Entertainment Weekly lists the top 100 books published between 1983 and 2008. It's idiosyncratic (as any list of this type must be), waffling between pop culture and high-brow, but at least it manages a couple of short story collections:
- Selected Stories, Alice Munro
- Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
- Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat
- Pastoralia, George Saunders
- Cathedral, Raymond Carver
- Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
- Close Range, Annie Proulx
Of course, if you're Richard Ford, you're wondering why Rock Springs (1988) got beat out by Close Range and Krik? Krak!.
Also, I wondered: why 1983? Well, only two books on the list barely made the cutoff point–LaBrava by Elmore Leonard and Cathedral by Raymond Carver–and I think Carver might have been the larger influence.
Speaking of Annie Proulx, if you are a fan of her Wyoming Stories, her next installment is out in September: Fine Just the Way It Is.
And score one for the women: four collections to three!
The forgot Dave Eggers’ How We are Hungry. How dare they! Speaking of style (from the previous post). Eggers manipulates commas and metaphor on the micro-level (the level of sentences and words) as well as any writer I’ve read.
–Howard Goldowsky
1983-2008 is 25 years, and 25 might seem a lot hipper than say 50.
I don’t understand why in this day and age we have the arbitrary anniversaries of things like literature.
The Guardian does “Top 10″ lists in books.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s
A recent one was “Top 10 Short Stories”.
Yes, any such list is arbitrary, but the Guardian’s are chosen and annotated by a particular author, so you can at least pin any idiosyncracy on that author.
Um, yeah, I guess that nice even number of a quarter century might also have influenced the whole 1983 choice . . .