The Peregrine Reader

In his introduction to this anthology, Vause recounts launching the National Undergraduate Literature Conference as an avenue for students to read their critical and creative works before an academic audience, but it is the creative work of the Conference's renowned keynote speakers--including Richard Ford, Ray Bradbury, Maxine Kumin and 25 others--that the editors have chosen to anthologize. What the collected poems, stories and essays have in common, Vause argues, is ""a reverence for reading and writing by those who practice the ancient and noble craft of storytelling."" Most stories also reflect whatever the writer was working on at the moment, so the collection doesn't really cohere. Moreover, because many participants are writers with real reputations, most of the stories have already been collected elsewhere. Certainly the best stories--John Edgar Wideman's ""newborn thrown in trash and dies,"" Raymond Carver's ""The Errand"" and Robert Olen Butler's ""A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain""--have. There are a couple of fine essays--John Barth's ""A Few Words About Minimalism,"" originally published in the New York Times Book Review and Ford's ""One More Writer's Beginnings,"" from Harper's--but the others don't hold up well when compared to the fiction. Of the three previously unpublished essays, only Antonya Nelson's piece on life, death and letters in Alaska has any heft; the others--a tiny musing on youthful reading by E.L. Doctorow; another very short piece on the bureaucracy at Rice University by George Garret--seem to be included simply by dint of the names attached to them and the fact that nobody had grabbed them before. All in all, this Peregrine is a rather piebald bird. (Apr.)