|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
Today's Younger Writers: Casting a Cold Eye on Love
| Article
# : |
11360 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
2,945 Words |
| Author
: |
Liza Mundy
Liza Mundy is a freelance writer living in Charlottesville,
Virginia. |
20 UNDER 30
Best Stories by America's New Young Writers
Edited by Debra Spark
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986
Paperback, $7.95
It would be difficult, not to mention churlish, to find fault with the concept behind Scribner's new anthology of short stories, 20 Under 30. Edited by Debra Spark, the collection assembles twenty stunningly well-crafted short stories by writers under the age of thirty. A few of them David Leavitt, David Updike, Leigh Allison Wilson have already begun to make names for themselves in major publications and books of their own. The majority of the rest have, until now, achieved recognition primarily among the cognoscenti: among people who read literary magazines, or who are associated with one of the myriad writing programs that have sprung up and now cling, unkillable as kudzoo, to colleges and universities around the country.
The anthology is a laudable project, well conceived and well executed. The print is easy to read, and the cover sports a tasteful modernist painting whose perfection of form and utter vagueness of meaning seem particularly suited to the works in this collection.
Reading the stories, one realizes immediately that something has changed in American literature; gone, it seems, are the days when young writers were driven to write out of a sense of social outrage, or a desire to change things, or curiosity about how other people live. Gone are the days when a young writer went "on the road" to discover a
... (1999 of 17573 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
