Reading I’Ve Liked; a Personal Selection Drawn From Two Decades of Reading and Reviewing, Presented With an Informal Prologue and Various Commentaries [Hardcover] Fadiman, Clifton

Description

This book is a compilation of short stories and excerpts written by famous people. According to one Amazon “If you would like to read the best short stories and essays of the 1920s and 1930s this is the anthology you want. Not the least of the attractions of this book is Fadiman’s charming 60 page introductory essay about his life as a reader. What follows are 900 pages of good reading, including 51 selections by 36 authors. Most are short stories, but there are also humorous sketches, essays, selections from novels, and odd-ball things such as a letter by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Fadiman’s literary tastes can perhaps be described as upper middle class with a bit of emphasis on the macabre. The authors represented here include Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, George Santayana, James Thurber, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Katherine Ann Porter. Fadiman’s erudite essays introduce each selection. The 1920s and 1930s were truly the golden age of the short story, due no doubt to the proliferation of magazines and their demand for good commercial writing. The stories Fadiman has selected for this anthology are the best of their type.””