Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories: An Anthology

Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin--this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ballads, parables, anecdotes, and legends along with some of the finest work of Chekhov, Babel, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Kafka, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter. This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

Contents
RANDALL JARRELL: Introduction
FRANZ KAFKA: A Country Doctor
ANTON CHEKHOV: Gusev
RAINER MARIA RILKE: The Wrecked Houses; The Big Thing
ROBERT FROST: The Witch of Co s
GIOVANNI VERGA: La Lupa
NIKOLAI GOGOL: The Nose
ELIZABETH BOWEN: Her Table Spread
LUDWIG TIECK: Fair Eckbert
BERTOLT BRECHT: Concerning the Infanticide, Marie Farrar
LEO TOLSTOY: The Three Hermits
PETER TAYLOR: What You Hear from 'Em?
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Fir Tree
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: He
ANONYMOUS: The Red King and the Witch
ANTON CHEKHOV: Rothschild's Fiddle
THE BROTHERS GRIMM: Cat and Mouse in Partnership
E. M. FORSTER: The Story of the Siren
THE BOOK OF JONAH
FRANZ KAFKA: The Bucket-Rider
SAINT-SIMON: The Death of Monseigneur
ISAAC BABEL: Awakening
CHUANG T'ZU: Five Anecdotes
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL: A Tale of the Cavalry
WILLIAM BLAKE: The Mental Traveller
D. H. LAWRENCE: Samson and Delilah
LEO TOLSTOY: The Porcelain Doll
IVAN TURGENEV: Byezhin Prairie
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: The Ruined Cottage
FRANK O'CONNOR: Peasants
ISAK DINESEN: Sorrow-Acre

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was born in Tennessee and graduated from Vanderbilt. A poet, novelist, translator, and critic as well as writer for children, Jarrell was a prolific author whose best-known works include the poems collected in The Woman at the Washington Zoo and The Lost World, the academic comedyPictures from an Institution, the children’s story The Bat Poet, and Poetry and the Age, a group of essays. An influential critic who, as poetry reviewer for The Nation, helped to launch the careers of Robert Lowell and other contemporaries, Jarrell taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, where he was much revered. He died in a car accident in 1965.