The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2 page)

Working with Jennifer Egan was an honor, as well as ridiculously easy. She was a thoughtful, serious reader, never satisfied with embellishments of language nor easily tempted by likable characters. She wanted the stories to go somewhere new and strange, to surprise and confound. Every story that she chose for this book achieves these difficult feats.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2013 and January 2014. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or who have made the United States their home; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish for their short fiction to be considered for next year's edition should send their publications or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, c/o
The Best American Short Stories
, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116.

H
EIDI
P
ITLOR

A
S WITH ANY
“best of” or “top ten” list—or any prize, for that matter—the authority of an anthology like this one stands in direct contradiction to its essential arbitrariness. Winning, or inclusion, is a matter of managing to delight the right combination of tastes—in this case, that of the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, who superhumanly winnowed the contents of 208 publications to 120 individual stories, and then my own, as chooser of the final 20. In other words, getting into this book is largely a matter of luck.

And yet a volume titled
The Best American Short Stories
casts an iconic shadow—as I know all too well, having published short stories for twenty-one years before I managed to eke one into these pages! The self-endowed authority of a collection of “bests” can feel onerous not just to the many whose work is passed over, but to readers who disagree with the selection of contents—namely, just about everyone who opens this book. Can you recall reading a collection of “bests” and not musing, at least once, of the editor, “Was she out of her mind?” A different sensibility—yours, for example—would doubtless have produced a different volume. So much for authority!

But there are excellent—even crucial—reasons to publish a book like
The Best American Short Stories:
it generates excitement around the practice of writing fiction, celebrates the short story form, and energizes the fragile ecosystem of magazines that sustain it. Worthy goals at any time, and never more so than now, when copyright is hanging in the balance, publishers are beset by uncertainties, and fiction writers are wondering, rightly, how important our work really is to the cultural conversation. True, some of the people gazing at their iPhones on the train may be reading short stories, but a great many more are playing games, listening to music, watching movies, or checking the stock market. I'm struck by how often, even among a gathering of literary folk, the talk turns to television.

However, as anyone who loves reading fiction knows, there is no activity quite like it. In fact, my primary motive for accepting the role of guest editor this year is that I welcome any excuse to call reading work. I had other reasons too: I wanted to explore, systematically, what I think makes a short story great—to identify my own aesthetic standards in a more rigorous way than I've done before. And having spent the past couple of years reading early-twentieth-century fiction, I was eager to get a snapshot of what short fiction writers working in America (120 of them, anyway) are doing and thinking about at present—formally, stylistically, culturally. I wanted to see what I might glean from their preoccupations, both about the state of the contemporary short story and about the wider world, whose synthesis is a writer's job.

To put my biases—and therefore handicaps—directly on the table: I don't care very much about genre, either as a reader or as a writer. To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don't think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes.

I read fiction for the same reason I write it: to escape. Don't get me wrong—I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I'm always happy to leave, and I'm always happy to come back. It's fair to say that I read in a childlike way, for fun. That sounds frivolous, I know, but I can't find a better word that doesn't sound pretentious (and
entertainment
is too evocative of reclining chairs and surround sound). Classic novels—a vexed category, granted—are, for the most part, incredibly fun to read. Jane Austen? A page-turner. Charles Dickens? Catnip. George Eliot? Un-put-downable. Wilkie Collins? Prepare to lose a night's sleep.

I recognize, of course, that one person's fun can be another person's slog. We'd probably all agree that we want gripping stories full of characters that move us. For me, that stuff can't be achieved without intelligence, nuance, and fresh language. The fun I'm talking about is fully compatible with fear, discomfort, and great sadness; I weep every time I read Edith Wharton's
The House of Mirth
, but I feel permanently enriched by it. The best fun, for me, comes from reading something that feels different from anything else. Originality is hard to gauge, of course—the fact that
I
haven't seen it before doesn't mean it hasn't been done—but for our purposes, let's say that I'm biased toward writers who take an obvious risk, formally, structurally, or in terms of subject matter, over those who do a familiar thing exquisitely.

If there was a single factor that decided whether a story ended up in my ongoing pile of contenders, it was its basic power to make me lose my bearings, to envelop me in a fictional world. In the case of Molly McNett's “La Pulchra Nota,” that world unfolds in the year 1399, when a devout singing teacher named John Fuller narrates his own mystical, heartbreaking downfall. In Laura van den Berg's “Antarctica,” it is the end-of-the-earth landscape of the story's title, a setting for grief and forensic investigation. Charles Baxter's “Charity” manages, in three paragraphs, to gyre its protagonist from teaching English in Ethiopia into homelessness and drug addiction in Minneapolis. And Benjamin Nugent's “God” is imbued with the cloistered bonhomie of college fraternity life, made perilous by the homosexual longings of its fraternity-brother narrator.

The vehicle for this transport into alternate worlds is vivid, specific language. Consider Craig Davidson's “Medium Tough,” which subsumes the reader in the hyper-medicalized sensibility of Dr. Jasper Railsback, a surgeon of newborns who is beset with a physical abnormality he attributes to his mother's alcohol abuse while he was in utero. Railsback observes, “The air in the NICU was heavy with pheromones: aliphatic acids, which waft from the pores of women who've just delivered. A distinctive scent. An undertone of caramelized sugar.” The language is technical, lyrical, and sensory—qualities whose seeming incompatibility makes their fusion even more potent.

It seems silly to continue quoting from stories that are printed in this volume (though I'm tempted), but suffice it to say that there's plenty more where that came from. Karen Russell's “Madame Bovary's Greyhound” is the imagined story of Emma Bovary's lost pet, Djali, told from the animal's perspective. An intriguing conceit, to be sure, but what gives the story its energy and tenderness is the play of Russell's inimitable prose. And Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's “The Judge's Will” owes its idiosyncratic power to the crystalline precision of her sentences.

So: a compelling premise and distinctive language to get in the door. Then what?

I read many stories that met both those requirements at first, but ultimately settled into predictable patterns, or seemed to stop short of something truly interesting. Each one of the twenty stories I chose had at least one move—often several—that genuinely surprised me, pushing past the obvious possibilities into territory that felt mysterious, or extreme. In Joyce Carol Oates's “Mastiff,” a dog attack—which the reader half-expects—prompts an unlikely intimacy between the quasi-strangers who undergo it. Stephen O'Connor's “Next to Nothing” has the aura of a modern-day Grimms' fairy tale, featuring a pair of blunt, affectless sisters who insist on ignoring warnings of an impending flood as they summer together with their children.

The surprise in David Gates's “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me,” a story about the long friendship between an alcoholic musician and his one-time devotee, is its final destination: happiness. Gates's protagonist winds up happy—a striking outcome in a year when optimism was in short supply. The stories I read were predominantly dark, even grim, reflecting a mood of anxiety and unease that I guess is no surprise at all, given that Americans have endured six years of recession and eleven years of a war whose point—and endpoint—remain unclear. I'm proud to include two excellent stories that engage directly with the lives of soldiers: Will Mackin's “Kattekoppen,” set among American forces in Afghanistan, and O. A. Lindsey's “Evie M.,” about a female veteran struggling to function in a corporate workplace as she contemplates suicide. The British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico figured in more than one story I read, including Nicole Cullen's “Long Tom Lookout,” included here, about a woman who spirits away the autistic, out-of-wedlock child of her husband, who is working long-term on the Gulf cleanup.

For the most part, the locus of anxiety in the larger pool of stories I read was the domestic sphere: illness and addiction, dead or imperiled children, cheating spouses, dissolving marriages. There was a curious predominance of pivotal roles played by wildlife, including crows, elk, bear (both brown and polar), turtles, deer, fish, and the aforementioned dogs. The prevailing narrative approach was the first-person singular, past tense. It was a year without much humor, but I welcomed the laughs that came, and was reminded that the funniest stuff is usually quite serious. I've included T. C. Boyle's riotous “The Night of the Satellite,” in which a relationship's precipitous unraveling culminates in a dispute over whether a mysterious piece of hardware has fallen to earth from outer space. In Nell Freudenberger's “Hover,” about a divorcing woman who begins levitating involuntarily, humor offsets a fierce account of a mother protecting her gentle, quirky son. In Ann Beattie's “The Indian Uprising,” caustic repartee between a retired professor and his former student masks their shared understanding that he is dying. And the deadpan delivery of Peter Cameron's “After the Flood,” in which an elderly couple agrees, at the behest of their pastor, to house a family left homeless by a flood, allows the story's horrific underpinnings to surface very slowly.

Although the majority of the 120 stories I read had contemporary settings, many could as easily have been set twenty years ago without anachronism. This is odd when you consider that a present-day photograph of any American location containing humans—a school, a street corner, a concert, a ball game—would be impossible to confuse with an image of the same scene, circa 1994. I'm not talking about facial hair or width of pants; I'm talking about the devices people walk around with, hold in their hands, and use to communicate—in some cases, almost constantly.

That revolution is the biggest change I've witnessed in my lifetime. Between the year I was born and when I went to college in 1981, I knew of exactly three telephonic possibilities: a busy signal, or a person picking up, or endless ringing.
Eighteen years of telecommunications stasis!
Hard to imagine that happening ever again. I'm not a proselyte; as a parent, journalist, music fan, and believer in copyright, I find my responses to our warp-speed technological change falling mainly on a spectrum from anxiety to terror. But there is no denying that a transformation is upon us, pervasive, dramatic, ongoing. And it is inseparable from many other seismic shifts of the past twenty years: modern terrorism, globalization, climate change.

How can such topics be manifest in a short story? Not all of them can at once, of course—or not directly. But my love of escape notwithstanding, I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges. In each of the twenty stories I chose—even those set in the past—I felt an engagement with the wider world at this specific point in time. It was my last criterion, but possibly the most important.

One way that cultural engagement can show itself is in the form a short story takes. Brendan Mathews's “This Is Not a Love Song” tells of the rise and fall of an early-1990s indie rocker, using artifacts assembled by her self-appointed documentarian: descriptions of photographs and interviews transcribed from cassette tapes. The story's inventive structure allows it to ask what separates homage from exploitation, and its setting in a precise technological moment (about twenty years ago, as it happens) suggests a shared understanding with the reader of all that has changed since then.

Another formally ambitious story I've included is Lauren Groff's “At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners,” which begins in the 1940s and reaches to the present. The sweeping tale of a man who spends the bulk of his life in a serpent-infested Florida swamp that gradually becomes surrounded by a university, it vividly juxtaposes primordial mystery with sprawling modernity. Joshua Ferris's “The Breeze” dramatizes a young woman's ineffable craving for intensity and authenticity in her dealings with her new husband. By conjuring the relationship in a series of scenes that don't quite add up—and often seem to contradict each other—Ferris manages, as in a cubist painting, to evoke a larger whole without ever quite pinpointing it.