Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction - Hardcover

Various

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525937358 ISBN 13: 9780525937357

Publisher: Dutton, 1994

Synopsis

An anthology of short stories that originally appeared in Playboy magazine presents tales by Bashevis Singer, Gordimer, Garci+a7a Ma+a7rquez, Nabokov, Borges, Malamud, Shaw, Updike, Tom McGuane, Corraghessan Boyle, and others. 25,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From Booklist

The usual big names are here (including Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw, Johns Updike and Cheever, and the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates), but up-and-comers are featured prominently. And editor Turner deserves praise for including several stories by women authors; in fact, two standouts are Laurie Colwin's poignant "My Mistress" and Bharati Mukherjee's electric "The Middle Man." Two long pieces--Nelson Algren's take on Depression-era carnival life, "The Last Carousel," and Norman Mailer's bizarre tale of black masses and Joan of Arc, "Trail of the Warlock"--are balanced by stories with traditional O. Henry-style endings, such as Roald Dahl's chilling "A Fine Son," Thomas McGuane's blunt "Like a Leaf," Bernard Malamud's wise "Naked Nude," and T. Coraghessan Boyle's funny-sad "Modern Love." There's even a laugh-out-loud "lost" segment of Catch-22, in which Joseph Heller's Yossarian determines baseball and basketball to be the stupidest sports ever invented. Glittering entries from Nabokov, Gabriel Garc{¡}ia M{ }arquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Baldwin, and Haruki Murakami round out the A list, with fascinating oddball curios like Jack Kerouac's "Good Blonde," Robert Coover's bizarre "Lucky Pierre in the Doctor's Office," and John Gardner's frightening "Julius Caesar and the Werewolf" putting the finishing touches on a grand collection. Joe Collins

From Publishers Weekly

That Playboy has always showcased first-rate mainstream fiction is evident from this superlative anthology of stories by Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Andre Dubus, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas McGuane, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer and others. Sex, when it occurs here, is often an arena of hazard or negotiation, as in Paul Theroux's prickly tale of a wealthy young Bostonian out for erotic adventure in Africa; or T. Coraghessan Boyle's ultimate satire of safe sex featuring an obsessive magazine editor who insists that her lover wear a full-body condom. Another human constant, death, pervades John Updike's account of smug tourists visiting an Egyptian necropolis and Vladimir Nabokov's witty tale of a seduction on a train. Women, though a decided minority, are represented by Joyce Carol Oates's withering portrait of American academics transplanted to Canada amid the 1960s counterculture; Nadine Gordimer's powerful tale of an Afrikaner farmer's disposal of the corpse of a black man; Laurie Colwin's disarmingly direct narrative of an adulterer; and pieces by Shirley Jackson, Bharati Mukherjee and Ursula LeGuin. Playboy fiction editor Turner has pulled together a smart anthology that constantly entertains and provokes.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0525937358
• ISBN 13: 9780525937357
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 624
• Editor: Turner Alice K.