A storied affair

I need help. I own, by my inaccurate count, over two hundred and twenty collections of short stories. Why? I'm baffled, flabbergasted, appalled: how did things get so out of hand? This is not, of course, the time or place to discuss bibliomania, bibliophilia, addiction, hoarding, or my marriage, the health of which is inextricably linked to the critical mass of books infesting our apartment. No, rather, this is a time to ask: why so many collections of short stories? Do other book lovers have this issue, an issue I didn't know I had? Is there a cure, preferably over-the-counter? I've seen apartments crawling with novels, military history tomes, plays, but never anthologies, at least this many. I would say this discovery makes me feel vaguely perverted, but when your career is in opera, feeling perverted is the least of your worries. Trust me.

Is it really critical to own three versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales? What kind of maniac, biblio- or otherwise, needs at least six different short story collections depicting H.P. Lovecraft's now-mainstream mythos? How many Calvino anthologies does one need? And don't get me started on Bradbury and Borges; e-readers were invented for their endless supply of eerie tales.  Multiple collections of Mark Twain stories, Jack London stories, Roger Zelazny, Stephen King, and Philip K. Dick. Pulp villains, pulp fiction, spies, vampires (when they were monsters, not boyfriends), and let's not forget the erotica. Balzac's Droll Stories, John Gardner, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Angela Carter, Robert E. Howard, and these are just the multiples! What was I thinking?


To be fair, I have made some fascinating discoveries. I had no idea that Tennessee Williams, Bertold Brecht, and  Eugene Ionesco, famous playwrights all, had published collections of stories along with their plays (Chekhov and Beckett are better known for theirs). For the exotic, I have Auschwitz-survivor Tadeuz Borowski's gallow's humored  This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, as well as Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! Legendary poets Alexander Pushkin and Dylan Thomas both wrote stories, as did Kipling. There is a wealth of Jewish fables and apocrypha, from occult tales of the Golem to the Wandering Jew to harrowing stories of the Holocaust. And the tragedy of Polish short story author Bruno Schulz's death at the hands of a Gestapo officer has moved modern American authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Cynthia Ozik to meditate on Schulz's stories in books of their own.

So, here are some gems I have uncovered in my thirty-odd years: Anthony Boucher's Mr. Lupescu is a diamond of magic realism. Robert Coover's The Dead Queen is a mordantly gothic take on the happily-ever-after of Snow White. Dandicat's Between the Pool and the Gardenias is as beautifully written as it is disturbing. And if you're noticing a pattern favoring the uncanny and off-kilter, let me underline it with China Mieville's Reports of Certain Events in London. There is no better short, noir thriller than Jorge Luis Borges's Death and the Compass, but if there is, it's Raymond Chandler's Spanish Blood. I have never been able to get Stephen King's Suffer the Little Children out of my head, especially now that I have children, but even before that time, Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant could always move this atheist to tears. Harlan Ellison's Grail and Theodore Sturgeon's Dazed both satisfy my taste for the infernal, while new sci-fi darling Paolo Bacigalupi does the same for my fondness for dystopias with his Pop Squad...suffer the little children indeed! And I must credit James Harris, the best uncle a book lover ever had, with introducing me to Irwin Shaw and his sublime The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.

There's more to say--isn't there always?--but after writing this I'm noticing all the volumes of stories I own that I haven't mentioned because of simple ignorance, and I should do something about that.