Beneath the elegantly printed title of the book, the date: Wednesday, September seventh, 2022. The ink, slightly blurred, and My signature quite in its evolving phase. On that day I took home with me volume 17, 64, 4, 20 of a book series titled “Short Story International (SSI)”. Thrown onto the pile of books to be read one day when the right time comes.
Lately I have been going into a reading spiral of sorts where I am having a hard time choosing what to read and is it the right time to read it, which kind of got me in a freeze for quite a while, I decided why not short stories which then I remembered I had a bunch of those somewhere around the house and that folks is how we got here, while at it I figured also to write my reflections as blog posts about what I read to help get my rusty blogging gears in motion.
Me being me, instead of getting the job done and just sitting down and reading the stories, I had to go to the depth of the internet to know more about the SSI series and how I am about to go about it.
On the blogging side of things my initial idea is to create a kind of parent title where i nest the author name and the country as it is shown in the titles of the SSI books
So it would look something like SSI-Japan-Kita Morio, getting that aside now I did find some interesting stuff about SSI.
SSI(short story international) as you might have guessed up until now is a collection of short stories from the world’s contemporary writers, and when i first googled about it i couldn’t find much information but with a bit more of digging i learned that this is a series listed on LibraryThing which made the whole process of researching about the series and the editors a bit easier.
The series includes numerous volumes, with editors like Sylvia Tankel and others contributing to different issues. For example, Sylvia Tankel edited several volumes, including numbers 2, 3, 4 … and more. And the name Sylvia Tankel appears in all of the ones I own as well.
Which Kind of made me question who even is Sylvia Tenkel, jumping from links to links starting from her LibraryThing profile, I was able to learn she started working on this series along with her husband Sam to promote global literature starting the Short Story International series in 1977. The SSI not only serves as a way to experience global literature but as a way for the reader to understand the nuances in cultural differences and for students to take notes on the styles of writing and ways of story telling.
While trying to answer the question what inspired inspired Sylvia Tankel to start the SSI journey it was nothing but a blind alley of brick and shadow, I was able to learn that the SSI had some significant contributions to the literary landscape of the 1970s and 1980s such as letting authors experiment more on their writing, include some form of shared cultural spaces and appreciation for the contemporary global literature.
While the statistics for how well readers and critics appreciated and cherished this series seems to be non-existent, except some graph on LibraryThing
which leads me to conclude that this series is very well accepted and not only in the 19’s but also the 2000’s.
see you all soon with the SSI series posts, till then stay safe