The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories

I have had a hectic week or so at the moment with very little sleep as I am currently in the process of moving into an apartment in a new city. Yes, you read that correctly. Though you may think I'm crazy for leaving the awesomeness of Birmingham, I can assure you: you may take the girl out of Birmingham, but you can't take Birmingham out of the girl. But, I'm still trying to keep a good reading schedule no matter what's happening. It's the one thing in the world that keeps me sane and so, here we are with the New Penguin Anthology of American Short Stories. Yes, I've read a lot of them before but that's besides the point. Between you and me, this is a comfort read in a difficult time.

The book opens with some Washington Irving. The grandfather of the American Short Story, I feel like he is still underrated with many people knowing of his work The Legend of Sleepy Hollow more than anything else. His story The Little Black Man teeters on the same junction as it starts with this almost folkoric atmosphere of someone passing down a story through the generations and our narrator reciting it to us. It is a story about redemption and how not to prejudge people as misanthropic when we don't really know them all that well at all. The story is one that starts off rather strange but ends in a way that is still yet, unexpected.

I could not tell you how many times I have read the story Young Goodman Brown and I still cannot put into words how much I enjoy it. I often teach this one when going through some creative writing stuff, either looking at the flaws of the main character and the reasons for his distrust (character motivations) or the atmosphere of the woodlands in comparison to what we know from folklore and fairy tales. Young Goodman Brown was always one of the highlights for me when reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and I think if I read the story again in a new updated anthology in a decade's time, I would still love it.

What would a short story anthology of American tales be without Tell-Tale Heart? It wouldn't. But I can tell you what I was surprised to find within: I Bought a Little City. For all of those that teach creative writing, to not include I Bought a Little City would be beyond me.

It is one of those stories which I usually use to teach about unchecked ambitions and the flaws in pursuing perfection. It is a wonderful story about a man who bought a city in Texas and initially spends his time doing it up and making it all nice and liveable. After this, he begins the slaughters, he begins the wrongs and the violence in pursuit of what he thinks could maintain or even improve the perfection of the city. Normally, teenagers quite like this one because they find it very readable and it's written in first person. But I was quite glad to find it included in this anthology because it doesn't normally get a mention. It is highly underrated.

New York to Detroit by Dorothy Parker was pretty good too - it wasn't one I had heard of by the author before and so, I was going in already interested. The whole story is a telephone call between two people: the woman is in New York and the man (Jack) is in Detroit. The problem is, when the woman talks normally, Jack can't hear her and so, she starts shouting down the phone about how much she misses him. However, this is where he's confused because he can hear that she's either mumbling or shouting. I found it to be quite a twisting story, completely made up of dialogue and though this is an odd structure - it still proved to be a successful story.

From William Faulkner to Eudora Welty, from Dorothy Parker to John Updike, John Cheever and even Jhumpa Lahiri. This anthology really does have it all when it comes to great stories about Americans in every age of life. From F Scott Fitzgerald's Lost Decade, to The Flowers by Alice Walker, this book really does put each great American age on the historical and literary map.