The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
A lot of people I know don’t like short stories. I think they’re missing out. For me they’re like a small but intense jewel. The good ones (and let’s assume that that’s the category I’m writing about) leave you yearning for more. They often serve up a punchline that knocks you off balance. And an anthology delivers a range of voices and time/location scenarios and perspectives that I find engrossing. This series (Best American Short Stories or BASS) is my annual Christmas treat – like fruitcake and turkey – it unfolds over my summer break at the beach.Charles May, who always writes in detail about this series reckons that “this is the best (or the best of the Best, if you will, collection of BASS stories published in many years.” I don’t agree with him; I’ve read more interesting and challenging editions of BASS in other years – but it is still a reading highlight for me.My pick of the bunch – a stand-out story was Jim Shepard’s ‘The World to Come’ – a beautiful and moving story set in 19th century rural New England. The main character is a lonely farmer’s wife who strikes up a close relationship with the woman who lives on the next farm. Shephard says of the story (in the wonderful Contributors Notes that accompany the stories) that he’d “come across a book chronicling the worst storms in the history of New England. (That’s the kind of book I tend to read.) I was struck, going through it, by just the day-to-day arduousness and loneliness of the farmers’ lives. That led me to other histories and journals and diaries, and I came across a farmer’s one-line notation about how sad his wife was, because her one friend had moved away.” I’ll look for more of his writing this year.There’s a good story by Alice Munro (as Charles May says “Not one of Munro’s best stories. But her less-than-best is better than most”) and a good story by George Saunders. I liked “Nemecia” by Kirsten Valdez Quade and The Third Dumpster by Gish Jen too. I could go on. Looking at reviews, I found this essay by Steven Millhauser whose story ‘A Voice in the Night’ is one of the stories in BASS. The essay is titled “The Ambition of the Short Story”. This is a quote from the essay: “The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/boo...)“Its littleness is the agency of its power” – I love that quote. I know that the remnants of some of these stories will linger with me for years, especially the Shephard one.
Still strong, but I think I may have enjoyed it less overall. Guest editor Elizabeth Stout's motif about how she liked stories with a particular voice, a la the olden days of mostly telephone communication, fell a little flat for me. Perhaps because some of the stories tried a little too hard at voice or craft for my tastes. The worst offenders were probably the ones closest to a fault in my own writing style--overwhelmingly narrative, without enough dialogue or anything else to allow the reader to come up for air.Still, I had plenty of favorites--and even honroable mentions. :P"Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz {The New Yorker). Second person account of a teenager's sexual relationship with a middle aged neighbor after his philandering brother dies of cancer."Horned Men" by Karl Taro Greenfeld (Zyzzyva). A mortgage broker who lost his job in the foreclosure crisis moves his family to a smaller house and ponders his possible guilt."Magic Man" by Sheila Kohler (Yale Review). A late-thirties mother rails against her own lost innocence while, unknowingly, her daughter is ensnared by a pedophile."Train" by Alice Munro (Harper's Magazine). A WWII veteran in Canada keeps running from his past over the course of 20ish years."Chapter Two" by Atonya Nelson (The New Yorker). A woman goes to AA meetings and tells stories about her wacky neighbor, while hiding more serious details about the neighbor and herself."The Tunnel, or The News from Spain" by Joan Wickersham (Glimmer Train). A daughter grows closer to her mother in her mom's last years, juxtaposed against a series of romantic relationships."Nemencia" by Kirstin Valdez Quade (Narrative Magaine). A young girl-turned-woman feels resentment towards a cousin who is a family legend after surviving a tragedy that she never seems to process fully.Honorable mentions:"The Provincials" by Daniel Alarcon--about a father and son who travel to the father's hometown where the son pretends to be his American brother. Liked the theme of resentment, but the women were so thinly drawn."A Voice in the Night" by Steven Milhauser, where a middle-aged Jewish atheist recalls hearing the story of Samuel in Sunday School and staying up as a young boy to hear the call of Gd. One of those examples of bogged down narrative, a little."Philanthropy" by Suzanne Rivecca--might be the story I relate to most personally, especially where a drug addict turned social worker tries explaining to a potential donor that you can't just ignore and move beyond your past--it informs who you are. But the writing could be a little pretentious, especially when the protagonist and author were obviously of the same mind, politically.
What do You think about The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013)?
One of the better BASS collections from recent years. I loved how internal many of the narratives were--David Means's "The Chair" was incredible, as well as the almost dreamy, distantly-narrated "Malaria" by Michael Byers. Lorrie Moore's "Referential" almost made me cry ("Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected twist in the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same way, regardless.") and Jim Shepard's "The Word to Come" definitely did, even though I had already read it in One Story. There were a few weird inclusions ("Encounters With Unexpected Animals" felt too slight, "Magic Man" a little heavy-handed, "A Voice in the Night" kind of tedious and unfinishable) but then there's Alice Munro, always perfect, and two unusually paced & plotted but flawlessly pulled-off stories about eccentric, inconvenient women who appear, altering the narrator's lives in subtle but undeniable ways--Suzanne Rivecca's "Philanthropy" and Antonya Nelson's "Chapter Two."
—Alyssa Knickerbocker
Usually, these are unfailingly good collections. Every now and then, the editorial choice is overly present. When I read Stephen King's collection, I was so bored, everything was so mainstream and white-dude. In Elizabeth Strout's, while the individual stories are obviously still strong, I think in every single work, there is an abused female. Halfway through the book, I'd be starting a new story wondering, okay, who gets molested in this one? A little disturbing, thematically. I was eager for the book to be over. BOO.
—Jen
How does one rate a book built by many minds, whose whole is still separated into the pieces provided by each author, never integrated, never synthesized into the singular? If any of the stories are good, regardless of the bad, it's almost impossible to get above an average of three. I liked some of these stories a fair bit, especially "Breatharians," "The Tunnel or The News From Spain," "Chapter Two," and "The Magic Man,"but overall, while the writing was sound or outright inspired all around, I was underwhelmed. As of late I find myself questioning the progression of stories and what it means for one to be complete. I realize it's a paradox, as stories don't end, they merely stop for breath. But that said, many of the endings of these award winning stories jar me, stopping abruptly or in strange places that stick out like comma splices to a trained eye. So I sit questioning their merit as a whole after following their meandering journeys to empty fields and cliff fades absent views. What makes a good story? What makes a good ending? If nothing else, I think the B.A.S.S. series serves to keep us questioning, which in turn serves to keep us reading and reevaluating; and as long as we do that, the answers and genres they're attached to, will continue to grow. That makes the frustration and aching wonder worth it in the end.
—L. Alexandra
