The group of 25 authors is full of noteworthy names: Chinua Achebe, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Jorge Luis Borges, and more. The themes in the anthology include love, marriage, parenthood, oppressive governments, art, religion, economic struggle, ideological conflict, and cultural dislocation. The modes range from fantasy to stark reality--there is violence and serenity, beauty and grotesqueness, sorrow and humor.

I especially loved the Chinese stories, which give a vivid portrayal of life under the Communist regime--it's like a real life dystopia. Other strong selections include Yukio Mishima's "Acts of Worship," about a professor's pilgrimage; Isabel Allende's "Clarisa," a colorful character study; and R.K. Narayan's "A Horse and Two Goats," a story of cross-cultural miscommunication. Overall, I would recommend this book both as a classroom text and for individual reading. Recommended companion text: "Caribbean New Wave," a short story anthology edited by Stewart Brown.


Wonderful collection for all, who like reading short stories   May 11, 2000
 4 out of 6 found this review helpful

This is a pocket-size book, that contains short stories from the best international authors. Each story is a good one. Each one is different from the next. So, this book is good not only for college classes, but anyone who enjoys reading short stories from Asian, Latin, and African authors.


Read this book   March 17, 2000
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

This is a valuable book for the simple fact that it brings together excellent stories from around the world that need to be preserved and read and passed along, in a manner that is professional and organized. I am grateful to the editor and publisher for this book, and hope it remains in print for a very long time so I can use it in classes I teach on International Short Stories.


Valuable for students & Delightful to read for anyone...   March 30, 2000
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This collection is valuable to the teachers in humanities classes, because it opens up their students' minds (hopefully) to the new and often previously completely unknown world of different cultures. Many best authors are chosen from each culture. All stories, without exception will bring something new to you as a reader, and the reading itself will be nothing but a sheer delight!!!! All stories will also make you think about your own culture and its values. Some stories will make you laugh, yet others will make you cry...


Worthwhile   March 23, 2007
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This book was published in 1992 and contained 25 short stories, five each from Sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, Japan and Latin America. Most of the works were written or published in the 1970s and 80s, except the stories for Japan, all but one of which came out originally in the 1950s and 60s.

The stories were chosen to showcase major writers from these regions who published after World War II, and whose work was already available in English translation. The compiler was attracted, firstly, to stories that provided insight into the values, pressures, behavior and conflicts of people from other cultures. ("What does it feel like to grow up in Beijing, Bombay, or Buenos Aires? Increasingly, we have become fascinated by the details of daily existence in other cultures and curious about the lives of those whose circumstances and pressures seem so different from our own.") And secondly, to works that transcended individual situations and locations to touch on the shared human condition.

Themes in the stories included relationships between family members, men and women, different social or racial groups in a particular society, and artists and society, and the struggle to find a job or overcome poverty, civil strife, repression or imprisonment. The stories from China showed the impact of the Cultural Revolution: three of them contained main characters either banished to the countryside or imprisoned because of it.

Each region was represented by just five stories, and the quality overall seemed fairly high, even though it was difficult to get more than a glimpse of "what it feels like" in each place. Works that succeeded particularly in communicating atmosphere were, in my opinion, "Civil Peace" by Achebe, about a family struggling to survive the aftermath of civil war; "Africa Emergent" by Gordimer, about the relations between a black artist and a white architect during the time of apartheid and the resulting psychological tensions; "The Destination," by Wang Anyi, about a man returning to Shanghai after years of internal exile; and "The Man from a Peddlers' Family" by Lu Wenfu, about a political cadre's acquaintance with a peddler over many years, through the political shifts in their society, conveyed particularly well in their remarks to each other.

Others included a tale by Kushwant Singh about an Indian civil servant who'd been so Anglicized he could no longer follow his society's customs; "Papito's Story" by Luisa Valenzuela, in which a neighbor observed passively an incident during the period of military rule in Argentina; Sawako Ariyoshi's "The Tomoshibi," about the inhabitants of a cozy little bar in a Tokyo backstreet; and Yuko Tsushima's "The Silent Traders," about a woman's memories of a particular neighborhood at various stages of her life. The stories set in Japan, though, felt several generations out of date at the least.

It's too bad that a multicultural anthology such as this one, published more than a year after the Gulf War, omitted the Arab world. Major Arab writers whose works were available in English translation before this book was published included 1988 Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Alifa Rifaat, Ghassan Kanafani, Zakaria Tamer and Mohamed Choukri. I also wondered why Japan was included instead, since it should've already been comparatively familiar to Americans as a fully industrialized U.S. ally.

The book provided useful lists of fiction anthologies for each region and informed biographies for each author. Though it's a minor point, in the table of contents in the China section the five authors weren't alphabetized correctly (the first author's surname should be Wang, not Anyi, for example), and their stories should've been reordered.

Readers who enjoyed this book might also enjoy Global Cultures: A Transnational Short Fiction Reader, a multicultural anthology of some 60 short stories that was published in 1994.