books@cc.

An Anthology
by Nadine Gordimer (ed.) (2004)

Nadine Gordimer asked twenty writers she admired if they would — without any fee or royalty — submit a story for a fundraising anthology, with all proceeds going to Treatment Action Campaign in aid of HIV/AIDS. While the premise is risky — and might involuntarily bring to cynical mind the cringe-worthy fiasco of Live 8, rest assured that the collection offers a worthy representation (and cause) for a literary endeavour. Although it won’t stop any nitpicking, admittedly it’s not that often that we get a one-stop collection of wide-ranging writers in a popular press. The stories, handpicked by the authors themselves as “representing some of the best of their lifetime work as storytellers”, while avoiding the explicit theme of HIV/AIDS, inadvertently deal with the subject of sex and death in a myriad of genre: sometimes funny, sometimes searching, but all contentedly sit alongside each other, offering the readers with multi-faceted collation of contemporary literature, with or without the philanthropy.

This is one instance where you can read Saramago write a fiction whose sentences aren’t multiple-page long, by the way. (I prefer his multiple-page long sentences though.)

Bulldog by Arthur Miller
The Centaur by Jose Saramago
Down the Quiet Street by Es’kia Mphahlele
The Firebird’s Nest by Salman Rushdie
Cell Phone by Ingo Schulze
Death Constant Beyond Love by Gabriel García Márquez
The Age of Lead by Margaret Atwood
Witnesses of an Era by Gunter Grass
The Journey to the Dead by John Updike
Sugar Baby by Chinua Achebe
The Way of the Wind by Amos Oz
Warm Dogs by Paul Theroux
The Ass and The Ox by Michel Tournier
Death of a Son b y Njabulo S. Ndebele
The Letter Scene by Susan Sontag
To Have Been by Claudio Magris
A Meeting, At Last by Hanif Kureishi
Associations in Blue by Christa Wolf
The Rejections by Woody Allen
The Ultimate Safari by Nadine Gordimer
Abandoned Children of This Planet by Kenzaburo Oe

Tags:anthology, short stories
Gordimer, Nadine, Saramago, Jose, short stories

March 31, 2007 @ 3:00 am