Esquire's Big Book of Fiction, edited by Adrienne Miller (Context Books, 796 pages, $21.95)

A glorious compendium! Here are 54 short stories that the magazine published over the 70 years that have passed since its launch in 1933. Names of near-classic greatness: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov. More modernly, Phillip Roth. Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, Antonya Nelson and Thomas McGuane. The last story is "The Wish," by Joanna Scott, published by Esquire in February 2000. Not an anthology of the greatest short fiction of three-quarters of the 20th century -- but if any magazine came near to Esquire in attracting and publishing marvelous short stories, I am totally unaware of it. And they are well chosen here. A book to have around the house as long as books are read.