The best american short.., p.1
The Best American Short Stories 2024, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
The Magic Bangle by Shastri Akella
Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico by Selena Gambrell Anderson
Viola in Midwinter by Marie-Helene Bertino
Blessed Deliverance by Jamel Brinkley
Phenotype by Alexandra Chang
Evensong by Laurie Colwin
The Happiest Day of Your Life by Katherine Damm
The Bed & Breakfast by Molly Dektar
Dorchester by Steven Duong
Seeing Through Maps by Madeline ffitch
Democracy in America by Allegra Hyde
Engelond by Taisia Kitaiskaia
P’s Parties by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Case Study by Daniel Mason
Just Another Family by Lori Ostlund
Privilege by Jim Shepard
Baboons by Susan Shepherd
Extinction by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Mall of America by Suzanne Wang
Valley of the Moon by Paul Yoon
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Stories of 2023
American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories
About the Editors
Guest Editors of The Best American Short Stories
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
Series editors, at least the editors of The Best American series, are different from other book editors. We do not suggest corrections or changes to text, or work with marketing and publicity departments to help guide publication. We do, however, read. A lot.
In my research for 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, published back in 2015, I learned about four people who weren’t often explored publicly, the four previous series editors of this longtime book. The first was Edward J. O’Brien, who had fallen in love with reading as a child with a heart condition; Poe, Dickens, and Balzac became his companions during those times when his illness flared. At only twenty-three, he set out to create a yearbook of American short stories. In order to stay on top of the flood of magazines that submitted their fiction to him, O’Brien devised elaborate filing and tracking systems, indexes of periodicals and every story that he’d read, relevant articles, and even a necrology of writers. He spent weekends reading short stories, stopping only for meals. Martha Foley helmed the series from 1941 to 1977. She had been coediting Story magazine when she took over the series after O’Brien died, and she herself wrote fiction and had had stories appear in The Best American Short Stories. Her system of reading and tracking was less orderly than O’Brien’s. She rated each story as “superlative,” “quite good,” “above average,” and “the others I try to forget,” and she tracked them all on colored index cards. Foley read in bursts and often fell weeks behind schedule, to the chagrin of her publisher. Next came Shannon Ravenel, who had been passing along stories to Foley as a young editor at Houghton Mifflin, something that Foley did not always welcome. After the latter died, Ravenel edited the series from 1978 to 1989. From South Carolina, Ravenel “was the only child of older parents . . . We had no money, but we had this good Southern name, Ravenel. I grew up reading. I had very, very bad eyes and was told that I shouldn’t read too much, but I did anyway.” Ravenel was the first to work with guest editors, but this did not lessen the number of stories that she read. Guest editors chose 20 stories from a pool of 120, a number winnowed from thousands by series editors. Ravenel later cofounded Algonquin Books, and in 1989, she resigned from The Best American Short Stories in order to focus on the new publisher. Her replacement was Katrina Kenison, another young editor at Houghton Mifflin. “I have to confess I had always been a novel reader. And I don’t think I took short stories all that seriously when I began, which is a terrible thing for an editor of short stories to confess. But I had just become a mother . . . and there was something about the form that really attracted me in my new life, because I didn’t have a lot of time ever to sit down and read at a stretch.” Kenison was another keeper of file cards, but she managed to stay on top of the fast flow. “Failing to stay on top of the tide was to drown in unread literary journals.” Kenison oversaw the series until 2006.
It was not easy to find information about my predecessors—one scholarly book about O’Brien that largely focused on his religiosity and the poetry that he’d written; a partially written memoir of Foley. I interviewed Ravenel and Kenison, but reading through my notes, I saw that there was much I hadn’t thought to ask and I hated to trouble them for even more time. In the end, I wanted to know things that maybe even they would have been unable to answer or remember: Who were these people who’d taken on the same challenge I had? What kept them reading all those stories year after year? What kept them confident in their ability to choose “the best”? How would they describe the experience of suddenly coming across an excellent story by a first-time author? And where did they read—was it always at home? At a desk, or in a den, an office? Did they have one chair that they preferred? Did their minds ever wander? What tenses or points of view, if any, made them itch? Were these four people influenced by politics, literature, culture, something else? How about their own moods? Did an unexpected bill or a sick child or upsetting news make it difficult for them to follow the threads of so many stories? Editors are meant to be objective arbiters of taste, curators, but can anyone really be objective about what they love?
I admit all of the following with hesitation: I’ve never had training to be an editor of any type. I have no degree in literature, although I do have a master’s in Creative Writing. Reading past volumes of the series was my only real training; there was no hand-off or passing of the torch between Kenison and me. I was lucky that I’d been the in-house editor of the book for years and could jump in quickly. Here’s something else: there were moments when reading even one more short story is as appealing as plucking out my own eyeball. And this: sometimes I cannot tell you with any sense of certainty whether a story is brilliant or terrible. Sometimes I deliberate with a guest editor, whose reaction or non-reaction is the same as mine, and together, we take a deep breath and jump, usually onto the side of “brilliant.” And: my mind wanders all the time. Focus has gotten harder for me over time. I have envied the other series editors (less so Kenison) for not having to contend with the internet, the world’s most effective distraction. I am very much influenced by politics, culture, my own mood, the moods of my children, the moods of the country. I read everywhere. At home sprawled on my couch, in waiting rooms, in libraries and coffee shops. Instead of index cards I use a plain old Microsoft Word document, where I list and grade all the stories that pass muster to me. It is one way to make something that is by nature amorphous and subjective and unruly seem more manageable.
In my eighteen years as series editor, I have thought of O’Brien, Foley, Ravenel, and Kenison often. I can think of no other people who have known the strangeness of reading American short stories (no translations or excerpts!) alone day in and day out. No coworkers or friends or family members have had the experience of taking in all of those voices and narratives over such a long period of time. If I could have a dinner party with anyone from history? No question: it would be those four people. Though we’ve lived through different times, vastly different moments of history, and though the writers we’ve championed as are different as Ernest Hemingway and Roxane Gay, Dorothy Parker and Ha Jin, I suspect that like me, my predecessors experienced profound awe at the sheer multitude of people—writers, characters—trying to speak and to be heard in this world, all those people trying only to be understood.
Reading is quieting the mind and making room for another voice. Reading is listening. It is a form of witness. Being a series editor is nothing less than a measure of love for the very human act of storytelling and making meaning. Reading is watching, and reading for this series is watching for words that have been set together in just the right strange and surprising and resonant way that causes a reader to feel and/or think something. Reading is recognizing something about oneself or a loved one or a nemesis, something about history or the future, something about humanity or nature or technology that one had not known or understood yet in the deeper tissue of one’s body. Reading is even, I’ll say, the cure for loneliness, meanness, narcissism. The joy that comes with the discovery of a piece of writing that stops my breath is the reason that I have done this job for so long. I have always been a picky reader, easily bored, easily critical (this job has only made me more so), but in the face of vibrant, authentic, fully inhabited writing, I’m a child again, a stranger on the earth, clay in the hands of this writer. We five series editors have been close witnesses, undoubtedly grateful witnesses to 109 years of human truths and storytelling. Between us, we’ve been some of the first to lay eyes upon the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Jack Kerouac, Charles Baxter, Amy Hempel, Mona Simpson, Robert Olen Butler, Andrea Barrett, Aleksandar Hemon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, and many, many other authors.
One paradox of life is that we achieve peak confidence about all that we know as teenagers, and at least for me, getting older has been a process of realizing what relatively little knowledge I will forever have. The more open I can remain to what I don’t know, the
The standard definition of the length of a short story and how this differs from flash, short shorts, and novellas.
My own taste. I’m more Catholic than I knew. Sometimes. Although this series began as a platform to highlight literary short fiction, genre-blending has always played a part, from the ghost stories written during the world wars to the more speculative stories that appear in this volume.
What makes writing or a writer American. Do they have to live here? What if an author lived here for most of their life but holds citizenship from another country? I admit that I’ve erred on the side of inclusivity, and I am even including my first story in translation this year, written as it was by an author who grew up in the United States, Jhumpa Lahiri, who first wrote in English before she taught herself Italian.
The best way to tell a story. I’m not a fan of the present tense, as I feel it hamstrings an author by holding them to a very small period of time, but stories like Shastri Akella’s “The Magic Bangle” prove me wrong. Present tense can be used to create a greater sense of urgency. In Akella’s story, a character wants only to feel safe in his skin. What is more necessary and urgent than that?
In my tenure, this series has published early stories by Karen Russell, Rebecca Makkai, Manuel Muñoz, Lauren Groff, Danielle Evans, Jamel Brinkley, Téa Obreht, Maggie Shipstead, Lisa Ko, and Sarah Thankam Mathews. It has also published later-in-life stories by Alice Munro, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Tobias Wolff, Mary Gordon, Louis Auchincloss, Alice McDermott, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson, and Wendell Berry. I want to talk about the mid-lifers and oldsters for a moment, those whose new books may arrive with less marketing money, fanfare, or public interest. Without them, without Mary Gaitskill or Barbara Kingsolver or James McBride, where would we be? With age comes a different perspective, wisdom, hard-earned truths. We are a culture and a publishing industry focused on the young, and an asset of this series is in fact the element of discovery. My guest editor and I get to offer new writers a portal to a larger audience, a prize in a cutthroat business and a very loud world. But here’s a warning to young writers: if you think that publication, an added item to an author bio, a prize, or a proud post on social media will bring you sustainable satisfaction, you will be disappointed. The highest highs and the truest and most lasting joy comes with reading and writing itself. To the writers in this volume: be sure to read the other stories here. To others who are reading these words: after you’re done reading this book, pick up one of the past volumes. Try one from a decade or longer ago. See if you can find a writer you’ve always wanted to try, someone you just never got around to reading. A story is a great place to start.
When I think of what I most love about short fiction (which happens to be what I love about any writing), it’s an easy sense of balance. It’s risk with depth. It’s one eye to the future with another to the past. It’s low- and highbrow side by side. It’s the marriage of young and old, showing and telling. We cannot write without reading. We cannot write well without a deep and broad sense of the other writing that has come before us.
This year’s volume brings an assortment of new and established voices, slow builds and explosions, rural and urban settings, earthly and surreal, young and old characters. Amidst the promising newcomers—Alexandra Chang, Katherine Damm, Susan Shepherd—comes a previously unpublished story by Laurie Colwin, who passed away in 1992. Established writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Jim Shepard appear alongside new voices like Suzanne Wang, whose first published story appears here and is guaranteed to make you rethink the relentless inhumanity of artificial intelligence. The new and old appear together within stories, too. Steven Duong addresses the horribly age-old plague of racism with fresh vulnerability and intimacy. Selena Gambrell Anderson takes an unemployed jeweler for a ride on an old slave slip. Allegra Hyde is, as she says, “someone who often likes to write about the future by way of the past, which is how I got it into my head to reimagine Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels around America in the nineteenth century.” A Russian bureaucrat living in Texas sets off for a ranch and bonds with animals in Taisia Kitaiskaia’s fairy tale–infused and electric “Engelond.” Paul Yoon beautifully brings to life a man leaving a settlement and returning to a destroyed home after the Korean War. A woman who lives on the fringe of society tries to reconnect with her grown son in Madeline ffitch’s astonishing story, about which the author writes, “sometimes words have so much power that you can’t talk about what you’re talking about. You have to talk about something else.” Another woman returns home to help her mother after her father’s death in Lori Ostlund’s “Just Another Family,” a story written with irresistible humor and pathos, patience and energy. Marie-Helene Bertino gorgeously explores the hazards of eternal life. Jamel Brinkley brings us a group of high schoolers who reconnect with an old friend over rescue rabbits. Molly Dektar offers up a father and daughter holding tight to their own versions of the past. A therapist gets in touch with a former patient years after their work together in Daniel Mason’s emotionally acute story, “A Case Study.” Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi manages to balance humanity and mysticism, beauty and illness in her story about a woman’s trip to a medieval city located near the Pyrenees.
This is my final volume of The Best American Short Stories. It’s time to devote myself to a different form of allyship with writers and writing. A couple years ago I started Heidi Pitlor Editorial and heidipitlor.substack.com in order to do just this (flagrant self-promotion here). I’ve missed the other kind of editing, the longer, deeper engagement with authors and their work. That said, I will greatly miss reading for this series. I still remember the moment I came across Lauren Groff’s story, “L. DeBard and Aliette,” her first to appear in this series. It was also my first year as series editor. Groff’s use of language and sense of story and character and motivation were stunning—I could not believe that this was a young writer. Stephen King, the guest editor that year, agreed. What a gift to have Lauren as my final guest editor! I sent her the first of three batches of stories, and she read these forty pieces in warp speed. She sent me a lovely, grateful email saying that she’d hoped for more stories that took “wild swings, risks, pushing against narrative expectations.” I happened to be teaching at a conference in Kauai at the time, and after my initial chafing—Let her read 3,500 stories every year, dammit—I was soon overcome with the sense that she was right. I had phoned it in, had sent along quality but ultimately safe stories. After eighteen years of reading, I had finally shifted into cruise control. I promptly went back and reread certain stories. I read the subsequent stories with different eyes, and soon after, I came upon Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” and we were off. Lauren agreed. Thank you, Lauren, for giving me the kick in the pants that I needed. We must be fully awake in order to read well. We must be fully awake when we write, too. If anyone writes with more alertness and focus and energy than Lauren herself, I’ve yet to come across their work.
I write this in April 2024, and the upcoming presidential election grows uncomfortably close. By the time you hold this book in your hands, someone, inevitably an older man, will have been elected president again. Most likely the partisan noise will have risen to a fever pitch and will continue this way for too long. Each of us longs to and deserves to be heard—but let us not forget to listen, to allow space for each other. To serve witness. In her story in the following pages, Laurie Colwin writes, “It occurs to me as I sit that everyone in the world is born with a personality and is fully entitled to express it. The planet is a-spin with notions, phobias, inclinations, tastes, ideas, creeds, beliefs, and behaviors of all kinds. Often this thought is uplifting and fills my heart with what feels like rich blood. If I stopped any of these people and questioned them closely, we would be sure to have a friend, an experience, a relative in common.”
The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2023 and January 2024. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who have made the United States or Canada their home; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts or novels are not considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publications to The Best American Short Stories, Mariner Books, Attention: Jessica Vestuto, HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, 23rd Floor, New York, NY 10007, or links or files as attachments to thebestamericanshortstories@gmail.com.
