Authors: Ron Hansen

You've Got to Read This (111 page)

BOOK: You've Got to Read This

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Count Tolstoy married Sofya Behrs in 1862 and fathered thirteen children while managing his country estate and creating his two greatest masterpieces,
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina.
Educational, religious, and social reform preoccupied him throughout his life, particularly after 1880, but it was in this period, too, that he produced "The Death of Ivan Ilych,"

"The Kreutzer Sonata," and "Master and Man." His last novel was
Resurrection.
In November, 1910, Tolstoy died of pneumonia at a railway station in Astapovo.

John Updike
was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932 and graduated
summa cum laude
in English literature from Harvard College in 1954.

After a year in England on the Knox Fellowship at Oxford University, he spent two years on the staff of
The New Yorker,
to which he has continued to contribute short stories, poems, essays, and book reviews. He is the author of nine collections of stories, including
The Same Door, Pigeon
Feathers, The Music School, Museums and Women, Problems,
and
Trust
Me,
and of sixteen novels, four collections of nonfictional prose, a memoir,
Self-Consciousness,
and children's books and poetry collections, for which he has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the father of four children and lives in Massachusetts.

Stephanie Vaughn
was born in Millersburg, Ohio, in 1945, and she grew up
626 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

on military installations in Ohio, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, the Philippine Islands, and Italy. She was educated at Ohio State University, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University, where she held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. Her short stories have appeared in
Antaeus, The New Yorker,
and
Redbook,
and in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize collections. She is the author of
Sweet Talk
and teaches fiction writing and literature at Cornell University.

Alice Walker
was born in 1944 to sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, and Sarah Lawrence, and published her first book of poetry,
Once,
in 1968. Since then she has published collections of poetry, short stories, and essays, and four novels, including
The Color Purple,
winner of the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Eudora Welty
was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives in a house built by her family. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin and attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

She is the author of a memoir,
One Writer's Beginnings;
a book of essays,
The Eye of the Story;
five novels,
The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding,
The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles,
and
The Optimist's Daughter;
and five volumes of short stories, most recently
The Collected Stories of Eudora
Welty.
She has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal for literature, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Howells Medal for Fiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Joy Williams
was born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in 1944. She received an M.A. from Marietta College and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. She worked as a marine researcher and data analyst in the Florida Keys before studying at Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. She's published the novels
State of Grace,
The Changeling,
and
Escapes,
and the short story collections
Taking Care
and
Breaking & Entering.
She is married and the mother of one daughter.

Jerome Wilson
was born in 1969 in Memphis, Tennessee. He's currently studying English literature at Memphis State and has worked as a restaurant busboy, a shipping clerk in a potato chip company, and a librarian's assistant. "Paper Garden" is his first published story.

Tobias Wolff
was born in Alabama in 1945 and was raised in Concrete, Washington, the location of his memoir
This Boy's Life.
He served as a lieutenant with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, then attended Oxford University, where he earned a First in English literature. After teaching high school in San Francisco, he studied at Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. He is now a professor of English at Syracuse University. His two collections of stories are
In the Garden of the North
American Martyrs
and
Back in the World.
His short novel
The Barracks
Thief
won the PEN/Faulkner Award and he is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Mr. Wolff is married and the father of three children.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 627

Al Young
was born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in 1939, the son of a professional musician and autoworker. He studied Spanish at the University of Michigan and was a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellow at Stanford.

He's been a jazz and blues singer and musician, an FM station disk jockey, and an instructor and lecturer at numerous universities. His books include the poetry collections
Dancing, The Song Turning Back on Itself, Geography of the Near Past,
and
Heaven: Collected Poems 1956-1990,
as well as the novels
Snakes, Sitting Pretty,
and
Seduction by Light.
He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material:

"A Mother's Tale," by James Agee. Reprinted by permission of the James Agee Trust.

"Guy de Maupassant," by Isaac Babel. Reprinted by permission of S. G. Phillips, Inc., from
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
, Copyright © 1955 by S. G. Phillips, Inc.

"Sonny's Blues" from
Going to Meet the Man
by James Baldwin. Copyright © 1957 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. "Sonny's Blues" was originally published in
Partisan Review.
Reprinted with permission of the James Baldwin Estate.

"The School" from
60 Stories
by Donald Barthelme. Reprinted with the permission of Wylie, Aitken & Stone, Inc.

"The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Anthony Kerrigan, from
A Personal
Anthology,
copyright © 1969 by Grove Press Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

"A Day in the Open" from
The Collected Works of Jane Bowles.
Copyright © 1966 by Jane Bowles. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted in Canada by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.

"A Distant Episode," © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950 by Paul Bowles. From
The
Delicate Prey: And Other Stories.
First printed by the Ecco Press in 1972.

Reprinted with permission.

"The Star Cafe," reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company, from
The Star Cafe
by Mary Caponegro.

"Reflections" from
Fireworks
by Angela Carter. Copyright © 1974 by Angela Carter.

Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Reprinted in Canada by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.

"Cathedral" from
Cathedral
by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1981 by Raymond Carver. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

"Goodbye, My Brother" from
The Stories of John Cheever
by John Cheever. Copyright 1951 by John Cheever. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

"Pie Dance" from
Rough Translations
by Molly Giles. Copyright © 1985 by Molly Giles. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, the University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia.

"Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases," by Lars Gustafsson:
Stories of Happy People.

"The Interview," by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Originally appeared in
The New Yorker.

"In the Penal Colony" from
Franz Kafka: Complete Stories
by Franz Kafka, ed. N.

"Girl" from
At the Bottom of the River
by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1978, 1983 by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Elizabeth Bishop's translation of "The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice
629

630 • COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lispector first appeared in
The Kenyon Review,
Summer 1964, OS Volume XXVI, Number 3. Copyright 1964 by Kenyon College. Translation copyright © 1964 by Elizabeth Bishop. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. The story first appeared in book form in Clarice Lispector's collection
Lagos de
Famttia,
copyright © I960, which was published in the translation by Giovanni Pontiero under the title
Family Ties,
copyright © 1970, by the University of Texas Press.

"The Daughters of the Late Colonel" from
The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
by Katherine Mansfield. Copyright 1922 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and renewed 1950

by John Middleton Murry. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

"Labor Day Dinner" from
The Moons of Jupiter and Other Stories
by Alice Munro.

"Spring in Fialta" from
Nabokov's Dozen
by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 1958 by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.

"The Things They Carried" from
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien. Copyright

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" from
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories,
copyright 1953 by Flannery O'Connor and renewed 1981 by Regina O'Connor, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace and Company.

"I Stand Here Ironing" from
Tell Me a Riddle
by Tillie Olsen. Copyright © 1956, 1957, I960, 1961 by Tillie Olsen. Used by permission of Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

"Wants" from
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
by Grace Paley. Copyright ©

1974 by Grace Paley. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," Delmore Schwartz:
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.
Copyright © 1978 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

"The Man to Send Rain Clouds" by Leslie Marmon Silko. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Helping," by Robert Stone. Copyright 1987 by Robert Stone. Originally published in
The New Yorker
; 6/8/87. Reprinted by permission of Donadio & Ashworth, Inc.

"Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car" from
Pigeon Feathers and
Other Stories
by John Updike. Copyright © 1962 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

by Alice Walker, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

"No Place for You, My Love" from
The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories,
copyright 1952 and renewed 1980 by Eudora Welty, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

(Introduction to Chekhov's "Goosebemes") from
The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays

"Paper Garden" by Jerome Wilson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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