Dana Gioia Books

Short stories and advice from 52 great authors of short fiction. Need I really say more? I love a good short story collection, and this most certainly is one. Over 900 pages, so you can enjoy it for a long time. Copyright 2006, meaning I was no longer passing myself off as a teacher when it was published. I could've used it then. But no matter. I still read for pleasure, and it certainly gave me much of that. Another keeper.

This book's title and subtitle are a good summary for a book I feel belongs every creative writing class and on the desk of every aspiring writer. And for only $18.95 USD for 926 pages, the book is a bargain. If you've recently purchased books for a college class, you will know what I mean, I've paid upwards of $100 for a book.

The Art of the Short Story is an anthology of the best stories from the best short story writers. See if you recognize a few of these names: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Edgar Allen Poe, Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, Jack London, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekov, F. Scott Fitgerald, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Updike, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Flannery O'Connor.

What I like best about this book is that, in addition to the great short stories, the book also contains commentary from each author. The commentary varies. The author might discuss how or why the story was written, or public reaction to the story, or their view of literature, or give specific advice on an area of the writer's craft. For example: Earnest Hemingway's essay is on Crafting one True Line. Jorge Luis Borge's author perscpective is Literature as Experience. Shirley Jackson's essay is The Public Reception of "The Lottery." There are too many to list here but the masters discuss the entire spectrum of short story writing from why to write to elements such as character, plot, style, and suspense to authorial explanation and defense of stories.

This collection has a nice variety of authors and stories. There are unmistakable classics like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" but also stories by several authors I had never been introduced to before. The result is a fascinating range of styles and perspectives which make the book a compelling and inspiring read.

In addition, many of the "Author's Perspective" pieces give great insights into the lives and views of the writers. For example, Baldwin writes about "Race and the African-American Writer," Faulkner writes about "The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself," and Kafka discusses "The Metamorphosis." These are writings that are not often seen, yet they go a very long way toward placing the story and author in context.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Excellent book for reading top notch literature and improving knowledge about contemporary authors. I really enjoyed the collection of work assembled in this book.

I bought this book to use in a course on short fiction at MIT. I expected the usual history of literature book, but what this contains is a treasure of not only excellent, popular fiction, but essays by each of the authors that are as interesting as the stories. I don't think you can find a better collection to study the art of the short story anywhere.

I'm a student and this textbook was assigned for my intro to literature class. I was surprised by how much I actually ENJOYED this textbook! There is a lot of good writing in it, some great examples of literature, which made for interesting class discussions. I even found myself reading a lot of the passages that weren't assigned, just out of curiousity, and most of them were really quite enjoyable.

Overpriced like most textbooks but probably the only introductory literature anthology since Benjamin LaMott's "Close Imagining" (McGraw Hill) that I'd use a second time. It's compact yet very generous and representative. For example, you can pair "Young Goodman Brown" with "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" or "A Rose for Emily" with "Barn Burning" or "A & P" with "Araby." Most of the frequently taught poems are here, and there are more plays--from Sophocles to Arthur Miller--than would ever fit into a single-semester course. And the Appendices are priceless--more useful information than is found in popular writing Handbooks along with exemplary student essays (a particularly handy feature).

I've previously used the big Kennedy and Gioia Intro text. Not only did the binding begin to fall apart on me mid-way though the semester but the amount of material--most of it never assigned--simply added to the guilt any instructor who emphasizes close reading of individual texts is bound to feel. Also, any introductory literature course that even purports to be representative must include some examples of the most important modern genre of all--the novel. Add "Great Expectations" and "The Great Gatsby" to the course and you'll see why the shorter, more compact anthology is the only one to consider. In fact, I might even settle for a "back pocket" version.

(My experiences with the complementary (but not really "complimentary") internet site--which my students never seemed to be able to access--would suggest that it would best be ignored. Go for the DVD or a price break instead.)

In Barrier Of A Common Language: An American Looks At Contemporary British Poetry, Dana Gioia (poet, literary critic, and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Art) has assembled insightful and informative essays on British poets and poetry over the past two decades. A scholarly compilation of such varied topics as the growing disconnect between British and American poetry; fading traditions in poetic literature; and in-depth analysis of modern works, fill the pages of this astute and superbly presented anthology of criticism. Barrier Of A Common Language is a welcome and seminal contribution to academic library British Literature & Poetry reference collections and reading lists.

First of all, you have to realize Dana Gioia isn't just an average American talking about British poetry. It isn't like, say me for example. Gioia is extremely well informed and knows what he is talking about. So you get a really good collection of essays. But that is what this is, just a collection of essays that are only connected by the fact that they discuss British poets. Now don't get me wrong, these are great essays and you can't go wrong reading them, I just wish that Gioia had rewritten them to make them more cohesive as a whole, to really give us a picture of British poetry. Several of the essays were just reviews of books, and the Larkin essay was a review of Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin. Gioia would have done better to have discussed Larkin, Burgess, Ted Hughes, Amis, Dick David, Gunn, etc, like his opening essay (The Barrier of a Common Language: New British Poetry in the Eighties) and his essay on Fenton and Causley. These are well written and good essay/reviews. I just think that we would have been better served by something that was more cohesive and not just a collection of previously published essays and reviews. Still, they are good.

Ever since the publication of "Can Poetry Matter?" the essayist and Formalist poet Dana Gioia has been one of the most polarizing figures in the current literary world. The controversy around Gioia redoubled when he accepted President Bush's invitation to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, causing more left-leaning poets to accuse him of "selling out." While I don't agree with everything Gioia says, and I'm certainly further to the left than he is, I think his opinions on the current state of poetry are never less than interesting and usually salutary. For instance, I couldn't agree more that poetry and music go well together on the same program, or that poets should mix their own work in public readings with favorite poems by others. Above all, Gioia has been a forceful advocate for poets in general and for the traditional craft of poetry in particular, and my hat is off to him for that. In "Disappearing Ink," his latest collection of essays, Gioia once again waves a red cape in the face of the academic establishment, banderilla at the ready. (Example: in the title essay, Gioia notes, "Attend an academic literary conference these days and you are more likely to hear, as I recently did, papers on the design of the Los Angeles freeway system as an expression of phallocentric power or gender-coding in breakfast cereal advertising than you are to find examinations of contemporary poetry.") The title essay, which discusses how the poetry scene is changing as the printed word gives way to the information highway, is a provocative yet common-sense examination of rap, cowboy poetry, performance poetry and other avenues poetry is taking toward survival in the 21st century. Gioia provides much reading pleasure in his discussion of various subjects, from the decline of San Francisco as an active literary center to the history of Italian-American poetry. He is at his most enjoyable when he comes to the defense of poets he admires, from misjudged classic poets (Longfellow, Frost) to underappreciated contemporary poets (John Haines, Samuel Menashe, Kay Ryan). He champions some poets you wouldn't expect him to defend, such as the late Jack Spicer, an openly gay San Francisco Bohemian who would be anathema to many in the Bush administration. His observations are nearly always astute, such as when he delineates the reasons why Elizabeth Bishop--whom he clearly reveres, but who doesn't really fit current poetic fashion--is a poetic god today: "During the bitterly divisive culture wars of the past quarter-century, Bishop could simultaneously appear on both sides of nearly every issue--the ally of both reformer and traditionalist, patron saint to both radical and reactionary--not to mention those beleaguered pilgrims traveling steadfastly in the middle of the road." Basically, Gioia just calls them the way he sees them, which is what a literary critic is supposed to do--except that too many have pulled their punches recently, to try and fit in with the tide of current opinion. Above all, Gioia believes in the art of poetry, and has faith that it will survive--in his words, "(m)ostly by being itself--concise, immediate, emotive, memorable, and musical, the qualities most prized in the new oral culture, which are also the virtues traditionally associated with the art." I wish I'd said that.

I bought this book after attending a lecture by Mr. Gioia at the University of Texas. He impressed me with his courage in pointing out that Academic Intellectualism is killing poetry in America. He is a man with the courage of his convictions, a sensitive artist who hasn't lost his masculinity. We need more men like him. The book is a good reflection of the man. I think you'll like it... and him.

I had to pick this up for a college course...it has an excellent sampling of various literature written in different styles and at different time periods.

Whether you want to have a collection of short stories, poetry, drama, etc, this book deserves a place on your shelf.

Thanks, Doc Staley.

I'm using this for a Lit. class. There's a good collection of works here.

In a former incarnation, I lived together with a now-ex wife in a beautiful apartment that had been the home of my ex-wife's grandparents. I loved this place, because the decor, the coral base-lit floor lamps, the art deco radio, the wallpaper was 1940's and '50's vintage and some pieces quite possibly dated from a decade or two before. This is the America that the grown Weldon Kees inhabited, and the smells, the arabesques on the carpeting, the tinny sounds of the radio are all replicated to perfection in these stories. In fact, reading these stories reminds me of climbing the back steps to that great apartment I once lived in and creaking open the door. All the things this tragic suicide knew are there: the Lucky Strike commercials, the tough guys saying See? See? over and over as they jabbed each other in the chest in the black and white movies Kees loved to watch. The short stories Kees writes are full of the telling details of a different, brasher, bolder, certain of itself America, but an America that could still drive sensitive people to despair. Some of these stories have the understated power of Kees' poems: "The Ceremony" with its nightmarish "petrified Indians" and a strange predicament right out of Kafka; the brother/pimp of "I Should Worry" who sits downstairs in his parts store while his deaf and dumb sister services a man upstairs in the same room in which their parents gassed themselves years before; an older spinster sister outraged by the sound of a couple next door having sex and struggling with the younger sister in a thwarted attempt to knock on the wall. There are memorable characters here aplenty and a clarity of language and vision that can be found in the best of Kees' poems. However, though I am mighty glad that Kees wrote these stories, I am even gladder that he abruptly stopped to write the often darkly exquisite poems, for Kees was obviously not a first-rate talent in his prose, mainly because he allows his lack of sympathy for some characters to portray them as one-dimensional cartoons. (Perhaps he lacked the "Negative Capability" that allows a great writer to love even the bad guys he or she creates.) Women, for instance, often appear in a totally unsympathetic,one-dimensional light. Indeed, in many of these stories women assume all the complexity of an "Our Miss Brooks" episode, stepping forth as carping harridans and frustrated, fire-spitting viragoes. Gays too are a problematic subject for Kees. "A Trip to the Mountains" and "The Life of the Mind" present homosexuality in a stereotypical way. However, given these obvious flaws, this selection of stories introduces readers to yet more glittering facets of a dark gem of a writer who left us all too soon.

:
No one knows how, or when, or even whether, Weldon Kees died. Having talked both of fleeing to Mexico and of suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge, his car was found near the latter on July 18, 1955. No hint of the man has since emerged.

But while he was active, Kees wrote fiction (initially), poetry, and cultural criticism of all kinds for major national periodicals; he painted (abstract expressionism), was a jazz musician, made films, and collaborated with anthropologists and behavioural scientists on various ventures. From his time of relocation to New York until his disappearance, he circled with many of the avant garde leaders in the New York art scene. Brief as his life was, it represents one of the most multi-faceted talents of his, or any, age.

Born in the plains (Beatrice, Nebraska, 1914) to parents operating a hardware store, Kees had several short stories published while in his twenties, but quit writing them altogether by the early forties when he moved east. They (43 in all) thus confine almost exlusively to glum-faced real-life depictions of common folks in depressed, small, mid American towns. Dana Goia has selected about a third of these, those deemed most successful, and includes an informative introduction. Kees, in this work, reflects clearly the social-conditions focus of the thirties throughout the US and presents his small gems in down-keyed, often unresolved, personal reflections and observations on everyday hum-drum existence by a generally undistinguished, often quietly frustrated narrator-protagonist. Generally these are finely edited, simple-language depictions of unfulfilled yearning and coping with material boredom and insignificance.

Stylistically, most are relatively brief and trenchant in their resolute resistance to unfounded optimism. But they are poignant within the simple, disciplined writing, and the reader is pulled gently and feelingly into the glum world of the however hapless, however compromised narrator. All presented in a gray climate unaccommodating of patriotic, religious, or familial panegyric.

Kees is a unique, if minor figure in American 20th century literature, and the thoughtful reader will be rewarded by giving him some time, likely reminded - nostalgically perhaps in the half-tone depression hues Kees uses - of the unadorned nature of the lives most of us lead.

Of course, I am speaking in my title of the pure anthology, a collection without explanatory or exploratory texts. And that is all this is: a collection of poems by 100 poets. But do not misread "all this is": "a collection" is all this book _needs_ be, and it is that quite exemplarily.

Now, no poetry anthology that is not 5000+ pages in length is going to leave you without any sense of "Oh, they really should have included such-and-such," and this anthology is not exempt. Of course, there are poems and poets that I think would work better than others included toward expanding representation and variation without thinning out the collection. And there are some contemporary poets that Gioia includes that I see little reason behind beside their being popular to someone. And there are contemporary (or late 20th century) poets not included that I believe would have done the anthology well as examples of the art. But as a broad anthology, this exceeds my expectations. Most of the major names are included, and there is enough offered to give a decent sampling of their artistic identities. As well, there is enough breadth to offer examples that would contribute to most any discussion about poetry and poetics. It would be an easy thing to teach poetry simply by opening this book, and exploring what you find.

As someone who has become rather despondant about the abundance of poorly conceived and executed anthologies out there, this one has pleased me (and is pleasing me) to no end. A well put together collection, and worthy of any classroom -- not to mention an excellent sampling of poetry for any curious reader.

California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present was published last November as the latest entry in the California Legacy series of Heyday Books. It is an anthology of poetry by California poets compiled and edited by Dana Gioia, who is currently serving as Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts. Chryss Yost, a poet, and Jack Hicks, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of California, Davis, joined him on the editorial team. Over one hundred poets (out of a group of thousands) are represented in the book, and the poems of each contributor are accompanied by detailed biographic profiles of the authors. In the introduction, Gioia explains that the purpose of the anthology is to provide the readers with a "comprehensive historic anthology of the state's poetry from the Gold Rush to the present." Indeed, the book is a work of literary history as well an anthology of poetry.
The criteria used by the editors in making selections included, literary excellence, historical importance, and representative range. To ensure the regional character of the work, the editors imposed a residence requirement. Contributors must have been born and raised in California or spent half their lives in the state.
The book is organized chronologically in four sections. The first three parts cover poetic eras the editors labeled, "Early Poets," "California Modernists," and "Mid-Century Rebels and Traditionalists." Familiar names are encountered, such as Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, Edwin Markham, Yvor Winters, Josephine Miles, William Everson, Charles Bukowski, Thom Gunn, Richard Brautigan, and many others. Generally, the coverage is from the Gold Rush in the nineteenth century to the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1960s. The final section of the anthology is devoted to contemporary poets, most of whom have attained reputations as major literary artists.
In his seminal article in a 1991 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Gioia argued that modern poetry could be more enthusiastically received by the public if, among other things, anthologists selected for their books poems that they truly liked and found qualified for further publication. It is apparent from the selections of California Poetry that the book's editors took Gioia's dictum to heart in compiling this excellent and historic anthology.

The merchandise arrived in a timely manner and the overall experience was good.

I picked this book up for a class, expecting to be perfectly bored. Instead, this book woke up my sleeping love of learning and literature. The book is easy to understand and contains MANY great stories and poems in it. It also has a great glossary and index was well. It came with an additional feature, MyLiteratureLab, which is an accompanying web page. That is also very helpful indeed.
This book is so good, there were even people at work wanting to check it out!