Christopher R. Beha: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout

The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction

The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, an anthology I edited with Joyce Carol Oates, is going into production and is now available for pre-order at Amazon. (The book will be coming out in October, but it's never too early secure yourself a copy.) In addition to an introduction and a very powerful story by Joyce herself, the anthology includes work -- all of it fairly recent -- by Richard Ford, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Ann Beattie, George Saunders, and John Updike. There are also wonderful stories by younger writers like Adam Haslett, Maile Meloy, and Elizabeth McCracken. Editing the anthology was a great experience, a wonderful reminder of how vibrant the short form is, and I'm grateful to Joyce for inviting me to help her.

The Completists

During the year I spent reading the Harvard Classics, I learned of a few other people engaged in similar projects, chief among them Matt Dessem, who has been blogging for several years now about his progress through the Criterion Collection of DVDs on his website, The Criterion Contraption.  Completists, Matt called us.  He spotted my project before I found his, and he was nice enough to mention me and a few other Completists on his blog and elsewhere.  For no especially good reason, I had decided to limit my own site to my responses to the Classics, but now that I'm doing the more informal blog thing, I wanted to acknowledge his site, which is one of my favorites.  As Matt pointed out to me, the Criterion Collection adds movies more quickly than he can watch them, so he should be offering his thoughts on everything from The 400 Blows to The Life of Brian pretty much forever.  Which is fine with me.

A New Year's Celebration

I spent the just finished year reading the 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics, which cut down substantially on my other reading, but I did have time for John Crowley's four volume sequence, AEgypt.  Several months ago, I wrote a review of the final volume in the project, Endless Things.  I thought then, as I think now, that Crowley is among the very best novelists around right now.  But I complained that the earlier volumes of AEgypt were all out of print (I'd found my copies on Ebay and paid almost $100 for one of them).  As it happens, while I was writing my review, Overlook Press was working to rectify this problem.

In August, Overlook published the first volume, The Solitudes (originally titled AEgypt).  Last month, they published the second volume -- my favorite of the four -- Love and Sleep.  And by the time 2008 is done, the entire series will be available in a uniform paperback edition.  Crowley has many more eloquent proselytizers than I, some of whom may have given up the hope that this or that publishing development will make him the household name he deserves to be.  Suffice it to say that if you're looking for your own reading project for the coming year, I urge you to head to Overlook's website and get started on one of the best works of American fiction to appear in the past quarter century.