Preface
3 X 33--an anthology of ninety-nine short stories, three stories apiece by thirty-three North American writers born after 1900--proceeds from a simple idea: read one story by a writer and you're studying the story. Only if you read a group of stories by the writer are you studying both the stories and the writer. A single story by a writer can't begin to take the measure of that writer's development, range, and career, but a small group of stories--even three apiece--often can.
By the end of a typical term, students may have read, say, forty of a typical anthology's hundred stories. These stories will have come at the students in such a blur that the mention of a particular assigned writer might elicit no more than a blank stare. Because students typically read only one story per writer, any sense they have of what a particular writer is really about--in terms of the writer's craft, the writer's preoccupations, the writer's contributions to literature and culture--will have been gleaned largely from outside reading or the instructor's lectures. .
In twenty-some years of college teaching, I've taught about a hundred courses--first-year writing, short story lit classes, fiction workshops to inexperienced sophomores and to extremely advanced graduate students--where what I really needed was one book, wherein which, for a reasonable cost, my students would have at their fingertips a group of stories by any and all writers I was teaching. The stories would be a healthy mix of both widely anthologized stories and more unexpected picks. In a perfect world, each writer would be introduced by another writer, one who could give a practitioner's-eye view of the writer and the stories in question, one that would be of use to those reading the stories for the first time as well as those who have loved them for years.
This is most assuredly not yet a perfect world.
But this is that book.
In a Nutshell, What's Special About This Book?
And Those Things Are Special Because …?
There is a degree to which readers, at any level of experience or sophistication, can learn about the same amount--on their own, without the need for extensive lectures (however helpful those would undoubtedly be) or outside reading (ditto)--from reading a group of a writer's short stories as from reading a group of a writer's novels. In either case, a short story or something much longer, the writer has to (again with the threes--forgive me):
Simply watching a writer do at least those three things repeatedly is going to help any reader learn things about what a given writer does and how he or she does it: an understanding that is the bedrock of even the most elementary of stories and their writers (and that is the foundation of any story: something central in any class that's reading stories, whether it's first-year writing, a short-story lit class, a contemporary writers class, or a fiction workshop).
3 X 33--alone among all the anthologies of short fiction available--allows any careful reader to be dazzled by having a slightly broader sampling of every writer's work at one's fingertips. It's fairly easy to consider the stories as a group, to see patterns emerge, to experience the magic, yes, but also to have a sporting chance to spot the mirrors and trapdoors, to study every wave of the wand, every flourish of the cape.
Why three?
There's no magic per se to that number. But anything more would be impossible to include within the covers of a single book Anything less than three is not a group. A band with two people in it is a duo, not a group. Two kids standing on a street corner aren't a group, they're just a couple of kids. Three is the minimum number to necessary to constitute a group, the smallest number needed to create a pattern of anything.
3 X 33 includes both the must-have stories from every writer included and a host of brilliant ones stories that that aren't in every table of contents of every anthology of short fiction on your bookshelf. Also not present in any other book are the useful, eye-opening, and delightful essays that introducinge each of the thirty-three writers. The introducers are all widely admired writers themselves, authors, collectively, of about two hundred works of fiction and the winners of nearly every worthwhile literary award there is. Several of the essays are written by writers whose own stories appear here. Some were written by people who were once the student of the writer they're now introducing. Several writers introduce their heroes. One even introduces his twin brother. What all the essays have in common is that, in them, the writers talk about what they' have learned from the stories they're writing about. They share their passion for stories they love, trying to show you-someone who is perhaps unfamiliar with some of the stories you're about to read--what, from the perspective of a good working writers, is so special about the writer in question, why that writer's work is admired, why people read it again and again, how and why it has influenced other writers, why it's worthy of your time.
After extensive consultation, I decided to focus on American writers born after 1900 (both The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards have been defining "American" as "North American" for decades, and we quite naturally followed suit). So that's what' is represented here. The year 1900 is a logical birth-year cutoff point, and not merely because neither the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald (born in 1896) nor that of Ernest Hemingway (born in 1899) allows textbooks to reprint three of the writer's stories. The first two giants of the form born after the turn of what, after all, was widely known as the American century were Eudora Welty (born in 1909) and John Cheever (born in 1912)--not incidentally, the two writers whose best-selling, highly honored career-spanning collections (The Stories of John Cheever in 1979, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in 1980) were instrumental in triggering a broader readership for the American short story.
Acknowledgments
The ninety-nine stories in this book got here after a truly exhaustive study of other textbooks and anthologies, and after consulting consultation with dozens of reviewers and other writers. Particularly helpful on this count, and generous with their time and resources, were Janet Burroway, Dan Chaon, Junot Diaz, Ken Foster, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Martone, Claire Messud,. Lorrie Moore, Stewart O'Nan, Elwood Reid, Richard Russo, Lee Smith, and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. In addition, all thirty-three of the writers who wrote introductions helped to shape the selections.
Thanks to Claire Wachtel and Bill Hoffman, the editors at Harcourt who bought this book and who convinced me that it was also a really good idea, one utterly different from everything else out there.
Thanks, too, to Cathy Richard Dodson, Karen Judd, and Michael Rosenberg at Wadsworth, whose editorial guidance brought this book to fruition (and who talked me into doing it yet again, after I was picked to write the sequel to Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather and didn't think I would be able to find time to do anything else).
I want to thank my students--all of them, really, a true cast of thousands who, over the past twenty-some years, collectively taught me the best things I know about teaching. I'm especially grateful to the graduate students in my fall 2003 fiction workshop, in which (aided by the assistance of Tricia Whittemore, who scanned many of these stories) I tested and refined an early beta version of this book: Andrew Cohen, Jocelyn Cullity, Rob Dennis, Kimberly Elkins, Sandra Giles, Charley Henley, Tom C. Hunley, Danielle Kotaska, Nikki Louis, Amy Smith, Lauren Spohrer, Ed Tarkington, Misty Urban, and Joel Weinbrot.
I'm willing to bet that no Instructor's Manual in the history of textbooks was ever written by a better fiction writer than Dan Melzer of California State University, Sacramento. I'm humbled that someone so smart and talented would take on such a thankless job. Thank you, Dan.
The thirty-three distinguished writers who wrote these introductions certainly didn't do it for the meager amount of money we paid them. Thank you, one and all, for sharing and airing your passions, for helping to pick the stories included here, and for making this book truly, deeply like no other.
There are many debts--in the production of this manuscript and otherwise--that I owe to my wife Jennifer. I'll never repay them adequately, but for her help on this book per se: molte grazie.
Finally, there's not a chance that you' would be holding this in your hands now if it weren't for the indispensable contributions of my two associate editors, Tom Bligh and Ken Foster. Ken was a brainstorming partner extraordinaire and, among many other tasks, did an excellent job of coordinating and editing all the introductions. Tom was a marvel: an all-purpose troubleshooter, editor, and proofreader.
Mark Winegardner
July 2004