What follows is the third in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (a full-press of Calamari Press) and with Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (a full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

To round out their 2008 catalog, Subito Press published With One’s Own Eyes: Sherwood Anderson’s Realities, a collection consisting of an introduction by Welford D. Taylor, a lecture that Sherwood Anderson gave on Realism in 1939, and the stories “Adventure” (originally published in Winesburg, Ohio, 1919) and “Death in the Woods” (originally published in The American Mercury, 1926); and while as such With One’s Own Eyes is a nice nod to the roots of Realism in American literature, it feels more like a project than a book, and its true value seems packed solely into the reprinted Sherwood Anderson lecture.

With One’s Own Eyes opens with Welford D. Taylor’s essay, a scholar of repute and a well-known researcher of Sherwood Anderson, but Taylor’s contribution is dry, steeped in tiresome academic references, and serves only as a reminder of what most students hate about the university years: those lectures that go on and on without them. In contrast, the stories reprinted in With One’s Own Eyes are interesting reads, and certainly solid representations of Sherwood Anderson’s style, but they do seem odd collected like this, since both are really more apt in their original contexts, “Adventure” within Winesburg, Ohio and “Death in the Woods” in Death in the Woods and Other Stories. Continue reading →