Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Meghan Mayhew Bergman, The Siege at Whale Cay
Justin Bigos, Fingerprints
Kevin Canty, Happy Endings
Diane Cook, Moving On
Julia Elliott, Bride
Louise Erdrich, The Big Cat
Ben Fowlkes, You’ll Apologize If You Have To
Arna Bontemps Hemenway, The Fugue
Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Sarah Kokernot, M & L
Victor Lodato, Jack, July
Colum McCann, Sh’khol
Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck
Thomas McGuane, Motherlode
Maile Meloy, Madame Lazarus
Shobha Rao, Kavitha and Mustafa
Joan Silber, About My Aunt
Aria Beth Sloss, North
Laura Lee Smith, Unsafe at Any Speed
Jess Walter, Mr. Voice
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Stories of 2014
Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories
Read More from The Best American Series®
About the Editors
Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2015 by T. C. Boyle
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ISSN 0067-6233
ISBN 978-0-547-93940-7
ISBN 978-0-547-93941-4 (pbk.)
Cover design by Christopher Moisan
eISBN 978-0-547-93943-8
v1.1015
“The Siege at Whale Cay” by Megan Mayhew Bergman. First published in the Kenyon Review, vol. xxxvi, no: 4. Copyright © 2015 by Megan Mayhew Bergman. From Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Fingerprints” by Justin Bigos. First published in McSweeney’s Quarterly 47. Copyright © 2014 by Justin Bigos. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Happy Endings” by Kevin Canty. First published in the New Ohio Review, #15. Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Canty. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.
“Moving On” by Diane Cook. First published in Tin House, vol. 15, no. 3. From Man v. Nature (pp. 3–19) by Diane Cook. Copyright © 2014 by Diane Cook. Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.
“Bride” by Julia Elliott. First published in Conjunctions, 63. Copyright © 2014 by Julia Elliott. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.
“The Big Cat” by Louise Erdrich. First published in The New Yorker, March 31, 2014. Copyright © 2015 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“You’ll Apologize If You Have To” by Ben Fowlkes. First published in Crazyhorse, no. 85. Copyright © 2014 by Ben Fowlkes. Reprinted by permission of Ben Fowlkes.
“The Fugue” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway. First published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 31, nos 1 & 2. From Elegy on Kinderklavier. Copyright © 2014 by Arna Bontemps Hemenway. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Sarabande Books, www.sarabandebooks.org.
“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson. First published in The New Yorker, March 3, 2014. Copyright © 2015 by Denis Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Aragi Inc.
“M & L” by Sarah Kokernot. First published in West Branch, no. 76. Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Kokernot. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Kokernot.
“Jack, July” by Victor Lodato. First published in The New Yorker, September 22, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Victor Lodato. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Sh’khol” by Colum McCann. First published by Byliner. Copyright © 2014 by Colum McCann. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Thunderstruck” by Elizabeth McCracken. First published in StoryQuarterly, 46/47. From Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken, compilation copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth McCracken. Used by permission of the Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Motherlode” by Thomas McGuane. First published in The New Yorker, September 8, 2014. From Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane, copyright © 2015 by Thomas McGuane. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
“Madame Lazarus” by Maile Meloy. First published in The New Yorker, June 23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Maile Meloy. Reprinted by permission of Maile Meloy.
“Kavitha and Mustafa” by Shobha Rao. First published in Nimrod, vol. 58. From An Unrestored Woman, copyright © 2016 by Shobha Rao. Reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
“About My Aunt” by Joan Silber. First published in Tin House, vol. 15, no. 4. Copyright © 2014 by Joan Silber. Reprinted by permission of Joan Silber.
“North” by Aria Beth Sloss. First published in One Story, no. 197. Copyright © 2014 by Aria Beth Sloss. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Unsafe at Any Speed” by Laura Lee Smith. First published in the New England Review, vol. 35, no. 1. Copyright © 2014 by Laura Lee Smith. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Mr. Voice” by Jess Walter. First published in Tin House, vol. 16, no. 1. Copyright © 2014 by Jess Walter. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.
Foreword
THIS IS THE hundredth volume of The Best American Short Stories. Over the past century, series editors have provided early support and exposure to such writers as Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Coover, John Updike, Shirley Jackson, and Raymond Carver, among countless others. I am deeply honored to be the editor of this esteemed, long-lasting series and to have been for the past nine years. For more about the series, its history, and a sampling of the gems that have appeared in its pages, see 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore, coedited by yours truly.
When I think back over some of the characters from this series that have stayed with me most, I think of Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel, the bewildered and imperfect schoolteacher from “Yurt,” which appeared in the 2009 volume. I think of the lapsed recovering alcoholic therapist, Elliot, from Robert Stone’s story “Helping,” featured in the 1988 volume, and in 1982, the narrator of Raymond Carver’s
“Cathedral,” whose discomfort with his blind guest is palpable. I think of all the tough-as-nails mothers: Mabel, in Bobby Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”; the bigoted woman known only as Julian’s mother in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” I think of writers like Mary Gaitskill and Ann Beattie and Joyce Carol Oates and John Cheever and Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, writers whose characters are complex, whose conflicts are often internal and unspoken, and whose decisions some people might deem “unlikable.”
Lately I’ve been mulling over the idea of likability of fictional characters. The topic received a burst of attention a couple of years ago, after the writer Claire Messud was asked about the protagonist of her novel The Woman Upstairs, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with [her], would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” Messud famously responded to the interviewer, “Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’” Messud’s answer ignited both readers and writers, many glad for her illumination of a troubling but increasingly prominent trend in how readers talk about fiction.
Soon after, The New Yorker interviewed a group of fiction writers about the issue. Donald Antrim said, “Reading into persona is a waste of time and life; our empathy will not be engaged but our narcissism might, and our experience will likely come without deeper emotional and spiritual recognitions and awakenings. The author maneuvering for love is commonplace and ordinary, and the work of fiction that seductively asserts the brilliance or importance or easy affability of its creator is an insubstantial thing. I have no problem with liking a character. But if that’s the reason I’m reading, I’ll put the book down.” And Margaret Atwood answered, “I myself have been idiotically told that I write ‘awful’ books because the people in them are unpleasant. Intelligent readers do not confuse the quality of a book with the moral rectitude of the characters. For those who want goodigoodiness, there are some Victorian good-girl religious novels that would suit them fine.”
And yet in the couple of years since then, I still somewhat regularly encounter reviews that attack a character’s or even a writer’s likability. To like a story or a novel is still, it seems, to like its characters. One female protagonist was just last week labeled a “morose, insufferable American narcissist” in a major Sunday book review. Another renowned book review laments that in a well-received debut novel, one character “isn’t much of a heroine. She’s annoying, self-centered and tragically naive.” The female narrator of one of my favorite novels of last year was called “irritatingly self-obsessed” by yet another major newspaper. Dip a toe into the reviews of fiction on GoodReads or Amazon, and you’ll find the question of likability everywhere. I’d hazard a guess that more female characters written by female writers are deemed unlikable than male characters or really any characters written by men. Hopefully VIDA, the organization that studies women in the literary arts, and other similar groups will research this question.
In this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, we are treated to characters like Kavitha, the emotionally numb wife who comes alive only in the face of violence, in Shobha Rao’s gorgeous story, “Kavitha and Mustafa.” We meet a desperate absentee father in Justin Bigos’s devastating “Fingerprints” and an emasculated man who sells dental equipment in the hilarious and profound “Unsafe at Any Speed,” by Laura Lee Smith. And Joe Carstairs, a ruthless champion speedboat racer and oil heiress in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s unforgettable “The Siege at Whale Cay.” Here are living, breathing people who screw up terribly and want and need and think uneasy thoughts. Did I like these characters? I very much liked reading their stories, as did T. C. Boyle. I liked the honesty of the portrayals, and their poetry and humor and surprise. Would I want to be friends with these characters? Who cares? To me, that question is tantamount to asking someone at an art exhibit if she would like to be friends with the color green, or someone listening to music if he would care to befriend a drum.
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.
HEIDI PITLOR
Introduction
BACK IN THE 1970S, 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 wer
e 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.