Master's Choice Volume I: Mystery Stories by Today's Top Writers and the Masters Who Inspired Them by Lawrence Block (ed)

Author:Lawrence Block (ed) [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ED GORMAN

Emile Zola is responsible for “En Famille.” I went to college with the poet Mary Haines. A few years ago, she was editing a collection of literary stories, and called to reminisce about the coffee-and-cigarette college discussions we used to have about French writers. She asked me if I still read a lot of Zola and I said I hadn’t in quite a few years. I went to the library shortly thereafter, and checked out a book of his stories. Not a bad one in the whole collection, and many of them powerful and unforgettable. I’d had the central idea for “En Famille” for years but couldn’t get it right. Zola, with his emphasis on heredity and environment, showed me how to do it.

Stephen Crane was always able to capture the essential strangeness of people, their isolation and quiet sorrow in even the most social of situations. The Red Badge of Courage is filled with such portraits, set against the society of an army at war. “The Blue Hotel” gives us another kind of society, that of hard, sly men dealing with an odd and somewhat disturbing stranger. Crane plays brilliantly with reality here-whose “truth” is the real truth, who is truly the victim? We think of hell as hot; here Crane shows us that hell can also be howling prairie winter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.