Short Story Wednesday: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

 

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories was published in 2015 and was edited by Lorrie Moore (Editor) and Heidi Pitlor (Series Editor).

Last week I wrote a post on the first short story in this book, "The Gay Old Dog" by Edna Ferber. This week I decided to post about the book, listing all the short stories in the book. It will be a useful list for me to refer back to. This book has been on my Kindle since August 2021, so it is time for me to read more of these stories. 

There is an introduction for the whole book, written by Lorrie Moore, and an introduction for the section about each decade, written by Heidi Pitlor. The years covered are 1915 - 2015. 

Towards the end of the introduction to the book, Lorrie Moore discusses the limitations in selecting short stories for an anthology with this scope. John Updike and Katrina Kenison published The Best American Short Stories of the Century in 2000, and Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor decided to have no overlaps between the two books. (Both were published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.) All the stories were selected from the Best American Short Stories series published annually.

So, here is a list of all the stories in the book:

1915-1920

• The Gay Old Dog / Edna Ferber

1920-1930

• Brothers / Sherwood Anderson
• My Old  Man / Ernest Hemingway
• Haircut / Ring Lardner 

1930-1940

• Babylon Revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald 
• The Cracked Looking-Glass / Katherine Anne Porter
• That Will Be Fine / William Faulkner

1940-1950

• Those Are as Brothers / Nancy Hale
• The Whole World Knows / Eudora Welty 
• The Enormous Radio / John Cheever

1950-1960

• I Stand Here Ironing / Tillie Olsen 
• Sonny's Blues / James Baldwin 
• The Conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth

1960-1970

• Everything That Rises Must Converge / Flannery O'Connor 
• Pigeon Feathers / John Updike 
• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? / Raymond Carver 
• By the River / Joyce Carol Oates

1970-1980 

• The School / Donald Barthelme 
• The Conventional Wisdom / Stanley Elkin

1980-1990

• Friends / Grace Paley 
• Harmony of the World / Charles Baxter
• Lawns / Mona Simpson 
• Communist / Richard Ford 
• Helping / Robert Stone 
• Displacement / David Wong Louie

1990-2000

• Friend of My Youth / Alice Munro 
• The Girl on the Plane / Mary Gaitskill 
• Xuela / Jamaica Kincaid 
• If You Sing Like That for Me / Akhil Sharma 
• Fiesta, 1980 / Junot Díaz

2000-2010

• The Third and Final Continent / Jhumpa Lahiri 
• Brownies / ZZ Packer 
• What You Pawn I Will Redeem / Sherman Alexie 
• Old Boys, Old Girls / Edward P. Jones 
• Refresh, Refresh / Benjamin Percy 
• Awaiting Orders / Tobias Wolff

2010-2015

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank / Nathan Englander 
• Diem Perdidi / Julie Otsuka 
• The Semplica-Girl Diaries / George Saunders 
• At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners / Lauren Groff

Some of these authors I am familiar with, some not. Other than the first story in the book, I haven't read any of the stories. 

Many reviews of the anthology note that the story by Nathan Englander is very good. I find it interesting that there are only two stories from the decade 1970-1980 and five stories from the following decade.

I would love to hear if anyone else has had experience with these stories or authors.

Short Story Wednesday: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

 

I have recently read several stories from Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. Initially I had a hard time getting into the stories in this book. Some of them were very difficult to read and relate to. I read the first five, was mostly confused, enjoyed a couple of them, then took a break.

When I came back to the book, I skipped two stories that had some relationship to Christmas ("Charades" and "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens") and read the next two stories. I liked both of them. How did that happen? Did I just get used to her style? I think all of the stories I have read have elements of sadness and deal with relationships, but these two I really liked.

"Beautiful Grade" 

Bill is taking his 24-year-old girlfriend to a New Year's Eve party. Bill is about 50 and he is very conscious that his friends are talking about the age difference in his newish relationship. He is a college professor and she was his student when they first got together. Now that she is not his student he can be more open about it. 

This quote describes the people at the party: 

There is Albert, with his videos; Albert's old friend Brigitte, a Berlin-born political scientist; Stanley Mix, off every other semester to fly to Japan and study the zoological effects of radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Stanley's wife, Roberta, a travel agent and obsessive tabulator of Stanley's frequent flyer miles (Bill has often admired her posters: STEP BACK IN TIME, COME TO ARGENTINA says the one on her door); Lina, a pretty visiting Serb teaching in Slavic Studies; and Lina's doctor husband, Jack, a Texan who five years ago in Yugoslavia put Dallas dirt under the laboring Lina's hospital bed so that his son could be "born on Texan soil." ("But the boy is a total sairb" Lina says of her son, rolling her lovely r's. "Just don't tell Jack.")

The party is at Albert's; he has just successfully divorced his third wife. He serves a meal; they talk, and all the while Bill is thinking about these people, dinner parties from the past, his attraction to Lina, his insecurities. 

My favorite part: at midnight, they all have a spoonful of black-eyed peas as the first thing they eat on January 1st. This is a southern tradition to ensure good luck year. 

"What You Want to Do Fine"

This story had a lot of humor, and I enjoyed that. Two gay men set off on a road trip, from Indiana all the way to New Orleans. Their backgrounds are very different. Mack paints houses; Quilty is blind with a seeing eye dog and has a legal practice. On the trip they visit a lot of cemeteries and play Trivial Pursuit at the motel. They eat hush puppies and catfish when they get into the deep south. They argue about petty subjects and try to figure out if they should stay together. 

Favorite quote: "He may have been blind and a recovering drinker, but with the help of his secretary, Martha, he had worked up a decent legal practice and did not give his services away for free. Good barter, however, he liked. It made life easier for a blind man. He was, after all, a practical person. Beneath all his eccentricities, he possessed a streak of pragmatism so sharp and deep that others mistook it for sanity."

Short Story Wednesday: Book Sale purchases, 2023

 

 

The Planned Parenthood book sale ended on Sunday, and I bought a lot of short story books. Today I am featuring five of them. As I started working on this post, I realized that all of these books are by authors that I have never read before, in any format. 

Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000) by Carol Shields

The first book is stories by a Canadian author, Carol Shields. I am always on the lookout for new Canadian authors to read. 

The stories here are fairly short; there are 22 stories and the book is 210 pages long, so the average story is around 9 pages.

I also purchased The Republic of Love by this author at the book sale.

You Think It, I'll Say It (2018) by Curtis Sittenfeld

This was the first short story collection by Sittenfeld. 

From the description on the dust jacket flap: "Throughout the ten stories in You Think It, I’ll Say It, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships, and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided." 

I also purchased American Wife and Sisterland by this author at the book sale this year.

Birds of America (1998) by Lorrie Moore

This was Lorrie Moore's third short story collection. Some of the reviews I read emphasized dark humor, and sad or depressing stories. So to balance that, I thought I would include this from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“Bats, flamingos, crows, performing ducks and bird feeders crop up in every story, but the real subject is human nature and the myriad ways Moore’s characters flock together or fly apart in the face of change, stasis or grief. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Rarely has a writer achieved such consistency, humor and compassion.” 

Twelve stories in 291 pages, so each story averages about 25 pages. 

Island: The Complete Stories (2000) by Alistair MacLeod

This is another Canadian author. I don't know much about Alistair MacLeod, but I do know that his short stories are acclaimed by many. I believe all the short stories in this book are set on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

This post at Buried in Print talks about Alistair MacLeod's short stories, and I think that all of the short stories in this book are reviewed on that blog.

All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006) by Edward P. Jones

I was not aware of this author until I heard about his stories at one of the Short Story Wednesday posts at Patricia Abbott's blog. 

From the description on the dust jacket flap: "Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them."

This is Jones's second collection of stories; it is the longest book on this list, at 399 pages.