The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties

by Shannon Ravenel (Editor)

The 1980s were one of the most fertile and controversial times for the American short story. Rich in craft and variety, this collection includes such classic and beloved stories as Peter Taylor's "The Old Forest," Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," and other works by Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and a host of exciting, newer talents.

The old forest / Peter Taylor --
The emerald / Donald Barthelme --
The shawl / Cynthia Ozick --
A working day / Robert Coover --
Cathedral / Raymond Carver --
Exchange value / Charles Johnson --
Deaths of distant friends / John Updike --
Sur: a summary report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-10 / Ursula K. Le Guin --
Nairobi / Joyce Carol Oates --
In the red room / Paul Bowles --
Sarah Cole: a type of love story / Russell Banks --
Fellow-creatures / Wright Morris --
Gryphon / Charles Baxter --
Health / Joy Williams --
The way we live now / Susan Sontag --
The things they carried / Tim O'Brien --
Dédé / Mavis Gallant --
Helping / Robert Stone --
The management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee --
Meneseteung / Alice Munro

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Literature

393 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Jerry]

This collects two of the editor’s favorite short stories from each year of the 1980s, from 1980 through 1989. It starts with Peter Taylor’s “The Old Forest”, one of the two highlights of the collection. You can pretty much tell what the story’s about from the first paragraph. The rest is extrapolation in the best sense.

I was already formally engaged, as we used to say, to the girl I was going to marry. But still I sometimes went out on the town with girls of a different sort. And during the very week before the date set for the wedding, in December, I was in an automobile accident at a time when one of those girls was with me. It was a calamitous thing to have happen—not the accident itself, which caused no serious injury to anyone, but the accident plus the presence of that girl.

The other highlight is Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon”, which tells the tale of a young boy, fourth grade, confronted by an adult in authority whose refusal to accept reality becomes progressively more epic as the story progresses. The delusions she presents are pleasing ones, and he has an excuse to believe them: all he must do is acquiesce to authority. But not everyone finds the delusions as pleasing as he does, so he must fight to protect the delusions he has accepted from authority.

The 1980s also saw the publication of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, one of the two selections from 1987, and several other very good stories. The eighties also saw the onset of AIDS, and one of the strangest stories is Susan Sontag’s weirdly circumspect “The Way We Live Now”, which involves naming neither the patient nor the disease while clearly describing both through a sort of rambling repetition of other characters’ descriptions.

At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs’ being ache-free for the first time in year.

The paragraph then continues on for the rest of the first half page and all the way down the second.

Another of the better stories is Ursula K. LeGuin’s semi-science fictional, in the sense of being an alternate history, “Sur: A Summary Report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-10”, in which a group of women make a non-research trip to the Antarctic, just for the experience of being there over the summer of 1909-10. Other than being an alternate history (or, perhaps, a secret history, as it doesn’t contradict known facts) and being somewhat gauzily fairy-tale-ish, there’s nothing of fantasy or science fiction in it.

In another quaint relic of the past, of the approximately (I’m going by name, which of course can be misleading) twelve men and eight women in the book, five of the men and none of the women have their birth year given in the introduction to the story. I suspect part of the reason was a fascination with their age; the average birth year of those whose year was considered newsworthy was 1921; the earliest two were born in 1910 (Paul Bowles and Wright Morris). But fascination with age couldn’t have been the entire point, because the youngest, Raymond Carver, born 1938, would have been only 44 in 1982 when his “Cathedral” appeared.

[Harry Ramble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plucked this one off the shelf (everything must go!) and was surprised to discover (I looked it up) this annual (and decennial) compendium from Houghton Mifflin is still being published to this day. Seriously, Curtis Sittenfeld is weighing in on the best short stories of 2020. Three decades ago, this was the sort of thing that would show up on the Featured Books table at your local mall's Walden Books or Borders. And they're still chugging along. It's like discovering your local Bell Telephone never closed and is still handing out rotary-dial desk phones and big-ass phonebooks.

Editor Shannon Ravenel tests readers' patience by frontloading 55+ pages of low-cal Southern gothic from Peter Taylor, 25 pages of postmodernist folderol from Donald Barthelme, and 30+ pages of Robert Coover's over-praised and overlong "A Working Day," but then eases gently into the greatest hits of the 80s.

How's everyone faring after 30+ years? Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl" will still peel the paint off your tender sensibilities. Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" suffers from an obviousness that didn't seem apparent in the 80s. Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" kicked off a cultural re-evaluation of a war that's about seven wars ago now. John Updike never misses and he doesn't here with "Deaths Of Distant Friends."

Things pick up considerably near the end. Robert Stone was on a hot streak in the 80s and "Helping" is as bleak and harrowing as anything he ever wrote. Moreso than the contemporaneous Children of Light. Or anything by David Gates, even. The last story, Alice Munro's "Meneseteung," is the highlight of the collection, an account of an obscure poet's life in frontier turn-of-the-20th-century Western Canada that executes a surprising but satisfying hairpin left turn in its last pages. Anyway, that was the 80s.

[Jeffrey Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gryphon is easily the best story I have not read before. Cathedrals will always be special, but Gryphon truly stood out.

[Bryan Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read many of the "Best American Short Stories" annual editions, probably the majority of those from the 21st Century, along with a handful of collections from the 80s/90s, so I was excited to pick up this "Best of the Decade" and see what made the final cut.

To say this is a disappointing selection would be a wild understatement. I have never read any "Best American" book (I've read some in the other series as well) with this much fodder, including a few of the outright worst stories I've ever seen in a BASS - I don't know how they were selected for their annual editions, let alone this one. Robert Coover's "A Working Day" achieves the rare feat of being simultaneously pornographic, fatuous, and banal, and Wright Morris's "Fellow-Creatures" is so uninteresting and insignificant it would get laughed out of an amateur weekend writing group.

There are some classics here, like Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" Charles Baxter's "Gryphon", and, of course, Raymond Carver's "Cathedral", significant only because it's on of the few Carver stories that doesn't sound exactly the fucking same as every other Carver story . Susan Sontag's entry is solid, as is John Updike's, and I actually liked the piece by Russell Banks, and author whose work I was not familiar with.

But really, I blame the editor - it's just a poor, poor selection, one which closes quite appropriately with a typically slumber-inducing overwritten, underwhelming yarn from the always disappointing Alice Munro.

From 10 books of 20 stories each, there had to be better options than these.

[atom_box Evan G · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is worth it for:
1) Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" where a man deals with his jealousy about his wife having a male friend.

2) Peter Taylor's, "The Old Forest". This is to be studied, a masterful layer by layer revealing of an incident and the reader's gradual shift in understanding that event. Some resonance with themes of Jane Austen. The social justice, gender, and class issues make it better now than it was in the 1980s.

Just okay, not for me in 2021:
3) Susan Sontag with the longterm illness of her friend. 4) Cynthia Ozick, WWII sadness.

[Dawn Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable short story collection

[Thomas McDade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gryphon by Charles Baxter

[Craig Schlossin · Rating 3 out of 5]

People like what they like. I don't think they can change that? So, if you do not like the first story maybe you should find another book. I should have.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to Joyce Carol Oates "Nairobi" on Selected Shorts podcast. Description: “Nairobi,” is not a chiller, but a delicate and secretive social comedy of manners, and its qualities are surfaced in this reading by Alison Pill.
http://www.selectedshorts.org/2017/03...

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book demonstrates clearly why this series is so popular and respected. Ravenel chose 2 stories from each of the annual collections. These collections are edited by Ravenel, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, and a guest editor. The guest editors were mostly big literary names - I was not sure that I trusted each one of them. Well, not to worry, there were a couple of disappointments, but for the most part this was a terrific collection which introduced me to some wonderful writers. There were a couple of familiar names with fine stories that I had not seen before: Joyce Carol Oates's "Nairobi": a tale of emotional prostitution among the well-to-do; Bowles's "In the Red Room": a typically cool and disturbing piece; and my hero Russell Banks's "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story": a twistedly amusing account of a romance between a handsome young gentleman and an unattractive lower class woman. There were a couple of stories that I have read before and enjoyed revisiting: Carver's "Cathedral" and Robert Stone's powerful "Helping". A few disappointments were encountered as well, such as Mavis Gallant's boring story, and Cynthia Ozick's predictable holocaust tale.

Alice Munro's "Meneseteung" was fabulous, one of the best things I have read in a long time. She is a marvelous writer, capable of vividly imagining a setting and creating full characters, not to mention a master's grasp of the language. Peter Taylor's long story "The Old Forest" was almost a genteel piece, written with a stately pace and feeling, about a young man's encounter with and unintentional participation in the troubles that can come up when class divisions and sexual attraction come into contact. Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme contributed interesting surreal pieces. Charles Johnson's "Exchange Value" was an intense and bizarrely humorous story from the ghetto. Wright Morris's "Fellow Creatures" is thoroughly charming, the account of a crusty old gent's growing appreciation for the members of the animal kingdom - this should be a favorite of vegetarians everywhere. Susan Sontag's "The Way We Live Now" is a fine look at how a group of NYC aesthetes deals with the AIDS crisis when it comes home to one of their number. Charles Baxter's "Gryphon" is an enigmatic but amusing piece about a schoolteacher who is, well, a little off. Tim O'Brien is well known as a writer that deals with the Vietnam War very effectively in his fiction, and I have wanted for some time to read something by him. "The Things They Carried" does not disappoint; it starts out itemizing a list of what US soldiers carried through the jungles and naturally develops into a depiction of the pain and misery of that experience. All in all, an excellent book.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eclectic collection of stories. The amount of forms presented in the collection is impressive. The shift in style, voice and writing techniques provide many points for consideration. There are two abstract stories early in the text which stand out for their level of writing experimentation. The Cathedral was particularly interesting since I've not read the story in years, like reading it again for the first time.

The Russell Banks story is a gem. The clever word play and writing tricks--the narrator moves into and out of the story consistently. The flow of the story is interrupted with digressions that shoot off in random directions. The storyteller also directly addresses the reader. A strange tact, certain a difficult technique, but well executed.

The Way We Live Now by Sonia Sontag is excellent. The main character of the story never speaks or appears directly in the text. All of the information about the MC is indirectly presented from a variety of friends and acquaintances. Certainly worth checking out.

Overall, I felt the stories were not up to the level of my expectations. There are five or six excellent stories, worthy of further consideration in a classroom setting, but I am left wanting more from the best stories from the decade.

p.48 I felt this was the last moment to reach out and understand something of the world that was other than my own narrow circumstances and my own narrow nature. Peter Taylor
p.69 Not perhaps the premier instrument of the present age. What would be? The bullhorn, no doubt. Donald Barthelme
p.129 It was beyond my understanding. Raymond Carver
p.334 You look at the audience, and at the preacher in his blue robe with his beautiful white hair, the potted palm trees under a blue sky, and you know they care about nothing. Bharati Mukherjee

[Theryn Fleming · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an uber-anthology consisting of two stories from each of the Best American anthologies from 1980-1989. I picked it up because the author names are mostly well-known ones that you see bandied about a lot, but I hadn't read any of these stories before. (It includes "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien and "Meneseteung" by Alice Munro.)

I connected with more of the later stories than the earlier ones (they were arranged chronologically). Some of the stories (particularly "The Way We Live Now" by Susan Sontag and "The Management of Grief" by Bharati Mukherjee) felt like historic records. "The Management of Grief" (about the aftermath of Air India) was especially poignant. Another that resonated was "Helping" by Robert Stone.

[Erin Quinney · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some interesting short stories in here. I like collections. I get to read stories by new authors. Sometimes, I find a new favorite. I wouldn't say that happened with this collection, but there were some great stories.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, especially the gut-wrenching piece about HIV and other hazards of the post-modern social world, "The Way We Live Now."

[Jessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gem. If you can get your hands on it, read!

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raymond Carver - Cathedral
John Updike - Death of Distant Friends

Two authors becoming my go to for the enjoyment of the written word.