The Best Bite: The Stories of Amy Hempel and Anne Beattie An amuse-bouche is an hors d'oeuvre served to shock the taste buds. Chefs are meticulous in their choice of ingredients for an amuse-bouche, as this one bite proclaims who they are and what they create. The bite must be just right. The writing of Amy Hempel and Anne Beattie is a lot like an amuse-bouche. Their opening sentences are immediately engaging, a unique and deliberate diction allows for maximum intensity in a limited space, and their stories are about the moment, rather than a prolonged succession of cause and effect events. An examination of the following six stories, “In the Cemetery When Al Jolson is Buried,” “Nashville Gone to Ashes,” “Jesus is Waiting,” “A Platonic Relationship,” “Home to Marie,” and “Find and Replace,” prove Beattie and Hempel’s concentrated works are demonstrative in the art of restraint. What takes an entire paragraph for some writers to covey is a clipped sentence for Hempel or Beattie. Each word is necessary and saturated with meaning, thus eliminating the need for excess. And no sentence is as important as the first. The initial sentence must incite intrigue and contain insight to the contents of the story. It is the foundation upon which the entire work is built. In an interview with the Paris Review, Amy Hempel compares writing short fiction with journalism, stating that, “you have to grab readers instantly and keep them.” She refers to “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” remarking “The opener contains the whole story: ‘Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting’” (Hempel, 39). The story centers on two women, one terminally ill, the other a visitor to her sick friend. In order to divert attention from the true reason for t... ... middle of paper ... ...shachari, Neila C. . "Ann Beatie - Interview." PICTURING ANN BEATTIE: A DIALOGUE. Version Volume 7.1. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2012. . Trouard, Dawn. Conversations with Ann Beattie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print. Wagner, Erica. "'The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel' - New York Times." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. The New York Times, 21 May 2006. Web. 30 May 2012. . Winner, Paul . "Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 176, Amy Hempel." Paris Review – Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists. Version No. 166. The Paris Review, n.d. Web. 30 May 2012. .
Devin Friedman is a creative storyteller who incorporates observant details in his writings, which makes the readers feel like as if they are part of the adventure. Devin attended the University of Michigan, and he was awarded as the winner of the Hopwood Contest. This contest was hosted by the university committee who appoints experienced judges and the Ann Arbor community to select winners in different writing divisions. In his recent years, Devin wrote for numerous publications such as The Best American Crime Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, People's Stories, and GQ. Out of the many articles Friedman has written in the past, “The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy,” “Famous People: James Franco,” and “The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being” are the ones I have chosen to read because of the interesting subject matters and the different writing styles.
Alexandra Bergson is a hard working women. She struggles at first but does not give up. Alexandra’s hard work finally pays off. She is really successful and really wealthy. She is a mentor to her under brother. She does not want him to be like her. She motivates and pushes him to become someone better than her. Alexandra was always kind and caring to all the people around her. She would try her best to be friendly and helpful with everyone. She was forgiving to people even if they did or said something to her. Alexandra was also a lonely single lady. She spent most of her time staying on top of her farm and younger brother. She was loving
Andi Anderson (Kate Hudson) is a beautiful, young, and successful writer who maintains a “How-To” section in “Composure” magazine. Her dream is to “write about things that matter, like politics and the environment, and foreign affairs- things I’m interested in.” (How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, time stamp 02:00). She knows that the only way she will eventually be able to write about subjects she’s passionate about is to be successful in writing her superficial “How-To” section in the magazine.
"Unit 2: Reading & Writing About Short Fiction." ENGL200: Composition and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 49-219. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
...n & Co., Inc., 1962); excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 3, ed. Carolyn Riley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1975), p. 526.
A short story is a work of literature that is shorter than a novel. Although some may believe the length may not be enough to develop a noble story, in these few pages an author can pack a tight punch that will leave one in awe, disgust, or utter sadness. Whether there is a moral of the story or it is simply for the reader’s enjoyment, each author has their own style of conveying a message through their work in very diverse ways. Through Flannery O’Connor and Chuck Palahniuk’s works we can see this very evidently.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. 348-350. Print.
...tical Review of Long Fiction. Vol. III 4 vols. Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 1991, p 1273
I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, but little enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it is apt to spoil two good things – a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in whi...
I keep my journal hidden; the script, the drawings, the color, the weight of the paper, contents I hope never to be experienced by another. My journal is intensely personal, temporal and exposed. When opening the leather bound formality of Alice Williamson's journal a framework of meaning is presupposed by the reader's own feelings concerning the medium. Reading someone else's diary can be, and is for myself, an voyeuristic invasion of space. The act of reading makes the private and personal into public. Yet, for Alice Williamson and many other female journalists of the Civil War period, the journal was creating a public memory of the hardship that would be sustained when read by others. The knowledge of the outside reader reading of your life was as important as the exercise of recording for one's self; creating a sense of sentimentality connecting people through emotions. (Arnold)
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
...." Studies In The Literary Imagination 36.2 (2003): 61-70. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 6 Dec. 2013.
...s in Short Fiction 36.3 (1999): 291+. Humanities Module. ProQuest. Carl Sandburg College, Galesburg, IL. CSC Lib 28 Feb. 2008
De France, Marie. Lanval. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 127-40.
Short stories are temporary portals to another world; there is a plethora of knowledge to learn from the scenario, and lies on top of that knowledge are simple morals. Langston Hughes writes in “Thank You Ma’m” the timeline of a single night in a slum neighborhood of an anonymous city. This “timeline” tells of the unfolding generosities that begin when a teenage boy fails an attempted robbery of Mrs. Jones. An annoyed bachelor on a British train listens to three children their aunt converse rather obnoxiously in Saki’s tale, “The Storyteller”. After a failed story attempt, the bachelor tries his hand at storytelling and gives a wonderfully satisfying, inappropriate story. These stories are laden with humor, but have, like all other stories, an underlying theme. Both themes of these stories are “implied,” and provide an excellent stage to compare and contrast a story on.