I second The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. I bought the book a couple of weeks ago but haven't had a chance to read it yet.
I also nominate
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules edited by David Sedaris. It's a collection of his favorite short stories.
All the proceeds from this book go toward 826NYC, a nonprofit organization offering free writing workshops and after-school tutoring to students ages six to eighteen.
The book's title references a painting by Adriaen van der Werff.
Quote:
David Sedaris, best-selling author and National Public Radio humorist, collected 17 of his favorite short stories for the new paperback Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.
And fans are apt to be as happy as if Sedaris wrote these stories himself.
Sedaris, of course, is author of five best sellers that mix memory and wit: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Barrel Fever, Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
In Children Playing, he brings together a group of stellar storytellers, most of them Americans, plus one from Canada and one from New Zealand.
They include Richard Yates (Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired), Charles Baxter (Gryphon), Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party), Alice Munro (Half a Grapefruit), Jincy Willett (The Best of Betty), Dorothy Parker (Song of the Shirt, 1941), Flannery O'Connor (Revelation) and Tobias Wolff (Bullet in the Brain).
Sedaris chose stories "that have stuck with me over the years and that I turn to again and again."
In the intro, Sedaris says he gravitated toward short stories when he was young and working at a packing plant, where he would read during breaks. "A good (short story) would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. This led to a kind of trance that made the dullest work, the dullest life, bearable."
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- USA Today
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