100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Introduction

1915–1920

EDNA FERBER, The Gay Old Dog

1920–1930

SHERWOOD ANDERSON, Brothers

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, My Old Man

RING LARDNER, Haircut

1930–1940

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Babylon Revisited

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Cracked Looking-Glass

WILLIAM FAULKNER, That Will Be Fine

1940–1950

NANCY HALE, Those Are as Brothers

EUDORA WELTY, The Whole World Knows

JOHN CHEEVER, The Enormous Radio

1950–1960

TILLIE OLSEN, I Stand Here Ironing

JAMES BALDWIN, Sonny’s Blues

PHILIP ROTH, The Conversion of the Jews

1960–1970

FLANNERY O’CONNOR, Everything That Rises Must Converge

JOHN UPDIKE, Pigeon Feathers

RAYMOND CARVER, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

JOYCE CAROL OATES, By the River

1970–1980

DONALD BARTHELME, The School

STANLEY ELKIN, The Conventional Wisdom

1980–1990

GRACE PALEY, Friends

CHARLES BAXTER, Harmony of the World

MONA SIMPSON, Lawns

RICHARD FORD, Communist

ROBERT STONE, Helping

DAVID WONG LOUIE, Displacement

1990–2000

ALICE MUNRO, Friend of My Youth

MARY GAITSKILL, The Girl on the Plane

JAMAICA KINCAID, Xuela

AKHIL SHARMA, If You Sing Like That for Me

JUNOT DÍAZ, Fiesta, 1980

2000–2010

JHUMPA LAHIRI, The Third and Final Continent

ZZ PACKER, Brownies

SHERMAN ALEXIE, What You Pawn I Will Redeem

EDWARD P. JONES, Old Boys, Old Girls

BENJAMIN PERCY, Refresh, Refresh

TOBIAS WOLFF, Awaiting Orders

2010–2015

NATHAN ENGLANDER, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

JULIE OTSUKA, Diem Perdidi

GEORGE SAUNDERS, The Semplica-Girl Diaries

LAUREN GROFF, At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners

Read More from The Best American Series®

About the Editors

Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Lorrie Moore

Historical introductions copyright © 2015 by Heidi Pitlor

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The Best American Series® and The Best American Short Stories® are registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie (2004). First published in The New Yorker. From Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. Copyright © 2003 by Sherman Alexie. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

Brothers by Sherwood Anderson (1921). First published in The Bookman.

Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin (1958). First published in Partisan Review. Collected in Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin, Vintage Books. Copyright © 1957 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. Used by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate.

The School by Donald Barthelme (1975). First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 1974 by Donald Barthelme. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Harmony of the World by Charles Baxter (1982). First published in Michigan Quarterly Review. From Harmony of the World: Stories by Charles Baxter. Copyright © 1984 by Charles Baxter. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver (1967). First published in December. From Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1966 by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

The Enormous Radio by John Cheever (1948). First published in The New Yorker. From The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever. Copyright © 1978 by John Cheever. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

Fiesta, 1980 by Junot Díaz (1997). First published in Story. From Drown by Junot Díaz. Copyright © 1996 by Junot Díaz. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

The Conventional Wisdom by Stanley Elkin (1978). First published in American Review. From The Living End by Stanley Elkin. Copyright © 1980 by Stanley Elkin. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Stanley Elkin.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (2012). First published in The New Yorker. From What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander. Copyright © 2012 by Nathan Englander. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

That Will Be Fine by William Faulkner (1936). First published in the American Mercury. Copyright © 1935 by Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright renewed © 1963 by Penguin Random House LLC. From Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

The Gay Old Dog by Edna Ferber (1917). First published in Metropolitan Magazine.

Babylon Revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1931). First published in The Saturday Evening Post. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. From Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1960 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright 1920, 1922, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1931, 1932, 1937 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1948, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1959, 1960, 1965 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. All rights reserved.

Communist by Richard Ford (1986). First published in Antaeus. From Rock Springs by Richard Ford. Copyright © 1987 by Richard Ford. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

The Girl on the Plane by Mary Gaitskill (1993). First published in Mirabella. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. From Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill. Copyright © 1997 by Mary Gaitskill. All rights reserved.

At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners by Lauren Groff (2014). First published in Five Points. Copyright © 2013 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permission of The Clegg Agency, Inc.

Those Are as Brothers by Nancy Hale (1942). First published in Mademoiselle. Copyright © 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated, as agent for the McDowell Colony, Inc.

My Old Man by Ernest Hemingway (1923). Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. From The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright © 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1953 by Ernest Hemingway. All rights reserved.

Old Boys, Old Girls by Edward P. Jones (2005). First published in The New Yorker. From All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones. Copyright © 2006 by Edward P. Jones. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Xuela by Jamaica Kincaid (1995). First published in The New Yorker. From The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1996 by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000). First published in The New Yorker. From Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Copyright © 1999 by Jhumpa Lahiri. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Haircut by Ring Lardner (1925). First published in Liberty magazine. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. From The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner by Ring Lardner. Copyright © 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1954 by Ellis A. Lardner. All rights reserved.

Displacement by David Wong Louie (1989). First published in Ploughshares. Copyright © 1989 by David Wong Louie. Reprinted by permission of David Wong Louie.

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro (1991). First published in The New Yorker. From Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro. Copyright © 1990 by Alice Munro. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor (1962). First published in New World Writing. From Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. Copyright © 1965 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor. Copyright renewed © 1993 by Regina O’Connor. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

By the River by Joyce Carol Oates (1969). First published in December. Copyright © 2014 by Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Joyce Carol Oates.

I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen (1957). First published in the Pacific Spectator. Reproduced from Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works by Tillie Olsen. Copyright © 2013 by the Board of Regents at the University of Nebraska, Jewish Publication Society. Reprinted by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.

Diem Perdidi by Julie Otsuka (2012). First published in Granta, Issue 117. Copyright © 2011 by Julie Otsuka, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Julie Otsuka.

Brownies by ZZ Packer (2000). First published in Harper’s Magazine. From Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer. Copyright © 2003 by ZZ Packer. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Friends by Grace Paley (1980). First published in The New Yorker. From The Collected Stories by Grace Paley. Copyright © 1994 by Grace Paley. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy (2006). First published in The Paris Review. From Refresh, Refresh: Stories by Benjamin Percy. Copyright © 2005, 2007 by Benjamin Percy. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

The Cracked Looking-Glass by Katherine Anne Porter (1933). First published in Scribner’s Magazine. From Flowering Judas and Other Stories by Katherine Anne Porter. Copyright © 1933 by Katherine Anne Porter. Copyright renewed © 1961 by Katherine Anne Porter. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth (1959). First published in The Paris Review. From Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. Copyright © 1959 by Philip Roth. Copyright renewed © 1987 by Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The Semplica-Girl Diaries by George Saunders (2013). First published in The New Yorker. From Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders. Copyright © 2013 by George Saunders. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

If You Sing Like That for Me by Akhil Sharma (1996). First published in the Atlantic Monthly. Copyright © 1996 by Akhil Sharma. Reprinted by permission of the Clegg Agency, Inc.

Lawns by Mona Simpson (1986). First published in the Iowa Review. Copyright © 1985 by Mona Simpson. Reprinted by permission of Mona Simpson.

Helping by Robert Stone (1988). First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 1987 by Robert Stone. Reprinted by permission of Donadio & Olson, Inc.

Pigeon Feathers by John Updike (1962). From Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories by John Updike. Copyright © 1962 by John Updike. Copyright renewed © 1990 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.

The Whole World Knows by Eudora Welty (1948). First published in Harper’s Bazaar. From The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty. Copyright © 1980 by Eudora Welty. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author. Copyright © 1949 by Eudora Welty. Copyright renewed © 1977 by Eudora Welty.

Awaiting Orders by Tobias Wolff (2006). First published in The New Yorker. From Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff. Copyright © 2008 by Tobias Wolff. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

Introduction

A STORY IS A noise in the night. You may be lying there quietly resting in the international house of literature and hear something in the walls, the click and burst of heat through pipes, a difficult settling of eaves, ice sliding off the roof, the scurry of animals, the squawk of a floorboard, someone coming up the stairs.

This is life itself, surprising and not entirely invited. And yet we come to short stories seeking it. Or at least some vivid representation of it: a dark corner that is either turned and gone around or fixed with a light in order to discover what is lurking there. In a civilized society there arrives in a person’s day a pause long enough to allow for the reading of it—the corner, the pause, the day, the society: the exquisite verbal bonsai of a moment, of another’s life and consciousness, presented with concision and purpose—from a certain angle, in a certain voice, fashioned from a frame of mind that is both familiar and strange, recognizable and startling as a pinch.

It is a lovely shock of mercy and democracy to find that we need to spend time in the company of people whose troubles we might ordinarily avoid. Ring Lardner’s clueless barber. (‘Shut up,’ he explained, as Lardner wrote elsewhere.) Lauren Groff’s bewitched eccentrics. Edward Jones’s lovelorn convicts. This is why storytelling exists in the first place. To inform us from and of Georgia O’Keeffe’s faraway nearby. It keeps us posted on the colorful swarming muck beneath a log. It both crashes in and lifts us out of the many gated communities of the mind. It animates (rather than answers) a question or two you may have about, say, Jesus. Finish a story and then you can return to healthy living, getting moderate exercise, appreciating unspoiled nature (good luck to you), and swooning at the wondrous universe as viewed in a clear night sky (rather than that narratively familiar dark and stormy one).

Make it interesting and it will be true: this is what story writers live by. In the way of Flaubert, storytelling is investigative and conjectural: we tell stories to find out what we believe. In the way of Joan Didion, we tell them in order to live. In the way of Scheherazade, we tell them in order not to die. Dreams, it turns out, are physiologically necessary for life. Presumably waking dreams are just as essential. Neurological experiments have shown that animals deprived of dreams die faster than they would by physical starvation. Science has also shown that stories help the mind make order and sense of random events. Furthermore, in a new study reported in the journal Science, subjects who read Alice Munro stories—specifically, the collection Too Much Happiness—demonstrated sharper social and psychological insight than those who did not.

Hey, we knew that.

But now there is empirical proof for others. In the words of Lorenz Hart, When you’re awake, the things you think / Come from the dreams you dream / Thought has wings and lots of things / are seldom what they seem (Where or When). He also wrote, The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore, a condition familiar to any writer at her desk. There’s always room for a little Broadway.

Short stories are about trouble in mind. A bit of the blues. Songs and cries that reveal the range and ways of human character. The secret ordinary and the ordinary secret. The little disturbances of man, to borrow Grace Paley’s phrase, though a story may also be having a conversation with many larger disturbances lurking off-page. Still, the focus on the foregrounded action will be sharp and distilled as moonshine and maybe a little tense and witty, like an excellent dinner party. Writers go there to record hearts, minds, manners, and lives, their own and others. Even at a dinner party we all want to see rich and poor, life and death, the past and the present bumping up against each other, moral accomplishment jostling moral failure. Readers desire not to escape but to see and hear and consider. To be surprised and challenged and partially affirmed. In other words, to have an experience.

It is difficult for a short story to create a completely new world or a social milieu in its entirety or present an entirely unfamiliar one or one unknown to the author—so little time and space—so stories are often leaning on a world that is already there, one that has already entered the writer’s mind and can be assembled metonymically in a quick sketch and referred to without having to be completely created from scratch. To some degree the setting is already understood and shared with the reader, although the writer is giving it his own twist or opinion or observations or voice. To someone unfamiliar with such a thing, for instance, the zombie apocalypse might have trouble fitting into this genre, despite the short story’s great range of subjects, lengths, voices, and techniques. The short story’s hallmark is compression—even if the story sometimes extends to near-novella length. The short story needs to get to the point or the question of the point or the question of its several points and then flip things upside down. It makes skepticism into an art form. It has a deeper but narrower mission than longer narratives, one that requires drilling down rather than lighting out. Like poetry, it takes care with every line. Like a play, it moves in a deliberate fashion, scene by scene. Although a story may want to be pungent and real and sizzling, still there should be as little fat as possible. In its abilities to stretch, move through time, present unexpected twists and shapes, the short story is as limber as Lycra but equally unforgiving. (It is interested in the human heart, of course, an artificial version of which was first made in the 1970s from the fabric of a woman’s girdle—a fun fact and a metaphor for inventiveness, which will become clearer if one walks around the block and thinks about it a little.)

The abundant, crazily disparate imagery that comes to mind when considering and generalizing about the genre demonstrates what story writers all know: the short story is pretty much theory-proof. One pronounces upon it with spluttering difficulty. An energetic effort may send one into a teeming theme park of argument, mixed metaphor, tendentious assertion. It has been said that the short story is the only genre of literature that has remained premodern. Here I suppose the speaker is thinking of the campfire tale, and the telling of something in a single sitting: in this paradigm a story retains some of its primitive delights. The size remains organic to the occasion.

But the short story has also been declared the very first modernist literature (with which I am more inclined to agree). As a record of rebellious human consciousness, of interiority and intersecting intents, it is second to none in power and efficiency. And perhaps the original writer of this modern short story would be Chekhov, with his casting out of moral lessons and his substitution of sharp psychological observations (without express judgment) of the human world. He was a doctor and believed in medicine’s experimental side. He was a doubter who stayed interested in his encounters.

On the occasions I have been asked to pronounce on and define short stories, which are my main mode of literary expression, I have looked at the story’s objectness and the act of its creation and grabbed at rather repellent analogies of a medical, romantic, or pediatric bent. Stories, in this vein, though abstractly, become human biopsies, or love affairs, or children left on the doorstep to be quickly fed and then left on someone else’s doorstep. Sometimes I have referred to short stories as puppets or pets or visitors violating the three-day fish rule, and a general derangement of mind and metaphor has set in in the pronouncing. I have likened them to clones, unvaccinated dogs, and poison bonbons. The scattershot defining of such a familiar, miraculous, homely, and elusive thing always has some frantic desperation in it.

One of the many interesting things about the twentieth-century journey of the short story is how, when owing to the replacement of magazine entertainment by television it lost much of its commercial luster, the short story reacquired or resumed or just plain continued its artistic one. It reached back to (or kept going with) the great Russian stories as well as those of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. A bold and complex story—such as a J. D. Salinger one included in this series sixty-five years ago and which was originally published in Good Housekeeping in pre-TV 1948—would have trouble finding a home in a housekeeping magazine now. Are there even housekeeping magazines now? In 1957, with television in full swing, Tillie Olsen’s I Stand Here Ironing, proudly reprinted here, was published in the Pacific Spectator. The short story was pretty much freed from sitting side by side with ads for soup and spaghetti and has been securely reattached to its project as art. It can be argued—and has been—that novelists as great as Updike and Hemingway have often done their best work in the short form. One can feel in their short works that these writers become simultaneously laser-eyed and loose-limbed, concentrated and unburdened; one can feel them emotionally intent and also a little bit on fire in the confines within which they must tell their tale. The ordinary citizens and the fresh vernacular of Hemingway and Anderson continue straight through the decades and help fashion literary heirs in Grace Paley and Raymond Carver.

All this great art, however, does not keep the American short story from being occasionally a popular form again; a renaissance cycles through every two decades or so. And anthologies that have been canon-making, archeological, and preserving—especially the ones in this series—become even more culturally important. A short story writer is not a rock star. Yet sometimes nonetheless story writers have been put on tours by their publishers, with the hope that a story collection might sell as well as a literary novel—that is, not all that well. A short story writer is sent out on the road to see who her readers actually are in order to console them.

Now, a short story writer on a book tour is a reassuring cultural idea, even if the writer is pretty much dragging herself around from town to town, like an old showman with a wizened mummy and a counting dog. She is out catching flu and greeting her audiences and answering their questions, and she will find herself bombarded with queries regarding the defining characteristics of the short story form, questions regarding the difference between novels and short stories, and questions about the mysteries and power of the short form. Such a writer should come prepared—why has she not been given talking points to read from?— but too often the whole matter is not given much rehearsed thought at all but instead prompts fresh (that is, improvised on the spot) and contradictory utterances. Such a writer may while considering these questions begin to scratch her temple, her sleeve, her chin and eyebrow, as if she has caught fleas from the counting dog. Here are the differences, she might say, ticking (ticking!) off things that have just popped into her head. Or she might say, completely guessing, perhaps there are relatively few differences between novels and stories. Perhaps the differences are exaggerated, like the differences between men and women often are, just to make things sexier. The short story writer on tour may find herself stalled and pulling cat hair off her latest recently purchased black outfit even though she will remember as she is doing this that the cat died over a year ago.

On a tour the short story writer becomes a character in a short story (and so the inner workings of the thing are occasionally, glancingly exposed). Though it is her own story, she sometimes feels like a minor character within it. She contemplates possible answers to the audience questions she knows are coming, questions about the writing life. It is hard to feel still like a real writer, traveling through so many airports—including one with a scanner that indicates she has explosives in her head. She is taking so much Dramamine it is difficult to recall what life at the desk was once like. Ah, yes—it was and remains a mysterious process. That is what she remembers best. She has no time for research or contemplation, and so every evening when the Q and A begins, it seems she is assembling her responses from scratch.

What makes and defines a short story? She clears her sore throat: A story is an intimate narrative composition thoughtfully assembled with illustrations but no argument. The short story writer on tour clearly has no confident idea.

She blunders ahead. A quick incisive collision with the unexpected, she says, fumbling for Kleenex.

The Somali driver awaiting her at one of the airports is holding up a sign that says MARIANNE MOORE. There is only her, or rather she, the author of a story collection.

I will have to do, the writer says.

What is the difference between a short story and a novel?

The Somali driver puts away his MARIANNE MOORE sign, smiles and says, I am the captain now! The short story writer guffaws.

How does a writer know when she has a short story or a novel? This is what readers, or more likely struggling writers, seem to want to know, though she herself has seldom asked that question. She feels it is rather self-evident, and if not self-evident, well then, lucky you. You may have both.

Fibrous asparagus from lunch is stuck in her one remaining wisdom tooth and the person she is about to read with has excellent teeth and has written a book narrated from the point of view of a dentist.

What is the difference at the sentence level between a novel and a short story?

Somewhere, in some bookstore, while she is thinking of answers to this question, a fly lands smack on her forehead, as if to express its opinion about the nature and substance of her thoughts. Perhaps it too has detected explosives.

In Seattle she cannot take her eyes off the amethyst-encrusted manhole covers. Taking the world in in its entirety: did not Chekhov say that is a requirement, even of short stories? Observe, observe: love can be deceiving. This is the theme not only of sad true pop songs but also of the work of one of the great Russian masters of the short story, as well as the Canadian master, Alice Munro. A short story is about love. It is always about love. And yet it is not a love story.

When does a story turn into a novel, or vice versa?

Never, the writer thinks. At least never for her, though that would be a wonderful surprise for her agent if it did.

Another writer waiting in a radio station green room where the short story writer is also waiting is carrying a plastic 3D replica of a female pelvis, though the program they are participating in is a radio program. The woman with the plastic pelvis is going on first to speak of female incontinence. She has written a book on it. The story writer feels bereft not to have such an interesting and practical topic for discussion; she feels deprived not to be holding a multicolored, anatomically correct plastic pelvis herself. One can never look too hard for metaphors; perhaps a replica of a human pelvis is precisely what a story is—something that listeners will not be able to see but that she could describe and that perhaps would give the story writer some jocularity, protection, weaponry. Chekhov was a doctor, she could say repeatedly. He believed in the exploration, the experiment, the questioning of received wisdom that is both medical science and fiction!

Once more: What is the inspiration for a short story versus the inspiration for anything else, say, a novel?

A short story is about love. Yet it is not a love story.

She barely makes her connection in Houston. Dehydration. Where is her Gatorade? In some airport or other she falls down the escalator, the wheels of her suitcase having got stuck and pulled her backward. When someone some evening in some city somewhere asks her whether being an author is what she had expected it would be, she starts laughing and cannot stop. She places her head down on the lectern, attempting to collect herself but keeping her eyes open to look for a glass of water.

How does one know when one’s idea is suited for a story rather than a novel?

She has no plastic pelvis to show or tell. She is thinking up titles to her next story: Dicey in the Dark! I Don’t Remember You Already. Two Meats for Dinner. Intelligence on the Ground. And The Fish Rule Does Not Apply to You.

Is the story form harder to write than a novel?

The lectern at a West Coast library—what city is she in today? She has crisscrossed North America in a demented way—has a sign facing the speaker that says PLEASE REPEAT QUESTION. Probably it’s acoustically good advice, but it makes the Q and A sound as if the writer is in a bad romantic relationship, acting preemptively evasive and on the defensive, as when one person asks, Where were you last night? and gets the answer Where was I last night? How appropriate for a short story writer on tour! She is doing the dialogue of a love affair on the rocks, where one person asks, What is going on? and the other replies, What is going on? That is your question?

Do you ever Google yourself? someone asks.

Do I ever Google myself?

Yes, that is the question.

That is the question?

Would you like another?

Would I like another question?

Why is she changing the subject? Why is she sounding defensive? Why can’t she answer a simple question? Why does she keep repeating the question?

When you write, do you ever have particular people in mind?

Actual people?

Or hypothetical people.

Am I thinking of someone else?

Yes, is there someone else that you are thinking of?

Is there someone else? There is always someone else. Do you mean generally or specifically?

So there is someone else? I mean, where were you last night?

Do you mean generally or specifically?

A short story is about love. But it is not a love story.

In Philly the short story writer on tour wakes up not knowing where she is—she has no idea where she was last night—and, unable to interpret the room, she literally gets out on the wrong side of the bed and bashes her foot against a chest of drawers (oh, a metaphor for a story collection), permanently loosening then losing her large toenail. Later, in another city, she will put the toenail under her pillow, hoping for a new pair of shoes from the Cobbler Fairy. Perhaps she has gone mad.

When you’re writing, how do you know when you’ve come to the end?

How does one know when one’s come to the end? One loses a scarf, sunglasses, two umbrellas, three cotton nightgowns across a large geographical area; perhaps one will be thrown into the federal slammer for interstate littering.

What would you say is the role of the short story in today’s world?

What would I say? Or what should I say?

The short story is the human mind at its most adventurous. It must be shared.

Everyone remains so nice. How can she not help but speak in facile, dimwitted remarks inflected with the faux-faded memory of continental philosophy: if the individual is a fiction, then what better place for him to reside than in fiction? Et cetera. But she believes in the human mind part.

What practitioner ever had a good working theory of the short story? Only the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor and his admirable and intriguing positing of the story as the life and voice of one individual within a societally submerged population. The lonely voice is as original and astute and as good as it gets yet still doesn’t cover everything (not Hawthorne, Coover, nor T. C. Boyle), though it gets very close. And if one were to take it as a prescription and write only stories that are the quasi-exiled voice of that marginalized individual, a writer would do very well.

The short story, of course, is a genre, not a form—it comes in so many different forms—even though its distinctiveness from the novel, say, is primarily one of length, and so a formal one. Shape and structure are naturally essential. When one looks out at the problems of life, and of the world, the problems, as well as the solutions, tend to be structural. When one looks at the success of a sentence, a joke, or an anecdote, it hinges upon structural decisions. Changing the structure changes the story. A short story writer is building a smaller house so fewer troublesome people can get inside. Perhaps the short story allows for fewer things to go wrong in this manner, because of its structural constraints but also because of its demands. Perhaps this is why some have remarked that the story has to be perfect, and novels are necessarily not, because that is not the novel’s aim. Conciseness is the sister of talent, said Chekhov himself. And perhaps it is also genius’s kissing cousin—in strappy shoes so elegantly thin it’s as if they were drawn on by a pen.

Yet there are so many different sorts of stories: look at the tremendous variety in subject, shape, and tone. When one assembles a hundred years of them, one is looking thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history—the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux, since short story writers have from the beginning been interested in the world they live in, its cultural changes, societal energies, the spiritual injuries to its citizenry and what those injuries may or may not mean. And North America—a collection of provinces, states, and conditions—has done a first-rate job of claiming and owning and sponsoring the short story, with all due respect to Ireland and nineteenth-century Russia. It may be the apprentice narrative form of choice, but that is only sensible. Student writers are encouraged to practice it, take a stab at it, rather than accumulate drawersful (yearsful) of novels. But the short narrative also remains a true master’s art. It is a string quartet, which is often preferred to a composer’s longer works. A short story is not minimalist, suggested Angela Carter. It is rococo, with trills and grace notes and esprit.

A novel puts many things in the air at once, a complicated machine that its author then tries to land safely—though more than one novel has had an author parachute out of it, leaving it to circle in the sky on its own: space junk that may or may not have some immortality to it. There are many places with such ghostly items flying around in the atmosphere. Most countries, it should be said, are nations of novelists. At one literary festival I attended recently in England, a couple were consulting their program. Who is reading next? asked the husband.

I believe it’s a new American short story writer, said the wife.

Really, the husband said, then, after perusing the program further, closed it abruptly. I need a new American short story writer like I need a hole in the head.

Well, we all know what he means.

And yet why not a hole in the head? A new little garden space for planting, a well-ventilated, freshly lit room in the mind? Do we not want to feel the tops of our heads come off, as Emily Dickinson said a poem did for her? A story does not intoxicate or narcotize or descend and smother. It opens up a little window or a door. And the world gets in it in an intimate way. Art is when one becomes aware of an unfolding, said Matisse. And stories unfold. That is pretty much one thing they can be counted on to do, if they are any good.

The American world we see reflected historically in the short story, as captured in the heroic century-long endeavor that is The Best American Short Stories, is one of predictably astonishing and thrilling variety. From 1915 to 2015: in this volume we see America in all its wildnesses of character and voice. James Baldwin’s sorrowful valentine to brotherhood and jazz in Sonny’s Blues; a child’s desperate religious questioning in Philip Roth’s The Conversion of the Jews and John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers; the adult defiance of an unreasonable God in Stanley Elkin’s The Conventional Wisdom. We see the psychological aftermath of war in stories by Robert Stone and Benjamin Percy. Lives of crime are given all sorts of unexpected angles in Eudora Welty, Mary Gaitskill, and Edward P. Jones. And sometimes the landscape is not only American but those places on the globe that have fed the American experience. Included here are Hemingway’s France, Fitzgerald’s France, Sharma’s India, Lahiri’s India, Ireland conjured by Katherine Anne Porter’s aging, heartbroken immigrants. Israel sticks its head in the door in the work of Nathan Englander; the Dominican Republic lives everywhere in Junot Díaz’s New Jersey. China is both sharply and hazily recalled by David Wong Louie’s resilient refugees. Uncontainability rounded up and contained in a small container. The short story captures and cages, though first it seeks, just as the reader seeks. Within these pages are Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia and ZZ Packer’s Georgia. We go to them all to see how other people make sense of things in their own individual voices and ways, to see what has hounded their hearts and caught their eye. Jamaica Kincaid’s loveless Caribbean child-narrators who speak their quiet rage and loneliness in formal, contractionless speech; Joyce Carol Oates’s uncertain families whose estrangement is enacted in neogothic violence: in the work of both of these authors, time-swept cultures allow youth and their parents to hate each other as easily as to love. Or sometimes children are betrayed in the ordinary ways, as in Fitzgerald’s famous story Babylon Revisited. There is the hilariously weary existentialism of Donald Barthelme’s teacher in The School, trying to spin his lesson so as to keep the children more childlike. There is the Holocaust seen and spoken of from the margins and from the hypothetical future, by Nancy Hale and Nathan Englander. There is war in the Mideast viewed and absorbed from slightly closer in by the characters in the Tobias Wolff and Benjamin Percy stories. And there is the oddly cheerful and degraded language uttered by the denizens of George Saunders’s capitalist dystopias.

We read short stories to see—quickly—how other people manage, what they know, what they are saying, what, privately, they are thinking and doing. According to Saunders, short stories are the deep, encoded crystallizations of all human knowledge. They are rarefied, dense meaning machines. The meaning is seldom pretty, sometimes hard to believe, and not always precisely factual. But it is the truth of dreams: when, working in an inspired way, the imagination merges a moment of action with a moment of interiority and a moment of truth is born; with luck and skill, there is the perfect voice to speak it, the perfect gesture to perform it. Put together over time, these stories cause an entire world to be glimpsed through the hearing of it. This is where the story owes its powers to poetry and plays: it is (perhaps) an aural art made from visual observation. Hence its origins around the spiky wattage of a campfire.

How do you know when you’ve come to the end?

An anthology is a small gathering of flowers from a large field. That is the word’s etymology from the ancient Greek as well as its action. It is not a contest, and this anthology especially is not one. Many favorite American short stories will be found here, and some will not. As with any cultural institution, this will be for various reasons. Perhaps the stories were not in this grand but fallible series to begin with. Perhaps John Updike put them into his Best of the Century book (we decided on no overlaps, but picking over his gemlike crumbs, I still found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best story, Flannery O’Connor’s best story, James Baldwin’s best story). Perhaps a story just plain could not fit into the very limited space Heidi Pitlor and I had available—only a handful of stories per decade. Perhaps the lovely Heidi mischievously hid some from me. Perhaps some were being held hostage by the Salinger estate and guarded like national security secrets. (Could we publish a Salinger story even in completely redacted form, like a Jenny Holzer exhibit? We would have had better luck with the Defense Department.) Often if the story was very long—the Best American series can proudly claim to have awarded Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café a place within its pages—the adhesive weaknesses of the bookbinding glue for this anniversary volume prevented us from including it. (Nor did the problematic bookbinding glue help us readhere the wads of hair we had torn from our heads in editorial anguish.)

Although a mechanism of literary canonization, a short story anthology, like the beautiful game of soccer, contains some of the unfortunate facts, restrictions, and hauntings of life: the score does not always reflect the playing. For it to be any good, its intentions must be quixotic, as the very word best implies, and one takes one’s hat off to it with gratitude and awe. Some favorite stories of mine—by Annie Proulx, Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Rick Bass, T. C. Boyle, Thomas McGuane, Susan Minot, Tony Earley, Amy Hempel, Amy Tan, Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Ethan Canin, Stuart Dybek, to name but a few—are not here, for one of the several aforementioned reasons. Missing as well are Toni Cade Bambara’s exuberant child noticers, whose encounters with the adult world express the worried questions we all should ask ourselves regarding its injustices. Also missing are Karen Russell’s roaming vampires in the lemon grove, whose float, drift, and deathless hunger express the artist at society’s peripheries, thinly disguised as an ordinary citizen (a timeless literary illustration but one there is no room for except in this sentence). Absent too are the stories of Don DeLillo, whose great work as a novelist has too often eclipsed his brilliant shorter work.

But we could wring our hands forever. The powerful stories that are here—owing to the steady presence of a diligent and questing hundred-year-old enterprise—are full of heat and song and argument, depictions of life and its traps, its home fires and circling passions. This volume is also a celebration not just of authors but of the editors and readers who experienced the stories here in the way they were intended: as serious art. What has been gathered reveals a scrutiny of the editorial eye as well as a devotion to talent, diversity, originality, and our deep history as storytellers. A bouquet of beautiful, piercing, lonely voices. Perhaps a chorus. Along with a purposefully stray measure of O Canada, these pages comprise our own literary version of a national anthem.

L.M.

1915–1920

At the turn of the twentieth century, short stories were a preferred form of entertainment in the United States. This was a boom time for magazine publishing, owing in part to developments in offset printing technology as well as to the Postal Act of 1879, which had granted magazines discounted mailing rates. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Delineator, all of which published short stories, sold more than a half million copies per issue. The authors of these stories were well known at the time and often well paid.

A certain formula became evident: a predictable plot tied up neatly with a happy ending. Most short stories were folksy in tone and told in a breezy third-person narration of homespun heroes, lovable detectives, or quirky salesmen, the literary equivalent of the Norman Rockwell paintings beside which they sometimes appeared.

In 1906 the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite published the first of his annual surveys of American poetry in the Boston Evening Transcript. Over the following years he became a mentor to a young poet and playwright, Edward J. O’Brien. Braithwaite’s editor at the Transcript suggested that the newspaper publish a companion to the poetry surveys, an annual survey of American short stories, and Braithwaite, overextended at the time, enlisted the help of his protégé.

O’Brien had grown up in Boston and since childhood had been a devout reader. He suffered from a heart condition, and during long periods of illness, he’d surrounded himself with books by Poe, Thackeray, Dickens, Dumas, and Balzac, among others. Because of his condition, which he kept largely secret throughout his life, he was unusually pale. Cecil Roberts, a poet and editor, said, He had such a pathetic air, with his ill-dress, attenuated body, his wistful blue eyes, and unkempt appearance. O’Brien did, however, benefit from all his reading. He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, attended Boston College, and transferred to Harvard, but he soon dropped out. He wrote, I decided not to entrust my education to professors any longer, but to educate myself as long as life lasted.

When he began his new venture with Braithwaite, O’Brien was well aware—and wary—of the reign of commercial short fiction. Authors and readers had also begun to object to the formulaic writing that was flooding newsstands. Even some fiction editors had grown concerned. For example, Burton Kline wrote, As an editor I have a feeling that some of the writers who should be railroad presidents or bank directors are getting in the way of real writers that I ought to be discovering. O’Brien decided that this new survey would be a chance to showcase literary fiction. He wrote to hundreds of magazines of all sizes, informing editors of the project and asking for free copies of the year’s issues. He was surprised by the many responses, and near the end of the year he wrote, We underestimated the number of stories. There are about 800 in all. Months later, he guessed that he had read 2,500 stories that year.

Eventually O’Brien submitted a proposal for an annual anthology of American short stories, edited by him, to a Boston book publisher, who loved the idea. He laid out his criteria in his first foreword and reprinted it nearly verbatim each year. He vowed impartiality and defined his views of substance and form: A fact or group of facts in a story only obtain substantial embodiment when the artist’s power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth . . . The first test of a story . . . is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or incidents . . . The true artist, however, will seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skillful selection and arrangement of his material, and by the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.

Authors like Fannie Hurst, Maxwell Struthers Burt, Benjamin Rosenblatt, and Wilbur Daniel Steele appeared several times in the early years of The Best American Short Stories. These and other contributors—Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Edna Ferber—ushered in a new and unflinching realism in American short fiction, as well as humor and more subtle characterization. Burt wrote, I do prefer the ‘I’ narrator greatly. It does away with the ‘Smart Alec’ omniscient narrator of the third person, which seems to me the bane of most American short-stories.

O’Brien was almost pathologically organized, a trait likely necessary for the amount of work on his desk. He created an extensive tracking system and in the book featured indexes of every American and British story, story collection, and relevant article published each year, among seemingly endless other lists and summaries. He even included a necrology of writers.

Despite his work, commercial short fiction continued its reign on newsstands through the decade. In fact, O’Brien felt that the quality of literary short fiction lessened during the First World War. In 1918 he wrote, If we are to make our war experience the beginning of a usable past, we must not sentimentalize it on the one hand, nor denaturalize it on the other. He guessed that it would be many years before writers could write about the war with any objectivity. (He was called before a draft board but was exempted on physical grounds.)

1917

EDNA FERBER

The Gay Old Dog

from Metropolitan Magazine

EDNA FERBER (1885–1968) was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and began her career at seventeen as a newspaper reporter. She wrote her first fiction while recovering from anemia and gained fame from a series of short stories—later novels—about Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman.

A regular at the Algonquin Round Table, Ferber was well known for her sarcasm. She never married. In her novel Dawn O’Hara, a character commented, Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.

Ferber’s best-known books include Show Boat; the Pulitzer Prize–winning So Big; Cimarron, a story of the Oklahoma land rush; and Giant. Her fiction often featured powerful female protagonists and characters struggling against prejudice. In her foreword to Buttered Side Down, the collection that included The Gay Old Dog, Ferber wrote, ‘And so,’ the story writers used to say. ‘They lived Happily Ever After.’ Um-m-m—maybe.

★

THOSE OF YOU who have dwelt—or even lingered—in Chicago, Illinois (this is not a humorous story), are familiar with the region known as the Loop. For those others of you to whom Chicago is a transfer point between New York and San Francisco there is presented this brief explanation:

The Loop is a clamorous, smoke-infested district embraced by the iron arms of the elevated tracks. In a city boasting fewer millions, it would be known familiarly as downtown. From Congress to Lake Street, from Wabash almost to the river, those thunderous tracks make a complete circle, or loop. Within it lie the retail shops, the commercial hotels, the theaters, the restaurants. It is the Fifth Avenue (diluted) and the Broadway (deleted) of Chicago. And he who frequents it by night in search of amusement and cheer is known, vulgarly, as a loop-hound.

Jo Hertz was a loop-hound. On the occasion of those sparse first nights granted the metropolis of the Middle West he was always present, third row, aisle, left. When a new loop café was opened, Jo’s table always commanded an unobstructed view of anything worth viewing. On entering he was wont to say, Hello, Gus, with careless cordiality to the head-waiter, the while his eye roved expertly from table to table as he removed his gloves. He ordered things under glass, so that his table, at midnight or thereabouts, resembled a hot-bed that favors the bell system. The waiters fought for him. He was the kind of man who mixes his own salad dressing. He liked to call for a bowl, some cracked ice, lemon, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, vinegar and oil, and make a rite of it. People at near-by tables would lay down their knives and forks to watch, fascinated. The secret of it seemed to lie in using all the oil in sight and calling for more.

That was Jo—a plump and lonely bachelor of fifty. A plethoric, roving-eyed and kindly man, clutching vainly at the garments of a youth that had long slipped past him. Jo Hertz, in one of those pinch-waist belted suits and a trench coat and a little green hat, walking up Michigan Avenue of a bright winter’s afternoon, trying to take the curb with a jaunty youthfulness against which every one of his fat-encased muscles rebelled, was a sight for mirth or pity, depending on one’s vision.

The gay-dog business was a late phase in the life of Jo Hertz. He had been a quite different sort of canine. The staid and harassed brother of three unwed and selfish sisters is an under dog. The tale of how Jo Hertz came to be a loop-hound should not be compressed within the limits of a short story. It should be told as are the photoplays, with frequent throw-backs and many cut-ins. To condense twenty-three years of a man’s life into some five or six thousand words requires a verbal economy amounting to parsimony.

At twenty-seven Jo had been the dutiful, hard-working son (in the wholesale harness business) of a widowed and gummidging mother, who called him Joey. If you had looked close you would have seen that now and then a double wrinkle would appear between Jo’s eyes—a wrinkle that had no business there at twenty-seven. Then Jo’s mother died, leaving him handicapped by a death-bed promise, the three sisters and a three-story-and-basement house on Calumet Avenue. Jo’s wrinkle became a fixture.

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.

Joey, she had said, in her high, thin voice, take care of the girls.

I will, ma, Jo had choked.

Joey, and the voice was weaker, promise me you won’t marry till the girls are all provided for. Then as Jo had hesitated, appalled: Joey, it’s my dying wish. Promise!

I promise, ma, he had said.

Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with a completely ruined life.

They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style, too. That is, Stell and Eva had. Carrie, the middle one, taught school over on the West Side. In those days it took her almost two hours each way. She said the kind of costume she required should have been corrugated steel. But all three knew what was being worn, and they wore it—or fairly faithful copies of it. Eva, the housekeeping sister, had a needle knack. She could skim the State Street windows and come away with a mental photograph of every separate tuck, hem, yoke, and ribbon. Heads of departments showed her the things they kept in drawers, and she went home and reproduced them with the aid of a two-dollar-a-day seamstress. Stell, the youngest, was the beauty. They called her Babe. She wasn’t really a beauty, but some one had once told her that she looked like Janice Meredith (it was when that work of fiction was at the height of its popularity). For years afterward, whenever she went to parties, she affected a single, fat curl over her right shoulder, with a rose stuck through it.

Twenty-three years ago one’s sisters did not strain at the household leash, nor crave a career. Carrie taught school, and hated it. Eva kept house expertly and complainingly. Babe’s profession was being the family beauty, and it took all her spare time. Eva always let her sleep until ten.

This was Jo’s household, and he was the nominal head of it. But it was an empty title. The three women dominated his life. They weren’t consciously selfish. If you had called them cruel they would have put you down as mad. When you are the lone brother of three sisters, it means that you must constantly be calling for, escorting, or dropping one of them somewhere. Most men of Jo’s age were standing before their mirror of a Saturday night, whistling blithely and abstractedly while they discarded a blue polka-dot for a maroon tie, whipped off the maroon for a shot-silk, and at the last moment decided against the shot-silk in favor of a plain black-and-white, because she had once said she preferred quiet ties. Jo, when he should have been preening his feathers for conquest, was saying:

"Well, my God, I am hurrying! Give a man time, can’t you? I just got home. You girls have been laying around the house all day. No wonder you’re ready."

He took a certain pride in seeing his sisters well dressed, at a time when he should have been reveling in fancy waistcoats and brilliant-hued socks, according to the style of that day, and the inalienable right of any unwed male under thirty, in any day. On those rare occasions when his business necessitated an out-of-town trip, he would spend half a day floundering about the shops selecting handkerchiefs, or stockings, or feathers, or fans, or gloves for the girls. They always turned out to be the wrong kind, judging by their reception.

From Carrie, What in the world do I want of a fan!

I thought you didn’t have one, Jo would say.

I haven’t. I never go to dances.

Jo would pass a futile hand over the top of his head, as was his way when disturbed. I just thought you’d like one. I thought every girl liked a fan. Just, feebly, just to—to have.

Oh, for pity’s sake!

And from Eva or Babe, "I’ve got silk stockings, Jo. Or, You brought me handkerchiefs the last time."

There was something selfish in his giving, as there always is in any gift freely and joyfully made. They never suspected the exquisite pleasure it gave him to select these things; these fine, soft, silken things. There were many things about this slow-going, amiable brother of theirs that they never suspected. If you had told them he was a dreamer of dreams, for example, they would have been amused. Sometimes, dead-tired by nine o’clock, after a hard day downtown, he would doze over the evening paper. At intervals he would wake, red-eyed, to a snatch of conversation such as, "Yes, but if you get a blue you