SHORT STORIES

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30342, 18 January 1964, Page 3

SHORT STORIES

The Best American Short Stories, 1. Edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett. Macgibbon and Kee. 436 pp.

For both the reader who! reads for entertainment only i and the student of the short story art this, the first of a new series, is an exciting anthology. It contains what the editors consider to be the best 21 short stories published in 1961. Many different subjects are treated in as many ways, but there is one modem mark common to most of them: the ability of today’s writers to develop the characters of the cast within a short compass of words, mostly with results startlingly real. There is a wealth of talent and variety in this collection. This reviewer wasi tremendously impressed by Flannery O’Connor's “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” One could quarrel with the title because it fails to convey the intense topicality of its subject—the newlyintegrated use of passenger buses in the Deep South. Here is a problem laid bare, a two-pronged problem between a doting, unintelligent, silly mother clinging to deeplaid prejudices, and a re sen t- | tul teenage son who accepts i the new order, ft is a touching. meaningful tragedy Appendices include names and addresses of American and Canadian magazines publishing short stories, and a i list of distinctive stories I published in 1961.