You've Got to Read This

TO READ THIS

C O N T E M P O R A R Y A M E R I C A N

W R I T E R S I N T R O D U C E

S T O R I E S T H A T H E L D T H E M

I N A W E

E D I T E D B Y

R O N H A N S E N AND J I M S H E P A R D

mm Perennial

An Imprint of
HarperCollins
Publishers
Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, pages 629-30 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS
. Copyright © 1994 by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY

10022.

FIRST EDITION

Reprinted in Perennial 2000.

Designed by Alma Hocbhauser Orenstein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data You've got to read this: contemporary American writers introduce stories that held them in awe / edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard. —

1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-055358-8—ISBN 0-06-098202-0 (pbk.)

1. Short stories. 2. Short stories. I. Hansen, Ron, 1927-II. Shepard, Jim.

PN6120.2.Y68 1994

813'.0108—dc20 94-14460

94 95 96 97 98 •/HC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

00 01 02 •/HC 22 21 20 19 (pbk.)

Contents

Introduction ix

James Agee, A Mother's Tale 1

Introduced by Annie Dillard

Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant 19

Introduced by Francine Prose

James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues 29

Introduced by Kenneth A. McClane

Donald Barthelme, The School 57

Introduced by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph 63

Introduced by Oscar Hijuelos

Jane Bowles, A Day in the Open 77

Introduced by Joy Williams

Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode 87

Introduced by John L'Heureux

Mary Caponegro, The Star Cafe 101

Introduced by John Hawkes

Angela Carter, Reflections 119

Introduced by Robert Coover

Raymond Carver, Cathedral 135

Introduced by Tobias Wolff

V

vi • CONTENTS

John Cheever, Goodbye, My Brother 151

Introduced by Allan Gurganus

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries 175

Introduced by Eudora Welty

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 187

Introduced by John Irving

Molly Giles, Pie Dance 249

Introduced by Amy Tan

Lars Gustafsson, Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases 257

Introduced by Charles Baxter

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Interview 271

Introduced by Jane Smiley

James Joyce, The Dead 283

Introduced by Mary Gordon

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony 319

Introduced by Joyce Carol Oates

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl 343

Introduced by Stephanie Vaughn

Clarice Lispector, The Smallest Woman in the World 349

Introduced by Julia Alvarez

Katherine Mansfield, The Daughters of the Late Colonel 359

Introduced by Deborah Eisenberg

Alice Munro, Labor Day Dinner 379

Introduced by David Leavitt

Vladimir Nabokov, Spring in Fialta 401

Introduced by Jim Shepard

CONTENTS • vii

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried 421

Introduced by Bobbie Ann Mason

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find 439

Introduced by Sue Miller

Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing 457

Introduced by Amy Hempel

Grace Paley, Wants 467

Introduced by Janet Kauffman

Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities 471

Introduced by Tim O'Brien

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Man to Send Rain Clouds 481

Introduced by Louis Owens

Robert Stone, Helping 489

Introduced by Louise Erdrich

Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man 513

Introduced by Ron Hansen

John Updike, Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car 559

Introduced by Lorrie Moore

Alice Walker, The Flowers 579

Introduced by Edward P. Jones

Eudora Welty, No Place for You, My Love 585

Introduced by Russell Banks

Jerome Wilson, Paper Garden 603

Introduced by Al Young

About the Authors

615

Introduction

We were far into the old have-you-ever-read? questions. We were sitting on the shaded second-floor porch of a house at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, talking about great short stories, the kind that hold you spellbound, make your hair stand on end, that you finish with the feeling of being wrung out, transported, and far better off than you were when you began reading. We lobbed titles at Tim O'Brien, who lobbed a few of his own back. We mentioned "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" by Delmore Schwartz, "A Distant Episode"

by Paul Bowles, Jack London's "To Build a Fire," Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." We were two fiction writers on staff at the conference, and university professors in English departments otherwise, so we had read a fair share of the short story masterpieces that find their way into anthologies, but there were so many others that were too little known. We'd both had the experience of having a friend say, "You've
got
to read this," as he or she handed us a story we'd never heard of, and on finishing it we'd often wondered how we'd felt complete without it. And countless times we and other writers we knew had been asked in question-and-answer sessions after fiction readings, What are
your
favorite stories? What do
you
recommend?

Wouldn't it be great, we thought, if there were an anthology based upon the stories that other writers feel passionate about?

Which is where this book began. We compiled a long list of our favorite writers and shortened it to a manageable size by confining it to American citizens. Then we wrote to ask if they'd introduce a story in English or English translation that left them breathless, held them in awe, or otherwise enthralled them when they first read it. We offered a wide latitude in these introductions: teacherly comments, reminiscences of that first encounter, anything that would provide an intriguing entrance into the story for the uninitiated. We approached some very famous and busy people so it was no surprise that a good many begged off, but a far greater number were pleased to have been asked and supplied us with a roster of one or three or six or nine stories they'd be happy to introduce.

We were then faced with hard choices, some of them frankly financial but others having to do with balance and variety and our own highly subjective judgment of which were the greater masterpieces.

Often the decisions were painful. We could fill another anthology with the stories we had to reject or could not afford, but what we have ix

X " INTRODUCTION

here is just what we wanted. Look at the contents page and you'll find the familiar and the unfamiliar, the hundred-years-old and the just-yesterday, stories that are symphonies of emotion and stories that are the simplest of melodies, beautifully played.

You may want to hold off on reading an introduction if you have not read a particular story before, in case it includes those passages a first reader would most want hidden for the sake of surprise and suspense.

Other stories may be well known to you. Then you may want to try a fresh reading with the introduction sitting helpfully beside you, like a friend. However you dip into this book, you'll be rewarded. There are riches everywhere. Wherever you wander you'll find an introducing author stepping forward with something he or she is passionate about, giving you the news about the way we live now, and saying to you: Here.

Take it. You've
got
to read this.

R O N HANSEN AND JIM SHEPARD

by J a m e s A g e e

Introduced by Annie Dillard

A g e e t e l l s m o s t o f t h i s q u e e r s t o r y i n t h e s p o k e n v o i c e o f a cow. You can scarcely believe anyone could read such a preposterous thing.

When you finish, you can scarcely believe anyone could write such a grand thing.

What compels is Agee's probing. What compels is the sheer winning length of the narrative line. It keeps going; Agee pushes it. Agee pushes it from its worrisomely sentimental beginning ("Mama!") through its dangerously allegorical middle (The One Who Came Back "even invited them to examine his wounded heels") to its austere, murderously violent end
("Kill
the calved).

At any point until that end, it could have been a bad story: a sermon, a tiresome allegory, or even, at very worst, a parable against meat-eating. It's a mined field, this cow's tale—it's risky, bold, and crazy—so you want to leap to your feet and cheer when Agee makes it through.

Two things break up the allegory that threatens to harden around the drama's players. Agee fully enlarges the figure of the broken-skulled steer who came back. His hide "was flung backward from his naked muscles by the wind of his running and now it lay around him in the dust like a ragged garment." His figural vividness finally replaces Christ's, for the moment, as Agee enters his own story at last and we join him there. And the allegory's simple equations open into interesting complexities. The steer's oracular commandments, in their controlled fury, urge resistance and murder. So the steer is like Christ, but he is not. The cattle are like people, but are people's victims. The Man With The Hammer is like God, like death, but is man. And man's life, too, is a dumb herding toward death. It's not Christian allegory, this story, it's good old-timey existentialism.

A Mother's Tale

James Agee

The calf ran up the little hill as fast as he could and stopped sharp.

"Mama!" he cried, all out of breath. "What
is
it! What are they
doing!

Where are they
going!"

Other spring calves came galloping too.

They all were looking up at her and awaiting her explanation, but she looked out over their excited eyes. As she watched the mysterious and majestic thing they had never seen before, her own eyes became even more than ordinarily still, and during the considerable moment before she answered, she scarcely heard their urgent questioning.

Far out along the autumn plain, beneath the sloping light, an immense drove of cattle moved eastward. They went at a walk, not very fast, but faster than they could imaginably enjoy. Those in front were compelled by those behind; those at the rear, with few exceptions, did their best to keep up; those who were locked within the herd could no more help moving than the particles inside a falling rock. Men on horses rode ahead, and alongside, and behind, or spurred their horses intensely back and forth, keeping the pace steady, and the herd in shape; and from man to man a dog sped back and forth incessantly as a shuttle, barking, incessantly, in a hysterical voice. Now and then one of the men shouted fiercely, and this like the shrieking of the dog was tinily audible above a low and awesome sound which seemed to come not from the multitude of hooves but from the center of the world, and above the sporadic bawlings and bellowings of the herd.

From the hillside this tumult was so distant that it only made more delicate the prodigious silence in which the earth and sky were held; and, from the hill, the sight was as modest as its sound. The herd was virtually hidden in the dust it raised, and could be known, in general, only by the horns, which pricked this flat sunlit dust like little briars. In one place a twist of the air revealed the trembling fabric of many backs; but it was only along the near edge of the mass that individual animals were discernible, small in a driven frieze, walking fast, stumbling and recovering, tossing their armed heads, or opening their skulls heavenward in one of those cries which reached the hillside long after the jaws were shut.

From where she watched, the mother could not be sure whether there were any she recognized. She knew that among them there must be a son of hers; she had not seen him since some previous spring, and she would not 3

4 • A MOTHER'S TALE

be seeing him again. Then the cries of the young ones impinged on her bemusement: "Where are they going?"

She looked into their ignorant eyes.

"Away," she said.

"Where?" they cried. "Where? Where?" her own son cried again.

She wondered what to say.

"On a long journey."

"But where
to?"
they shouted. "Yes, where
to?"
her son exclaimed, and she could see that he was losing his patience with her, as he always did when he felt she was evasive.