Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Anthologies

This week, we're reading, My True Love Gave To Me, a YA Christmas anthology that just came out with some of our favorite authors participating in it.

What is an anthology, exactly?  Well, dear old Webster defines it as "a book or other collection of selected writings by various authors,usually in the same literary form, of the same period, or on the same subject."

Basically, it means a bunch of short stories, all put together in one book.  Now, sometimes, it's lots of authors purposely getting together and writing stories to create an anthology, like this week's book.


In this case, all these YA authors decided it would be a good idea to write some short stories and make this book.  A lot of times, authors do this to promote their own writings.  For instance, David Levithan and Rainbow Rowell just were at Politics and Prose in DC doing a book signing, and you could get them to both sign this book.  I know they then went up to New York where ten of the twelve authors were going to be around to sign it.  So it really promotes the authors and their books.

Sometimes, an editor just takes a bunch of essays or short stories of similar topics and puts them together in a book because they think that people will buy them.  I know that this set comes out every year. 



 There are a bunch more, like the best sport stories and the best essays, etc.  They come out every year and it's just what are thought to be the best stories of the year in that category.  They usually sell pretty well and people pick them up based on the subject their interested in.

50 Essays is also another that's fairly popular, and is just a collection of popular essays, organized by subject.  A lot of professors use it as required reading because there are so many different subject matters in it and so many different authors, from writers to celebrities, so it's a nice range of essays to teach a class with.


Really, an anthology is just a collection of stories or essays that an editor thinks is going to sell well.  Sometimes, authors will specifically write a story for an anthology, and sometimes an editor will just pick a bunch of stories to put in it.

1 comment: