Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story

Film director Coppola founded Zoetrope: All Story in 1997 to cultivate literary works, short stories in particular, as a resource for developing screenplays. This compilation contains an engaging diversity of writing by authors both celebrated (David Mamet, Salman Rushdie) and little known. Here are great opening lines--""Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year-old sister"" (Robert Olen Butler, ""Fair Warning""); ""Help me"" (Amy Bloom, ""The Gates Are Closing"")--and a few great stories. Peter Lefcourt excels with a tale of a serial killer who murders bad writers. In Melissa Banks's rebuttal to ""The Rules"" (""The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing""; before it was a chunk of Bank's successful first book, it appeared in Zoetrope) a woman named Jane meets Mr. Right at a friend's wedding. Not trusting her luck with men, she decides to adhere to this ""guide to manipulation."" The results are clever. Other pieces, however, were obviously written for the camera--making for thin literature. The book's most successful story is ""Fair Warning""; concerning an art auctioneer forced to evaluate her own worth when she must sell a date with herself at a charity fund-raiser, it's an interior, reflective tale that would be difficult to translate into film. ""Like movies, [short] stories are to be consumed in one sitting,"" Coppola writes in his introduction. ""The good ones transport you, the great ones change you, and the bad ones--well, at least they are short."" Collected here are, mostly, the kind that transport or transform. (May)