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| 9781623719357
| 1623719356
| 3.72
| 72
| Oct 15, 2019
| Oct 15, 2019
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liked it
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2.5 stars Prior to this year I’d never liked multi-author anthologies, but this year I’ve suddenly become interested—specifically in prize anthologies, 2.5 stars Prior to this year I’d never liked multi-author anthologies, but this year I’ve suddenly become interested—specifically in prize anthologies, which in theory provide a higher level of quality. A limitation, however, is just how many of these are American-only, so I was excited to find this anthology. It includes the first 20 years of winners of the Caine Prize, a prestigious short-story prize founded in 2000 for English-language stories by authors from (or with a parent from) any African country. Unfortunately, the stories themselves were a bit of a letdown: there’s a handful I liked, but they are overall less polished than I expected from prizewinning stories. Maybe in part this is because I’d just come from reading 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, each of which is selected from thousands of stories published annually. By contrast, the Caine Prize was new, as are many of the literary journals it pulls from: from news articles, there were only 110 entries in its 7th year and just under 300 by 2023. Kenya, the country with the second-most winners, apparently didn’t have any literary journals until the third winner used his winnings to found one. Maybe in part the Caine Prize judges have different criteria than I do: in particular, I’d call 2/3 of these “issue” stories, with the most frequent issues being poverty, refugees and street kids. The prize has in fact been criticized for encouraging writers to present stereotypical depictions of Africa, and perhaps the judges prioritized gravity of subject matter over writing quality at times. Or maybe it’s that the judges prioritize recognizing new writers: of the 20 included here, only 4 had published a novel or collection before their win, only one or two of which got much notice, though several have had breakout successes since. A few other notes on the stories and authors: - Amusingly, the stories start out on the longer end, culminating with the fourth, which is nearly 40 pages long. After that the judges apparently drew a line, because the remaining 16 stories are almost all in the 10-13 page range. - Countries represented: Nigeria (6 times), Kenya (4), South Africa (3), Zimbabwe (2), Sudan (2), and Uganda, Sierra Leone and Zambia once each. However, from what I can find 12 of these writers are immigrants or expats, mostly based in the U.S. and U.K. - There’s a 50/50 split between men and women. Nineteen stories were originally published in English, and one in Arabic. - For those looking for more reviews of the stories, many have their own pages, but the prize foundation also publishes an anthology each year of all five shortlisted stories, plus 12 stories written in a writers’ workshop sponsored by the prize. Sadly Goodreads does not collect all those anthologies in one place, but those reviews are a great place to get a fuller picture. I was surprised to see how many of the same people keep getting nominated, although there’s never been a repeat winner. - I have to mention how much gross imagery is in these stories, of excrement particularly. Anyway, on to the story reviews! “The Museum” by Leila Aboulela: Focuses on the tentative relationship between a young Sudanese graduate student in Scotland and a local classmate. Probably one of the better stories, though especially as it’s the first, it struck me as a little rough around the edges for a prizewinner. Its themes—the way cultural imperialism complicates personal relationships, and the way Europe views Africa—have been much-explored in literature and popular culture since, but I do think this is a good example, bringing some complexity and stereotype-busting elements to the portrayal of both the Sudanese girl and the Scottish boy. “Love Poems” by Helon Habila: Follows a journalist turned political prisoner as the prison warden asks him to ghostwrite love poems for his girlfriend. This story is structurally ambitious, alternating between the prisoner’s diary entries and the voice of an unknown person who appears to be researching him, but it didn’t quite work for me: the diary entries are written exactly like fiction, and it’s very much an issue story that introduces no complexity to the protagonist outside his victimhood. “Discovering Home” by Binyavanga Wainaina: I agree with the other reviewer that this is the worst in the collection. It’s a sort of fictional travelogue through three countries with a jerky pace, seemingly random scenes, no character development, clunky repetitions, and a weird compulsion to constantly address the reader in an attempt to skewer stereotypes (why is the narrator so preoccupied with how outsiders would view his country?). Well, someone out there apparently liked it. “Weight of Whispers” by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: A far more complex and difficult story, as well as the longest. It follows a prince and his family who leave their homeland after the fall of the genocidal regimes in Rwanda and Burundi, and become refugees in Kenya. It does not make concessions to the uninformed reader, so I found this article helpful in parsing it. I appreciated it though: it’s compelling, and it leaves the reader with a lot to think about. Personally I think that (view spoiler)[the prince must have been complicit in the genocide somehow. He seems to been totally untouched by it, after all, and only felt the need to flee the country after the regime fell; for that matter, I’m unconvinced that his comments to his servant were as offhand as he claims (and even if they were, it’s telling that he sat through a whole genocide and this is the first time he’s fulminated against anyone). And even his own associates seem to find the idea of his involvement plausible. (hide spoiler)] It’s an interesting literary use of the refugee story: on the one hand the author using refugees from elsewhere to critique her own country; on the other, presenting a range of levels of sympathy and probable complicity from each of the family members. I felt for the space cadet sister. “Seventh Street Alchemy” by Brian Chikwava: This doesn’t really want to be a written story, I think; it wants to be set to music, and from the auther’s bio it turns out he’s done just that with other writings! The events are banal and the language overwrought and the whole time I was reading it, I envisioned it being read aloud at an open mic night somewhere. It’s probably much better that way. “Monday Morning” by Segun Afolabi: This one I liked better: a snapshot of a refugee family temporarily lodged at a hotel in an unspecified European country. It’s emotionally effective, showing the individuality of each relative, sensitively indicating their trauma by showing how it affects them now, and suggesting hope and resilience without being trite. “Jungfrau” by Mary Watson: A literary story I’m not sure I quite got (sadly there doesn’t seem to be lit crit online for this one). On the surface, it’s about the conflict between a girl’s instinctive admiration for her glamorous, hypocritical aunt and her dutiful love for her civic-minded mother. But by the end there’s the clear implication that (view spoiler)[the girl’s father has been sexually abusing her (hide spoiler)] and I’m not sure how to fit that into the rest of the story. I wasn’t sure how to parse the whale watching either. “Jambula Tree” by Monica Arac de Nyeko: This is discussed as a story of romance between two girls in a homophobic society, but there’s no real substance to either of the girls or their relationship; the strongest element is the depiction of the slum where they live. Framing it as one girl’s monologue addressed to the other raises questions about why so much of it is spent explaining stuff the other girl already knows. “Poison” by Henrietta Rose-Innes: One of my favorites: it reads like an apocalyptic story, though the disaster is local rather than global (which I appreciated). It follows a woman who is trying to get out of Cape Town… or maybe not trying that hard after all. Felt vivid and real and has a great atmosphere, though I would’ve liked to know more about the protagonist, which is a common theme with these stories. “Waiting” by EC Osundu “Stickfighting Days” by Olufemi Terry “Hitting Budapest” by NoViolet Bulawayo I’ll discuss these three together because they all use the same technique, which I hate: where an author writing for adults adopts the first-person, present-tense point-of-view of a child in some extreme circumstances to increase pathos (while also making the voice totally matter-of-fact because the mere fact of their age is supposed to melt you). In “Waiting” the children are in a refugee camp, and it struck me as pandering and gross: why would these kids lack identities of their own and instead assume the names on their donated T-shirts? why do they fight over food like animals when there’s enough to go around? why does the story romanticize international adoption? In “Stickfighting Days” they’re boys living in a dump, who apparently have all the free time in the world to play fight with each other because their food is coming from, uh, somewhere? Less pandering but didn’t feel any more authentic. “Hitting Budapest” is the best of the three, this time about slum-dwelling children. It was expanded to become Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, which I decided against when it was big because I don’t like the technique. Well, I didn’t like this story either. “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde: Thank God, an adult protagonist. This one is interesting and surprisingly funny, though a bit obvious at times, about a man who grew up under colonialism but gets a larger view of the world fighting in WWII. Then he gets home and becomes a sovereign citizen, declaring an abandoned municipal building to be his republic (population: one). In a nice counterpoint to most stories of this type (view spoiler)[his thumbing his nose at colonial authorizes does not result in brutality, because they don’t want to create a martyr. Instead they ignore him and he goes his weird and merry way (hide spoiler)]. Leaves the reader with questions about his answer to colonialism—is Bombay an empowered figure or an irrelevant one? What does it mean that his power depends on his irrelevance? “Miracle” by Tope Folarin: One of the most fun stories to read, this one is about a Nigerian-American boy selected for a faith healing at a revival. As with the last story, this one’s strong enough to have more than one reading: (view spoiler)[the boy comes to understand the importance of faith to his community, but also learns that the faith healing is a fraud. The ending could be read as poking fun, or as pointing to the fact of the existence of glasses as the real miracle here. (hide spoiler)] The shift from first-person plural to singular is interesting, though I’m left thinking this boy couldn’t possibly have understood the other congregants quite that well. “My Father’s Head” by Okwiri Oduor: I liked this more than I didn’t, mostly for its vivid imagery. A nursing home worker tries to conjure her dead father, and succeeds: now what? Someone familiar with Kenyan culture would probably get more out of it than I did. “The Sack” by Namwali Serpell: This one I liked less. It’s deliberately written to be as confusing as possible, featuring Jacob and Joseph from The Old Drift (though this story came out before the novel) many years after the end of that book, but referred to individually as “J.” and “the man” making unclear which is which, and I wasn’t even sure (view spoiler)[who killed whom at the end (hide spoiler)]. I also didn’t much care. “Memories We Lost” by Lidudumalingani: This feels like a stereotypically fearmongering story about a girl identified as having schizophrenia, though given how young she is and the fact that her primary symptom is sudden bouts of violence, her kid sister’s diagnosis seems suspect. The story is told from the perspective of said sister, and gives the ill girl little voice or agency, as instead the sister makes decisions for her. (view spoiler)[Not the most thought through decisions either; I mean, are they going to spend their teen years as roaming beggars? I can’t help thinking they’re in for much worse than the treatment the sister would’ve been subjected to had they stayed. (hide spoiler)] The community’s response to this girl and local treatments offered are lousy, but contrary to the assumptions of some reviewers, on average people with schizophrenia actually do better in less developed countries. “The Story of the Girls Whose Birds Flew Away” by Bushra al-Fadil: A weird story that even admirers describe as a fever dream. This is the one translated story, and I’m impressed by how much rhyme and rhythm the translator managed to get into the language. The story doesn’t make a lot of sense though, and I’m over Sudanese men writing about violence against women in the creepiest ways possible. (view spoiler)[I almost think the narrator committed the murders, given he’s a stalker with a tenuous connection to reality. (hide spoiler)] “Fanta Blackcurrent” by Makena Onjerika: Another street children story for old times’ sake, but I liked this one better than the others: it’s told in the first-person plural with strong, distinctive language, and the girls grow up to be young women fast. A sad tale of how their lives turn out. “Skinned” by Lesley Nneka Arimah: This dystopian story is a strong end to the anthology: a world where women are required to go naked from adolescence until they marry, with a lot of commentary on expectations of women’s roles and the dynamics among members of an oppressed group with different levels of wealth and willingness to conform. The end didn’t entirely make sense to me—why does Ejem suddenly want to talk to the servants so much?—but overall I found it to be strong storytelling and a clever take. Arimah’s collection was already on my TBR, but this confirmed it. Overall then, a mixed bag, as with any anthology. Because I only sort of liked about half of them and didn’t love any, it’s hard to recommend this one, but it may be worth a look if you want to see a range of African short stories. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 14, 2024
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Jun 29, 2024
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May 03, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0593470591
| 9780593470596
| 0593470591
| 3.70
| 466
| Sep 12, 2023
| Sep 12, 2023
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really liked it
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My first O. Henry Prize anthology, after reading a few volumes of Best American Short Stories. I’m not sure why I didn’t start with the O. Henry serie
My first O. Henry Prize anthology, after reading a few volumes of Best American Short Stories. I’m not sure why I didn’t start with the O. Henry series instead: unlike BASS, it isn’t limited to American writers and even includes stories in translation; also, ordering the stories artistically rather than alphabetically makes for a more pleasing composition. And then, despite mixed responses to Groff’s own stories elsewhere, I loved everything about her introduction, from her love of short stories and recognition of their many facets (introduction writers who justify each story with a phrase really do flatten them too much), to her tiring of the endless run of first-person stories (“I began to feel at the center of a sucking collective whirlpool of anxious solipsism”). Though first-person lovers shouldn’t worry: it’s so ubiquitous in today’s stories to still account for 8 of the 20. At any rate, I loved the first 5 stories and considered that this might be my first 5-star anthology, though several subsequent stories lost me and it became more of a regular anthology from there, with hits and misses. It begins with some strongly fantastical or surrealist tales, though ultimately only 5 of the 20 stories have this as a major factor, and has all the experimentation with form that I was missing from this year’s BASS. In terms of demographics, there’s a 50/50 gender split, and about half are authors of color. Most stories were first published in the U.S., but three are translated (two from Spanish and one from Danish) and two first published in English in other countries (one Irish author and one Zambian). Notes on the individual stories: “Office Hours” by Ling Ma: A whammy of a beginning: lots of layers and interpretations, excellent writing. An isolated film studies professor discovers a unique way of handling the impossibility of the demands placed on her. I was left with so many questions: (view spoiler)[did Marie do this on purpose? What will her life look like from here? What will she do about the obnoxious colleague? (hide spoiler)] Part of Ma’s collection (which I really need to read) for those seeking more. Arguably the best of the whole anthology. “Man Mountain” by Catherine Lacey: This story is so bonkers I laughed aloud on finishing it. The author’s note is very helpful—it has serious themes, such as the stifling patriarchy that has the protagonist identifying as a “human spider” rather than a woman—but it’s also gleefully weird. “Me, Rory and Aurora” by Jonas Eika: The first translated story, and I seem to be in the minority for loving it: it’s strange, almost dreamlike, yet compelling, about a down-and-out young person becoming part of a threesome with a married couple. It has a thematic and emotional resonance I can’t quite explain. “The Complete” by Gabriel Smith: Very experimental and meta, and did less for me than the first three, but I found it intriguing and funny and appreciated its boldness. The author’s note is useful here also. “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak” by Jamil Jan Kochai: A great, emotionally resonant story of the life of a Muslim-American family, from the perspective of someone spying on them. I at first assumed (view spoiler)[the second-person narrator was a ghost, but in the end I think they’re supposed to be a government spy—though their level of omniscience seems beyond anything a real spy could achieve. (hide spoiler)] It’s an affecting portrayal of a family, with a great mix of sympathy and realism. “Wisconsin” by Lisa Taddeo: Ironically—or maybe not, given its content—this story about a love affair is where my love for the anthology began to cool. It’s a dead-mom story that might’ve fit well into this year’s BASS (though the frankness about sex pushes the limits a bit), and the protagonist (view spoiler)[taking revenge via sex on a guy she found out after the fact had broken her mom’s heart before she was even born (hide spoiler)] didn’t quite compute for me. “Ira & the Whale” by Rachel B. Glaser: This is a well-written story about the approach of death under truly bizarre and fantastical circumstances, which just isn’t a subject I enjoy. I do think it does a good job with the lives of gay men, and it is resonant and succeeds at the effect it’s trying to achieve. “The Commander’s Teeth” by Naomi Shuyama-Gómez: The first story I thought just not very good. It’s a common short-story subject: an encounter between two people who would never ordinarily meet, in this case a new-minted dentist in 90s Colombia and a rebel commander. But nothing really changes as a result, and I didn’t understand the decision to intersperse that situation with boring scenes from the dentist’s sex life, rather than digging deeper into either her history with FARC or her sexuality. Both topics seemed potentially interesting but we didn’t see enough to make me care about either. “The Mad People of Paris” by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: Another least favorite. Maybe I just don’t know enough French history to get much out of this (other than that the narrator himself is definitely mad), but this didn’t make a lick of sense to me. “Snake & Submarine” by Shelby Kinney-Lang: A complex story about a writer following the blog of a former classmate dying from cancer, and writing a story with a much happier ending, featuring a character based in part on the classmate and in part on another woman he once dated. I’m not sure I fully understand the connections or why this is all so important to the narrator, but it was well-written enough that I would like to read some commentary. “The Mother” by Jacob M’hango: Another reviewer called this a folktale with pieces missing and that seems exactly right to me. It’s very elliptical, skips out on most of the actual events and keeps the reader distant from the characters. I read the end as a twist (view spoiler)[the sister was a witch after all! (hide spoiler)] and was somewhat surprised by the author’s note suggesting the story is about environmentalism, which is only briefly mentioned. “The Hollow” by ‘Pemi Aguda: Invites comparison to the previous, as both are African stories about violence against women. This one is much stronger, exploring trauma through the lives of a couple of characters and a magical house. It didn’t do much for me emotionally but I can see it working for others. “Dream Man” by Cristina Rivera Garza: This translated story is long, almost 50 pages, and I’m on the fence about whether it was worth it. It certainly leaves the reader with a lot to figure out: (view spoiler)[are Irena and Mariana sirens, and if so, are they inevitably killing Alvaro and possibly his family? Is Alvaro a figment of Irena’s imagination, let loose in the world and picked up by Fuensanta? Is everyone a figment of everyone else’s imagination because we all project our ideas of people onto them? (hide spoiler)] I also wonder about the title: (view spoiler)[at first glance Alvaro doesn’t seem superlative enough to be a dream man, but perhaps for Irena he is, because he makes himself available when she wants him and scarce when she doesn’t, all without reproach. Fuensanta seems like a man’s dream woman, but at the end Alvaro thinks she’s really more of a man? (hide spoiler)] Presumably this is here because it’s so mind-bending. “The Locksmith” by Gray Wolfe LaJoie: A short but effective tale of the inner and outer lives of someone overlooked by society, but far more complex, intelligent and kind than people might assume. Completely believable and not saccharine. See a good full-length review here. “After Hours at the Acacia Park Pool” by Kirstin Valdez Quade: Vivid storytelling, but I liked this less than other stories from this author. The coming-of-age story feels very standard. I was pissed at the way the mom exploited her daughter’s labor and then gaslit her about her outrage: for all her sanctimony about sacrificing to help others, the mom sure didn’t do so herself. (view spoiler)[Of course Laura is a minor so her mom would’ve been within her rights to just order her to babysit the neighbor’s kids for free, but instead she tricks and manipulates her while being hypocritically self-righteous. The mother impliedly doesn’t work herself so could’ve pitched in, and the parents also have the money to pay Laura themselves if they think the neighbor can’t afford it, rather than forcing all the sacrifice on her. (hide spoiler)] How to Raise your Daughter to Undervalue her Work 101. “Happy is a Doing Word” by Arinze Ifeakandu: A well-written story about the lives of two friends as they grow from boys to young men. A good exploration of how homophobia can deform someone’s psyche and their life, and I tend to like stories that successfully encapsulate so much time in so few pages. Not sure I understand the title, though. “Elision” by David Ryan: A brief story juxtaposing geological and interpersonal upheaval. Its ambiguity and not striking a particular emotional chord with me meant I did not get much out of it. “X��fù” by K-Ming Chang: A great monologue by a Taiwanese-American mother to her daughter, on the perfidies of mothers-in-law. Really a pitch-perfect, earthy, very believable voice. “Temporary Housing” by Kathleen Alcott: My second Alcott story, and they seem to do much less for me than for others. The writing is good but for me the many disparate elements never came together, and little observations clearly meant to be insightful just confused me. It’s a story of a woman looking back on a less successful high school friend, with the implication that (view spoiler)[the narrator overdoses at the end, just as her friend did. (hide spoiler)] “The Blackhills” by Eamon McGuinness: This is really good, a strong end to the anthology. It’s a sort of matter-of-fact minimalism that leaves the reader figuring it out as you go. Suspenseful and best read without prior information. (view spoiler)[The great twist only a third of the way through left me expecting another, but thankfully no, that was all. The rest of the story shows us the protagonist’s life as a family man, helping us infer why he’d go to such lengths to protect his niece. (hide spoiler)] It’s fun to end the collection with a late-night story about a man taking out the trash, though after Groff’s discussion at the beginning of anthology-wide themes, I wondered about so much writing about violence against women ending in a story where (view spoiler)[the victim is never seen or heard—even if we are satisfied that the perpetrator found his just desserts. (hide spoiler)] In the end there are probably still elements I’m missing about this anthology as a composition. Someone suggested doubles as a theme, which I agree with; I’d say gendered violence in its various forms is another, though it’s much more of a literary than an issues-based collection. While the whole book didn’t live up to the expectations set by the first five stories, I’m glad to have read it and appreciate Groff’s taste in stories. For those deciding between BASS 2023 and this anthology, I’d say this one contains much more experimentation with style, fantastical elements, sexuality, and queerness. BASS focuses on more straightforward and traditional literary stories, though both volumes are quite diverse. Overall I was pleased with both. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 03, 2024
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Jul 22, 2024
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Apr 20, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0063315742
| 3.68
| 560
| Oct 17, 2023
| Oct 17, 2023
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liked it
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After reading a couple years of Best American Short Stories and criticizing this year’s collection for including no speculative or experimental work,
After reading a couple years of Best American Short Stories and criticizing this year’s collection for including no speculative or experimental work, I decided to check out this anthology—all speculative, of course, and this batch highly experimental in form and structure. To the extent guest editor Kuang chose the stories (series editor Adams picks 80 by reading widely in magazines, collections and anthologies; the guest editor narrows it to 20), her introduction makes her philosophy clear: her primary criterion was “commitment to the bit,” with a strong preference for gonzo, bonkers, and sometimes political stories. They are concept-heavy, giving me new appreciation for the character-driven stories in BASS 2023. It is an interesting and diverse batch of stories—in topic and structure as well as author and character identity—but I only liked about 8 out of 20, and loved none, even the couple from authors whose work I’ve loved before. Notes on the individual stories: “Readings in the Slantwise Sciences” by Sofia Samatar: I love Samatar’s work—seriously, go check out her collection—but this is a wild choice to begin the anthology because it isn’t even a story, it’s a writing exercise. Samatar was going stir crazy during lockdown and rewrote three National Geographic articles to be surreal and fantastical. The articles have no connection to each other and while I rather liked the use of fairies as a metaphor for insect die-off, the piece overall is a strange choice. “Air to Shape Lungs” by Shingai Njeri Kagunda: Another strange choice for a first impression. The author comes up with a fantasy concept to symbolize opposition to borders and racism, writes a 3-page description of said concept and stops there, without actual plot or characters. “Beginnings” by Kristina Ten: The first one I sort of liked, a poignant little suburban fairy tale that kept me guessing about where we were and what was really going on. Not sure why the author thinks all fairy tales end happily, though. “Sparrows” by Susan Palwick: A favorite. While the world is falling apart, a lonely college student holes up in her dorm to finish her Shakespeare paper, and it’s a resonant exploration of meaning in life, what we do when death is imminent, and where the world might be headed. I’m excited to see this author has written novels (better yet, not about the apocalypse)—my biggest find of the anthology. “The Six Deaths of the Saint” by Alix Harrow: The most popular of the anthology, and I see why and mostly agree. An exciting tale of love and war with twists that pack a punch, and emotional and thematic resonance. I didn’t entirely love the ending: (view spoiler)[it felt like a “everything you needed, you had all along” message, which given that they were starving orphans, was not true. (hide spoiler)] But overall I probably liked this better than the novel I’ve read from Harrow and see why people love her short fiction. “Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist” by Isabel J. Kim: I’ve heard great things about this author, but this is a very meta takedown of a subgenre I don’t read, which did very little for me. “Men, Women and Chainsaws” by Stephen Graham Jones: A twist on horror tropes, which will likely work better for people who like horror. I admired the rare realistic depiction of average small-town young adults—not bookish, or solitary and eccentric, the way authors tend to prefer their leads; the protagonist works at a car dealership but wishes she was a hair stylist, lives in a trailer with roommates and parties hard at bonfires on the weekend—but didn’t otherwise enjoy it. The ending felt particularly off: (view spoiler)[the protagonist is basically a psychopath, murdering her ex for breaking up with her, but the story doesn’t embrace that and even vindicates her at the end. (hide spoiler)] “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills: Part dystopian tale, part historical review, all op-ed about reproductive rights in America. It’s effective—I can see it being read at conferences in years to come, and if you’re feeling outraged about recent Supreme Court decisions and want validation, this story is a great choice. I would have liked a little more from the characters. “There are No Monsters at Rancho Buenavista” by Isabel Cañas: A flash fiction monster story. It’s fine but not helped by putting the author’s note up front—I’m not convinced this is the subversion she thinks it is. “Murder by Pixel�� by S.L. Huang: This reads like a feature in a news magazine—impressively so; fiction authors rarely mimic the style of anything so well. What happens when chatbot AIs are set loose to contact people? The story gives us a scenario, inventing only the people involved, and giving us even (presumably fictional) interviews with professionals and the (real) history of AI. A strong work, to be engaged with as a thinkpiece more so than a story. “White Water, Blue Ocean” by Linda Raquel Nieves Perez: The worst-written story in the collection, featuring a Puerto Rican(?) family under a curse (or perhaps a poorly-thought-out blessing from a clueless spirit). Full of abrupt emotional shifts and awkward exposition, and with a narrator who believes the entire world revolves around their gender identity. “The CRISPR Cookbook” by MKRNYILGLD: Formatted as an instruction manual for the science-inclined who need to cook up their own abortions in an oppressive world. Suffers from being Abortion Story #2 and less effective than Abortion Story #1; I’d have rather read the actual story of a scientist doing this than the manual she refers to. “Three Mothers Mountain” by Nathan Ballingrud: A well-written story if you’re interested in Appalachian fairy tales blended with horror. I don’t like horror and found it gross and sad. The kids should’ve talked to their teachers. “The Odyssey Problem” by Chris Willrich: A spacefaring riff on “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” in which several completely opposed—but all sensible by their own terms—systems of morality run into each other in what feels like escalating moral oneupmanship. I see why some people love this, and it’s certainly confident, blazing ahead and demanding readers keep up. But my biggest takeaway was “never assume you’ve reached the apex of moral progress,” which is pretty obvious, and its characters are no more than props. Why make a rescued Omelas child your narrator if you refuse to do pathos? Plus, Willrich ignores Le Guin’s points about the long-term effects—intellectual, linguistic, physical—that such a childhood would have. “Pellargonia” by Theodora Goss: Three teens with a worldbuilding hobby accidentally create a country, and the story is in the form of a letter to the relevant journal asking for help. Maybe I’m a curmudgeon for disliking it, as most readers found it charming, but the constant interjections interrupt the flow and it is not believable as a letter to an academic journal (nor did it make me believe these kids could’ve successfully passed off their prior work). Also, it felt like it was hiding the fact that this is a story about clueless Americans screwing things up for everyone by messing with countries they don’t understand behind the tired “every kid in the friend group has a different diversity point” trope. Maybe it’s subtly making the point that identity politics don’t absolve you of responsibility for your actions, or maybe that’s giving it too much credit. “Pre-Simulation Consultation” by Kim Fu: Happily, I liked this one: a story in the form of a transcript between a customer and employee, negotiating a virtual reality experience. We learn a fair bit indirectly about both of the characters, it’s a fun but thoughtful look at corporate and legal handling of new technologies, and the end is strong. “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” by Maria Dong: Ugh. A vibes story I definitely didn’t vibe with. A depressing premise (all life is dying off, and humans are making it worse by their spirits parasitically invading other species and killing them off even faster), that’s apparently supposed to be counterbalanced by the mystical connection between two souls, but those souls are parasites and we’re given no reason to care about them, and no hope. Also, the protagonist didn’t begin as a bird. “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne Valente: A bonkers story about a woman’s turbulent lifelong romantic relationship with the space-time continuum, which is always appearing in different forms. I can see why people like it but this one was just too out there for me, not surprising since Valente’s recent novels have been too. My buddy read partner, who liked it, describes it as “a story of metaphysics and madness.” “Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead” by KT Bryski: A good one. In a sort of purgatory, this story alternates between the poignant story of the dead narrator, and trickster stories recognizable in inspiration but twisted to feature the dead. Clever and meaningful and strange. “Cumulative Ethical Guidelines for Mid-Range Interstellar Storytellers” by Malka Older: I can see why others would find this unremarkable, but for me it was the perfect end to the anthology. It reads like a crowdsourced Google Doc put together by and for storytellers working on spaceships. It sneaks in a lot of worldbuilding while sounding like the kinds of comments people actually write, and I found it fun and sweet. Overall, then, lots of ups and downs, a few new authors discovered. Worth the read for me but hard to recommend. I might try another volume in a different year to see whether it’s the guest editor’s taste that doesn’t quite agree with me, or the series editor’s. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 02, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0547485859
| 9780547485850
| 0547485859
| 4.13
| 1,136
| Oct 06, 2015
| Oct 06, 2015
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liked it
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Whew—two months and I’ve finally finished this anthology! Reviews below (note that most of these stories have individual Goodreads pages as well). But
Whew—two months and I’ve finally finished this anthology! Reviews below (note that most of these stories have individual Goodreads pages as well). But first, some overall commentary. This was a worthwhile endeavor: literary speed dating, featuring acclaimed authors and stories. I would have preferred an anthology that just aimed to represent the best stories of the century, not limited to those selected for Best American Short Stories in their year (sadly, I haven’t found any such anthology). This volume has the further limitation that a prior pair of editors took their own pass 15 years earlier, in the harder-to-find The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and this book’s editors decided on no overlap, so all the pre-2000 stories here are in theory second-best. In practice, some are fabulous, some decent, some duds. There’s a tilt toward more recent stories: though they span a full century, 21 of 40 represent the final 35 years (1980 onwards). Demographically, the tilt toward male authors remains consistent throughout, at 6 of every 10 stories, while the 10 authors of color are almost all clustered toward the end. The most surprising statistic to me is just how young these authors were, with most of the stories being published by people in their 30s and even 20s! In fact, only 5 stories were written by someone aged 50+. Sadly, most of the sections written by the editors feel bizarrely off-base and banal, though reading a bit about the history of the series was interesting; I could’ve used less imaginary short story writers on book tours and more explanation of why these stories were chosen, or deeper observations on the 2,000 stories featured over the century. There’s so much railing against the horrors of plot (even stuck into someone’s mini-bio) that I just wound up curious about what an overly plot-driven short story even looks like. Also noteworthy is BASS’s awkward relationship with genre: while a few stories here have speculative elements, there’s only one I’d call a genre story, which is almost worse than none. Unlike her predecessors, the current series editor seems open to sci-fi and fantasy, but without actually reading the associated magazines (she picks up the occasional story that makes it into someplace like the New Yorker), which seems to me an unhappy compromise. Either narrow your mission (and title) to realistic literary fiction, or actually read the places where great speculative stories are published so you can represent them properly. As is, we get bizarre choices like Ursula Le Guin having being published in BASS three times—but only for realistic stories few readers will even have heard of. Anyway, the stories: 1910s: “The Gay Old Dog” by Edna Ferber: This is a great time capsule story that puts me in mind of Edith Wharton: a Chicago family gradually losing its money, a brother who loses his opportunity to marry because he has to get his sisters settled first. I was entertained by the author’s holding forth on social issues of the day (“Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made. The dead have no right to lay their clammy fingers upon the living.”), and for every dated gendered assumption that made me roll my eyes (the career-oriented sister’s unattractiveness: why would a 30-something who works indoors have “leathery” skin?) there was another that charmed me (a young man’s God-given right to fancy waistcoats and colorful socks, and the assumption that he’ll love preening in the mirror). While the story is compelling, the ending likewise feels foreign today: (view spoiler)[meeting a former fiancée while watching her son march off as a WWI volunteer makes the protagonist wish he’d married this poorly-behaved woman and had his own son to send to the trenches. (hide spoiler)] 1920s: “Brothers” by Sherwood Anderson “My Old Man” by Ernest Hemingway “Haircut” by Ring Lardner The 1920s must have been a rough decade for short stories if these are the best. Fortunately, they’re relatively short. All three feature first-person male narrators observing other men in their communities, all involving crime and some fairly obvious things the reader is meant to see through. The triptych improves slightly as it goes: I can’t fathom why “Brothers” is here and have nothing to say about it beyond that it’s a chiasmus. “My Old Man” is probably most notable for the story about the story, namely that its pity publication in BASS launched Hemingway’s career. “Haircut” gives us an entertainingly clueless narrator to see through but is otherwise a bit broad. 1930s: “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: More engaging reading than the 1920s set, but my sympathies didn’t go where the author intended. A tale of American expats in Europe, and a formerly alcoholic father trying to convince his deceased wife’s sister to return custody of his 9-year-old daughter. This guy is such a stereotype: uninvolved but plies the kid with gifts, has been sober for ten minutes and is outraged by his sister-in-law’s doubts, wants his kid back to satisfy his own emotional needs but doesn’t seem to have considered what being uprooted would mean for her. I sympathized with the “evil” sister-in-law, who struck me as someone with anxiety being expected to do something she’s not comfortable with. “The Cracked Looking-Glass” by Katherine Anne Porter: The first story that made me want to seek out more from the author. This is the story of a marriage between Irish-American immigrants, a middle-aged woman and an elderly man, with vivid characters and a glimpse into lives that feel very real. “That Will Be Fine” by William Faulkner: A throwback to the 1920s stories, narrated by a young boy observing his no-good uncle without understanding what he’s up to. I liked it a bit better than the 1920s stories, perhaps just because the more challenging prose made reading it feel like an accomplishment, but didn’t ultimately buy the child narrator’s cluelessness: at 7 he’s developmentally old enough to understand mysteries (Boxcar Children are aimed at ages 6-8 and were available when Faulkner was writing!) yet bizarrely overlooks obviously sinister behavior. (view spoiler)[He encounters a man violently restraining a woman and preventing her from speaking, who gives the boy a message “from her” to his uncle to come inside, and just passes this on with no commentary whatsoever. (hide spoiler)] 1940s: “Those Are as Brothers” by Nancy Hale: Interesting mostly as a time capsule of how Americans in 1941 thought about the Holocaust. A woman who has escaped an abusive marriage feels kinship and empathy for a Jewish man who has escaped a concentration camp. Today’s readers would look askance at comparing one’s relationship, however awful, to a Nazi camp (some even complain about comparing other genocides and mass internments, thus ensuring that these atrocities will continue), but this was written before the Holocaust was enshrined as the worst thing to ever happen and the purpose of the comparison is increasing empathy for the refugees, which is interesting to see. “The Whole World Knows” by Eudora Welty: The most challenging story so far. I have read it twice, I have sought out academic commentary, and I’m still not sure I fully get it, let alone catch all the literary allusions. A structurally complicated story about a young man separated from his wife, in which his fantasies blend into reality. I think in the end that (view spoiler)[he rapes the teenage girl he’s been seeing, who then shoots herself with his father’s pistol. (hide spoiler)] I have no idea what the button sewing was about. “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever: The first perfect story. A New York couple acquires a radio that allows them to hear into the lives of their neighbors, with troubling results. I’m still trying to figure out why the ending happened: (view spoiler)[did the radio itself poison their marriage? Did it exacerbate the cracks, by making the wife more conscious of others’ judgment even in her own home, while making the husband feel he too had the right to let loose when others aren’t so perfect either? Or was this there all along? (hide spoiler)] 1950s: “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen: A hilariously stereotypical title for a 1950s story, but actually this one is heartbreaking. A mother looks back on her eldest daughter’s life, and how a lack of stability and emotional safety—mostly caused by their precarious economic situation—caused the daughter untold suffering with potential lifelong effects. Succinct, devastating and ahead of its time, and I’m still pondering the mother’s final conclusion: (view spoiler)[I can’t help suspecting her decision to remain quiet is mostly about not wanting to be judged herself. (hide spoiler)] “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin: A beautiful and powerful story about the relationship between two adult brothers—the older one stepping into the role of father before he really has the wisdom to do so—and the younger brother’s life-sustaining connection to music. I finished it feeling I’d read an entire novel about these people and I mean that as a compliment. “The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth: A boy with religious questions finds himself backed into extreme measures. I found this one weird, tasteless and rather poorly written. 1960s: “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor: This is a good story, in a technical sense, though everyone in it behaves terribly and the end is miserable. The first story that’s squarely about race relations (though implicit in “Sonny’s Blues”), this one could be read as racist, or as a clear-eyed deconstruction of white attitudes: the patronizingly racist mother, the angry son whose performative antiracism mostly seems to be a rebellion against her. I fail to see the Catholic angle, unless you are already inclined to interpret human failings as a need for grace. “Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike: An adolescent boy confronts fear of death and questions about religion—a relatable phase and a well-written story, but one that didn’t do much for me. The boy ultimately reaches a narcissistic, if comforting, conclusion. “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver: An overlong story about a guy who finds out his wife cheated on him a couple years ago, and which then chronicles every blessed thing he does for the next 12 hours, mostly wandering about feeling sorry for himself. Please. “By the River” by Joyce Carol Oates: Well, that’s certainly a Joyce Carol Oates story. Very Biblical, boring until it’s horrifying, though she does a good job of subtly building the tension such that I was expecting something like that. 1970s: “The School” by Donald Barthelme: Surrealist flash fiction, with a life-affirming message in the midst of death. I didn’t have a strong reaction to it but am curious about what else this author wrote. “The Conventional Wisdom” by Stanley Elkin: That was an unexpected twist. (view spoiler)[I think the story is parodying the conventional wisdom about heaven and hell, especially given the author is Jewish, but his “sinners in the hands of an angry god” portrayal is nevertheless powerful enough to give even a committed atheist a chill! (hide spoiler)] Bold and different. 1980s: “Friends” by Grace Paley: A group of middle-aged women travel to visit a friend who is dying of cancer. I can see why this story isn’t a standout for most people, but it intrigued me with its textured portrayal of the women’s lives. And what exactly did classmates see wrong with the daughter who died young? This story also contains perhaps the saddest line in the anthology so far, when (view spoiler)[the dying woman asks her friends to leave as she doesn’t have much time and wants to think about her lost daughter. (hide spoiler)] “The Harmony of the World” by Charles Baxter: On the surface this is the story of a failed musician failing at love, and I’m wrestling to understand it beyond the surface level (not too surprising since music and music-focused stories are not my forte). Is the narrator, who does indeed seem very emotionally restrained until he reams out his girlfriend for her failures as a singer, actually fatally lacking in passion? Or perhaps his problem wasn’t with his playing, but that he didn’t care enough to work on it and instead quit at the first discouragement? He and the composer of the eponymous symphony both produce apparently passionless works before their hidden reservoirs of emotion emerge in destructive ways—what does it all mean? “Lawns” by Mona Simpson: The standout of the 80s stories, this one turns out to be sickening in content but deals with an important topic in a nuanced and powerful way: (view spoiler)[it’s about a college student who’s been sexually abused by her father since childhood, finally breaking away and wrestling with her understanding of what happened. It does not pull punches in the descriptions. (hide spoiler)] Simpson’s introducing the character with her problematic behavior before revealing her trauma is artful and recreates the way one is likely to encounter sufferers in real life. I’m concerned for the character at the end: (view spoiler)[who else besides her father is likely to have written her that letter? Will loneliness keep her from making a final break? (hide spoiler)] “Communist” by Richard Ford: Another boy-shooting-birds story that impressed me even less than Updike’s, with more diffuse themes. Or maybe I just didn’t care enough to search for them. “Helping” by Robert Stone: A long story about a day in the life of a troubled veteran turned social worker, who gets triggered by a client, throws away his sobriety and is an ass to everyone around him. Reasonably well-written but the protagonist reminds me a little too much of my own asshole neighbor, the mutual contempt in this marriage is exhausting and it all builds up to nothing much. Surely there must have been better Vietnam vet stories available. “Displacement” by David Wong Louie: There are definitely better immigrant stories—this one is pretty weak—but I suppose there was less competition in the 80s. 1990s: “Friend of My Youth” by Alice Munro: This one left me with a lot to think about. On the surface, it’s a story of a farm woman in rural Canada in the early 20th century, and the choices she makes under difficult circumstances. But it’s told third- and fourth-hand, by a narrator who never met the protagonist and for whom the story is bound up with her youthful resentment and adult guilt about her treatment of her sick mother. In the end, everyone’s interpretation of Flora mostly tells us about themselves: the mother is straightforward and affectionate and, as she gets ill, wishes she had a caretaker like that; the narrator resents expectations of self-sacrifice, and so wants to knock Flora off her pedestal. I saw Flora as a woman with limited choices making the best of a bad situation, which probably tells you something about me. “The Girl on the Plane” by Mary Gaitskill: So timely that if not for the descriptions of plane travel, you could mistake it for a 2020s story. A man meets a woman who reminds him of a college friend, and finally is forced to acknowledge his own complicity in a sexual assault. “Xuela” by Jamaica Kincaid: Impressive writing on a technical level, but in content, this struck me as the first chapter in a run-of-the-mill post-colonial Caribbean novel—one that neither feels complete on its own, nor made me want to read on (for those who do, see The Autobiography of My Mother). “If You Sing Like That For Me” by Akhil Sharma: Meh. “Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Diaz: A Dominican immigrant family attends an extended family party, but all is not well at home, as seen through the eyes of a boy in his early teens(?). A common subject but I liked the story and found it well-written, fresh and raw. 2000s: “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri: A disappointment given the author’s literary stature. It feels like this story took the immigrant protagonist’s relationship with an elderly, ailing white landlady from “Displacement,” the Indian couple’s arranged marriage from “If You Sing,” which the groom has only entered to check off a life milestone, and made the whole thing saccharine instead of dismal, but with no greater depth. Clearly I have different taste in immigrant stories from the editors. “Brownies” by ZZ Packer: I’d read this before and found it a little too on-the-nose, a story about a young girl learning that oppressed people too can hunger for and abuse power. This time I appreciated more the author’s keen eye for people, places and social dynamics. I also noticed the narrator’s passivity and near-absence from the story, and am on the fence about whether to read it as an observation of someone who can draw moral conclusions but not act on them, or simply unsatisfying. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie: I enjoyed this story a lot, and in fact read it twice—it’s heavy on dialogue that feels very real; it’s often funny, though always mixed with loss; and it has a satisfying ending. At the same time, I feel unqualified to review it. It’s the only Native American story in the book and hammers Indianness hard, which is also present in the whole structure of the story: a man who wants to acquire something but continuously resists accumulating money, instead immediately sharing everything he gains. But then this seems not only cultural, but also a result of the short-term thinking brought on by financial stress. There’s also a gaping, unnamed sense of loss throughout the story, and I’m told its level of despair is considered passé among Native American readers today. “Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones: Oddly, I liked this one much better when I read it a few years in Jones’s collection. Out of that context, this level of violence and misery feels almost like trolling, like Jones pulled elements from over-the-top TV shows and is laughing at what white people will believe if written by someone with the right skin color. Of course, people in prison often do have over-the-top terrible lives, and it is well-written. But I was unsatisfied by the unanswered questions, particularly around the protagonist’s backstory (at first I assumed he ran away due to poverty or abuse at home, but by the end it appears not?). Of all Jones’s stories, this is definitely a choice. Final 6 reviews in the comments due to length restrictions! ...more |
Notes are private!
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really liked it
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Reviews of the individual stories below, but first some commentary on the anthology as a whole. This is my second time reading one of these volumes (th Reviews of the individual stories below, but first some commentary on the anthology as a whole. This is my second time reading one of these volumes (the first was 2019), and it’s interesting to compare them, giving a sense of the guest editor’s tastes. Here’s what stands out about this one: - Short means short: the average story has 14 pages, with a few at just 6-8. - First person: a full 15 out of 20 stories, which was a lot for me. Only one story does anything interesting with perspective or structure; the others (first and third person alike) are straightforward single points-of-view with at most some unreliability from the narrator. - Female-dominated, racial diversity: This is generally true of these anthologies, and perhaps the current market overall, but especially so here: 15 of the stories are by women and over half by authors of color, with a lot of diversity of background all around. - Contemporary realism only: On the other hand, while the 2019 collection included three historical stories and three dystopian or fantastical stories, the 2023 features only modern, realistic settings (a few include hallucinations, but that happens in real life too). Disappointingly narrow for an anthology claiming to represent the best regardless of genre. - But not domestic realism: Only a handful of stories deal much with marriage or parenting. Far more focus on cultural issues, on friendships, on community, on searches for identity and meaning. While I’d personally have preferred a reduction of the first-person onslaught, and a bit more risk-taking and genre variation, the anthology did ultimately win me over—it helped that I liked the second half, overall, much better than those in the first. Below are notes on the individual stories (what I always want from reviews of collections): Tender by Cherline Bazile: An immigrant high school student struggles in her relationship with her best friend, mostly because she has declared herself the only one with a right to a bad home life. Unfortunately the anthology started out with a bit of a dud for me; this one is structurally plain, has too many characters in too few pages, and we never actually see this awful home life, either. Do You Belong to Anybody? by Maya Binyam: Happily, I loved the second story, my favorite of the anthology. A man returns to his native Ethiopia after many years away, for initially unclear reasons, and it’s this absurdist tragicomedy, relayed in a voice I can best describe as “Murderbot with amnesia”—except the narrator doesn’t have amnesia, he just doesn’t feel like sharing. And is maybe neurodivergent, but certainly traumatized. I spent the whole story trying to figure out what was going on and then read it all over again once I did, which is exactly what I want from a short story. Turns out the author expanded it into a novel, which I plan to read. His Finest Moment by Tom Bissell: A famous novelist and serial sexual harasser attempts to warn his teenage daughter before the story of his bad behavior breaks. I appreciate this story for its convincing development of a perspective from which I wouldn’t want to read a whole novel, but showing that perspective is basically all it does. Almost more snapshot than story. Camp Emeline by Taryn Bowe: A family who lost their youngest child sets up a camp for disabled kids, as seen through the eyes of the teenage sister, who is struggling. Said sister gets involved with a 24-year-old camp employee, who’s also had a rough life, and this helps, I guess? As with the first story, I was underwhelmed—it’s structurally ordinary and didn’t make me feel. Treasure Island Alley by Da-Lin: After the last two stories, the sheer ambition of this one was a breath of fresh air. It’s about the meaning of death, through both science and religion, and covers the entire long life of a Taiwanese-American woman through the prism of a single day when she was five. I’m not sure it entirely succeeds—perhaps because it’s only 13 pages long; when Ted Chiang did it he took four times that—but it’s certainly interesting. The Master Mourner by Benjamin Ehrlich: Is this even a story? I’m afraid I don’t get it at all. Seven pages consisting mostly of descriptions of a couple of eccentric adults in an Orthodox Jewish boy’s community, followed by an out-of-nowhere epiphany and a deliberately vague ending. (view spoiler)[The father died, I guess? (hide spoiler)] The Company of Others by Sara Freeman: Each year, it seems, there’s one particular story that stands out for its combination of great writing and no imagination. While her husband and young daughter are away, a woman contemplates her ambivalence about parenting and her relationship with her own dead mother, and wonders if maybe she never should have married her husband at all. I wondered if maybe something would ever happen, but it didn’t. Annunciation by Lauren Groff: Another young woman seeking her path, and things definitely happen in this one, as our narrator gets to know a couple of overlooked, eccentric women in her community—her elderly German immigrant landlady, and a coworker who is an evangelical van-dweller fleeing domestic violence. There is tragedy, and the narrator comes to understand her own mother better. Some strong character sketches, and it depicts the Bay Area with a vivid sense of place. It never quite popped for me though: the narrator and her story aren’t quite strong enough as the linchpin that must hold it all together, and the ending felt a bit weak and conventional. The Mine by Nathan Harris: A South African man has risen to manage a mine, but there’s a tragedy and he feels haunted by visions locally understood to represent a guilty conscience. Unfortunately, this story just felt inauthentic to me. There’s no sense of place (and indeed, the author is American, with no mention of even visiting South Africa), everyone including the miners speaks formal American English, and the first-person voice likewise sounds like a college-educated American, whereas the narrator is supposed to have apprenticed in a mine from boyhood. Bebo by Jared Jackson: All right, now this one brings the voice, as well as the sense of place. It’s a boys-in-the-hood story featuring young teens in the inner city, in which the narrator must confront his failings as a friend to a boy worse off than himself. I found this one very strong, though tragic and sometimes gross. At first it felt like the story was being a little hard on the narrator—the whole world has failed Bebo; what is another kid supposed to do about it?—but on reflection, isn’t that the purpose of friendship, to be there for someone even if you can’t make it better? The Muddle by Sana Krasikov: This time the friends are two Ukrainian women in their 60s: one Jewish, a nonconformist, an immigrant to the U.S.; the other more of a follower, remaining in Ukraine with her Russian husband. When Russia invades, the U.S.-based woman tries to convince her friend to get out, and must ultimately confront the limits on what we can do about how those around us live their lives and what they choose to believe. A solid and timely story, and the conversations feel very realistic, though it’s missing that extra something for me, the characters a bit lacking in depth and the sense of lives lived. My Brother William by Danica Li: This story has all the depth and feeling I was missing from the last one, following the relationship of an adult brother and sister over several decades of their lives. A beautiful, poignant story, that I think will touch anyone who has a sibling they don’t see often, and that really brings the leads to life despite being only 14 pages long. The real vs. virtual world musings didn’t add much for me, but I still thought it was great. Peking Duck by Ling Ma: The one story in the collection to play with perspective, to use structure to illustrate its themes—this is a very artsy story, in other words, yet seems to be the most popular of the bunch. Featuring a Chinese-American writer who mines her immigrant mother’s experiences in her fiction, it asks questions about who really knows a story, who has the right to tell it. And it’s fascinatingly recursive: (view spoiler)[of course I wanted the final section to be from the perspective of the actual mother; it feels so authentic! But it can’t be, because it’s autofiction; Ling Ma herself is the daughter. (hide spoiler)] I think I liked it, in a complicated way; in any case, while some of the others feel chosen at random, this one clearly belongs in a best-of collection. Compromisos by Manuel Muñoz: A gay Mexican-American father tries to reconcile with his family when his relationship with a man proves to have no future. This is… fine? Like several of the stories in this collection, it’s so restrained that its emotional impact was blunted for me. We never even meet the young daughter who seems to be the father’s primary reason to return. A visually vivid story, and an interesting perspective, but not memorable for me. Grand Mal by Joanna Pearson: A literary crime story with an unreliable narrator: this one is good, and had me going back through it for clues once I’d finished. It’s also been turned into a novel, which I don’t plan to read because I don’t like murder mysteries, but I did like the story. Trash by Souvankham Thammavongsa: A 6-page anecdote narrated by a naïve and sloppy 32-year-old grocery store cashier, about meeting her ambitious lawyer mother-in-law, who of course disapproves. From the contributor’s note, the author is impressed with her own story, but I can’t say the same; it all felt obvious, with some weird moments (who would wait 2 hours in a parking lot for someone’s shift to end rather than going elsewhere or coming in? Why does the narrator think she’s “worked her way up” at the grocery store when she’s still a cashier?). Supernova by Kosiso Ugwueze: A depressed and recently suicidal young woman is kidnapped from a bus in Nigeria and held for ransom. I liked this one, particularly the Nigerian English and Isioma’s inability to muster the level of respect and fear her captors expect, all while still behaving believably. The growing rapport with the captors is interesting too. (view spoiler)[The ending elevates it I think, forcing the reader to ask the same questions I think Isioma has been asking herself all along: does anyone care about her? (hide spoiler)] Of the stories that haven’t yet been turned into novels, this is the one I’d most like to see. This Isn’t the Actual Sea by Corinna Vallianatos: A surprisingly good story about a friendship between two middle-aged artists, a writer and a filmmaker. I’m not sure I entirely understood it, but prefer a bit of artsiness over obviousness in a short story, and the portrayal of the friendship between the two women and the filmmaker’s relationship to her art felt very real. It Is What It Is by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi: A slightly bonkers story about two Iranian expat women—roommates, grad students—in Chicago, who both seem to be losing their minds. It’s the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there’s a series of tragedies or near-misses affecting their homeland (see this review for a timeline). I liked it more than I didn’t. It really isn’t about the cat. Moon by Esther Yi: An uptight young woman attends a K-pop concert and becomes completely obsessed with a member of the boy band. I didn’t really connect with this one, and thought it ended too soon: we’re still within days of the concert, too early to know whether this will actually change the narrator’s life forever or if it’s just a weird blip. The novel it turned into would no doubt answer the question but I’m not that interested. At any rate, I’m glad I read the anthology in the end; the stories are well-written (though I had a chuckle at the “‘Coincidence,’ she emitted tersely” in the penultimate story!) with some variation in subject matter if not in genre, and it introduced me to a bunch of new authors. EDIT: Well, I found out where all the experimental and genre-bending literary stories went this year! Check out The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 02, 2024
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Dec 23, 2023
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| 1328484246
| 9781328484246
| 1328484246
| 3.65
| 1,558
| Oct 01, 2019
| Oct 01, 2019
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liked it
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This is my first year reading the Best American Short Stories, after having gotten more into short stories over the last few years. I am not a fan of
This is my first year reading the Best American Short Stories, after having gotten more into short stories over the last few years. I am not a fan of multi-author anthologies, finding them impossible to “get into” when each new story is like starting a new book, and that’s particularly true here, where there is no unifying theme. From reading a number of both brief and in-depth reviews of this collection and its stories, I have the sense this year wasn’t the best for this series. Many readers only connected with a couple of the stories, though Doerr must have done something right in selecting them when readers’ favorites seem to vary so widely. Looking through the top reviews on this page shows that while most readers only really liked a third or fewer of the stories, almost every story made somebody’s shortlist, with little consistency in which were the favorites. For me the only two standouts are “Letter of Apology” by Maria Reva and “Omakase” by Weike Wang, but I liked these enough that I now plan to read the authors’ books. So, a rundown in order of appearance: “The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: The collection begins with a dystopian tale about a world in which kindness and human connection are despised, and the resulting hole is filled with constant injections of drugs. All this I think is astute commentary on certain trends in our society, but I found other elements – like the genetic engineering that sometimes goes wrong and gives people only one personality trait – rather less relevant, and like many insecure sci-fi stories, this one spends way too much time talking about why their values aren’t our values and how our world became theirs. It’s as if we went around talking about the Renaissance all the time and why we aren’t like those people; I’m not buying. “Natural Light” by Kathleen Alcott: This is perhaps the most literary and best-written story in the collection, about a woman in her 30s who discovers something new about her deceased mother. I admire the author’s skill a lot, but her subject matter was too run-of-the-mill to interest me in reading more, and I still can’t figure out the ending; the last couple of sentences just seem like word salad to me. The story made more sense once (view spoiler)[I figured out that the random interjections were the narrator’s intrusive thoughts of suicide methods. The contents of the photograph, meanwhile, seemed obvious to me: the mother was receiving oral sex with drug paraphernalia scattered around, yes? (hide spoiler)] “The Great Interruption” by Wendell Berry: An entertaining boyhood escapade turns into a local legend, which is then used to comment on the demise of local culture in America. A well-written story, though Berry’s nostalgia for the rural America of yore is steeped in white male privilege, which though not acknowledged becomes visible at one point when the females privileged to hear the original story are referred to as the “housewives and big girls” of the community (it contained no other adult women). “No More Than a Bubble” by Jamel Brinkley: Two college boys crash a party with the goal of hooking up with a pair of slightly older women, and wind up way out of their depth. It’s a vividly told tale but I didn’t really know what to make of this one. The problematic aspects of the boys’ sexuality are clearly acknowledged, but I didn’t know how to reconcile Ben’s (view spoiler)[telling us that he learned the most important lesson of his life from all this with his still being alone and confused many years later, i.e., at exactly the same place his father’s view of women, which the young Ben adopted unquestioningly, led his father to end up. (hide spoiler)] “The Third Tower” by Deborah Eisenberg: In a vaguely-sketched dystopian world, the medical system tries to stamp out the creativity and possibly repressed memories of government-sponsored horror from the mind of a young woman. This one was a little too on-the-nose for me, and Therese’s gullibility and eager compliance made it harder for me to have strong feelings about what was being done to her. “Hellion” by Julia Elliott: An adolescent girl in rural South Carolina befriends a visiting boy, and unfortunate consequences follow from their actions. It’s sweet enough I suppose, but what Doerr cites as its exuberance and courage, for me was just over-the-top in a way that seems almost careless: the character referred to as having grown up “before the Civil War” early enough in the story that we don’t yet realize this isn’t meant literally (it’s set in the 1980s or thereabouts); the young female narrator going off on a sudden tangent about people killing the planet when she’d never before mentioned an interest in science or ecology and again, it’s the 1980s. It all felt a bit haphazard to me, and the grounding in serious questions about whether this girl has a shot at a fulfilling life wasn’t quite enough to draw it back. “Bronze” by Jeffrey Eugenides: A gender-nonconforming freshman meets an older gay man on the train home to college from New York, and has to finally decide whether he’s actually gay and if not, whether his self-expression is worth letting people read him that way. Interesting enough but didn’t do much for me, though I did find it interesting that Eugenides developed the older man, who without getting a point-of-view would have just been a standard creep. “Protozoa” by Ella Martinsen Gorham: A 14-year-old girl tries to establish her self-identity in both the real and virtual worlds. Doerr perhaps sells this one short by calling it a cautionary tale about the amount of investment teens put into their online lives; in many ways Noa seems to live more in the real world than a lot of teens (she interacts with quite a few people in real life over the course of the story), and I found myself thinking that the cautionary message might have been sent more effectively. But I’m not sure the author actually intended the story as anything so simple: what might have been portrayed as traumatizing cyberbullying in another story, Noa seems perfectly well-equipped to handle and even in some ways to welcome, while her real story is about trying to establish herself as someone darker and edgier. “Seeing Ershadi” by Nicole Krauss: A dancer and her friend both attribute newfound motivation to leave bad situations to visions of actor Homayoun Ershadi. This one didn’t really do anything for me. It seems to have a hole at its center: we hear a lot about the plot of the Iranian film Taste of Cherry, and a lot about the narrator’s friend’s life, while the narrator’s own life and decisions are sidelined. It is sweet though that according to the author’s note at the end, Ershadi read and was touched by the story at a difficult point in his own life. “Pity and Shame” by Ursula Le Guin: An outcast young woman in a late 19th century California mining town cares for a lonely mine engineer injured in an accident, and the two of them and a doctor all form a bond. A sweet story but not one that leaves the reader with much to think about, despite the author’s legendary status. “Anyone Can Do It” by Manuel Muñoz: A young mother struggles to figure out how to pay the bills when her husband, along with other farmworkers, is suddenly snatched by immigration. Timely, certainly, though set in the 1980s rather than the present, and the author adds some complexity in that, for instance, Delfina doesn’t actually seem to like or miss her husband much. But she was a bit of a hollow character that was hard for me to root for, and (view spoiler)[I was a little disturbed by the way the theft of her car was foreshadowed by her allowing her 4-year-old son to shoplift a toy car. It seems to me that she’s allowing her son to grow up into exactly the kind of person who took advantage of her. (hide spoiler)] “The Plan” by Sigrid Nunez: Inside the mind of a killer. Interesting enough, but didn’t do much for me. “Letter of Apology” by Maria Reva: In late Soviet Ukraine, a KGB agent is required to extract a letter of apology from a renowned poet for making a political joke. The agent, who narrates the story, is in denial about certain aspects of his own life, leading him to wildly misinterpret the behavior of the poet’s wife. I loved this one: there’s a ton of humor in the contrast between the dread image of the KGB and the reality of the bumbling and confused Mikhail, as well as the absurdities of the system as a whole. The whole story is full of dark humor and the changes wrought in both Mikhail and Milena seemed very real and sympathetic to me. I was excited to find that the author has also published this as part of a whole collection of linked short stories. “Black Corfu” by Karen Russell: On a Croatian island in 1620, ruled at the time from Venice, a black man wanted to be a doctor but is permitted only to cut the hamstrings of the dead, meant to prevent them from rising again as less-violent zombies, known as vukodlak. He’s falsely accused of botching a procedure – or is the accusation really false? This was my first exposure to an author who’s gotten a lot of buzz lately, and the story hits a lot of buttons in terms of racial prejudice and glass ceilings, but didn’t actually work well for me. “Audition” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: A young man who wants to be an actor instead, for unspecified reasons, works on construction sites owned by his father, a real estate developer, and seems to be falling under the spell of crack. This didn’t do much for me. “Natural Disasters” by Alexis Schaitkin: A young New Yorker moves to Oklahoma with her husband, where she takes a job writing descriptions of houses for sale and tries to fit everything that happens into some meaningful narrative of her life. I enjoyed the narrator’s voice, her obvious pretention and her adult awareness of it when telling the story from the vantage point of many years later, but I was underwhelmed and unconvinced by the “big event.” (view spoiler)[Really, at age 24 it’s this earth-shattering moment for her to hear that some guy’s brother died meaninglessly? (hide spoiler)] “Our Day of Grace” by Jim Shepard: An epistolary story about the American Civil War: two southern women write letters to two Confederate soldiers, one of whom writes back. The letters are credible enough but the Civil War has also been pretty well done to death as a setting, and in my view this didn’t do anything new or exciting. “Wrong Object” by Mona Simpson: A therapist treats a man who at first seems boring, but then reveals that he only experiences sexual attraction to adolescent girls, though he insists he’s never acted upon it. This is interesting, but perhaps too short for me. I would have liked to know a little more about the therapist’s life, which is only vaguely hinted at, and to have seen the consequences at the end developed a little more. But the existence of people seeking treatment for pedophilia who have never acted on their urges was not new information to me, which may have blunted my reaction to the story. “They Told Us Not To Say This” by Jenn Alandy Trahan: Blink and you’ll miss this 7-page story, told in the first person plural about a group of second-generation Filipina-American girls who are second-class in their families but find empowerment on the basketball court. This is the one story no reviewer seems to have highlighted as a favorite, and I can see why not. “Omakase” by Weike Wang: A Chinese-American woman in her late 30s goes out for omakase (in Japanese, “I’ll leave it up to you”; in restaurants, sushi selected by the chef) with her white boyfriend, who increasingly shows his obliviousness about racial issues and his dismissive and condescending attitude toward her, despite the fact that she’s the one to do most of the sacrificing and pay most of the bills in their relationship. It’s interesting to see the widely varied responses that reviewers have had, some feeling that all the ways in which the woman is marginalized and put down in the world and within her own relationship to be too stereotypical, while others seem to take the boyfriend’s opinions at face value and view her as too sensitive and neurotic for her own good. Those varying responses are certainly a testament to the realism of the story. She is a bit neurotic, but to me much of this is the conflict generated by her instincts telling her she’s in a bad situation, while everyone around her (boyfriend, family, friends) insists that the only problem is her – thereby robbing her of the sense of self-worth she needs to actually stand up for herself. She comes across as real and vibrant, as do the racial issues addressed, and I’m interested in reading Wang’s novel. Overall, an interesting collection of stories I don’t regret reading, but that took me a really long time to get through. I’m not sure if I’ll try another of these collections, but I did at least discover a couple of promising authors. ...more |
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Apr 15, 2020
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Jun 18, 2020
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Jul 01, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0991392108
| 9780991392100
| 0991392108
| 4.04
| 434
| Jan 30, 2014
| Jan 30, 2014
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it was ok
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I was excited to read this collection: while my reading in general is quite diverse, my fantasy reading isn’t so much (there are far fewer options), s
I was excited to read this collection: while my reading in general is quite diverse, my fantasy reading isn’t so much (there are far fewer options), so this book seemed like a great chance to discover new authors. Also, I love historical fantasy. But as it turned out, while most stories in the collection are well-written in a technical sense, I didn’t enjoy them. After taking more than a month to struggle through the first 13 (out of 27), I skipped ahead to read 3 more by well-known authors or that got especially high marks from reviewers. That will be all for me. The first thing potential readers should know about this anthology is that “Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History” doesn’t simply mean, as I'd hoped, that it’s a collection of stories with settings rarely featured in English-language fiction. In fact, 10 of the stories are set in the U.S., and two more in Canada. Instead, it features characters marginalized within their own societies – whether they’re escaped slaves, orphans raised as servants in brothels, or transgender immigrants – and the stories are all about marginalization and oppression. As such, they’re unrelentingly grim, with a remarkably similar tone throughout. Almost all feature the death of a major character – be they only 8 pages long – not infrequently the protagonist. Most involve war or rebellion, from the perspective of a character who’s powerless. In other words, this collection embodies what many who only read white men wrongly assume diverse fiction (particularly by authors of color) is like: grim, tragic, message-driven works about oppression that seem more like taking your medicine than enjoyable reading. Very few novels are actually like that (a novel has the space to develop many ideas and experiences), but the compressed format of a short story – especially with many talented but inexperienced authors writing on a single theme – lends itself to one-note works. The inexperience of the authors is worth addressing, because after awhile I noticed that the stories by established authors (Sofia Samatar, Tananarive Due) were more memorable and interesting than the others. Of the 27, only 6 had published novels at the time of their inclusion in this collection (7 if you count one whose novels were co-written). Yes, short fiction is a way for new authors to break in, but the unusual preponderance of less experienced writers may explain why so many of the stories feel so similar, despite being technically proficient: the authors hadn’t yet established their voices and stuck closely to the prompt instead. However, it is worth noting that with few exceptions, the stories are quite well-written, and their breadth in terms of location and character diversity is certainly encouraging. There are such great ideas here that I'm sorry not to have enjoyed it. It is overall a promising group of authors, and some of my negative reaction is likely based on publishing decisions beyond their control. Multi-author anthologies tend to be rocky reading generally, since one can never settle in to a particular style or group of characters. And the formatting, with large pages covered in text and very narrow margins, tends to make the stories feel dense even when they aren’t. I wouldn’t rule out any authors based on this anthology, and I hope they will go on to publish novels with equally diverse settings and characters, but also with some room for lightness and fun. As for this collection, I'm glad many have loved it, but it's not one I'll recommend to friends – especially those I’m trying to expose to more diverse works. ...more |
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it was ok
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This book is basically what I expected from a collection of Soviet short stories that I found only by searching “Uzbekistan” in my university library’
This book is basically what I expected from a collection of Soviet short stories that I found only by searching “Uzbekistan” in my university library’s catalogue, and had to request from overflow storage. Nevertheless, because I appear to be the only person on the Internet to have read it, and because six stories by six different authors invite wide variation in quality, I will provide details. “Two Chapters from Navai” by Aibek – pgs 5-44 ★ The collection begins with by far its worst piece. This “short story” consists of chapters 2 and 9 of a novel, which, judging from these two excerpts (selected, as far as I can tell, at random) is a plotless paean to a 15th-century Uzbek poet, who moved in court circles in Herat, located in what is now Afghanistan. Alisher Navai is promoted to various posts, and there is much rejoicing. And we care why? “Sisters” by Askad Mukhtar – pgs 45-86 ★★½ After “Navai” almost anything would be an improvement, and so this is – though this piece, too, consists of non-contiguous excerpts from a novel and contains far too many characters to be developed in such a brief piece, most of whose introductions we don’t see. Nevertheless, this rather propagandistic tale of Uzbek women finding freedom and purpose under Communism has a vitality to it which I enjoyed, and the novel is excerpted such that this piece has a clear story arc. “The Healer of the Blind” by Abdullah Kahhar – pgs 87-116 ★★★ Finally, an actual self-contained short story: a man captured by bandits and doomed to die takes a clever gamble. This story is predictable and never got me too invested, but it has a tension-filled slow build, the right number of characters and ends with a bang. “Shirin Comes” by Aidyn – pgs 117-126 ★★ This brief story – about an elderly couple who visit a communal work site and are impressed – barely registers, and nothing meaningful happens in it. “New Year’s Party” by Rahmat Faizi – pgs 127-142 ★★ A story of a social gathering that turns into a spat about whether the traditional practice of bringing hostess gifts is now offensive. This one is difficult to follow – I had to re-read much of it to figure out what was going on – and adds to the confusion by including far too many characters. “The First Step” by Sa’ida Zunnonova – pgs 143-153 ★★★ Probably my favorite story in the collection. A group of female students decide to include the wife of a male classmate in their circle, though he prefers to keep her isolated at home. This is the only story told in the first person, which is not my favorite storytelling device in fiction from my own culture (where I often find it a lazy attempt at a shortcut to emotional connection), but which in foreign fiction can help bridge the cultural gap. This turned out to be an interesting tale, though the last sentence is too heavy-handed. The book does not contain any introduction or critical material, and ends with very brief bios of the six contributors. Oddly, I learned from the bios that the bookjacket mistakes the gender of Rahmat Faizi, who was actually a man (Aidyn and Zunnonova, the authors of the two shortest stories, are the only women included). So, then. This collection was an interesting cultural experience – having never read any Soviet fiction before, I enjoyed being exposed to the different perspectives, and am glad I read this rather than the one translated Uzbek novel of which I am aware, which I knew would have driven me crazy. That said, I would hardly recommend seeking it out unless you also need it for a challenge. ...more |
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Feb 22, 2016
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Feb 25, 2016
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Oct 19, 2015
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