Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 27, 1994 TAG: 9402200131
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I suppose every red-blooded American male has received, by now, a copy of the promotional packet featuring forty years of fabulous foxes from the foldout pages of Playboy. Such fickle, two-dimensional creatures, these foxes. And you have to subscribe to the magazine to receive the goods.
The volume under review here, "Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction," might just be a better buy.
It might come as a surprise to some that the fiction editor of Playboy for the past decade and more has been Alice K. Turner ~ a very astute woman. Her selection of stories for this volume includes the prize-winning likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula Le Guin, and Nadine Gordimer. As might be expected, however, male writers predominate. Heavyweights in this corner include Norman Mailer, John Cheever, Robert Coover, John Updike, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud ~ in fact, just about everyone a professor might assign in a contemporary fiction course, including a couple of other Nobel Prize winners (besides Gordimer, that is) named Marquez and Singer.
The novelty items in Turner's one-a-year-for-the-past- forty selection (with a couple of others thrown in) include a chapter from "Catch-22" that Joseph Heller says he didn't realize got cut from the published novel (it's good, but one understands the cutting) and a short story by a writer better known for spinning out hundreds of pages per all-day-and-all- night session, the Roadmaster himself, Jack Kerouac. In both cases, the essential appeal of the authors' approach to fiction shines through. For my money, these two items alone make the volume well worth the price.
I suppose the best way to sum up this volume is simply to say that reading Playboy without the pictures has never more satisfying. Good fiction, served up with the tantalizing cachet of forbidden fruit. The bunny book is, after all, a magazine for men.
- DAN GRIBBIN teaches literature and film at Ferrum College. He is fiction editor of Artemis.
by CNB