Book Description
In this engagingly diverse anthology, critic and poet Randall Jarrell illuminates storytelling as a fundamental human impulse. Redefining the story form in this collection of world classics, he sets ballads, poems, parables, anecdotes, fairy tales, and legends alongside short stories by Anton Chekhov, Isak Dinesen, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Leo Tolstoy, and others. Jarrell’s inimitable taste and innovative choices — he includes both well-known works like Gogol’s “The Nose” and quirkier selections such as Chuang Tzu’s “Five Anecdotes” — deepen the reader’s appreciation of the storyteller’s art and its place in the world. “Jarrell is everywhere the man who has just read something he loves or hates.... And what unfailing taste he possessed.” — Leslie Fiedler
About the author
RANDALL JERRELL (1914–1965) was born in Tennessee and graduated from Vanderbilt. A poet, novelist, translator, and critic as well as writer for children, Jarrell was a prolific author whose best-known works include the poems collected in The Woman at the Washington Zoo and The Lost World, the academic comedy Pictures from an Institution, the children’s story The Bat Poet, and Poetry and the Age, a group of essays. An influential critic who, as poetry reviewer for The Nation, helped to launch the careers of Robert Lowell and other contemporaries, Jarrell taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, where he was much revered. He died in a car accident in 1965.
