Short Takes on Big Subjects
Sunday, January 21, 2007; Page BW11
PENGUIN EPICSPenguin. $8.95 each, $179 boxed set
Everything about an epic is large, right? The personalities, the emotions, the stakes. The seas are wider than in standard novels, the swords deadlier, the pages longer. The list of epics unread can seem guiltily endless, too, even for serious bibliophiles. But Penguin is here to help. The publisher has extracted brief highlights from 20 epics and published them individually in beautifully designed little books. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, meet "the king who knew the countries of the world . . . he brought us a tale of the days before the flood." In Siegfried's Murder, from the Nibelungenlied, discover how Siegfried was betrayed. (Word to the wise: When you bathe in dragon's blood to render yourself invincible, don't miss a spot.) In Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche, learn how a beautiful princess had to descend into hell to ascend immortal heights, "a story recited by an old woman to a terrified, kidnapped girl and overheard by the narrator (who has been transformed into an ass)." Perusing these tales will not be nearly so fraught for most readers; indeed, these slim volumes (the longest is 138 pages, the shortest only 71) offer tantalizing glimpses into strange worlds long gone that still resonate in the modern words we read.
NEW SUDDEN FICTION Short-Short Stories From America and Beyond Edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas Norton. $15.95
The Chinese call very short stories "smoke-long stories" because they are just long enough to read on a smoking break. But when Robert Shapard and James Thomas noticed brief little fictions popping up in literary magazines, they didn't know what to make of them. Were they "experimental fictions? Sketches? Prose poems? Anecdotes? Enigmas?" Shapard and Thomas, both literature and creative writing teachers, decided to call them "sudden fiction" and have collected 60 of these shortest stories, all roughly 5 pages long, in this volume, the fourth of this sort that they've done together. In New Sudden Fiction, David Foster Wallace writes about the scalding of a child, and Ursula Hegi imagines a woman running into her first lover, who "has tripled in size." Elizabeth Berg distills a woman's complicated feelings about men in a scene from a cocktail party, while Ha Jin tells of a joke gone horribly wrong. Less, indeed, can be more.
HOW TO READ . . .Norton. $11.95 each
In a similar bid to make big things bite-size, Norton is offering a series of primers on major thinkers and texts. Shakespeare, Jung, Marx, among many others, get the same treatment: 10 brief excerpts from their work, followed by longer explanatory essays from learned scholars. For instance, in How to Read the Bible, Richard Holloway, a former Scottish bishop, begins his explication following the first few verses of Genesis by pointing out that "to read the Bible profitably . . . you have to work out what your line on God is going to be and, if possible, stick to it throughout." He then offers two simple ways of looking at God -- as a believer or a nonbeliever -- that turn out not to be entirely contradictory. In How to Read Sartre, Robert Bernasconi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, explains that the French philosopher "did not always write great prose; he often tortured the French language." But reading him is worth the effort because he addressed "the kind of questions about our responsibilities and about the meaning of life that ordinary people expect [philosophy] to address."
From Our Previous Reviews
? At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, $20), the third volume of Taylor Branch's monumental life of Martin Luther King Jr., "should satisfy readers who look for bottom-up as well as top-down histories of the civil rights movement," wrote James T. Patterson.
? In On Michael Jackson (Vintage, $13), Margo Jefferson, one of the best cultural critics in the business according to Christopher John Farley, "manages to be tough without being judgmental, funny without being cruel and deep without being long-winded."
? Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who was assassinated last year, was "unwavering in telling the gruesome truth about the injustices that she has witnessed," wrote Michael McFaul of Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (Owl, $16), her last book to be published here before her death.
Rachel Hartigan Shea is a Book World contributing editor.
