Best American Short Stories

[Maribeth Seagers]

TheBest American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.

The series began in 1915, when Edward O'Brien edited his selection of the previous year's stories. This first edition was serialized in a magazine; however, it caught the attention of the publishing company Small, Maynard & Company, which published subsequent editions until 1926, when the title was transferred to Dodd, Mead and Company.

Though the series attained a degree of fame and popularity, it was never universally accepted. Fans of the period's popular fiction often found his selections precious or willfully obscure. On the other hand, many critics who accepted "literary" fiction objected to O'Brien's occasionally strident and pedantic tone. After his death, for instance, The New Yorker compared him to the recently deceased editor of the Social Register, suggesting that they shared a form of snobbery.

O'Brien died of a heart attack in London in 1941. He was replaced as editor of the series by Martha Foley, founder and former editor of Story magazine. O'Brien, who had once called Story one of the most important events in literary history since the publication of Lyrical Ballads, presumably would have approved the choice. Foley edited the publication, at first alone and then with the assistance of her son, David Burnett, until 1977. These years witnessed both the ascendancy and eclipse of the type of short story favored by O'Brien: writers as diverse as John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tillie Olsen offered sharply observed, generally realistic stories that eschewed trite conventions. At the same time, Foley evinced some degree of awareness of the new currents in fiction. Donald Barthelme, for instance, was chosen for The School in 1976. Foley also attended to the rise of so-called minority literature, dedicating the 1975 volume to Leslie Marmon Silko, although it has been argued that the series was less perceptive in this area than it might have been.

In 2000, John Updike selected 22 unabridged stories from the first 84 annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories, and the result is The Best American Short Stories of the Century. The expanded CD audio edition includes a new story from The Best American Short Stories 1999 to round out the century.In 2015, Lorrie Moore served as the guest editor for a centennial anthology from the series, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories.

I saw what a short story could be and what it could do. I wanted to write stories this good. I wanted to learn everything and to read every short story I could get my hands on. This book was my primer. Each story held a lesson or a revelation.

Speaking of story collections, I wrote the titular story in The Werewolf at Dusk, a collection of illustrated stories by David Small that came out this week (!). If you like graphic novels and weird short stories, check it out.

This week, The Atlantic published a new list of \u201CThe Great American Novels.\u201D It\u2019s full of both expected classics as well as both good and/or weird surprises. There is no way to do these lists without the former and no point in doing them without the latter. Overall, I think The Atlantic did a fine job. I appreciated the inclusion of graphic novels (Sabrina and Watchmen) and especially the genre books. Certainly novels like Chandler\u2019s The Big Sleep, Le Guin\u2019s The Dispossessed, Butler\u2019s Kindred, and Jackson\u2019s The Haunting of Hill House deserve spots. What\u2019s American literature without science fiction, horror, and hardboiled detective fiction? Excluding them would be like excluding Westerns and rom coms from a list of Great American Movies.

Yes, I get that the list was restricted to novels. That\u2019s fine and good. But reading the article made me think about how central the short story is to American literature. Indeed, it might be the quintessential American literary form. (I was hardly the only person to think along these lines: Amber Sparks, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Aaron Burch, and others had similar thoughts.)

Hell, does it make sense to put writers like George Saunders, Joy Williams, Annie Proulx, and Jhumpa Lahiri on here for novels that\u2014great as they might be\u2014are not as good or influential as their story collections? A Great American Fiction list would, I think, instead list Pastoralia (or perhaps Tenth of December), Taking Care, Close Range, and Interpreter of Maladies, respectively.

This is really less a critique of The Atlantic\u2019s list than a thought about American literature in general and perhaps a lament for the declining role of the short story. Because it is hard not to notice the shrinking prestige of short stories, even as the form is as vibrant and alive as ever in American letters.

Part of this has nothing to do with literature, per se. The past few decades have seen the much-discussed destruction of American magazines and newspapers. Many have disappeared and those that survive depend on online clicks. There\u2019s not much space for short stories, and even less money for short story authors.

But there are other factors. I often wonder what things would look like if the big literary awards followed the lead of the genre awards\u2014such as the Hugo and Nebula\u2014and included short story categories. The National Book Awards and Pulitzers command attention, readership, and press coverage. Short story collections theoretically compete for the Fiction category, but in practice almost never win. In my lifetime, only two straight story collections (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Interpreter of Maladies) have won the Pulitzer for example.

I do have to shout out The Story Prize here, but I believe the short story is a unique enough form to merit it's own award categories in the biggest awards. It\u2019s as distinct a category as Young People\u2019s Literature and Poetry (to pick NBA categories) and certainly as distinct as the multiple Pulitzer non-fiction book categories (to say nothing of the many journalism awards).

Another problem for the short story is that big publishers have increasingly decided not to publish them. It used to be quite common to start your career with a two-book deal, one story collection and one novel. Back then, there was an idea an author would stay with a publisher and that publisher would build their whole career. Today, it\u2019s more common for the big publishers to allow authors\u2014who still write and love short stories\u2014to have a collection on a small press and then snatch them up for a novel. (This is part of why some call small and indie presses the \u201Cminor leagues\u201D that the big publishers poach for talent.)

There is doom loop aspect here. Because big publishers don\u2019t publish stories as often, they don\u2019t have big publicity behind. Because short stories are not awarded as often, they do not get the coverage that awards bring. Because they don\u2019t have the publicity dollars or awards coverage\u2014and tend to get left off listicles\u2014they don\u2019t sell as many copies. Thus justifying not publishing, awarding, or listing them.

I honestly believe there is more appetite for short stories than publishers might realize. In recent years, books like Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s Her Body and Other Parties and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah\u2019s Friday Black have been break-out hits and sold plenty of copies. And, while I don\u2019t want to call any authors out, increasingly many \u201Cnovels\u201D are simply lightly fixed-up short story collections. Publishers and readers seem to simply want to see the word \u201Cnovel\u201D on the manuscript even if it is a bunch of stories. (Ditto novellas, a category that has functionally disappeared as publishers simply put them out as \u201Cnovels.\u201D) Hell, one might even argue a few of The Atlantic\u2019s picks like A Visit from the Goon Squad are, in truth, a bunch of short stories in a novel trench coat.

If heaven exists, it must exist in the form of a clean and quiet house, a comfortable chair near a snoring dog, a glass of cold wine, and a lapful of short stories. I love the short story form with a wild-eyed passion, the fervor of a street-corner evangelist who dresses up in robes to shout at pedestrians about angels and harlots and the seven-headed beast of the end of days.

But, oh, what brilliant stories these are. I know it is the custom for the writers of such introductions to shout out each contribution by name with a compliment, perhaps a way of justifying for a large audience choices that are so deeply individual and subjective. I wonder, however, if this practice risks minimizing or simplifying the appeal of deeply complex stories like those that are found in this anthology, each of which is excellent in multiple, and sometimes even contradictory, ways.

The second test was that each of the stories had to subvert my expectations, and some succeeded to the point where they made it past my deepest, most ingrained antipathies. For example, halfway through the year, I asked Jenny to please stop sending me any more first-person stories because, while there were so many perfectly competent ones coming to me, I began to resent being anchored again and again to individual consciousnesses; I began to feel at the center of a sucking collective whirlpool of anxious solipsism.

I was trained early in this kind of aesthetic construction; it was probably my first serious artistic love. I was a child of the eighties, an adolescent in the early nineties, and I owned first a beige Fisher-Price tape recorder, then a giant black boom box, and out of these I made mixtapes assembled with extreme thought and care, the covers decorated with magazine collages and Wite-Out and nail polish, my most legible block handwriting listing the songs on the insides.

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