Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Contributions from such major figures as Borges, Cheever, Alice Munro and Ray Bradbury carry the day in In the Stacks: Short Stories about Libraries and Librarians, assembled by former librarian Michael Cart (My Father's Scar). Borges's well-known "The Library of Babel" is the best of the bunch, with its thought-provoking musings on the possibilities of an "infinite" library. Cheever chips in with a noteworthy contribution in "The Trouble of Marcie Flint," a typical exploration of infidelity and the dark side of suburbia. A handful of the remaining stories are pedantic, underdeveloped or ill-conceived, but there's more than enough wheat among the chaff to make this an intriguing collection. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Librarian Cart (Tomorrow Land) gathered these 19 stories about what he calls "the many-splendored universe we call the library." What is impressive is the list of writers: Italo Calvino, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro, John Cheever, Jorge Luis Borges, and more are represented in these pages. A librarian's love of books is dramatically demonstrated in Le Guin's "Phoenix," where the librarian risks his life to save some precious examples from fire, and in Anthony Boucher's "QL696.C9," the call number is a clue to a mystery. Librarians and romance are subjects in Sue Kaufman's "Summer Librarian" and Francine Prose's "Rubber Life," while other stories focus on the value of the library itself. Calvino's "A General in the Library," the strongest story in the collection, reaffirms the power of books as a general is told to clean out all the politically incorrect books in a library and ends up wanting to read them all. Frustratingly, while most of the stories praise the library and books, the librarians portrayed often fit the stereotype of the lonely, timid character that librarians have been struggling to overcome. Recommended for large library collections. Josh Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
