Sudden Fiction International by Robert Shapard, James Thomas (Editor)

From the Publisher

'Sudden Fiction International is even better than its predecessor. It's a fine teaching tool, a good gift, it's Around - the - world - in - Sixty - Stories, with many surprises, new friends, old friends, almost every stop a brief wonder in itself.'--Alan Cheuse

Publishers Weekly

Shapard and Thomas ( Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories ) gather 60 highly readable, very brief tales from 32 countries, including the U.S. In an astute introduction, Charles Baxter ( First Light ) points out that the shortest stories often have ``to do with a sudden crisis, in which the character does not act so much as react . . . . When a character reacts, the situation is larger and more powerful than that character is.'' In Colette's ``The Other Wife,'' a married couple enters a restaurant, where the man steers his wife away from a table occupied by his ex-wife; in ``One of These Days,'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a mayor in a totalitarian regime demands to have an infected tooth pulled, threatening to shoot the dentist if he refuses, and the dentist proceeds without anesthesia, saying, ``Now you'll pay for our twenty dead men.'' Many writers here (e.g., Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Jorge Luis Borges) are widely published; others, such as Poland's Slawomir Mrozek and India's Krishnan Varma, present foreign cultures in distinctive styles that invite further attention. (Oct.)

Library Journal

A follow-up to Sudden Fiction ( LJ 11/1/86), this anthology presents an enticing smorgasbord of 60 short-short stories (none longer than five pages) from every continent, including work from such rarely represented countries as Botswana, Guatemala, Cyprus, and Pakistan. Although a quarter of the stories are from the United States, where the short-short form now flourishes, the catalog of international writers is impressive: Cortazar, Kawabata, Boll, Colette, Dinesen, Gordimer, Garcia Marquez, Babal, Calvino, and splendid lesser-knowns such as Krishnan Varma. Not all these exotic delights will suit every palate--the stories range from realism to absurdist fantasy, poetic lyric to political allegory--but one is always left hungry enough to try another. The collection also includes commentaries by the writers and translators and is perhaps even better than the earlier book.--Peter Bricklebank, City Coll., CUNY

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