The Story about the Story Vol. II

In the second volume of The Story about the Story, editor J. C. Hallman continues to argue for an alternative to the staid five-paragraph-essay writing that has inoculated so many against the effects of good books. Writers have long approached writing about reading from an intensely personal perspective. Never before collected in a single volume, these many essays demonstrate new possibilities for how to write about reading. They offer lessons from a remarkable range of celebrated authors, amounting to an invaluable course on how to both write and read. Whether they discuss a staple of the canon (Thomas Mann on Leo Tolstoy), the merits of a contemporary (Vivian Gornick on Grace Paley), a pillar of genre-writing (Jane Tompkins on Louis LAmour), or, arguably, the funniest man on the planet (David Shields on Bill Murray), these essays are by turns poignant, smart, suggestive, intellectual, humorous, sassy, scathing, laudatory, wistful, and hopeful — above all deeply engaged in a process of careful reading. The essays in The Story about the Story Vol. II dig deep into the past and aim toward a future where literature plays a profound role in how we think, read, live, and write.

In addition to editing The Story About the Story, J.C. Hallman is the author of several books, including The Chess Artist, In Utopia, Wm and H'ry, and B and Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal.

The list of contributors includes:

1) Wendy Lesser on Cervantes

2) Philip Lopate on Stendhal

3) John Berryman on Anne Frank

4) David Shields on Bill Murray

5) Zadie Smith on Hurston F

6) Charles Baxter on Chekhov

7) Thomas Mann on Tolstoy

8) Jane Tompkins on LAmour

9) Joyce Carol Oates on Mary Shelley

10) Martin Amis on Larkin

11) Margaret Atwood on Wells

12) Michael Dirda on “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

13) Walter Benjamin on Leskov

14) Nicholson Baker on Defoe

15) James Thurber on James

16) Elizabeth Hardwick on Melville

17) David Foster Wallace on Updike

18) Jacque Barzun on Abraham Lincoln

19) Vivian Gornick on Paley

20) H.L. Mencken on Dreiser

21) Susan Cheever on Alcott

22) Ralph Ellison on Crane

23) Joseph Conrad on Crane

24) Francisco Goldman on Bolano

25) Katherine Anne Porter on Cather

26) Harold Bloom on Hans Christian Andersen

Ecstatically: How to Write About Reading – J.C. Hallman

Criticism – Henry James

1) The First Novel – Wendy Lesser

2) Portrait Inside My Head – Phillip Lopate

3) The Development of Anne Frank – John Berryman

4) The Only Solution to the Soul is the Senses: A Mediation on Bil Murray and Myself – David Shields

5) Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean? – Zadie Smith Hurston

6) Sonyas Last Speech, or, Double-Voicing: An Essay in Sixteen Sections – Charles Baxter

7) Thomas Mann on Leo Tolstoy – Thomas Mann

8) The Last of the Breed: Homage to Louis LAmour – Jane Tompkins

9) Frankensteins Fallen Angel – Joyce Carol Oates

10) Philip Larkin 1922 – 1985 – Martin Amis

11) Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells ¬– Margaret Atwood

12) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Michael Dirda

13) The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov – Walter Benjamin

14) Defoe, Truthteller – Nicholson Baker

15) The Wings of Henry James – James Thurber

16) Billy Budd – Elizabeth Hardwick

17) Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think – David Foster Wallace

18) Lincoln the Writer – Jacque Barzun

19) Grace Paley – Vivian Gornick

20) Theodore Dreiser – H.L. Mencken

21) Little Women – Susan Cheever

22) Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction – Ralph Ellison

23) Joseph Conrad on Stephen Crane – Joseph Conrad

24) Brick – Francisco Goldman

25) Reflections on Willa Cather – Katherine Anne Porter

26) Trust the Tale, Not the Teller: Hans Christian Andersen – Harold Bloom