J.C. Hallman, editor of an inspired anthology, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (Tin House), has already exhibited a commendable ambidexterity with his nonfiction (soon to be a useless descriptor) tome The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe, a companionable investigation of the chess culture (The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game), and a collection of short fiction (The Hospital for Bad Poets).

The anthology he has assembled of about 30 essays features an all-star list of writers (living and dead)—such as Frank O’Connor, William Gass, Wallace Stegner, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, Dagoberto Gilb, Seamus Heaney, Susan Sontag, James Wood, E.B. White, Hermann Hesse, Cynthia Ozick, Geoff Dyer, Charles D’Ambrosio, Alan de Botton, Sven Birkerts, and Oscar Wilde—discussing the work of other literary greats, including Marcel Proust, J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Malcolm Lowry, T.S. Eliot, Anton Chekhov, Robert Lowell, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, Truman Capote, and John Steinbeck. My favorites are Ozick’s declawing of Capote and Gilb’s homage to McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy and Blood Meridien. But really, this volume is just overflowing with delightful prose and thinking.

Beyond the brilliant writing about outstanding writers is Hallman’s astute brief for so-called Creative Criticism. People who know what I am talking about include The Quarterly Conversation:

Quite plainly, we were taken aback by how precisely the author had laid out our own aspirations for criticism in this magazine. The piece, in our humble opinion, points toward an educated, unpretentious form of literary critique that serves both literature and the everyday reader. When people want to know what we’re looking for in this magazine, we’ll point them to Hallman’s essay and those he has collected in the book it prefaces.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 18, 2009

While preparing my chat with American short fiction samurai Tobias Wolff for publication, I realized that though I greatly appreciate short stories I have not been paying sufficient attention to them in this space. Luckily, I have the 2009 edition of The Best American Short Stories at hand.

As you may know, this series has a long and honorable history dating back to 1915, as well as a permanent editor, Heidi Pitlor, who is joined each year by a guest editor—this year, Alice Sebold. And as is the customary practice, each volume contains about 20 short fictions, culled from a wide-ranging smorgasbord of magazines and finally selected from about a hundred stories by the guest editor. And, as has been the case, there are well-known names from well-known publications and newcomers from not-so-well-known periodicals.

This year, Daniel Alarcón, Annie Proulx, Yiyun Li, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (The New Yorker), Joseph Epstein (Commentary), Richard Powers (Conjunctions), Kevin Moffett, Adam Johnson (Tin House), Ron Rash (The Southern Review), and Jill McCorkle (Narrative Magazine) are joined by Steve De Jarnatt (Santa Monica Review), Alice Fulton (Tin House), Karl Taro Greenfeld (American Short Fiction), Eleanor Henderson (Agni), Greg Hrbek (Black Warrior Review), Victoria Lancelotta (The Gettysburg Review), Rebecca Makkai (New England Review), Alex Rose (Ploughshares), Ethan Rutherford (American Short Fiction), and Namwali Serpell (Callaloo) to round out a cornucopia of short narratives.

Sebold introduces the anthology:

More than mere solace is to be gained by reading good stories—short stories in particular. Stories provide an endless access into another world, brought forth by an infinite number of gifted minds. A story about grief can comfort; a story about arrogance can shock and yet confirm; a story populated largely by landscape, whether lush or industrial, can expand the realm that we as individuals inhabit.

She echoes Pitlor’s conviction that these selections “demonstrate the human ability to endure crises and to regenerate afterward. There is nothing safe about these stories.” —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 12, 2009

Saying someone needs no introduction used to have some validity—before life in the post-industrial world went all 365/24/7 on us. Now the exponential explosion of sense-wracking gossip, trivia, ED adverts, and religious poppycock renders that gesture anachronistic. Nonetheless I would love to think that Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five), who died in 2007, needs no introduction—at least to people who find their way to this outlying outpost.

Let me take care of a couple things on my left-wing, arugula-eating agenda by bringing an unintentionally amusing obituary of Vonnegut to your attention. This in the they-would-be-viewed-as-amusing-if-they-weren’t-so toxic category and a case in point of one of Vonnegut’s Swiftian bon mots from Cat’s Cradle:

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Well anyway, a new volume of Vonnegut short stories has been assembled: Look at the Birdie (Delacorte). Anthologized here are 14 previously unpublished stories (festooned with the author’s chirpy line drawings) written just as Vonnegut was liberating himself from the grind of his servitude to General Electric. The stories are nascent exemplars of Vonnegut’s humorous humanism and are well worth any reader’s time. But what I found especially edifying was the facsimile of a letter he wrote to a friend in 1951 on where his writing was going:

…the obvious alternative is, of course, something to please The Atlantic, Harper’s or The New Yorker. To do this would be to turn out something after the fashion of somebody-or-other, and I might be able to do it. I say might. It amounts to signing on with any of a dozen schools born 10, 20, 30 years ago. The kicks are largely on having passed off a creditable counterfeit. And, of course, if you appear in The Atlantic or Harper’s or The New Yorker, by God you must be a writer, because everybody says so. This is poor competition for the fat checks from the slicks. For want of anything more tempting, I’ll stick with money.

And he did. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 4, 2009

If it were possible to embarrass corporations such as Amazon, the recent snafu over Amazon’s recall (that would be the kind word for it) of Kindle versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm should be at least an embarrassment—though litigation would seem a more appropriate remedy. The short of it is that Amazon sold something it didn’t have the rights to and then took it back. Though after much hue and cry they promised not to do it again. Nice, huh?

Which reminds me that Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays and All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, both by Orwell and compiled by George Packer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), were published earlier this year, and neither is available in a Kindle version, so happily one can still purchase some essential Orwell, worry-free. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 22, 2009

The Cultivated Life (Rizzoli), a delightful anthology written and illustrated by Jean-Philippe Delhomme, is a thin tome containing more than 100 of the ubiquitous French illustrator’s works. As is the case with many visual artists co-opted by various luxury brands, you will no doubt recognize the style and images that have hawked cars and boutiques.

Interview magazine featured Delhomme this spring: Glenn O’Brien (who hired him for a well-regarded advertising campaign for Barneys) offers up a quickie interview snapshot of the iconoclastic artist. The Cultivated Life is a razor-sharp dissection of the vicissitudes of a life surrounded by designer and brand names, with an illuminating essay thrown in here and there. You can see his recent work for the Mark Hotel and other amusements at his fun-filled web site. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2009

Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series anthologies is not far behind. What started in 1915 as simply The Best American Short Stories now has every stripe of superlative excessive collections, including the imaginative and contrived The Best American Nonrequired Reading. But the 21st century is all about exploiting Brand, right? So let me move on. If not the “best” stories, Pelecanos’s 19 selections are certainly quite wonderful, as he is certain to upset purists by including fine writers like Elizabeth Strout, Alice Munro, Thisbe Nissen, James Lee Burke, Robert Ferragamo, Michael Connelly, Chuck Hogan, and Joyce Carol Oates. My favorites are a poignant, flashback-filled story by Kyle Minor (“A Day Meant to Do Less”), Scott Phillips’s well-modulated nostalgia (“The Emerson, 1950”), and Stephen Rhodes’s Wall Street morality tale (“At the Top of His Game”).

For many years, Shannon Ravenel edited the New Stories From the South anthology; she’s turned over the reins to Kathy Pories and yearly guest editors: Alan Gurganis in 2006, Edward P. Jones in 2007, and Z.Z. Packer in 2008. As expected, these anthologies do feature many of the South’s favorite sons and daughters (which, if you are out of touch with that region’s rich literary tradition and culture, is a major public service); in this instance, Packer’s introduction is an intriguing, smart, and provocative essay entitled “The Double Indemnity of the South”:

And as backward as we’ve been portrayed—or as backward as we’ve sometimes portrayed ourselves, slipping behind a curtain of innocent and naïve agrarianism, rural somnolence, and sleepy everlasting vowels—the truth is that every awful and beautiful thing that has happened in America happened in the South first.

Kudos to Dan Wickett and Dzanc Books for finding a need and filling it well with the initial Best of the Web 2008. The volume’s editor, Nathan Leslie, writes:

This anthology does not attempt to capture some very vital aspects of the online experience—no multimedia experience, no interactive texts, no surfing here. We limited ourselves to four genres—poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. There are others; this isn’t our attempt to build Rome in a day… Rome will come. It will take time. For now I simply hope you like the anthology we put together. Read, enjoy, savor.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 21, 2008

Cartoonists have struggled in the American culture for their rightful seat at the big arts banquet of popular culture—the big shift in their legitimacy can probably be pegged to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus in the late ’80s. Back in the mid-20th century, parents who were even more clueless (but less lethally so) than today’s breeders scorned DC and Marvel comics and reviled Mad magazine; some even theorized that the books were contributors to the big scare of the ’50s: juvenile delinquency. There were exceptions to the rule: cartoonists such as those found on the op-ed pages of then-flourishing daily newspapers such as the inimitable Herblock and Bill Mauldin.

Mauldin, who had a long and fruitful career as a political cartoonist (“If it’s big,” he used to say, “hit it.”), collecting two Pulitzer Prizes along the way, was well accounted for in Todd DePastino’s biography Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front. Beginning his life’s work for the Army and some civilian publications, he created the characters Willie and Joe to portray what seemingly no other medium was able to capture: the daily lives of infantry grunts in combat zones. DePastino has now edited a wonderful two-volume slipcased anthology of more than 600 of those cartoons in Willie & Joe: The WWII Years.

None other than venerable caricaturist David Levine has lavished this praise on Mauldin: “I think of Mauldin as one of the great anti-war artists, much like Goya. He took drawing up to a communicative level that I think is extraordinary.” Another of Mauldin’s peers, Jules Feiffer recalls:

He was a master of what The New Yorker helped invent, which was that one line that said everything. But where The New Yorker gave it to us in terms of humor, rather gentrified humor, Mauldin was giving it from the working class, from the laboring man, and here he was the grunt, that was the laboring man of the war… He was a beloved figure, and more than that, he connected. He connected in a way that few do in their times, and he connected to a sensibility that was pure and whole… He told the truth to a lot of people.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 15, 2008