Dear Diana Secker Tesdell,
I adore you. Don't be scared. I mean you no harm. Mine is a remote and chaste affection, circumspect in all but this simple declaration. I realize that you don't know me "from Adam," as Grandma used to say. To be fair though, I've been able to learn very little about you either. Periodic if desultory searches of the Internet yield up little or nothing; no pictures, little biographical material, no "Wiki", few traces but the evidence of your editing of various anthologies for Everyman's Library in their wonderful Pocket Classics and Pocket Poets. Fair enough. Let the work speak for itself. Nonetheless, yours is now a name I hope to see in every addition to either series. I've come to know and trust the words, "Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell" on a title-page as a guarantee of good reading. Like meeting a very dear old friend, or teacher by now.
I've followed you since 2007, when Everyman's Pocket Classics put out your first anthology in the series, Christmas Stories. I have a special fondness for holiday stories, and have quite a collection of same. Your anthology remains my favorite. In part the reason is a sentimental one. The inclusion of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory inspired me to create an event and read that story aloud at the bookstore where I work. This reading has since become an annual event and something like a tradition. In fact, I read another story from your collection for my encore that first year, Reginald's Christmas Revels, by the great Saki. All of which is incidental to my appreciation of the book however. Your book was fresh, bright, adult and very interesting. No easy thing to achieve in a Christmas anthology. Unlike most such holiday collections, yours had many surprises, even for an old Christmas junkie like me: recent stories from Muriel Spark (Christmas Fugue), Grace Paley (The Loudest Voice), Alice Munro (The Turkey Season), Richard Ford (Creche), and unexpected titles from older writers like Willa Cather (The Burglar's Christmas) and Damon Runyan, whose Dancing Dan's Christmas was my second story at the following year's reading. The mix of contemporary and classic stories was deft and unexpected. In short, I am still mightily impressed by selection and I still recommend and sell your wonderful little book every Holiday Season.
All your subsequent contributions to the series have likewise proved delightful. (And two others, Dog Stories and Cat Stories both inspired a series of public readings at the bookstore.) From the most seemingly familiar titles like Love Stories, or Stories of the Sea, to the least anticipated like Stories of Art and Artists, every book has proved to be a delightful mix of the familiar and the unexpected. Even something so seemingly innocent sounding as Bedtime Stories, in your very capable editorial hands became a thought-provoking exercise in the exploration of consciousness. I usually despair of dreams in fiction. You reminded me that great writers can go anywhere, even to sleep, without being boring. It was startling to consider just how modern Hawthorne could be in his nightmares, or how close a contemporary writer like Steven Millhauser or A. S. Byatt can to the remembered feeling of fairy tales and yet remain wonderfully, ruthlessly adult. It even made me read an old chestnuts like Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in a new way.
No easy thing, for an anthologist to be witty, I should think, but time and again you've proved it. Yours are not just collections of short stories on common themes. Your stories speak to one another, comment on each other, play together. Your books, each and every one, provides a new context for thinking about just what makes a love story a love story, how a New York story might fit in a distinct fictional geography, or even how a truly great dog story is something other than just another shaggy dog story.
And now I have your latest, Stories from the Kitchen, and could not be better pleased. At a glance, I am unacquainted with two thirds of your selections, and would not have thought to see any of the rest but for Saki's Tea (doesn't that sound odd?) and maybe the excerpt from Proust. Names I don't know: Laura Vapnyar, Erica Bauermeister, Elissa Schappell, and stories I don't know from many of the names I do; for example, Love and Oysters -- whatever that might be -- from Dickens. I am excited to get started! This will be good. Thanks, again.
Thus this mash-note, my dear, dear Ms. Secker-Tesdell, wherever you are. I am and shall remain then
Most gratefully yours,
Usedbuyer2.0
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