Helen Schulman's Fools for Love collects 10 of her short stories, including a new one about the marriage of a playwright and her gay husband. Below, the award-winning author of This Beautiful Life, Lucky Dogs, and five other novels names six favorite story collections.
'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' by Raymond Carver (1981)
When I was in college at Cornell, I dated a literary boy who was a protégé of Harold Brodkey's—who I'd never heard of—and this boy gave me a copy of Carver's collection as a gift. My first thought was, "People who are alive now write short stories?" Today I still read these stories. My favorite is "Why Don't You Dance?" Buy it here.
'Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers' by Stanley Elkin (1966)
"A Poetics for Bullies" is a lyrical masterpiece, and Elkin was a genius who never got the attention he deserved. Buy it here.
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'Many Windows' edited by Ted Solotaroff (1982)
At Columbia, I took a class from Ted Solotaroff, who used this compilation of the stories that he'd edited at American Review as a baseline text. I loved these stories! Grace Paley. William Gass. Austin Clarke. It was as if each one was written in a new and different language. Some of my students think no one should read them—dated, sexist, racist. That all may be true, but I still think they are groundbreaking. Buy it here.
'Going to Meet the Man' by James Baldwin (1965)
I also took an African American lit course at Columbia, taught by Amiri Baraka. When he handed out the syllabus, he said, "If you haven't already read these books, you are ignorant or racist." I knew I was ignorant; that is why I took the course. Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" slayed me, a story about the hell and heaven of artistic obsession. Buy it here.
'The Stories of John Cheever' (1978)
During those years, I read every short story I could get my hands on, which led me to this master class of the form. Some favorites: "The Country Husband," "The Five-Forty-Eight," and "Goodbye, My Brother," which I continue to read when I lose heart over the entire literary enterprise. Buy it here.
'The Complete Stories' by Flannery O'Connor (1971)
At the same time, I was also reading O'Connor, the genius of omniscience. As a New York Jew, I was fascinated by her Catholicism and her God's-eye view of her characters: He—and she—loved them all equally. I strive for this broadcast love. Buy it here.
