The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)A warning to students using this as a textbook: take note that this version is the COMPACT 7th edition, and may very well be useless to you if you've been assigned the 7th edition of the text. To call this book "compact" is incredibly misleading. It's outright missing fifty-one stories and then some, compared against the regular version. The last sentence in the description on the back cover, not replicated in Amazon's product description, briefly mentions the book's creative definition of "compact." The word isn't even part of the official title, so you won't find it listed as such on Amazon's website. The only indication that this is the vastly shorter version is the cover image, which is probably too small to easily make out, and the listed word count, which only helps if you know what it's supposed to be. Had they called this a condensed or abridged version, or an excised one, the book's nature would be much clearer. Also, I might not be out forty bucks. I'm guessing I'm not the first. Good luck finding the regular 7th edition on Amazon; I couldn't.
Content-wise, I expect this to be an excellent and informative book. It has a very wide range of authors and stories, even when missing 40% of them. Were I reviewing the regular edition, I would likely give it five stars. Perhaps I will, after I'm forced to buy it too.

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During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Accordingly, her choice of fiction in the first edition of her The Story and Its Writer was as notable for its student appeal as it was for its quality and range. And to complement these stories, she introduced a lasting innovation: an array of the writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story. In subsequent editions her sense of what works was confirmed as the book evolved into the most comprehensive, diverse-- and bestselling -- introduction to fiction anthology. Instructors rely on Ann Charters' ability to assemble an authoritative and teachable anthology, and anticipate each edition's selection of new writers and stories.

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