For our third major assignment, you will curate and editorialize a selection of at least 5 short stories.
You will find at least five short stories that you feel are meaningful, significant, or valuable and put them together into a collection. Two of these short stories
MUST be stories outside of the stories we have read in class. You will organize those short stories in whatever order you want, and present them as a
collection.
You will also write an editorial introduction to these stories explaining why you have selected these five short stories for your collection and the general
significance of your collection. In this introduction, you can consider the following questions:
Why is each story significant to you?
How are the stories connected to each other?
As a collection, how are the stories relevant to the world, history, or literature?
What do you think is happening by putting the different authors in conversation with each other?
Although your editorial introduction does not need to be written in essay format, it will likely contain outside sources to help you answer some of these
questions, and those should be cited. The introduction should be at least 800 words. In your letter, you should use specific quotes and examples from the
short stories to help illustrate your choices.
Remember that some stories will be easily connected, some stories will have no connection, and some stories will require significant work to create
connections. It is up to you how you choose to organize your collection and you can justify putting stories in however you would like.
You will also do a presentation of your collection to the class, in which you will explain your editorial introduction and share some of the short stories you
read with us.
Here are some resources to find short stories in. Many of the journals listed here have a large majority of them available in the library database, so you can
access the stories inside:
Ploughshares
Publisher Site: https://www.pshares.org/issues/genre/fiction (Links to an external site.)
Library Link: https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.hccc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspub&AN=edp56470&site=pfi-live (Links to an external site.)
The New Yorker
Publisher Site: https://www.newyorker.com/fiction-and-poetry (Links to an external site.)
Library Link: https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.hccc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspub&AN=edp51980&site=pfi-live (Links to an external site.)
The Virginia Quarterly
Publisher Site: http://www.vqronline.org/fiction (Links to an external site.)
Library Link: https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.hccc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspub&AN=edp69038&site=pfi-live (Links to an external site.)
The Threepenny Review
Publisher Site: https://www.threepennyreview.com/readingroom.html (Links to an external site.)
The Missouri Review
Publisher Site: https://www.missourireview.com/category/featured-prose/ (Links to an external site.)
Harvard Review
Publisher Site: https://harvardreview.org/online-features/?genre=fiction (Links to an external site.)