The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2 page)

To readers who tend to think primarily in terms of liking or disliking characters: these people are fictional. They do not stand before us asking to be liked. They stand before us asking to be read. They ask to be seen and heard and maybe even understood, or at least for their motives to be understood, if that is what the author is after. But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend these characters are in fact real, that they are human beings standing before us. Let us open up at least a little to those we might not like—in their presence, we might experience something new. To me, facing those we might not want to face is crucial to living in a diverse world. To echo Donald Antrim, when we instinctively turn away from something different or uncomfortable or what we deem “incapable of being liked,” we shortchange ourselves. Maybe we unwittingly dislike characters who do or say what we ourselves cannot or simply, for whatever reason, do not. As the fiction writer and critic Roxane Gay wrote, “Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don't dare be so alive.” If reading fiction has the power to enlarge our understanding of others and enliven ourselves, let us try to no longer shrink from these things.

What an honor it has been to work with T. C. Boyle, whose own stories have appeared in this series many times. He came at the job of guest editorship with the deep knowledge and experience of a master. He chose twenty thrillingly diverse and stellar stories by established and exciting new writers.

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

B
ACK IN THE
1970
S
, when I was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I went one evening to hear Stanley Elkin read from his latest novel. Stanley was a magnetic performer, fully invested in his role, and we students knew enough from previous encounters to avoid the first three rows, where the audience was at risk of being sprayed with flying spittle as he worked himself into an actor's rage. This was performance at its highest level, as was the Q&A that followed. The first question was from a student who was as hopefully dedicated to the short story form as I was: “Mr. Elkin, you've written one great book of stories, why don't you write another?” Stanley's response: “No money in it. Next question.”

Was he joking? Was his cynicism part of the act? I don't know. But in our time the literary marketplace has certainly favored the novel over the short story, and anyone seeking to make a living off stories, as Fitzgerald did in the 1930s, would have to have been transported in time. Either that, or gone off his meds. And it's interesting to note that aside from a late collection of early pieces, Stanley did publish only that one collection. As did James Joyce and Philip Roth and so many others, who through temperament, ambition, or calculation went on to publish exclusively in longer form.

A hundred years ago, when Edward O'Brien inaugurated this annual volume in celebration of the short story, things were both different and the same. Different, in that O'Brien's principal motivation in making his selection of the year's twenty best stories was to distinguish the artists from the commercial hacks, the original from the conventional. “There are many signs,” he wrote in his introduction, “that literature in America stands at a parting of ways. The technical-commercial method has been fully exploited, and, I think, found wanting in essential results” and was responsible for “the pitiful gray shabbiness of American fiction.” It's difficult to grasp just what he's militating against here, unless we consider how the function of short stories on the page was co-opted first by radio serials and films, then television, and more recently the Internet, with its panoply of blogs, tweets, and postings. That there
was
a commercial short story to denigrate is fairly astonishing in itself, like learning that a new Dead Sea scroll has been unearthed. O'Brien can rest assured that we no longer have to worry about the commercialization of the short story for the obvious reason that there is no commerce to speak of. Our stories—and the stories in this volume stand as a representative sample—are conceived and composed solely for the numinous pleasure artistic creation imbues us with, the out-of-body experience writer and reader share alike.

Still, then as now, the short story was considered inferior to the novel, a mere stepping-stone to higher things, and the less dedicated (less addicted? less fou?) could find their métier in writing longer works, or better yet, writing for the screen. This was great good news for O'Brien: “The commercialized short story writer has less enthusiasm in writing for editors nowadays. The ‘movies' have captured him. Why write stories when scenarios are not only much less exhausting, but actually more remunerative?” So much for the money-grubbers. Let them stand out there in the blaze of Hollywood sun, at the beck and call of actors, directors, producers, and their mothers, while the serious practitioners of the form rise up to take their rightful place in the popular and literary magazines.

An evangelist of the literary story, O'Brien went beyond praising the individual writers he'd chosen for the inaugural volume to applaud and promote the magazines that met his standards as well, including
The Bellman
, in which the top story of the year appeared (“Zelig,” by Benjamin Rosenblatt), and a new monthly,
Midland
, which though it published but ten stories that year, found its writers displaying “the most vital interpretation in fiction of our national life that many years have been able to show.” And more: “Since the most brilliant days of the New England men of letters, no such group of writers has defined its position with such assurance and modesty.” Hyperbole? Yes, of course, when viewed from the far end of the long tunnel of a hundred years' time, but hyperbole in a good cause. He also singled out stories by writers like Stacy Aumonier, Maxwell Struthers Burt, and Wilbur Daniel as achieving the highest honor he could bestow, that of being of lasting value—and if he was wrong, carried away in his enthusiasm, give him credit here too. After all, who can say with any certainty what literature will endure and what will die with the generation that produced it? Make no mistake about it, O'Brien was on a mission to cultivate the taste of the reading public and champion the homegrown story, and he was feisty over it too, singling out British critics like James Stephens, who, in his estimation, insufficiently appreciated the American novel and seemed barely aware of the achievement of the American story.

But what of the stories themselves, the selection from 1915 that included pieces from Fannie Hurst and Ben Hecht (the only names I recognized, both of whom would, traitorously, go on to careers in film)? I'd like to report that there are hidden gems here, works equal in depth and color to Joyce's
Dubliners
stories or Conrad's “Youth” or Chekhov's “Peasants,” but that's not the case. The stories are rudimentary—character studies, anecdotes, tales that exist only to deliver a surprise or the mild glimmer of irony. And they are short, for the most part, more like scenes that might have been contained in the longer narratives of this volume. The shortest of them, what would be called “flash fiction” today, at just 152 words, is by Mary Boyle O'Reilly. It's called “In Berlin,” and I find it fascinating in its historical context (two years before America entered the First World War) and the way in which the author so nakedly attempts to extract the pathos from her episode set aboard a German passenger train. The scenario: “The train crawling out of Berlin was filled with women and children, hardly an able-bodied man. In one compartment a gray-haired Landsturm soldier sat beside an elderly woman who seemed weak and ill.” The woman, lost in her thoughts—dazed—kept repeating “One, two, three” aloud, which prompted titters from the pair of girls seated across from her. The old soldier leaned in: “‘Fräulein,' he said gravely, ‘you will perhaps cease laughing when I tell you that this poor lady is my wife. We have just lost our three sons in battle. Before leaving for the front myself I must take their mother to an insane asylum.'” Paragraph. “It became terribly quiet in the compartment.”

All right. I'm sorry. But if that penultimate line doesn't make you burst into laughter, you'd better check your pulse. O'Brien read 2,200 stories that year (by contrast, Heidi Pitlor, who, as series editor, does the heavy lifting here, considered 3,000), and his aim was to define the literary story and elevate it above the expected, the maudlin, the pat and declamatory. To give him credit (he is, after all, one of the first to have recognized Hemingway's talent, including “My Old Man” in the 1923 volume, even though it hadn't yet been published, and in subsequent editions he recognized the work of Sherwood Anderson, Edna Ferber, J. P. Marquand, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Herbst, among many others), he can play only the hand he's been dealt, as is the case with all editors of best-of anthologies. “Zelig,” the story he singled out above all the rest, does show elements of modern sensibility in terms of its milieu—Zelig is a working man, a Russian Jew come to America reluctantly because his immigrant son is stricken ill—and in its representation of the protagonist's consciousness, which moves toward the close third-person on display in a number of stories in the current volume, like “The Fugue,” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway, or Victor Lodato's grimly hilarious “Jack, July.” Still, Zelig is cut in the mold of Silas Marner, a miser and nothing more, and it's his lack of dimension that artificially dominates the story and propels the reader toward the expected (and yes, maudlin) denouement. I can only imagine what the “technical-commercial” fiction must have been like that year.

The Model T gave way to the Model A and to the Ferrari and the Prius, the biplane of the First World War to the jet of the Second, modernism to postmodernism and post-postmodernism. We advance. We progress. We move on. But we are part of a tradition and this is what makes O'Brien's achievement so special—and so humbling for us writers bent over our keyboards in our own soon-to-be-superseded age.
The Best American Short Stories
series still follows his template and his aesthetic too, seeking to identify and collect some of the best short fiction published in the preceding year. O'Brien listed 93 stories in his Roll of Honor for 1914–15 and 37 periodicals from which the selections were made. In addition, he included an alphabetical listing of the authors of all the noteworthy stories he'd come across, replete with asterisks for the ones deserving of readers' special attention. In the same spirit, the editors of the 2015 volume list the 100 Distinguished Stories of the year and some 277 magazines. (In a wonderfully fussy way—and by way of encouraging competition—O'Brien also produced a graph of all the magazines, showing how many stories each periodical published and figuring the percentage of those he considered exceptional.) Finally, O'Brien made no apologies. The stories he presented were the best of the year by his lights—and his lights were the only ones that mattered.

I have to confess that I came to my role as guest editor this year with just a tad less assurance. This was my show, yes, but those hundred years of history—that tunnel of time—was daunting. Ultimately, though, what I was looking for wasn't much different from what O'Brien was: stories that grabbed me in any number of ways, stories that stood out from the merely earnest and competent, that revealed some core truth I hadn't suspected when I picked them up. Another editor might have chosen another lineup altogether from the 120 finalists, but that only speaks to the subjectivity each reader brings to his or her encounter with any work of art. If I expected anything, I expected to be surprised, because surprise is what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year's selections.

For one thing, I was struck by the intricate narrative development and length of many of these stories, some of which, like the two powerful missing-child stories that appear back-to-back here due to the happy accident of the alphabetical listing O'Brien ordained at the outset (Colum McCann's “Sh'khol” and Elizabeth McCracken's “Thunderstruck”), seem like compressed novels in the richness of their characterization and their steady, careful development. So too with Megan Mayhew Bergman's elegant historical piece, “The Siege at Whale Cay,” which presents a deeply plumbed love triangle involving the young protagonist, her mannish lover, and, convincingly, touchingly, the cinema star Marlene Dietrich. (What
did
Marlene do on vacation during those grim war years? Where did she go? Who was she? It's testimony to Bergman's imagination that such a familiar real-life figure can seem so naturally integrated into the world she creates that we're never pulled out of the story.) Likewise, Diane Cook's feminist fable, “Moving On,” with its dark shades of Kafka, Atwood, and Orwellian control, develops with the pace and power of a much longer work, as does Julia Elliott's delicious and wickedly funny examination of the ascetic versus the sensual in the convent that provides the setting for “Bride.” Long stories all. Very long stories.