Volume 2, Number 6 · April 30, 1964
New Short Stories
By Robert M. Adams
Prize Stories 1964: The O. Henry Awards
edited by Richard Poirier
Doubleday, 286 pp., $4.95
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
by Donald Barthelme
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 193 pp., $4.95
Three: 1964
by R.H. Robinson, by E.R. Widmer, by E. Pohoryles
Random House, 276 pp., $4.95
Emblems of Conduct
by Donald Windham
Scribner, 210 pp., $4.50
Behold Goliath
by Alfred Chester
Random House, 240 pp., $4.95
Of all the ridiculous critical categories—'short story'—as if there were something in a mere word-count which entitled one to bundle together parables and sketches, fantasies and fables, romances, burlesques, narrations, satires, character-studies, moralities, enigmas (not to mention all the subject-categories—mystery-stories, love-stories, adventure-stories, ghost-stories, ad infinitum) indiscriminately. Yet, if only as a nondescript, catch-all phrase, the term 'short story' is probably inevitable; and along with it comes the loose and casual critical standard to which individual specimens are inevitably held. They need only be memorable. It is a standard of great simplicity, very hard to meet; but for the omnibus reviewer—whose five dozen stories are a mere tokens of as many thousands which confront the omnibus reader—it is, perforce, primary.
Review, 1680 words
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