The Library of America’s titles for the early months of 2013, which we announced last summer, have all either arrived from the printer or are currently at press. We’ve just finalized the line-up for the remainder of the year. Below are the publications for May and beyond, including four authors new to The Library of America series and the latest volume in the American Poets Project series.
John Updike
The Collected Stories
Christopher Carduff, editor
September 2013
Boxed set / ISBN 978-1-59853-250-0
Volume 1: Collected Early Stories (102 stories)
Library of America #242 / ISBN 978-1-59853-251-7
Volume 2: Collected Later Stories (84 stories)
Library of America #243 / ISBN 978-1-59853-252-4
Ring Lardner
Stories & Other Writings
Ian Frazier, editor
You Know Me Al • The Big Town • The Real Dope • other writings
September 2013
Library of America #244 / ISBN 978-1-59853-253-1
Jonathan Edwards
Writings from the Great Awakening
Philip F. Gura, editor
Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival • A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections • other writings
October 2013
Library of America #245 / ISBN 978-1-59853-254-8
Susan Sontag
Essays of the 1960s & 70s
David Rieff, editor
Against Interpretation • Styles of Radical Will • On Photography • Illness as Metaphor • uncollected essays
October 2013
Library of America #246 / ISBN 978-1-59853-255-5
American Musicals
The Complete Books and Lyrics of Sixteen Classic Broadway Shows
Laurence Maslon, editor
Show Boat • As Thousands Cheer • Pal Joey • Oklahoma! • Kiss Me, Kate • South Pacific • My Fair Lady • nine others*
November 2013
Boxed set / ISBN 978-1-59853-257-9
Volume 1: 1927–1949 / Library of America #253 / ISBN 978-1-59853-258-6
Volume 2: 1950–1969 / Library of America #254 / ISBN 978-1-59853-259-3
Countee Cullen
Collected Poems
Major Jackson, editor
Copper Sun • The Ballad of the Brown Girl • The Black Christ and Other Poems • other collected and uncollected poems
May 2013
American Poets Project #32 / ISBN 978-1-59853-083-4
American Pastimes
The Very Best of Red Smith
Daniel Okrent, editor
Terence Smith, afterword
May 2013
A Special Publication of The Library of America / ISBN 978-1-59853-217-3
The Cool School
Writings from America’s Hip Underground
Glenn O’Brien, editor
From bop to punk, a who’s who of the alternative set, including such writers and artists as Henry Miller, Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Annie Ross, Terry Southern, and Andy Warhol
October 2013
A Special Publication of The Library of America / ISBN 978-1-59853-256-2
New boxed sets
Dashiell Hammett
The Library of America Collection
Steven Marcus, editor
May 2013
2 volumes / Combines #110 & #125 / ISBN 978-1-59853-218-0
Reporting Civil Rights
The Library of America Collection
Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Bill Kovach, Carol Polsgrove (editorial board)
July 2013
2 volumes / Combines #137 & #138 / ISBN 978-1-59853-219-7
Update on Library of America e-books: Conversion of LOA titles, both new and backlist, to e-book formats continues apace. Eighteen titles are now available (and the latest, Slave Narratives, will be available in a few days). Library of America e-books are available in all major formats.
You can see the current list of available e-book titles at www.loa.org/ebooks.
The only must-buy I see on this list is Updike's collected stories -- his stories are arguably his strongest achievement, and the inclusion of all of them plus previously uncollected stories make this a must-buy. This is what LOA should be all about!
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I don't understand LOA's esteem for Broadway -- a regional NYC phenomena at best. The American Poets Project volumes dedicated to Foster and Berlin (?) were a waste, as was the Kaufman volume, as are these two new volumes. Preserving mere ephemera.
The inclusion of Ring Lardner is also a yawn -- unable to fathom LOA's deep investment in the genre of sports writing. Yawn.
And the two new "special publications" are also a miss. Bob Dylan?! Good grief. LOA has officially jumped the shark.
Cullen is a decent minor poet, fair enough for her. And Jonathan Edwards is a somewhat respectable intellectual figure, so okay.
BUT Susan Sontag?!? I've seen her named used as an adjective denoting intellectual pretentiousness, as in "oh that's mere Sontagism..." Definitely a period piece. Good grief.
Still waiting for the complete poems of A.R. Ammons to go with the wonderful Ashbery and Merwin and Swenson and Bishop and Frost and Stevens volumes. Still also waiting on Marianne Moore and why not also James Merrill if you can get the rights from Knopf. For me, at any rate, LOA now misses more than hits nowadays, but the hits, though increasingly sparse, still keep me coming back.
I wonder if most of the people on LOA's board who choose new titles are older, in their 60s on up?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that some recent titles -- Kerouac, Broadway shows, Cool School, Susan Sontag -- were selected because of their sentimental value to the current oldest generation. These were the works of their youth.
If so, they're doing a disservice to LOA by canonizing for the wrong reasons -- i.e., personal sentimental value vs. intrinsic merit and timeless quality.
Will we be subject to the personal whims of every successive generation on the LOA board? If so, LOA will be diluted beyond recognition by "popular" and "genre" and ***temporarily*** popular pieces.
P.S.
Do they actually, really expect people to sit down and read the text of My Fair Lady? Do these people exist?
Yes.
DeleteYou are out of touch if you think that Susan Sontag's inclusion is the result of "sentimental value" of any sort. Sontag's impact, the impact of her work, extends beyond the myopic eye's field of perception.
DeleteI find the two comments by Anonymous frustrating (and the idiosyncrasies in content, style, and punctuation reveal they were obviously written by the same person). Such comments inhibit discussion of literary worth because the author doesn’t offer any rationale for his/her opinions and instead casually tosses off nebulous terms (“period piece,” “intrinsic merit,” “timeless quality”) that will always be defined by whatever the commentator happens to like or dislike. Anonymous’s summary dismissals are the type of thing you see from petulant adolescents on Amazon (“Beyonce sucks!” “Taylor Swift rules!”).
ReplyDeleteTo wit: Anonymous pretty much admits to not having read Sontag—but once saw her name used as an adjective. (And lo: an online search reveals that the word “Sontagism” has appeared only once in print—in a New York rag published by a right-wing think tank, no less). But not having read Sontag doesn’t keep Anon from courageously dismissing her, sure that Carlos Fuentes was wrong when he compared her to Erasmus and unwilling to explain why she didn’t deserve the National Book Critics Circle Award, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a National Book Award, or the Jerusalem Prize.
Stranger still: Anonymous dismisses Ring Lardner as a (“yawn”) sports journalist, although his most acclaimed literary contributions are fiction and satire. Of course, some of the stories do involve baseball. On those grounds alone, I suppose Anon would be justified dismissing Melville as a whaler. (That Cetology chapter sure is a “yawn”!) Or, once again, perhaps Anon simply hasn’t read Lardner. Back in the day when I taught, I used to tell my students: when they criticize something they don’t yet understand, they come across as naive. But whenever they criticize something they haven’t even read, they just look ignorant.
And, while I myself am certainly not the target audience for a collection of musicals, I can easily imagine that there are readers who might want to have copies of the librettos. Anon insists on “timelessness” as a criterion; well, these musicals have lasted longer than the largely forgotten A. R. Ammons (!), for example. (Anonymous seems to have a peculiar definition of “timeless” that he or she might want to share with the class.)
Anonymous’s snap judgments often fall apart on an instant’s reflection. First: in spite of their enduring, nationwide popularity among critics and audiences and local theaters, Anon claims that musicals and comedies are “at best” Manhattan phenomena—yet the New York School poet John Ashbery isn’t. (Okay, then.) Second: Anon can’t imagine who would read the text of “My Fair Lady,” but a quick online search reveals that ten years after the musical’s first performance a 1975 Signet Classics paperback edition went through several printings. (Well, somebody must have read it.) Third, LoA shouldn’t bend to popular tastes, but they should only publish material people will actually read. If there is an intellectual coherence to the thumbs-up or thumbs-down approach of such superficiality, I’m at a loss to define it.
More bizarrely, we have Anonymous’s imaginative psychological foray into the decision-making process of the LOA board, accused of publishing “sentimental favorites” from their childhoods. What a textbook case of projection! It’s pretty clear that Anon’s version of the Library of America would contain only writings that Anon has already read and approved. And, above all: LOA must have nothing that might challenge Anonymous’s shallow, calcified concepts of “intrinsic merit.”
Fortunately, neither Anonymous nor I get to decide what or who is included in the Library of America, because then it would be the Library of A Few of My Favorite Things (and that, my friend, is a reference to one of these ephemeral musicals).
PS – One point of agreement: I, too, would love to see collections of Merrill and Moore in my LoaFoMFT collection—but as Anonymous acknowledges, I’m sure that acquiring the rights would be very difficult, perhaps impossible.
Someone has too much time on their hands... oh, an academic of course.
DeleteTwo quick points -- search for "sontagisme" not "sontagism" (my typo). It was Harold Bloom who used this to Camille Paglia, not a "right-wing think tank" -- which is hilarious, and says MUCH about your colored weltanschauung where you see fascists hidden everywhere.
Second, if you dismiss Ammons because his work is temporarily out of print soon after his death (a common happenstance while the literary executors sort out and edit new editions), you again reveal MUCH about your taste or lack thereof. Ammons will be recognized as THE major American poet of the last half of the 20th c. Far more deserving than Ring Lardner, whom I have read and who safe to say is NOT the second coming of Herman Melville!
This may be the first time I, a former junior high school teacher, have been disparagingly called an “academic.” Is this a promotion?
DeleteBut Anonymous’s response simply confirms my point: again, nothing is offered to support these literary assessments, other than his or her own impeccable, unimpeachable taste. We have, in its incontrovertible entirety: “Ammons will be recognized as THE major American poet of the last half of the 20th c.” There is absolutely nothing to distinguish such a declaration from those wielded by my eighth-graders: “Metallica is the best band EVER!” Even the use of ALL CAPS is the same. It’s a sophomoric form: argument by bludgeon.
Incidentally, I haven’t read enough of Ammons to form an opinion of his work. (Nor, for that matter, have I listened knowingly to anything by Metallica.) But Anonymous understands that’s not the point here.
Finally, it’s always revealing when the person who makes a mistake (“Sontagism” versus “Sontagisme”) lashes out at the person referring to it. But does a tastemaker like Anonymous really think his point is stronger when he trades in the Manhattan Institute for a poseur like Camille Paglia?
You conveniently misread my post -- the remark re. Sontagisme was made by Harold Bloom, strongest American literary critic of 20th c. So if you want to argue taste, I'll take Bloom's over yours without hesitation.
DeleteYou've compared Lardner with Melville and preferred Broadway shows to A.R. Ammons -- this is all we need to know about your standards of literary taste, which are philistine at best.
What top-tier writers have championed Lardner and taken up his banner? Name one. Unlike Sherwood Anderson, who was acknowledged by Faulkner and Hemingway as an important influence, and therefore worthy of canonization in LOA, Lardner had no significant literary influence. This is merely one reason why he is a period piece.
Inclusion in LOA is essentially an official act of canonization -- for more on this subject, I recommend Bloom's marvelous "The Western Canon," particularly the lists at the end, although he has since repudiated these. I'll gladly take an LOA volume of virtually any American writer whose name appears there over Ring Lardner!
But lo, Ring has his champion in junior high teacher Bryan Williams -- long may Ring live!
Although we have only Paglia’s word that Bloom coined the term “Sontagisme,”and in spite of Paglia’s reputation for invention and embellishment, I’ll concede the point.
DeleteAs for Anonymous’s throw-down challenge: “What top-tier writers have championed Lardner and taken up his banner? Name one.”
With profound thanks to Google (which Anon might want to learn to use before making such easily refutable comments):
“Hemingway actually signed his high school pieces ‘Ring Lardner, Jr.,’ and Edmund Wilson would later link the two writers.”— Wilfrid Sheed
“Of all those prominent writers most influenced by Ring to one extent or another (among who can be counted James T. Farrell, Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, John O’Hara and James Thurber) it was Hemingway who felt the influence most deeply. . .”—Jonathan Yardley
“Fitzgerald admired Lardner’s work and tried to promote his reputation, bringing together Lardner and editor Maxwell Perkins and providing the title for Lardner’s first Scribner’s title, How to Write a Short Story, a collection that prompted a reassessment of Lardner’s fiction.”—Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the Cambridge History of American Literature, Morris Dickstein lists the writers who “most impressed” J. D. Salinger: “Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Nelson Algren, and William Saroyan”
“H.L. Mencken, Ring Lardner, Joseph Mitchell, Edmund Wilson and dozens of other major American writers were working journalists before they were canonized in the church of literature.”—William Zinzer, in “On Writing Well”
“It is no surprise to learn that Ring Lardner and Nathanael West were among Miss O’Connor’s favorite writers.”—a 1972 essay by Richard Freeman on Flannery O’Connor
“I will do my best to believe that the language of Tennyson and the language of Whitman are one and the same. But may I explain that the responsibility for my error rests with Walt Whitman himself, with Mr. Ring Lardner, Mr. Sherwood Anderson, and Mr. Sinclair Lewis? I had been reading these writers and thinking how magnificent a language American is. ”—Virginia Woolf (actually, Woolf wrote an entire essay praising Lardner, which I strongly recommend)
“If Ring Lardner outlasts our day, as I do not doubt he will, it is possible that Dorothy Parker will, too.”—Edmund Wilson
“I tried again and again to get him [Paul Rosenfeld] to read such writers as Ring Lardner and Mark Twain, but I never had the least success.”—Edmund Wilson
(But what would Edmund Wilson know? The very existence of The Library of America is entirely his fault.)
I could add to this list ad infinitum, but somebody would probably throw down a penalty flag.
Whoop de do, the old goat knows how to copy/paste. If pressing CTRL+C required IQ points, you'd be a genius.
DeleteRegardless, there's a difference between lip service and professional courtesies between writers and an actual LITERARY influence that is discernible as a relationship between the works of one writer and another. Sherwood Anderson, with his pathos, epiphanies, and unsentimental style left his fingerprints on the WORK of Hemingway and Faulkner in ways that Lardner never did.
This is the difference between literary GOSSIP and literary INFLUENCE. And this is why Anderson belongs in LOA but Lardner does not.
About literary influence, Bloom has taught us that writers are ready to praise those weak precursors whom they do not perceive as threats to their own artistic strength, and in fact often denigrate those writers who are the REAL influence because their prior achievement induces anxiety -- to wit, the shabby treatment of Anderson by both Hemingway and Faulkner.
So praise of Lardner by Hemingway and Faulkner -- which, incidentally, you do not provide; instead, you offer merely third-party conclusions -- such praise, rather than evidence of influence, may in fact be interpreted as the opposite, as a freedom from fear of influence because Lardner was a weak writer.
And that is my experience reading Larder -- it is not a first- or even second-rate aesthetic experience, like Melville or Ammons or Warren or Cormac McCarthy or Welty or McCullers or Roth or DeLillo or Pynchon or... well, you get the picture.
(Faulkner? I never made any claims about Faulkner.)
DeleteBut let’s tally it up. In one corner: the opinions of William Zinser, Wilfrid Sheed, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Edmund Wilson, Morris Dickstein (“one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature”—Norman Mailer), Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Yardley—all highly acclaimed and respected essayists and fiction writers.
In the other: Anonymous’s proclaimed ability to telepathically channel Harold Bloom, who (as far as I’ve been able to determine) never wrote anything about Ring Lardner at all. Regardless, not even Bloom, as much as I too admire him as a critic, is always right, nor can he be expected to read and write about every American author. And, as much as Bloom wrote about scriptural texts, I doubt he intended to supplant them with his personal tastes.
Let’s close with a reminder: We are discussing the Library of America, not the “Library of Authors Harold Bloom Has Read and Approved” (and definitely not the “Library of Anonymous” or the “Library of Bryan Williams”)
And, with that, I bow out of this debate.
PS – Readers might want to check out the five stories singled out by famed poet John Berryman as Lardner’s best: “Haircut” (“which deserves its fame,” according to Berryman), “Harmony,” “Some Like Them Cold,” “The Golden Honeymoon,” and “I Can’t Breathe.” Berryman’s essay, comparing and contrasting Dreiser, Lardner, and Fitzgerald, is reprinted in “The Freedom of the Poet.” Berryman is right: They are all fantastic stories--and not a one of them is about baseball! John Updike also included “The Golden Honeymoon” in his collection, “Best American Short Stories of the Century.”
Again you conveniently misread my post. You are such a poor reader, I begin to understand your strong liking for Lardner...
DeleteI am not channeling Bloom's opinion of Lardner; I am expressing my own independent aesthetic judgment, supported by Bloom's general theory of literary influence.
One of Bloom's profoundest insights is that academics and journalists do not make the canon -- ARTISTS make the canon by influencing other ARTISTS. Critics merely help in delineating or highlighting these often obscure relationships.
So far as I can tell, Ring Lardner had no significant influence upon any other major or even minor figure in American literature. O'Connor and Salinger may have expressed pleasure in reading him, but this is completely different from being INFLUENCED by his writing or by him as an artist.
This is why Lardner is not a canonical figure. And yes, this is my own opinion, not Bloom's, though I don't think he'd disagree with me. Lardner is an aesthetic "dead end," a period piece. If LOA enshrines Lardner, then god knows Hamlin Garland is next... or god forbid Thomas Wolfe... oh dear...
So take all your Pulitzer prize winners (a joke of a prize, evidenced by the third-rate Yardley winning it) and stuff them in a sack, mister. Having numbers on your side is more often than not a sign that you're wrong. Your literary taste is decidedly middle-brow.
And let's close with this reminder: canonization is by definition SELECTIVE. Some must live, some must die. And time settles all. LOA should have let Lardner, the Broadway shows, Kerouac, Susan Sontag, Red Smith (?!?), and the "Cool School" on the back burner for another fifty years. After the current LOA board passes on, absolutely no one would have been clamoring for the inclusion of these hopelessly minor figures in a permanent library of America's "best and most significant writing."
One more note -- John Berryman was a TERRIBLE poet. Bloom canonized him only because he was admired by Merwin and other poets of stature... but Berryman is TERRIBLE... opaque, poor quality of mind, nearly unreadable...
DeleteI recommend Robert Penn Warren and A.R. Ammons to anyone looking for a major American poet of the postwar 20th c. Both Southerners, interestingly enough.
I know I should keep my promise to bow out. At this point, I think Anonymous is trolling, tossing off unsupported opinions and ALL CAPS declarations, shifting the goal posts merely to provoke and antagonize. Just as he hasn’t read Sontag, I doubt Anon has read much of anything by Ring Lardner. (Nor has he read anything about him.) Anyone who has read his dark satires could never mistake them for sports writing.
DeleteSeveral sources I quoted did mention Lardner’s influence on other writers, of course. If I cited a critic, Anon called them third-rate or said they offered little more than literary gossip. When I quoted “artists,” Anon claimed they just enjoyed reading Lardner or touted him because he was a lesser writer and, as a result, didn’t threaten their fragile egos.
But never fear: Anon’s close reading of Lardner’s oeuvre holds the key to his non-influence! So, here, in the spirit of weary capitulation:
That "literary gossip" Flannery O’Connor had no idea what she was talking about when she wrote to her friends the Fitzgeralds in 1951: “I certainly enjoyed Catcher in the Rye. ... I reckon that man owes a lot to Ring Lardner.” How could she think such a thing? That Lardner is one of Holden Caulfield’s favorite authors must be a clever reference to the universally bad tastes of adolescents, and Salinger quoting Lardner in “Franny and Zooey” is only to show the poverty of the writing. Any resemblance in Lardner’s and Salinger’s prose styles must be a figment of O’Connor’s imagination.
Similarly, both Burton Rascoe and Hemingway must have been completely bonkers. In 1924 Hemingway, probably drunk, wrote to Ezra Pound: “Burton Rascoe said ‘In Our Time’ showed the influences of who the hell do you think?—Ring Lardner and Sherwood Anderson!" And a couple of months later, apparently still blotto, Hemingway wrote to Edmund Wilson: “Some bright guy said ‘In Our Time’ was a series of thumbnail sketches showing a great deal of talent but obviously under the influence of Ring Lardner. Yeah! That kind of stuff is fine. It doesn't bother.”
Sure enough, a decade later, Hemingway denounced Lardner (“Nothing to learn because he doesn't know anything”). Well, actually, by that time Hemingway said that about everyone who might have influenced him—including Anderson. So Anon is right! Authors “often denigrate those writers who are the REAL influence because their prior achievement induces anxiety.” Unless that author is Ring Lardner. According to Anon’s logic: Hemingway was wrong when he acknowledged Lardner’s influence and he was wrong when later he denied it, but he was right when he acknowledged Anderson’s influence and he was right when later he denied it. Can this be any clearer?
And short story writer V. S. Pritchett was making it up in 1959: “Now, mainly under the double influence of Joyce and Lardner's American successors—the stream of consciousness being married to the stream of garrulity—we begin to have a talking prose and are likely to have more.” Oh, dear lord. What a mistake! Lardner had no American successors! And comparing Lardner to Joyce! Outrage! Philistine!
John Berryman, John Updike, William Zinsser—how dare those trendy misfits resurrect the long-dead Lardner and include him in their canon of great story writers! I mean, what do they know about writing anyway (especially that Zinsser guy—who he?).
I (obviously) could go on and on, “ctrl-C-ing” dozens—no, hundreds—of readers who have discussed Lardner’s influence on other great American writers during the last century. But they all must be mistaken, because Anonymous, a more astute reader than O’Connor, Rascoe, Hemingway, Berryman, Updike, Zinsser, anyone who ever won one of those disgraceful Pulitzers, and all those sixty-plus-year-olds on the LOA board, cannot find one drop of Lardner in the works of any subsequent“ major or even minor figure in American literature.”
One final note (inspired by the Anonymous School of Literary Analysis and Criticism): John Berryman was a TERRIBLE poet. Robert Penn Warren ROCKS!
The old goat employs mere argumentum ad verecundiam ad nauseum... but the mechanical rote CTRL+C job here fails to persuade. Burton Rascoe? Whoever he is, he's no Northrop Frye or Erich Auerbach or E.R. Curtius or yes Harold Bloom.
DeleteSherwood Anderson is a living influence upon major American writers. Lardner is nearly unreadable -- I read the Lardner collection in the Penguin Classics series a few years ago and found "You Know Me Al" dated beyond belief. Lardner's claim to fame is his use of the vernacular and "real speech"? As if Twain didn't exist before him? Twain and Anderson are the real influences upon Hemingway, Lardner is a historical footnote at best.
I sense here the outrage of the second-rate taste being called second-rate and perhaps realizing the truth of the accusation. You lost ALL credibility with me when you expressed admiration for John Berryman. Please spare me any further posts by saying that Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky are strong poets, or that Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs are major novelists -- statements that would defy argument...
As a reading experience, as a literary experience, Lardner pales right out of existence next to Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, and yes even Anderson. He doesn't move me, his writing doesn't impress me with its eloquence or mastery of language, descriptive or metaphorical or otherwise, and I don't sense here an intellect, a quality of mind at work. So rather than argue ad verecundiam, I will indeed resort to my own experience as a reader, which is in the final analysis all we have, and all we SHOULD resort to.
You champion Lardner, you champion Berryman, you are the Champion of the Hopelessly Mediocre. Enjoy!
Countee Cullen was male, so good for him.
ReplyDeletetouche
DeleteThis lengthy exchange of what are essentially statements of bias by two "high brows" is variously puerile, opinionated, and boring. I cannot believe LOA is giving it space. What is the purpose behind giving a platform to two such long-winded pseudo-intellectuals???
ReplyDeleteWhile the book and lyrics for Show Boat are interesting, the novel by Edna Ferber would be more valuable for reading. Her novel Giant was made into a path-breaking movie and is well worth reading. And So Big may be the best novel written by Ferber. These three plus one or two additional novels would make an excellent addition to the Library of America.
ReplyDeleteI have been hoping for some sports writing, although I contend Grantland Rice is perhaps the best of them, and should have his own volume as well. I'll be very interested in the Red Smith volume. Great American writing has taken many forms, and its really a shame that some people mistake their own personal tastes for objective assessment.
ReplyDeleteThe link to a list of e-books does not link to a list of e-books.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the e-book link. The search function on our site is completely down, and our programmers are trying to figure out what the problem is. We hope to have it fixed by Monday, April 1.
ReplyDeleteLOA seems to be on a roll with short-story writers -- Updike, Anderson, Cheever, Carver, etc.
ReplyDeleteI have two requests:
First, I'd love for LOA to issue the complete stories of John O'Hara. He's a writer (like Anderson) whose qualities shine most brightly in his stories instead of his novels. I have collections of his Gibbsville PA stories and Hollywood stories, and this fall Penguin is issuing a collection of his New York stories. His complete stories must run to a couple thousand pages.
Second, I hope that LOA waits until all of Hemingway is out of copyright so that you can issue his complete stories in a single volume. Actually, I wish LOA had done this with Fitzgerald as well. Faulkner's stories will be collected in a single volume, as were Hawthorne's. It'd be less than ideal for the short stories of Fitzgerald and Hemingway to be scattered chronologically across many volumes instead of collected in a single volume.
Thx!
VERY excited about the Updike and Sontag volumes.
ReplyDelete