A Work in Progress

Rain Makes Applesauce

I found the most delightful children's book last week at work.  Perhaps I should consider this a belated Lost in the Stacks book (and a juvenile addition to the list).  It's a whimsical story/poem with the most amazing illustrations.  If you look close enough at them you can get quite lost in the tiny detail.  Rain Makes Applesauce by Julian Scheer and Marvin Bileck was a Caldecott Honor book in 1965.  I'm sorry not to be able to share the cover with you, but the library copy has been rebound, but here is a peek inside.   

The text is a nonsense rhyme that begins:

Rain makes applesauce
The stars are made of lemon juice...and rain makes applesauce
I wear my shoes inside out...and rain makes applesauce
My house goes walking every day...and rain makes applesauce

And goes on page after page with equally silly pronouncements with pictures to match.

Oh, you're just talking silly, silly talk
I know I'm talking silly talk, but --

--
Rain makes applesauce

And look at the detail!  The rain pours down, the little people stir and stir and drink and drink.  And all the apples are scattered about.  It's all very charming.

Dolls go dancing on the moon...and rain makes applesauce

This is one of my favorite pictures in the book.  It's all so fantastical.  What child wouldn't be enamored?  I wonder if a child would be more likely to get caught up in the minutiae of it all?  At first glance I flipped through thinking 'how unusual', but when I slowed down and started really looking, I became very caught up in it all.

Books that make me slow down and pay attention are always welcome.  It's as easy to forget to stop and look as it is to stop and listen.  That is really look and really listen. 

I need to do that more often!

Oh, to regain that wonder of a child!

Lost in the Stacks: Girl in May

Picking a lost in the stacks book is a lot like choosing a sweet from a chocolate box.  You never quite know what you're going to get.  A delectable violet cream or a chewy nougat or maybe a chocolate with a crunchy coconut middle (my own preferences are mostly in that order).  This is especially true with the books on my library's shelves as our dust jackets are discarded before the books are sent to their places in the stacks.  I am always on the lookout for an unusual spine or a catchy title--something that separates a book from the others on the shelf.  Normally I like to grab several books over the course of the week and "try them out" as potential "lost books", but this week was too busy to make more than one lone selection.  The question is, did I choose a good one?

Have you heard of Bruce Marshall?  I hadn't.  The title Girl in May caught my eye and the fact that the description from the original dust jacket was glued into the back of the book was the tipping point for me in terms of making a choice.  As it turns out Bruce Marshall, a Scottish author who later moved to France, even merits his own Wikipedia entry.  What do you make of someone whose profession is listed as Novelist & Accountant (in that order by the way).  Someone steadfast and maybe a little staid?  I'm curious.

Isn't it interesting when someone converts to Roman Catholicism they tend to be quite 'vocal' (hmm, not the best description, at least not exactly what I have in mind) about their faith.  I say that as someone who was raised Catholic but was always very laid back about it.  I know there is a difference oftentimes between choosing and having the choice thrust upon you, if you know what I mean.  I'm thinking of authors like Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark who converted to the faith and it had an influence on their work.  Bruce Marshall also converted and it appears that like other writers in the same situation, it lent itself to exploration in his work.

I won't quote the entire description from the dust jacket blurb, but here are a few highlights to give the flavor of the story.

"There is always an idyllic streak even in the bitterest and most mocking of Bruce Marshall's novels, so that this full-length Marshall story of young love was perhaps to be expected.  Girl in May is a tender and charming romance between a heroine of seventeen and a hero of the same age--staged during the Kaiser war in and about St. Andrews, and vividly alive with the gay precocity, the courage and the exuberance of youth."

Moragh Dunwoodie, called Bumpie by her friends, and Duncan Soutar who is called Watson by his girl are the love interests.  He's a first year student at the University and she's a schoolgirl who has just been expelled from boarding school.

"Their romance is one of stolen meetings and kisses after dark.  They have their private language and their many private jokes, while around them move the motley crowd of absurdities of all ages who constitute for Marshall the population of St. Andrews.

I tried to find some reviews of the book, and discovered that Kirkus Reviews published something about it when it was released in 1956.  They call it a "winsome" love story.  It sounds as though this is a story that is perhaps told from the perspective of old age--looking back on the relationship, which didn't come to fruition.  I get a favorable impression but am not quite sure what to make of this:

"A tour de force, this slight tale -- and the colloquialism and Scotticisms trip the unwary reader."

Do you think that's meant as a barb or basically nice?  I do like charming, so the story has some potential.  Has anyone come across Bruce Marshall before?  A little teaser for a taste:

"Duncan Goodwillie Soutar had gone as an Arts student to St. Andrews in October 1917.  It wasn't quite Oxford or Cambridge, of course, but it was the next best thing and, with the motorcar retail trade at a standstill on account of the war, all that his father could afford."

Lost in the Stacks: Heat and Dust

Here's a bit of trivia for you.  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar!  If you don't know her fiction (and to be honest I have yet to read her), you probably have seen one of the many films for which she wrote the screenplay.  I adore Merchant Ivory films (they are so lush and beautiful).  She collaborated with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant for more than twenty films.  It was her screenplays for A Room with a View and Howards End (both Merchant Ivory productions) which won Oscars.  And of course it's Heat and Dust which, as you can see by the cover here, that claimed the Booker in 1975.

I always assumed that Jhabvala was herself Indian, but I have only just learned she was actually born in Germany of Polish parents.  She was Jewish and emigrated to Britain right before WWII.  In the mid-1950s she made her home in India where she remained for more than twenty years.  Finally in 1975 she emigrated to the US and became a citizen.  I had no idea, but she passed away earlier this year in April.

Surely a Booker winner shouldn't be a lost in the stacks book, but I can't tell you how many times I have pulled this book from the shelves to look at and then slid it back in to its place.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone in the (granted my own quiet corner) blogging world write about her work, so why not throw a little attention her way.  It also happens to be one of the books included in 500 Great Books by Women (which I own and often refer to for reading ideas) edited by Erica Bauermeister.  The entry for this title reads:

"Heat and Dust views India through the lives of two English women living fifty years apart. Olivia is the first wife of an English government official assigned to India in the 1920s. The unnamed narrator the story is the young granddaughter of the same official by a later wife who, intrigued by family rumors about Olivia, travels to India seeking answers to Olivia's mysterious existence. How, in a segregated society, did Olivia meet an Indian prince of questionable character, and why did she leave her husband for him? What happened to her afterwards? As the narrator stays in the town where Olivia lived and visits places that influenced Olivia's life, we witness India's past through Olivia's letters and journals and the narrator's imagination. For Olivia, removed from the day-to-day existence of the Indian people, India "was like being not in a different part of this world but in another world altogether, in another reality." In contrast, the narrator sublets a room that shares a courtyard with an Indian family and learns much about their life. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala shows us both pre- and post-independent India, exposing the similarities and differences of India's impact on each of these women."

Maybe I am in the mood for some good historical fiction (or just plain old really good fiction), or it's my general interest in India (see yesterday's post), but the story is hugely appealing to me.  It begins . . .

"Shortly after Olivia went away with the Newab, Beth Crawford returned from Simla.  This was in September, 1923.  Beth had to go down to Bombay to meet the boat on which her sister Tressie was arriving.  Tressie was coming out to spend the cold season with the Crawfords.  They had arranged all sorts of visits and expeditions for her, but she stayed mostly in Satipur because of Douglas.  They went riding together and played croquet and tennis and did her best to be good company for him."

Lost in the Stacks: House Across the River

Has it really been almost a whole year since my last lost in the stacks post?  My how time flies, doesn't it.  I know fall is still weeks away, but there is something about August and the approaching school year that makes me really think of libraries and cool weather and piles of books to read (okay, so for me those piles are around all year), so it seems natural that it's time once again to see what forgotten hidden gems I can find in the library stacks.  I'm still hoping to share a few more readers' libraries, but I'll intersperse those with the books I discover in my upcoming browsing forays.

This week's choice was an easy one.  I was so intrigued by the last Persephone short story that I read, that I had to request another book by the same author.  Last weekend I read Margaret Bonham's "The English Lesson".  When I discovered that she  had written a mystery I thought I would try my luck with interlibrary loan and hoped to find a copy.  And as luck would have it, the book speedily made its way to me from Texas and here it is in hand.  

I'm always a little curious about the authors I read, and here she is.  It's quite a personal biography that her publisher offers.  She was born in London but preferred country life (Shropshire, Devon and then later Oxfordshire).  She began writing in 1944 and mostly published short stories (more than 80 of them by the time this book came out).

"Her interests are varied and include Wales and the Welsh, pre-1930 cars and Georgian architecture; she likes cats, Bach, Beethoven and Britten, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and the Times crossword puzzle; she dislikes long hikes, church bells, the Romantic Revival, ballet and opera."

I told you it was very personal.  A little hodgepodge of likes and dislikes. 

The House Across the River was published in 1950.  Like the author blurb that was printed on the dust jacket, the library also cut out and pasted into the first few pages part of the story description.  Unfortunately it ends mid-sentence, but this is what I gleaned from it about the story . . .  The setting is London either during or just after the war.  Nigel Cassell has left his wife.  As he makes his way through the rubble of a badly bombed district on the way to a hotel, he sees the foot of a woman.  Like the character in a scary movie who hears a noise in the basement and goes to investigate (me, shaking head, knowing trouble is coming), he goes to a hotel bar rather than to the police.  There he meets an "enigmatic doctor".  "An encounter that is to torment him for weeks."  Rather than tell the man about the body, he talks about himself and later becomes obsessed with finding and talking to him again.

The description cuts off here:

"In his pursuit of the doctor, at first alone and later with his unconventional cousin Olivia, Nigel begins to . . . "

Maybe whoever cataloged and processed the book did this on purpose.  Anyone looking at the book and reading the description would wonder what happened.  How can they leave the reader hanging like that?  I guess there is nothing for it but to begin reading, don't you think?

"Cassell came out of the garage with his suitcase, and started looking for a hotel.  He knew himself entirely  alone, and this was what he had chosen, but it was not a good feeling; it gave him the sensation of being hollow, holding back from panic.  It made him move deliberately, as if he watched himself from without, a critic in the stalls; he put down his case on the pavement and dropped the car keys in his pocket, and drew on his gloves.  In daylight he could find his way about the city, but now he did not know where he was."

I think I'll keep reading.  A good first choice.  I wonder what else I'll find.  Don't worry, I'll share whatever it is with you next week!

Lost in the Stacks: The Voyage Home

I go in phases with my reading.  Sometimes what appeals most is dependent on my mood, sometimes (strange as this might sound) it's dependent on the season or the weather, sometimes it's reading challenges and sometimes library due dates affect my reading pattern.  I'll go for long stretches wanting a certain sort of book to the exclusion of all others until I feel satiated and am ready to move on to something else (or am urged along by something new).  But it's all pretty cyclical.  I'll eventually return to a favorite theme, genre or sort of book. 

Lately I crave lots of mysteries, the cozier the better (the cold weather?).  I'm not sure how many mysteries I have started or have in progress (am up to four perhaps? and eyeing others...).  It's not impossible to find good mysteries in my library's stacks (maybe a little challenge for myself to find one for next week), but I came across an author I have wanted to read (and even own) who reflects, too, another desire of late.  A certain sort of story, and if I say the sort of story that Persephone Books or Virago would publish, I bet you'll easily be able to envision the type of book I am thinking of I suspect.  I am sure that very soon I am going to be raiding my bookshelves for just such a book.

In the meantime, have you heard of Storm Jameson?  I am sure a fair few of you will have not only heard of her but read her, too.  She is a Virago Modern Classics author.  I have her Women Against Men, which contains three short novels.  I'll get back to that, but let me share one of her books that caught my eye as I was browsing the stacks.  The Voyage Home is actually the second book in a trilogy.  It's a pity we don't have the first book, since the story sounds right up my alley: "The towering saga of an English family at the dawning of a new century. This story is a spiritual voyage about finding a balance between career and family."  The trilogy is made up of The Lovely Ship, The Voyage Home and A Richer Dust.

Jameson was a hugely prolific writer.  Her first novel was published in 1919 and she was writing well into the late 1970s.  It's not surprising that this trilogy is about a shipbuilding family as Jameson was born in Whitby and grew up in North Riding of Yorkshire.  Whitby was formerly a shipbuilding and whaling town but at the time Jameson lived there it still had a harbor and her father was a seaman.  The books are in particular about one woman, Mary Hervey.  The Lovely Ship follows Mary's life through her youth, marriage and family.  The Voyage Home picks up when she is more mature and taking stock of her life.  The review of The Voyage Home that appeared in the New York Times on January 19, 1930 is very favorable.      

"In Mary Hervey, Storm Jameson has created a fine and recognizable character.  There are a depth and insight in her writing which evoke--in Henry James's hackneyed but valuable distinction--the emotion of recognition.  She penetrates the obscure corners of human will and motive, and she presents her conclusions in phrases which make even the most familiar objects more real and significant."

The reviewer noted that she hoped the trilogy would at some point appear in a single volume as "Mary Hervey's life richly deserves a more unified presentation", but from what I can tell the books unfortunately never did get published in one volume.  I think I have just (inadvertently) talked myself into finding and ordering the first book of this trilogy, so I can start at the beginning.

In the meantime I have a Virago edition of Jameson's 1933 novel Women Against Men, which is made up of Delicate Monster, The Single Heart and A Day Off. 

". . . these three novels explore the love that women bear men, powerfully illustrating that this love can become a weapon women use, sometimes against others, but most often against themselves."

It appears that the three stories are related only in theme but not characters, each telling a slightly different sort of story.  Jameson seems to take as her subject strong women, and as Virago thought highly enough of her to publish her works she's basically a shoo-in as a potential (and likely) read for me.  On an entirely different and shallow note, I love the illustration for the Virago edition.  It is a painting by one of my favorite artists, Edward Hopper called "Tables for Ladies", painted in 1930 and is located in NYC's MoMA. 

October (and RIP reading) is quickly nearing the end.  November will be taken up with books translated from German.  Maybe I should make December my own personal Virago/Persephone reading month.  Hmm.  Something to contemplate. 

Lost in the Stacks: Memoirs of Montparnasse

I'm always pleased when a book that catches my eye in the stacks turns out to be not quite so "lost" after all.  I had not hard of John Glassco before, but when my eye ran over the spine of this particular book and caught Memoirs of Montparnasse my curiosity was piqued and off the shelf came the book.  It was originally published in 1970 by Oxford University Press and then reissued by NYRB Classics in 2007.

Glassco, or Buffy as he was known by his friends, was born in Montreal and was a poet who dropped out of McGill University in 1927 and did what every other self-respecting writer of that era seemed to do--he went to Paris.  I suspect his memoir can easily be added to the shelf of famous literary exiles who wrote about that milieu--Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund White, et al. 

The book garnered a favorable review in the NYT in November of 1970.  It sounds as though Glassco met everyone worth meeting from Gertrude Stein to Ford Maddox Ford.  He was unimpressed by Hemingway and thought Stein was pretentious.  He worked with Kay Boyle on a set of memoirs  of the Dayang Muda (it's amazing the things you pick up reading stray NYT reviews).  I think Glassco's Memoirs might fit the category of literary nonfiction quite nicely, since it's not your conventional straightforward memoir (but then again, don't you think most memoirs must make use of creative devices?  how many people remember conversations years and years after they occurred anyway?).

"It is quite possible that all the people John Glassco met and listened to actually didn't say everything he attributes to them with quite the same bright, polished assurance.  But when he set down his memoirs, he was capable of such amusing flights of repartee, and that is all that matters now.  For this is a delightful, on-the-spot report of the says when it was still possible to be very young, very hip and very happy all at the same time." (NYT 1970)

Glassco was only about seventeen when he went off to Paris.  He wrote the first few chapters of his memoirs in 1928 and the rest in 1932-33 after he had returned to Montreal and was awaiting a "crucial" operation.  It wasn't published until much later and with few revisions according to Glassco's preface.  

". . . in spite of a temptation to suppress or at least soften many passages that expose the youthful memoirist in all his flippancy, hedonism and conceit.  And after all, why change any of this?  The young man is no longer myself: I hardly recognize him, even from his photographs and handwriting, and in my memory he is less like someone I have been than a character in a novel I have read."

I've had a good run of memoirs of late, each with its own slant, and this would make a nice companion to the rest of the books on my pile.  I could even count it as one of my Canadian Reading Challenge books.  I think I'll be leaving this one in the 'want to read pile' for a while and see if it floats up to the top before it's due back at the library.

"Considering the cultural changes of the last five decades, this precocious, witty, document from a long-vanished younger generation has both the freshness and remoteness of some ornate space ship found intact in a forgotten tomb." (NYT 1970)

I wonder if another forty years on it still holds up to the same scrutiny?

Lost in the Stacks: The Cases of Susan Dare

Finally . . . a lost in the stacks post.  Have you missed reading them?  I've actually missed writing them and have wanted to get back on schedule with posting them regularly ever since I got back from vacation in August, but one thing after another kept me too busy to share any of my 'older' library book finds.  It seems fitting now that it is October and we are in the midst of RIP reading season to choose an author who writes mysteries. 

I own a handful of Mignon Eberhardt's books and read one a couple of years back hoping to pick up another ever since, but never quite getting back to her work.  I'm especially interested in Eberhart since she is a Nebraska author.  She was born in Lincoln in 1899, and educated at Nebraska Wesleyan University.  She later settled for a time in Valentine with her husband who was an engineer before moving on to bigger and more exciting places.   She was hugely prolific, her career lasting some six decades.  She wrote more than sixty novels for which she won an assortment of awards, including A $5000 Scotland Yard Prize.  I've only read The Mystery at Hunting's End, one of her nurse Sarah Keate novels, which was published in 1930.

According to the Wikipedia Eberhart favored female sleuths, which was an unusual twist for the time.  After her first mystery was published in 1929, Agatha Christie followed up by introducing her own very famous Miss Jane Marple.  Eberhart was known as "America's Agatha Christie" (though it seems I've heard that about other American mystery writers from that Golden era, too).  I think she was quite popular in her day, and even now some of her books are still in print in paper from Nebraska's Bison Books and in ebook format from The Mysterious Press.  I wish I enjoyed reading on my Nook more, though I am still very tempted to order and download a few of those previously hard to find titles.

I don't see The Cases of Susan Dare listed on the Wikipedia's bibliography, but the copy I borrowed was published in 1934.  There are six short stories, which I imagine are interlinked and they feature Susan Dare.

"Susan Dare is a charming young writer of mystery stories who has long pursued clues on paper with relentless logic but who has never encountered an actual murder.  Then came that eventful week at Christabel Frame's--where she first met Jim Byrne and first met murder.  Red is the color of violent death, and a red stone enabled Susan to duplicate for the first time in the realm of true murder her many triumphs in the field of fictional crime."

Although I'm not sure Eberhart's books would be categorized as romantic suspense (I think they are closer to simple cozy mysteries), her stories do generally have a love interest.  In this case it's Jim Byrne, a reporter.

"Inside the lovely head of Susan Dare, grisly murder lurks. A mystery author who makes her living providing tidy solutions to imaginary crimes, Dare is enjoying a much-needed vacation when the mood at her host’s house turns sour. Ugly secrets lurk in the Frame family’s past, and jealousy stirs beneath the surface of their tranquil country estate. Dare makes plans to leave before her hosts turn on each other, but she is too late. On the morning of her departure, a gunshot echoes through the fog. Only a beautiful author with a head full of murder mysteries can pinpoint the killer."

I was thinking it would be fun to read one of the stories for my RIP/ghost story reading this weekend, but the more I flip through the book, the more I think it is much closer to a novel than individual stories.  I guess there is just one way of finding out. 

Lost in the Stacks: Little Britches

I wasn't familiar with author Ralph Moody, but when I saw a row of distinctive Bison Books' spines peeking out at me from my library's bookshelves I had to pull a few out and see what they were all about.  A cursory glance at the book blurbs and it was Mary Emma & Company that I brought back to my desk--less with my lost in the stacks posts in mind than the fact that I liked the sound of the protagonist in the story.  Also, another of the books has a Nebraska setting and I've been looking for just such books for a work-related project.

One of the quotes offers a tempting glimpse into this story; "reading his books is like returning to Grandmother's kitchen with the heavenly smell of sugar cookies escaping from the oven."  Doesn't that just paint a pleasant picture in your mind--a happy, warm and fuzzy one, and I'm all for books that can do that.  A sugar cookie of a book has kind of a nice ring to it.  And I do love sugar cookies.

As it turns out Ralph Moody was quite a prolific writer.  Born in New Hampshire but raised in Colorado, his father died young and the family returned to the East Coast to live.  He eventually travelled back through the Midwest working in a variety of places to help support his family.  Largely self-taught and with a lifelong interesting in learning, he reminds me of Louis L'Amour.  Later in life he took a writing class which began his career as an author.

I don't normally read a lot of western (am thinking here in terms of locale-Western US) fiction, but I do like the sound of these books and decided it wasn't a good idea to start reading in the middle of a series of books which sound somewhat autobiographical.  His family saga begins with Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers, which he published in 1950.  The book covers the years 1906-1910 when his father took the family to Colorado.  The book begins:

"I never really knew my Father very well till we moved to the ranch on the Fort-Logan-Morrison road, not far from Denver.  That was just after my eighth birthday--right at the end of 1906.  When we lived in East Rochester, New Hampshire, he worked in the woolen mill, but it wasn't good for his lungs.  He was sick in bed the winter before we moved--the one after Hal was a year old."

The story continues through a successive seven books through the 1920s when Moody puts an end to his "roving" days (I think by that point he gets married).  Mary Emma & Company is somewhere in the middle of the series of books and is about his widowed mother and their life in Massachusetts when Little Britches had to be the "man of the family".  I think I'd definitely prefer to read them in order now that I think about it.

The books have been in print continuously since their initial publication, and reading through some of the Amazon reviews they do seem much loved.  I'm not sure really that the books are indeed lost in the stacks, but as I have never come across them online it seems worth mentioning him as someone whose works are worth exploring.  It would be fun to read them aloud to children or classroom setting (or to just read them on my own for that matter).  I suspect some of you will recognize Ralph Moody or will have read his books.  If so, what do you think, should I embark on the the epic journey with this family?  I have an unusual fascination (maybe not so unusual) for Depression-era America, and these do sound like fun, comforting reads. 

Lost in the Stacks: The Coming Out Party (Visiting Book Edition)

Yet another ILL request that is doubling as a guest lost in the stacks book. Glen Petrie's The Coming Out Party is another book which garnered a mention in Mary Cadogan's Women and Children First: Aspects of War and Literature. Although not considered by Cadogan to be a work of serious literature, my curiosity was piqued sufficiently to request the book via interlibrary loan.

For some reason I thought this was a book which had been written at the time of WWI, but as it turns out it was published in 1972 in Great Britain. I was a little disappointed when I discovered this, but as it is a short book I plan on giving it a go. I've not been able to find information about either the book or the author, so here's a bit from the jacket blurb. At the time of publication Petrie was a teacher in a North London school and wrote in his spare time. He had published a few other novels and a short story prior to this one.

As for The Coming Out Party:

"Susan and her brother Toby are the children of a family of prosperous Westmoreland landowners. At the outbreak of the Great War Susan has just finished school and when Toby enlists she becomes increasingly bored by the isolation imposed on her by her social position. Reluctant to join the fashionable VADs, she decides to follow one of the housemaids into a more strenuous and, she thinks, more real, form of war work. She moves to Crewe to work in the engine maintenance sheds. At first the squalor of the work conditions and the apparent cynicism of her fellow-workers appal her but she learns eventually to survive and to give as good as she gets. When in the last months of the war, with her women companions, loses her job she finds herself incapable of reconciling herself to the leisured world of her childhood and drifts into the hectic but brittle gaiety of the post-war West End."

So it sounds like it could be promising. One that has simply slid between the cracks and should be rescued? (Or not?). Has anyone read it? I'll give it a try in any case.

Lost in the Stacks: Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

I was going to call this post 'Found in the Stacks' since I happened across this lovely NYRB reissue of the 1958 classic, Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories, purely by chance.  I was pulling books to put on display yesterday (display theme: short stories!), and was in a section that had a number of interesting-looking anthologies.  This caught my eye, but I had intended it for  my display.  Back at my desk to change the book locations (and oh, so many lovely short story collections I assembled), and I had a moment to actually look at it, and decided it needed to come home with me instead.  For some reason I thought this was a collection of stories by Randall Jarrell, but it's an anthology of various short story writers as selected by Jarrell.  I'd heard of Jarrell, but didn't know anything about him.  He was a poet, novelist, translator, critic, and children's book author from Tennessee. 

I'm told Jarrell was a good friend of poet Robert Lowell, and that Jarrell was Poet Laureate (or at least what is now known as Poet Laureate).  Poetry is another gaping (very much gaping) hole in my reading repetoire that I swear one day I am going to address.

Anyway, it's the blurbs that sold me.

"My favorite short-story anthology is Randall Jarrell's, with a brilliant essay as a preface." --Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"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

Brad Leithauser calls the anthology "as fine an entry into the art of the short story as any I know."  How could I possibly pass it up.  Besides, I'm an easy sell when it comes to short stories.  I love short stories, though I don't read enough of them.  This book, I plan on reading.  I'm starting with that much lauded introductory essay of course (and may share my findings here).

I bet you're curious to know who Jarrell has chosen for inclusion in the book, right?

Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, Giovanni Verga, Nikolai Gogol, Elizabeth Bowen, Ludwig Tieck, Bertolt Brecht, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Taylor, Hans Christian Andersen, Katherine Anne Porter, the Bothers Grimm, E.M. Forster, the Book of Jonah, Saint-Simon, Isaac Babel, Chuang Tzu, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, William Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Ivan Turgenev, William Wordsworth, Frank O'Connor, and Isak Dinesen. 

Okay, so a little thin on women writers, but as someone else mentioned in a review it is an idiosyncratic and eclectic selection, so I'm willing to go with his choices.  I'm very excited about my find and am going to start reading this weekend!  First story is "A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka.  Yay for short stories.