Description: Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as "Working Class Stories" or "Gay and Lesbian Stories." The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.
Review Quotes: Here are the categories of a postcanonical era with a vengeance: not just stories with a thematic cycle but also those written by African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicano-Latinos, lesbians and gays, Native Americans, non-English speakers, members of the working class, people concerned with the Holocaust, and even those with ecological interests.-- "American Literary Scholarship"