Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

Edited by Randall Jarrell

Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin—this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ballads, parables, anecdotes, and legends along with some of the finest work of Chekhov, Babel, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Kafka, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter. This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

Contents

Reviews

Long out of print, this landmark volume—and the sweeping essay at the front—may change how you think about fiction. (It may also change how you think about your own life.) This is a book to return to, and to keep.
— Stephen Burt

It has been clear for some time that Randall Jarrell is one of the most gifted poets and critics of his generation.
— The New York Times Book Review

Jarrell is everywhere the man who has just read something he loves or hates . . . but always the man speaking his passion, rather than an embodied institution pronouncing judgment. He is resolutely unsystematic, committed to no methodology or aesthetic theory, responsible only to his own responses, hushed only before the mystery of his own taste. And what unfailing taste he possessed.
— Leslie A. Fiedler

Randall Jarrell was such a gifted reader of poetry that it's easy to overlook how keenly he read and discussed prose. The introduction to this wide-ranging collection is alone worth the price of admission: a brilliant, characteristically light-stepping little journey into the heart of the narrative impulse. This is as fine an entry into the art of the short story as any I know.
— Brad Leithauser

He was a kind of conscience of poetry. . .His influence on the poetry of his time has yet to be fathomed: it worked through his own poems, his published criticism, his teaching, his involvement with the work of his friends. For many of us, if asked that old question: "To what or whom do you address your poems?" the truthful answer would be: "To the mind of Randall Jarrell."
— Adrienne Rich

Eulogy was the glory of Randall's criticism. Eulogies that not only impressed readers with his own enthusiasms, but which also, time and again, changed and improved opinions and values. He left many reputations permanently altered and exalted . . . Randall was so often right that sometimes we said he was always right. He could enjoy discarded writers whom it was a scandal to like, praise young, unknown writers as if he were praising and describing Shakespeare's tragedies and read Shakespeare's tragedies with the uncertainty and wonder of their first discoveries.
— Robert Lowell

Also see:

The Haunted Looking Glass Ghost stories chosen and illustrated by Edward Gorey The Haunted Looking Glass is the late Edward Gorey's selection of his favorite tales of ghosts, ghouls, and grisly goings-on.

Letters: Summer 1926 By Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt, Jamey Gambrell Preface by Susan Sontag Appendix and epilogue by Jamey Gambrell Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth-century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.

Peasants and Other Stories By Anton Chekhov Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett Introduction by Edmund Wilson "No one understood as clearly and finely as Anton Chekhov the tragedy of life's trivialities, no one before him showed men with such merciless truth the terrible and shameful picture of their life in the dim chaos of bourgeois everyday existence." —Maxim Gorky

The Stories of J.F. Powers By J.F. Powers Introduction by Denis Donoghue Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest.

Virgin Soil By Ivan Turgenev Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett Introduction by Charlotte Hobson This rich and complex book is at once a love story, a devastating, and bitterly funny social satire, and, perhaps most movingly of all, a heartfelt celebration of the immense beauty of the Russian countryside.

The Colour Out of Space Edited by D. Thin This new collection features some of the greatest masters of extreme terror.

Unknown Masterpieces Edited by Edwin Frank In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.

Masters of the Short Story Collection Love in a Fallen City, White Walls, Paris Stories, and Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

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