The Everyman's Pocket Classics series and editor Diana Secker Tesdell offer attractive, gifty, hardcover story anthologies covering a variety of topics, such as the sea, cats, horses and Christmas. They published an anthology on motherhood, too, and now we have its companion volume on fatherhood just in time for Father's Day.
The earmark of these collections is the quality and range of the stories, and Stories of Fatherhood holds to those standards. Here are 20 stories by writers both well-known and relatively undiscovered. Every story is, in its own way, a small masterpiece. There are two Irish jewels: Frank O'Connor's "My Oedipus Complex" and James Joyce's "A Little Cloud." There are a handful from past greats, such as Guy de Maupassant, Franz Kafka, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence. In "Christmas," Vladimir Nabokov reaches back to his own early years in Russia to detail a father's grief as he returns to the family's estate to bury his dead teenage son.
In John Updike's elegiac and poignant "My Father's Tears," the narrator tells us about the only time he saw his father cry. Harold Brodkey's poetic "His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft" chronicles special moments when a boy's father picked him up. Jim Shepard's "The Mortality of Parents," which marks the death of a father with wit and wisdom, will have readers looking for more of his work. The book itself is compact and inexpensive; the literature within is priceless. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher