Occasional hors-série Personal Anthology: Susan Sontag's 'ideal' anthology
A Personal Anthology remains on holiday until September, when the weekly mail-out returns – some exciting names already lined up! – but I couldn’t resist posting this occasional missive.
Browsing through the second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries (is there any other way to read them? they are very jotted, very provisional and fragmentary) I came across this entry, from 1978, in which Sontag notes down names and titles for what she calls ‘An Ideal Story Anthology’. As might be expected, there are some heavy-hitting postmodernist writers there, and some of the major European modernists that Sontag did so much to proselytise.
Here is her list. I’ve added links where writers and individual stories have already been covered in this Personal Anthology project:
An Ideal Story Anthology
V Woolf, ‘The Moment’ or ‘The Unwritten Novel’
Robert Walser, ‘Kleist in Thun’ [picked there by Chris Power]
Paul Goodman, ‘Minutes are Flying’
Laura Riding, ‘Last lesson in Geography’
[In the margin: the Geman writer Wolfgang] Bochert, '[the Jewish Serbian-Hungarian writer Danilo] Kiš
[Tommaso] Landolfi, ‘W.C.’
Calvino, ‘[The Distance of the'] Moon’ (from Cosmicomics) [picked there by Leone Ross, and also by Sam Mills and Vanessa Onwuemezi]
Beckett, ‘The Expelled’
Barthelme, ‘The Balloon’ [picked there by Agri Ismaïl, and also by Jennifer Hodgson, Carolina Alvarado Monk and Alyssa Harad]
Philip Roth, ‘On the Air’ [Roth’s story published in New American Review n 1970]
John Ashbery, ‘Prose Poem’
John Barth, ‘Title’ or ‘Life-Story’
Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘Prologue’
John McPhee, ‘Boardwalk’
Bruno Schulz, ‘Hourglass’ or ‘The Book’
[Elisabeth] Langgässer, ‘Mars’
des Forêts,
Sinyavsky,
[Peter] Handke,
[the Austrian poet Ingeborg] Bachmann,
Borges, ‘Pierre Menard’ [picked – again! – by Agri Ismaïl, who clearly shares strong critical DNA with Sontag]
Gadda,
Garcia Márquez,
[Stanislaw] Lem, ‘Probablaism...’ [likely means ‘The Third Sally’ or ‘The Dragons of Probability’]
Ballard,
It’s quite heady mix, I think you’ll agree, and if she goes well over the dozen allowed entries we’ll forgive her for that. As with so many great entries to the project, there are names here that are absolutely new to me, and may be to you. Get reading!
*
As it happens, yesterday saw another collaborative story anthology hit Substack - the crowd-sourced anthology suggested by George Saunders on his Story Club mailing, in which he encouraged subscribers and readers to contribute the name of one single solitary story each to build another kind of ideal anthology. To read the list, see here. Obviously there are plenty of overlaps with the Personal Anthology archives – too many to list. Characteristically, Saunders excluded his own stories from consideration, so to make up for that, here’s a link to the eleven times his own stories have been picked on A Personal Anthology.
*
Normal service will resume in early September. As ever, if you would like to contribute your own selection of a dozen favourite short stories to make up your own Personal Anthology, then please do get in touch!
All the best
Jonathan Gibbs