This is part 2 of our series of posts regarding our collection of short story anthologies.
The Mechanics Institute Library has a deep and extensive collection of short stories dating back to the early 20th century. Many of these you can find in anthologies such as The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Year's Best Stories, or several other short story anthologies in our collection.
For many years we placed these books on the shelf for members to find by simply browsing. As of now (count as of August 2024), we have 578 volumes of short story anthologies. We realized there are so many short stories tucked within these anthologies that we had to improve our catalog so members could discover individual short stories by their favorite authors that only appear in these anthologies. We are pleased to announce that we have completed this re-cataloging project.
To give you a sampling of what we have uncovered, Mechanics Institute staff have read stories by their favorite authors and share their thoughts below.
(Please ask a staff member for assistance if you would like to search for short stories in our catalog.)
Dorothy Parker. The Banquet of Crow, in Best American Short Stories 1958 (SS B56 1958)
Originally published in 1957 in The New Yorker, it tells the story of a woman living in a traditional marriage of the time. Her union with her husband is disintegrating and despite him moving out to live at his club and enjoying his new lifestyle the protagonist believes he will come back and appreciate her and their marriage on a new level after the separation. To her dismay, she learns otherwise but nevertheless sustains the belief that her husband will eventually eat crow. Parker aptly provides a picture of the isolation of women in upper-middle-class marriages of the time, how their worth was tied so closely to that of their husbands and what female social groups looked like at the time. -- Review by Kathy Bella.
Richard Brautigan. The World War I Los Angeles Airplane, in Best American Short Stories 1972 (SS B56 1972)
Richard Brautigan, although one of the great writers of the Beat Generation, never obtained the same long-term fame and recognition afforded to his contemporaries, like Kerouac, Bukowski, or Ginsberg. He had a meteoric rise (and fall) from fame in the 70s. He wrote in a very unusual, at the time experimental, style consisting of blunt statements of fact written with an almost child-like simplicity. He also mastered the "very short story" decades before the terms "flash fiction" or "microfiction" existed. This story runs for only 4 pages. In a first-person narration he summarizes, using numbered points, as if writing a memo, the life of a fictional father-in-law. Despite (or maybe as a result of?) Brautigan's plain, direct, "like a memo" prose you come away from this story with an incredibly evocative picture of an entire life. Even weeks after reading this I find myself thinking about the man who once saw a rainbow follow his airplane and the rest of the life that he led afterwards. -- Review by Steven Dunlap
Ursula K. Le Guin. The Shobie's Story, in Year's Best Science Fiction 1991 (SY39s 1991)
The story follows a group of travelers aboard a starship on a journey to establish a new colony. As they navigate the challenges of space travel, interpersonal dynamics unfold, revealing the complexities of human relationships and the quest for belonging in an uncertain universe. Le Guin's narrative delves into themes of identity, community, and the pursuit of a better future against the backdrop of science fiction. -- Review by Jimmy DeGuzman
