通篇都是一男一女在西班牙火车站的对话，句子简洁而零散。它已经成为海明威标志性的风格，也是后人竞相模仿的对象。 欧茨还把约翰·契弗和平克尼·本尼迪克特的旧作换成了新作。她将15名老作家剔除出候选作家名单，取而代之的是17张新面孔，其中包括朱诺特·迪亚兹。我对迪亚兹还很陌生，但《纽约客》（The New Yorker）的编辑们和普利策奖委员会都已经对她很熟悉了。迪亚兹不仅带来了一个精彩的短篇——《新泽西州，爱迪生市》（Edison, New Jersey），还留下一句箴言，我们当中有些人对这句箴言体会尤深：“作家之所以成其为作家，乃是因为即使毫无希望，即使所做的事情前途渺茫，他还是会坚持写下去。” 《牛津美国短篇小说选》的编选初衷是为了展开全方位的研究，帮助读者形成深厚的文学功底，但它的作用远不止于此。你可以随时随地沉浸其中，又可以随时随地将它放在一边。它是一本有趣的读物，上面登载了各个入选作家鞭辟入里的背景简介。全书收录短篇小说59篇，供稿名家包括雷蒙德·卡佛、塞缪尔·克莱门斯（马克·吐温——译注）、斯蒂芬·克莱恩、威廉·福克纳、F.斯科特·菲茨杰拉德、华盛顿·欧文、伯纳德·马拉默德、赫尔曼·梅尔维尔、伊迪丝·华顿及斯蒂芬·金、安妮·普罗克斯、菲利普·罗斯、约翰·厄普代克等。 |
Short Stories for Everyone The Oxford Book of American Short Stories has lots going for it, including Joyce Carol Oates, who contributed to and edited both this edition and the original, which was published in 1992. This time around, Oates says she was "pleased to discover virtually unknown yet fascinating work by certain classic American writers." That means Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which appeared in the first edition, has been replaced by "Hills Like White Elephants," a lesser-known story, published in 1927, that consists almost entirely of a conversation between a man and a women at a train station in Spain, talking in the lean, staccato-like manner that became Hemingway's trademark and a style hundreds of others would copy. Oates also replaced older stories by John Cheever and Pinckney Benedict with newer ones. She totally eliminated the work of 15 other writers, but made up for the deletions with 17 new faces, including Junot Diaz, who was new to me but not to the editors at The New Yorker and the Pulitzer Prize committee. In addition to a great short story called "Edison, New Jersey," Diaz leaves us with a message that some of us have learned the hard way: "A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing he does shows signs of promise, he keeps writing anyway." Designed as a sweeping survey that touches the appropriate literary bases, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories is all that and more. It's the kind of book you can dip into and out of at will, a fun read that includes short but meaningful background on the authors. It contains 59 stories in all, including contributions from Raymond Carver, Samuel Clemens, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Washington Irving, Bernard Malamud, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, along with Stephen King, Annie Proulx, Philip Roth, and John Updike. |
最新文章