老少咸宜的短篇佳作

????《牛津美國短篇小說選》（The Oxford Book of American Short Stories）不乏優秀的候選作家，喬伊斯·卡羅爾·歐茨便是其中之一。她是1992年第一版及今年新版小說選的供稿人和編輯。這一次，歐茨說，她“很高興能夠從美國經典作家的作品中發現一些不為人知、卻引人入勝的佳作”。也就是說，第一版收錄了厄內斯特·海明威的著作《一個干凈明亮的地方》（A Clean, Well-Lighted Place），今年的新版則會收錄其相對而言不那么出名的作品《白象似的群山》（Hills Like White Elephants）。這篇小說出版于1927年，通篇都是一男一女在西班牙火車站的對話，句子簡潔而零散。它已經成為海明威標志性的風格，也是后人競相模仿的對象。

????歐茨還把約翰·契弗和平克尼·本尼迪克特的舊作換成了新作。她將15名老作家剔除出候選作家名單，取而代之的是17張新面孔，其中包括朱諾特·迪亞茲。我對迪亞茲還很陌生，但《紐約客》（The New Yorker）的編輯們和普利策獎委員會都已經對她很熟悉了。迪亞茲不僅帶來了一個精彩的短篇——《新澤西州，愛迪生市》（Edison, New Jersey），還留下一句箴言，我們當中有些人對這句箴言體會尤深：“作家之所以成其為作家，乃是因為即使毫無希望，即使所做的事情前途渺茫，他還是會堅持寫下去。”

????《牛津美國短篇小說選》的編選初衷是為了展開全方位的研究，幫助讀者形成深厚的文學功底，但它的作用遠不止于此。你可以隨時隨地沉浸其中，又可以隨時隨地將它放在一邊。它是一本有趣的讀物，上面登載了各個入選作家鞭辟入里的背景簡介。全書收錄短篇小說59篇，供稿名家包括雷蒙德·卡佛、塞繆爾·克萊門斯（馬克·吐溫——譯注）、斯蒂芬·克萊恩、威廉·福克納、F.斯科特·菲茨杰拉德、華盛頓·歐文、伯納德·馬拉默德、赫爾曼·梅爾維爾、伊迪絲·華頓及斯蒂芬·金、安妮·普羅克斯、菲利普·羅斯、約翰·厄普代克等。

Short Stories for Everyone

????The Oxford Book of American Short Stories?has lots going for it, including Joyce Carol Oates, who contributed to and edited both this edition and the original, which was published in 1992. This time around, Oates says she was "pleased to discover virtually unknown yet fascinating work by certain classic American writers." That means Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which appeared in the first edition, has been replaced by "Hills Like White Elephants," a lesser-known story, published in 1927, that consists almost entirely of a conversation between a man and a women at a train station in Spain, talking in the lean, staccato-like manner that became Hemingway's trademark and a style hundreds of others would copy.

????Oates also replaced older stories by John Cheever and Pinckney Benedict with newer ones. She totally eliminated the work of 15 other writers, but made up for the deletions with 17 new faces, including Junot Diaz, who was new to me but not to the editors at?The New Yorker?and the Pulitzer Prize committee. In addition to a great short story called "Edison, New Jersey," Diaz leaves us with a message that some of us have learned the hard way: "A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing he does shows signs of promise, he keeps writing anyway."

????Designed as a sweeping survey that touches the appropriate literary bases,?The Oxford Book of American Short Stories?is all that and more. It's the kind of book you can dip into and out of at will, a fun read that includes short but meaningful background on the authors. It contains 59 stories in all, including contributions from Raymond Carver, Samuel Clemens, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Washington Irving, Bernard Malamud, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, along with Stephen King, Annie Proulx, Philip Roth, and John Updike.