The Short Story: An International Perspective, Part 5

About this course:

A continuation of the past four summers’ reading and discussion of short stories by a wide variety of international writers. The suggested book for this class is The Art of the Short Stories: 52 Great Authors, Their Best Short Fiction, and Their Insights on Writing. Authors from 15 countries offer stories that are sad, happy, wistful, poignant, satirical, disturbing, and humorous; yet underscore the complex circumstances and multiple vagaries of the human condition. The breadth of this anthology is vast, starting with the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) and concluding with the Chinese-American author Ha Jin (b. 1956). Included are familiar names: Maupassant, Chekhov, Carver, Atwood, Oates, Borges, Lessing, and Baldwin. Others are perhaps not as well known (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Leslie Marmon Silko), but certainly well worth reading and discussing. Themes include loss, alienation, feminism, family dysfunction, political displacement, exile, sexual awakening, and others.