Table of Contents

As promised, here's a listing of the writers and stories included in the book.  From the start, we wanted the anthology to function as a dialogue between contemporary women fiction writers and the women writers who have inspired and influenced them.  We wanted the dialogue to include voices diverse in style and background, and to encompass both established and emerging women writers.  As the list below demonstrates, we ended up with a body of contributors and stories that surpassed our hopes.  

And, again, the task we gave these writers was to write a piece that in some way responded to the work of a female forerunner in fiction.  The name of each writer's chosen forerunner appears in parentheses here.

KSL

~~~~~

The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction

Jodi Angel * "catch the grey dog" (Shirley Jackson)

Kim Barnes * excerpt from the novel A Country Called Home (Toni Morrison)

Mary Clearman Blew * "The Reining Pattern" (Katherine Anne Porter)

Kelly Cherry * "What I Don't Tell People" (Grace Paley)

Lucy Corin * "Some Machines" (Lydia Davis)

Claire Davis * "Electric" (Flannery O'Connor)

Amina Gautier * "What Matters Most" (Katharine Mansfield)

Ranjini George * excerpt from the novel-in-progress Blue Flowers (Jane Austen, George Eliot)

Elizabeth Graver * excerpt from the novel Unravelling (George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte)

Ann Harleman * "Salvage" (Alice Walker)

Pam Houston * "How to Talk to a Hunter" (Lorrie Moore)

Lindsay Hutton * "The Death of Cherry Gibbons" (Margot Singer)

Beena Kamlani * "Goat" (Jane Austen)

Jacqueline Kolosov * "Solstice in the Jardin du Luxembourg" (Virginia Woolf)

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum * "The Nursery" (Alice Munro)

Jill McCorkle * "Surrender" (Eudora Welty)

Kyoko Mori * "Starlines" (Edith Wharton)

Alix Ohlin * "The Stepmother's Story" (Daphne DuMaurier)

Marjorie Sandor * "Elegy for Miss Beagle" (Eudora Welty)

Margot Singer * "Lila's Story" (Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Carson, Carole Maso)

Julia Ridley Smith * "Tooth" (Flannery O'Connor)

Maura Stanton * "Ocean Blues" (Eudora Welty)

Elizabeth Tallent * "Bitter Greens" (Tatyana Tolstaya)

Katherine Taylor * "Crying and Smoking" (Joan Didion)