The Well-Digested Short Story

...That the editors' wish continues to be fulfilled, Writers at Work, the most discriminatingly eclectic interviews with writers I have ever seen, Best Short Stories from The Paris Review, and the current issue of the magazine all demonstrate...

...And it is a delight to find in one anthology from one magazine stories concerned with contemporary society, the human condition, and individual depths that must be forced into critical slots if one is foolish enough to do so...

...Some of the writers are now known pretty well, though they weren't when the Review published them...

...The best of these are John Phillips' "The Engines of Hy-geia," a movingly realistic story of a guilt-ridden domestic tyrant whose wife is dying of cancer, and Gerard Kornelis Van Het Reve's fine not-too-Kafkaesque fable of senselessness posed against insentience...

...If one needs to fit them into the over-convenient slots of criticism, he can say that some of them are realists, naturalists, symbolists, fabulists...

...Patti Hill is included with a good story about an elder sister who is dominated by a younger sister...

...Author, "On a Darkling Plain" "WHAT WE wanted to make of The Paris Review and what eventually it became," William Styron writes in his introduction to the stories collected from it, "was a magazine that most of the other quarterlies were not...

...There is a fine realistic fable about the innocent callousness of youth and the terrified loss of innocence in maturity by Italo Calvino (whose first novel, The Baron in the Trees, was reviewed in THE NEW LEADER for December 7), and a good story about the confusion of modern life, where the unimportant individual is equally unimportant dying and living, by An-toine Blondin, known in France but not, I think, in America...

...Evan S. Connell, whose novel The Bridge interested too few, has a fine story about a Mexican who attracts an audience to hear his frenetic wailing, a representation of man's awe of, fascination with and fright of death...

...Most satisfying of all the stories by authors now published is Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews," about a boy who asks amusing and profound questions of a Rabbi who has only simple dogmatic answers for anything...

...If you prefer a predictable stereotype, neither the anthology nor the magazine is for you...

...More stories like those in The Paris Review should be published and pondered...

...The short story is not a declining or lost art form...

...In the entire anthology there isn't a single story that Henry James might have written (and discarded), a single faint Joycean echo, a single regurgitation of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Proust, Hemingway or Faulkner...

...But the other stories by Mac Hyman, Hughes Rudd, William Fain and Owen Dod-son are good—a word that contemporary touters might translate into colossal—varied both in technique and vision...

...Kerouac is represented (and was introduced by) a part of On the Road, the affair with the Mexican girl, a tender unsentimental rhapsody that shows there was a time when he was not a victim of his own publicity...

...I don't mean to imply that the Review writers are ill-read...

...it is only almost as neglected as poetry...

...they have literary ancestors, some of them those I mention above, but they've digested them and become themselves...

...The less-known writers are nearly as good, all memorably original except for Terry Southern, whose story seemed to me a too-conscious exercise in sophisticated symbolism (where the symbolism is imposed rather than a natural product of the tale told...

...It is hilarious and serious and can be read again and again without losing the freshness that makes you remember it before you reread, as you reread, and, I hope, forever after...

...She has since published The Nine Mile Circle, a novel I'd like now to read...

...So good an anthology and so good a magazine as The Paris Review should be read by all who look for varieties of excellence that transcend peculiarity...

...Samuel Beckett is represented by part of Molloy, his first piece of fiction to reach American readers...

...This part, about Molloy's ridiculous, evocative shifting of his 16 stones from one pocket to another so he'll never suck the same stone twice, is an integral whole that illustrates beautifully Beckett's preoccupation with the in-determinism of life...

...We decided that we wanted the Review to become a magazine in which the reader, hoping to find genuinely creative work, would in some abundance find it—stories, poems, art—rather than discover there one forlorn and lonesome story or a single poem sandwiched in between yet another tired, stale essay on Faulkner's symbolic use of light and dark and a desperate maneuver exposing poor old Herman Melville as a manquee sodomist...

...But freshly so...