If it’s fall, then it’s time for the annual literary tradition of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories. The perennial series is selected initially by Katrina Kenison each year, with the final winners selected by a rotating guest editor. For 2005, the guest editor is Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon.
Chabon’s selections are pleasingly diverse, from the singular elegance of Alice Munro’s “Silence,” to Joy Williams’ eerie “The Girls,” to the supernaturally/emotionally devastating “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link. In his introduction, Chabon notes that he reads primarily for entertainment, yet his definition of entertainment isn’t shallow, as entertainment is often defined. Instead, his selections cover a broad range of human experience, past and present, realistic and supernatural, all entertaining, but all illuminating scenes of life, pleasant and not.
Some of the highlights of the current collection include the incomparable Munro’s story about a woman whose adult daughter disappears into a secluded cult, and how the mother comes to terms with the deafening silence of the daughter’s absence. J. Robert Lennon’s “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand” is a collection of short pieces, somewhat O’Henry-esque in nature. David Bezmozgis’ “Natasha” is a coming-of-age story with a particularly, brutally real-life element to it. Rishi Reddi’s “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy” addresses culture shock and the difficulties of being an elderly immigrant in a new land. Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Scheme of Things” follows con artists at odds with each other when they find an elderly couple to target.
This year’s edition has a wide array of both realistic fiction (“Silence,” “The Scheme of Things”) and fiction that borders on supernatural or speculative (“Stone Animals,” “Hart and Boot”). It’s easy to see how Chabon views good stories as entertaining; while the themes of such stories as “Natasha” are all too real and distressing, the story itself is compelling. The stories include such supposedly “small” slice of life pieces as Nathaniel Bellows’ “First Four Measures,” in which a young boy learns a hard life lesson, to the emotionally-charged supernatural “Stone Animals,” in which a household in crisis finds their property being attacked in external ways.
Some of the writing is ethereal, more focused on style than content, while other stories are written in a hard-edged, often funny style, such as the opening to Tim Pratt’s “Hart and Boot”:
“The man’s head and torso emerged from a hole in the ground, just a few feet from the rock where Pearl
Hart sat smoking her last cigarette. His appearance surprised her, and she cussed him at some length. The man stared at her during the outpouring of profanity, his mild face smeared with dirt, his body still half-submerged. Pearl stopped cussing and squinted at him in the fading sunlight. He didn’t have on a shirt, and Pearl, being Pearl, wondered immediately if he was wearing pants.”
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