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...most illuminating and eloquent is Tobias Wolff's explication of his short story "Powder"--which centers on a father and son's attempts at making their way home for Christmas Eve in the midst of a snowstorm. The urgency of memory, the need to mediate all the past's heart-break and humor, infuses Wolff's story with dead-pan beauty. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver's classic "Popular Mechanics" (minus the bloody conclusion) in terms of its powerful brevity, "Powder" is the best work included in the anthology...
Although "Powder" is three and half pages of genius prose--which is also included in Wolff's most recent book "The Night In Question"--it represents all the stories included this year's collection of "The Best American Short Stories." They may not all necessarily take the art of the short story to much needed, new innovative levels, but they all offering precisely crafted glimpse into the human experience that echo entire worlds and lifetimes...
Along with stories by well known authors like Wolff, Stone and Cynthia Ozick, are the works of emerging talents like newly minted literary wunderkind Junot Diaz. "Fiesta, 1980"--which is also included in Diaz's critically lauded 1996 debut "Drown"--details a Dominican American boy's encounters with his father's Puerto Rican mistress and his experience at a lively family party. Here Diaz once again proves that he is one of the best young writers around not for what Proulx calls his distinct "cultural, ethnic, and class" perspective, but because underneath his deceptively simple, "street vernacular" prose...
...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...
Knowles, Todd, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, former Dean of Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Christoph Wolff represent the FAS administration...