The Best American Catholic Short Stories: A Sheed & Ward Collection

Front Cover
Daniel McVeigh, Patricia Schnapp
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007 - Fiction - 346 pages
The Best American Catholic Short Stories captures twenty of the best short stories from thirteen American Catholic writers over the past seventy-five years. Spanning most of the twentieth century, the stories in this collection deal with many of the issues brought into the spotlight with Vatican II. One ongoing area of controversy, of course, is in the very notion of Catholic fiction. What constitutes a work as "Catholic"? This new collection, with its rich variety of themes, styles, and tones, takes an important step in answering this question. Pat Schnapp and Dan McVeigh have assembled an extraordinary sampling that is unique in its subject and scope. Major contributors include Mary Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Ron Hansen, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Richard Russo.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Old Red
1
The Presence
17
The Peach Stone
31
Lions Harts Leaping Does
47
The Devil in the Desert
67
Emmanuele Emmanuele
91
The Displaced Person
121
Dawn
155
Playland
227
The Devil and Irv Cherniske
239
The Rich Brother
257
Mrs Cassidys Last Year
273
The Whores Child
281
Died and Gone to Vegas
295
Good for the Soul
311
A Fathers Story
325

Silent Retreats
165
Keepsakes
181
Resident Priest
197
Geneseo
209
In The Beginning
343
Selected Bibliography
345
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