Book #100: The Best American Short Stories 2011

Book #100: The Best American Short Stories 2011 edited by Geraldine Brooks

July 27, 2014


It probably seems really random that, for such an important milestone as my 100th book for this "challenge," that I would read the best short stories from three years ago. Why not this year's (or last year, as I imagine that 2013 would be newest as yet), or the ones from the year that I was born, or something? I dunno. It was the newest edition available at the library last week when I took my nephew, so I nabbed it. I've been trying to read more short fiction, and that's about as contemporary as I could get. This is the first of any "best American" books that I've ever read, and here's what I understood about the way this series works:

Brooks was selected as the editor for this edition, obviously. She is a writer herself; her name is familiar, but I can't think of any titles off the top of my head. What's interesting is that Brooks is not herself an American writer, but an Australian one. I do not know if this is typical of the series, to get a (kind of) "outsider's" perspective on these American works? I don't object to that; if anything, I think it's pretty cool, and would be interesting in reading more editions edited by non-American writers. All of the submissions for this had been previously published in some sort of literary magazine, like The New Yorker or Harper's Magazine. In her intro, Brooks described the difficulty of choosing the 20 best from all of these. She expressed a preference for works that took place in other countries or mentioned world travel, and I could see that in the stories themselves.

So really, it's pretty subjective as far as what determines what the "best" are. I, like most readers of these works I'm sure, felt differently about all of them. Some I thought were deserving of their place, and some I wasn't so into. None of them were terrible stories. But I found myself thinking that sometimes, short modern fiction gives me a sort of empty or hopeless feeling. Like, stories about marriages falling apart, or people themselves falling apart; I feel like all of these stories were sad. What I'd like to do now, besides reading more of these "Best American" books, is to maybe get a subscription to some literary magazine, and see if this isn't typical of modern short fiction in general. I know life can be shit a lot of the time, and relationships and people are complex, but I don't know, I don't mind a little optimism in my reading.

I only had heard of two of the authors in this text. Joyce Carol Oates had a story called "I.D." that I consider one of the best (maybe the best) in the whole collection. It's about a thirteen-year-old girl who is pretty troubled, whose divorced mother has left her alone in their Atlantic City home for the past few days. Her father isn't around; the story gradually reveals that he'd beat the shit out of the poor kid, to the extent that she had to get eye surgery (she even wears prescription tinted lens, which she feels makes her look "cool"). She's concerned with her reputation; she hangs out with high school boys, and wants to get the attention of the coolest guy in school. One day in math class, she's picked up by the police, and asked to identify her mother's dead body. She's shocked, and isn't able to do it correctly, even though the clues in the text make it clear that it is her mother. Her father has gone AWOL from the army, so the poor girl's future is unclear. The only way she can deal is the only way she knows how: go back to school and play it cool in front of her friends.

I've also heard of Jennifer Egan, but again, can't really think of what I know her for. Her story, "Out of Body," was an interesting example of when the second-person perspective in a story actually works (I felt like Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" was an okay example of it as well) as it told the story of a young gay man in the early '90s who had recently attempted suicide; at the end of the story, he might be drowning in a river (it leaves it unclear as to whether he makes it or not, but the story switches abruptly, meaningful, to the first person for the last couple of lines). Apparently this is part of a larger work of her own called A Visit from the Goon Squad, and that title sounds vaguely familiar, so maybe that's a work I should check out sometime.

As we're coming to the end of July, I'm slowly, hesitantly getting back into teacher mode. So I found myself thinking about whether some of these stories could be used in my classroom. I found two that seemed interesting, and didn't have any sexual content of any kind and maybe a little swearing, that I would consider using. One was Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Widows," which presents very complicated morality questions as it tells the story of how one man, the lone survivor out of all of his family of the Holocaust, became hardened by his experiences. The fact that it presents such difficult questions, and that it also includes two interesting settings (Israel, where shit is getting way too real lately, and of course Europe during and after World War II). I feel like I could structure quite a bit around this particular story. I will need to see how I can get access to it to use in my classroom; I'm very grateful that the text includes the original publications for all of the stories.

The other story that I thought might work for my classroom was Caitlin Horrocks's "The Sleep." It tells the story of a widower and his children who one winter, in their small rural community, decide to hibernate for the winter. He extols the virtues of it to his neighbors and friends, how it is economical and how they'll wake up feeling very refreshed. After a few years, most of the town is hibernating for months in the wintertime, and when their ritual gains national attention, most are critical of what they're doing. There's a question of, are people running from their problems by going to sleep? It's a very surreal story, yet with such an otherwise realistic setting and characters, and I'd be interesting in seeing how perhaps my more advanced students would take it.

I imagine that much of my reading for the next few weeks will center around planning for the new school year. I don't have any specific books that I'm just dying to read right now; I feel like I just need to get really excited about reading something. I think I'll have another look at some of the "to-read" lists that I've compiled and stashed away in various random locations, and see if anything sparks for me.