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100 Years Of The Best American Short Stories
Witness the ever-changing history and identity of America in this collection of 40 stories collected from the first 100 years of this bestselling series.
For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.”
These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver’s “minimalism,” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley’s “secular Yiddishkeit.” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.
For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.”
These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver’s “minimalism,” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley’s “secular Yiddishkeit.” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.
752 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2015
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3462 people want to read
About the author
Lorrie Moore
71 books2,597 followersLORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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October 15, 2024
Whew—two months and I’ve finally finished this anthology! Reviews below (note that most of these stories have individual Goodreads pages as well). But first, some overall commentary.
This was a worthwhile endeavor: literary speed dating, featuring acclaimed authors and stories. I would have preferred an anthology that just aimed to represent the best stories of the century, not limited to those selected for Best American Short Stories in their year (sadly, I haven’t found any such anthology). This volume has the further limitation that a prior pair of editors took their own pass 15 years earlier, in the harder-to-find The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and this book’s editors decided on no overlap, so all the pre-2000 stories here are in theory second-best. In practice, some are fabulous, some decent, some duds.
There’s a tilt toward more recent stories: though they span a full century, 21 of 40 represent the final 35 years (1980 onwards). Demographically, the tilt toward male authors remains consistent throughout, at 6 of every 10 stories, while the 10 authors of color are almost all clustered toward the end. The most surprising statistic to me is just how young these authors were, with most of the stories being published by people in their 30s and even 20s! In fact, only 5 stories were written by someone aged 50+.
Sadly, most of the sections written by the editors feel bizarrely off-base and banal, though reading a bit about the history of the series was interesting; I could’ve used less imaginary short story writers on book tours and more explanation of why these stories were chosen, or deeper observations on the 2,000 stories featured over the century. There’s so much railing against the horrors of plot (even stuck into someone’s mini-bio) that I just wound up curious about what an overly plot-driven short story even looks like.
Also noteworthy is BASS’s awkward relationship with genre: while a few stories here have speculative elements, there’s only one I’d call a genre story, which is almost worse than none. Unlike her predecessors, the current series editor seems open to sci-fi and fantasy, but without actually reading the associated magazines (she picks up the occasional story that makes it into someplace like the New Yorker), which seems to me an unhappy compromise. Either narrow your mission (and title) to realistic literary fiction, or actually read the places where great speculative stories are published so you can represent them properly. As is, we get bizarre choices like Ursula Le Guin having being published in BASS three times—but only for realistic stories few readers will even have heard of.
Anyway, the stories:
1910s:
“The Gay Old Dog” by Edna Ferber: This is a great time capsule story that puts me in mind of Edith Wharton: a Chicago family gradually losing its money, a brother who loses his opportunity to marry because he has to get his sisters settled first. I was entertained by the author’s holding forth on social issues of the day (“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.”), and for every dated gendered assumption that made me roll my eyes (the career-oriented sister’s unattractiveness: why would a 30-something who works indoors have “leathery” skin?) there was another that charmed me (a young man’s God-given right to fancy waistcoats and colorful socks, and the assumption that he’ll love preening in the mirror). While the story is compelling, the ending likewise feels foreign today:
1920s:
“Brothers” by Sherwood Anderson
“My Old Man” by Ernest Hemingway
“Haircut” by Ring Lardner
The 1920s must have been a rough decade for short stories if these are the best. Fortunately, they’re relatively short. All three feature first-person male narrators observing other men in their communities, all involving crime and some fairly obvious things the reader is meant to see through. The triptych improves slightly as it goes: I can’t fathom why “Brothers” is here and have nothing to say about it beyond that it’s a chiasmus. “My Old Man” is probably most notable for the story about the story, namely that its pity publication in BASS launched Hemingway’s career. “Haircut” gives us an entertainingly clueless narrator to see through but is otherwise a bit broad.
1930s:
“Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: More engaging reading than the 1920s set, but my sympathies didn’t go where the author intended. A tale of American expats in Europe, and a formerly alcoholic father trying to convince his deceased wife’s sister to return custody of his 9-year-old daughter. This guy is such a stereotype: uninvolved but plies the kid with gifts, has been sober for ten minutes and is outraged by his sister-in-law’s doubts, wants his kid back to satisfy his own emotional needs but doesn’t seem to have considered what being uprooted would mean for her. I sympathized with the “evil” sister-in-law, who struck me as someone with anxiety being expected to do something she’s not comfortable with.
“The Cracked Looking-Glass” by Katherine Anne Porter: The first story that made me want to seek out more from the author. This is the story of a marriage between Irish-American immigrants, a middle-aged woman and an elderly man, with vivid characters and a glimpse into lives that feel very real.
“That Will Be Fine” by William Faulkner: A throwback to the 1920s stories, narrated by a young boy observing his no-good uncle without understanding what he’s up to. I liked it a bit better than the 1920s stories, perhaps just because the more challenging prose made reading it feel like an accomplishment, but didn’t ultimately buy the child narrator’s cluelessness: at 7 he’s developmentally old enough to understand mysteries (Boxcar Children are aimed at ages 6-8 and were available when Faulkner was writing!) yet bizarrely overlooks obviously sinister behavior.
1940s:
“Those Are as Brothers” by Nancy Hale: Interesting mostly as a time capsule of how Americans in 1941 thought about the Holocaust. A woman who has escaped an abusive marriage feels kinship and empathy for a Jewish man who has escaped a concentration camp. Today’s readers would look askance at comparing one’s relationship, however awful, to a Nazi camp (some even complain about comparing other genocides and mass internments, thus ensuring that these atrocities will continue), but this was written before the Holocaust was enshrined as the worst thing to ever happen and the purpose of the comparison is increasing empathy for the refugees, which is interesting to see.
“The Whole World Knows” by Eudora Welty: The most challenging story so far. I have read it twice, I have sought out academic commentary, and I’m still not sure I fully get it, let alone catch all the literary allusions. A structurally complicated story about a young man separated from his wife, in which his fantasies blend into reality. I think in the end that I have no idea what the button sewing was about.
“The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever: The first perfect story. A New York couple acquires a radio that allows them to hear into the lives of their neighbors, with troubling results. I’m still trying to figure out why the ending happened:
1950s:
“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen: A hilariously stereotypical title for a 1950s story, but actually this one is heartbreaking. A mother looks back on her eldest daughter’s life, and how a lack of stability and emotional safety—mostly caused by their precarious economic situation—caused the daughter untold suffering with potential lifelong effects. Succinct, devastating and ahead of its time, and I’m still pondering the mother’s final conclusion:
“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin: A beautiful and powerful story about the relationship between two adult brothers—the older one stepping into the role of father before he really has the wisdom to do so—and the younger brother’s life-sustaining connection to music. I finished it feeling I’d read an entire novel about these people and I mean that as a compliment.
“The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth: A boy with religious questions finds himself backed into extreme measures. I found this one weird, tasteless and rather poorly written.
1960s:
“Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor: This is a good story, in a technical sense, though everyone in it behaves terribly and the end is miserable. The first story that’s squarely about race relations (though implicit in “Sonny’s Blues”), this one could be read as racist, or as a clear-eyed deconstruction of white attitudes: the patronizingly racist mother, the angry son whose performative antiracism mostly seems to be a rebellion against her. I fail to see the Catholic angle, unless you are already inclined to interpret human failings as a need for grace.
“Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike: An adolescent boy confronts fear of death and questions about religion—a relatable phase and a well-written story, but one that didn’t do much for me. The boy ultimately reaches a narcissistic, if comforting, conclusion.
“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver: An overlong story about a guy who finds out his wife cheated on him a couple years ago, and which then chronicles every blessed thing he does for the next 12 hours, mostly wandering about feeling sorry for himself. Please.
“By the River” by Joyce Carol Oates: Well, that’s certainly a Joyce Carol Oates story. Very Biblical, boring until it’s horrifying, though she does a good job of subtly building the tension such that I was expecting something like that.
1970s:
“The School” by Donald Barthelme: Surrealist flash fiction, with a life-affirming message in the midst of death. I didn’t have a strong reaction to it but am curious about what else this author wrote.
“The Conventional Wisdom” by Stanley Elkin: That was an unexpected twist. Bold and different.
1980s:
“Friends” by Grace Paley: A group of middle-aged women travel to visit a friend who is dying of cancer. I can see why this story isn’t a standout for most people, but it intrigued me with its textured portrayal of the women’s lives. And what exactly did classmates see wrong with the daughter who died young? This story also contains perhaps the saddest line in the anthology so far, when
“The Harmony of the World” by Charles Baxter: On the surface this is the story of a failed musician failing at love, and I’m wrestling to understand it beyond the surface level (not too surprising since music and music-focused stories are not my forte). Is the narrator, who does indeed seem very emotionally restrained until he reams out his girlfriend for her failures as a singer, actually fatally lacking in passion? Or perhaps his problem wasn’t with his playing, but that he didn’t care enough to work on it and instead quit at the first discouragement? He and the composer of the eponymous symphony both produce apparently passionless works before their hidden reservoirs of emotion emerge in destructive ways—what does it all mean?
“Lawns” by Mona Simpson: The standout of the 80s stories, this one turns out to be sickening in content but deals with an important topic in a nuanced and powerful way: Simpson’s introducing the character with her problematic behavior before revealing her trauma is artful and recreates the way one is likely to encounter sufferers in real life. I’m concerned for the character at the end:
“Communist” by Richard Ford: Another boy-shooting-birds story that impressed me even less than Updike’s, with more diffuse themes. Or maybe I just didn’t care enough to search for them.
“Helping” by Robert Stone: A long story about a day in the life of a troubled veteran turned social worker, who gets triggered by a client, throws away his sobriety and is an ass to everyone around him. Reasonably well-written but the protagonist reminds me a little too much of my own asshole neighbor, the mutual contempt in this marriage is exhausting and it all builds up to nothing much. Surely there must have been better Vietnam vet stories available.
“Displacement” by David Wong Louie: There are definitely better immigrant stories—this one is pretty weak—but I suppose there was less competition in the 80s.
1990s:
“Friend of My Youth” by Alice Munro: This one left me with a lot to think about. On the surface, it’s a story of a farm woman in rural Canada in the early 20th century, and the choices she makes under difficult circumstances. But it’s told third- and fourth-hand, by a narrator who never met the protagonist and for whom the story is bound up with her youthful resentment and adult guilt about her treatment of her sick mother. In the end, everyone’s interpretation of Flora mostly tells us about themselves: the mother is straightforward and affectionate and, as she gets ill, wishes she had a caretaker like that; the narrator resents expectations of self-sacrifice, and so wants to knock Flora off her pedestal. I saw Flora as a woman with limited choices making the best of a bad situation, which probably tells you something about me.
“The Girl on the Plane” by Mary Gaitskill: So timely that if not for the descriptions of plane travel, you could mistake it for a 2020s story. A man meets a woman who reminds him of a college friend, and finally is forced to acknowledge his own complicity in a sexual assault.
“Xuela” by Jamaica Kincaid: Impressive writing on a technical level, but in content, this struck me as the first chapter in a run-of-the-mill post-colonial Caribbean novel—one that neither feels complete on its own, nor made me want to read on (for those who do, see The Autobiography of My Mother).
“If You Sing Like That For Me” by Akhil Sharma: Meh.
“Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Diaz: A Dominican immigrant family attends an extended family party, but all is not well at home, as seen through the eyes of a boy in his early teens(?). A common subject but I liked the story and found it well-written, fresh and raw.
2000s:
“The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri: A disappointment given the author’s literary stature. It feels like this story took the immigrant protagonist’s relationship with an elderly, ailing white landlady from “Displacement,” the Indian couple’s arranged marriage from “If You Sing,” which the groom has only entered to check off a life milestone, and made the whole thing saccharine instead of dismal, but with no greater depth. Clearly I have different taste in immigrant stories from the editors.
“Brownies” by ZZ Packer: I’d read this before and found it a little too on-the-nose, a story about a young girl learning that oppressed people too can hunger for and abuse power. This time I appreciated more the author’s keen eye for people, places and social dynamics. I also noticed the narrator’s passivity and near-absence from the story, and am on the fence about whether to read it as an observation of someone who can draw moral conclusions but not act on them, or simply unsatisfying.
“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie: I enjoyed this story a lot, and in fact read it twice—it’s heavy on dialogue that feels very real; it’s often funny, though always mixed with loss; and it has a satisfying ending. At the same time, I feel unqualified to review it. It’s the only Native American story in the book and hammers Indianness hard, which is also present in the whole structure of the story: a man who wants to acquire something but continuously resists accumulating money, instead immediately sharing everything he gains. But then this seems not only cultural, but also a result of the short-term thinking brought on by financial stress. There’s also a gaping, unnamed sense of loss throughout the story, and I’m told its level of despair is considered passé among Native American readers today.
“Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones: Oddly, I liked this one much better when I read it a few years ago in Jones’s collection. Out of that context, this level of violence and misery feels almost like trolling, like Jones pulled elements from over-the-top TV shows and is laughing at what white people will believe if written by someone with the right skin color. Of course, people in prison often do have over-the-top terrible lives, and it is well-written. But I was unsatisfied by the unanswered questions, particularly around the protagonist’s backstory (at first I assumed he ran away due to poverty or abuse at home, but by the end it appears not?). Of all Jones’s stories, this is definitely a choice.
Final 6 reviews in the comments due to length restrictions!
This was a worthwhile endeavor: literary speed dating, featuring acclaimed authors and stories. I would have preferred an anthology that just aimed to represent the best stories of the century, not limited to those selected for Best American Short Stories in their year (sadly, I haven’t found any such anthology). This volume has the further limitation that a prior pair of editors took their own pass 15 years earlier, in the harder-to-find The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and this book’s editors decided on no overlap, so all the pre-2000 stories here are in theory second-best. In practice, some are fabulous, some decent, some duds.
There’s a tilt toward more recent stories: though they span a full century, 21 of 40 represent the final 35 years (1980 onwards). Demographically, the tilt toward male authors remains consistent throughout, at 6 of every 10 stories, while the 10 authors of color are almost all clustered toward the end. The most surprising statistic to me is just how young these authors were, with most of the stories being published by people in their 30s and even 20s! In fact, only 5 stories were written by someone aged 50+.
Sadly, most of the sections written by the editors feel bizarrely off-base and banal, though reading a bit about the history of the series was interesting; I could’ve used less imaginary short story writers on book tours and more explanation of why these stories were chosen, or deeper observations on the 2,000 stories featured over the century. There’s so much railing against the horrors of plot (even stuck into someone’s mini-bio) that I just wound up curious about what an overly plot-driven short story even looks like.
Also noteworthy is BASS’s awkward relationship with genre: while a few stories here have speculative elements, there’s only one I’d call a genre story, which is almost worse than none. Unlike her predecessors, the current series editor seems open to sci-fi and fantasy, but without actually reading the associated magazines (she picks up the occasional story that makes it into someplace like the New Yorker), which seems to me an unhappy compromise. Either narrow your mission (and title) to realistic literary fiction, or actually read the places where great speculative stories are published so you can represent them properly. As is, we get bizarre choices like Ursula Le Guin having being published in BASS three times—but only for realistic stories few readers will even have heard of.
Anyway, the stories:
1910s:
“The Gay Old Dog” by Edna Ferber: This is a great time capsule story that puts me in mind of Edith Wharton: a Chicago family gradually losing its money, a brother who loses his opportunity to marry because he has to get his sisters settled first. I was entertained by the author’s holding forth on social issues of the day (“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.”), and for every dated gendered assumption that made me roll my eyes (the career-oriented sister’s unattractiveness: why would a 30-something who works indoors have “leathery” skin?) there was another that charmed me (a young man’s God-given right to fancy waistcoats and colorful socks, and the assumption that he’ll love preening in the mirror). While the story is compelling, the ending likewise feels foreign today:
1920s:
“Brothers” by Sherwood Anderson
“My Old Man” by Ernest Hemingway
“Haircut” by Ring Lardner
The 1920s must have been a rough decade for short stories if these are the best. Fortunately, they’re relatively short. All three feature first-person male narrators observing other men in their communities, all involving crime and some fairly obvious things the reader is meant to see through. The triptych improves slightly as it goes: I can’t fathom why “Brothers” is here and have nothing to say about it beyond that it’s a chiasmus. “My Old Man” is probably most notable for the story about the story, namely that its pity publication in BASS launched Hemingway’s career. “Haircut” gives us an entertainingly clueless narrator to see through but is otherwise a bit broad.
1930s:
“Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: More engaging reading than the 1920s set, but my sympathies didn’t go where the author intended. A tale of American expats in Europe, and a formerly alcoholic father trying to convince his deceased wife’s sister to return custody of his 9-year-old daughter. This guy is such a stereotype: uninvolved but plies the kid with gifts, has been sober for ten minutes and is outraged by his sister-in-law’s doubts, wants his kid back to satisfy his own emotional needs but doesn’t seem to have considered what being uprooted would mean for her. I sympathized with the “evil” sister-in-law, who struck me as someone with anxiety being expected to do something she’s not comfortable with.
“The Cracked Looking-Glass” by Katherine Anne Porter: The first story that made me want to seek out more from the author. This is the story of a marriage between Irish-American immigrants, a middle-aged woman and an elderly man, with vivid characters and a glimpse into lives that feel very real.
“That Will Be Fine” by William Faulkner: A throwback to the 1920s stories, narrated by a young boy observing his no-good uncle without understanding what he’s up to. I liked it a bit better than the 1920s stories, perhaps just because the more challenging prose made reading it feel like an accomplishment, but didn’t ultimately buy the child narrator’s cluelessness: at 7 he’s developmentally old enough to understand mysteries (Boxcar Children are aimed at ages 6-8 and were available when Faulkner was writing!) yet bizarrely overlooks obviously sinister behavior.
1940s:
“Those Are as Brothers” by Nancy Hale: Interesting mostly as a time capsule of how Americans in 1941 thought about the Holocaust. A woman who has escaped an abusive marriage feels kinship and empathy for a Jewish man who has escaped a concentration camp. Today’s readers would look askance at comparing one’s relationship, however awful, to a Nazi camp (some even complain about comparing other genocides and mass internments, thus ensuring that these atrocities will continue), but this was written before the Holocaust was enshrined as the worst thing to ever happen and the purpose of the comparison is increasing empathy for the refugees, which is interesting to see.
“The Whole World Knows” by Eudora Welty: The most challenging story so far. I have read it twice, I have sought out academic commentary, and I’m still not sure I fully get it, let alone catch all the literary allusions. A structurally complicated story about a young man separated from his wife, in which his fantasies blend into reality. I think in the end that I have no idea what the button sewing was about.
“The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever: The first perfect story. A New York couple acquires a radio that allows them to hear into the lives of their neighbors, with troubling results. I’m still trying to figure out why the ending happened:
1950s:
“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen: A hilariously stereotypical title for a 1950s story, but actually this one is heartbreaking. A mother looks back on her eldest daughter’s life, and how a lack of stability and emotional safety—mostly caused by their precarious economic situation—caused the daughter untold suffering with potential lifelong effects. Succinct, devastating and ahead of its time, and I’m still pondering the mother’s final conclusion:
“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin: A beautiful and powerful story about the relationship between two adult brothers—the older one stepping into the role of father before he really has the wisdom to do so—and the younger brother’s life-sustaining connection to music. I finished it feeling I’d read an entire novel about these people and I mean that as a compliment.
“The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth: A boy with religious questions finds himself backed into extreme measures. I found this one weird, tasteless and rather poorly written.
1960s:
“Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor: This is a good story, in a technical sense, though everyone in it behaves terribly and the end is miserable. The first story that’s squarely about race relations (though implicit in “Sonny’s Blues”), this one could be read as racist, or as a clear-eyed deconstruction of white attitudes: the patronizingly racist mother, the angry son whose performative antiracism mostly seems to be a rebellion against her. I fail to see the Catholic angle, unless you are already inclined to interpret human failings as a need for grace.
“Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike: An adolescent boy confronts fear of death and questions about religion—a relatable phase and a well-written story, but one that didn’t do much for me. The boy ultimately reaches a narcissistic, if comforting, conclusion.
“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver: An overlong story about a guy who finds out his wife cheated on him a couple years ago, and which then chronicles every blessed thing he does for the next 12 hours, mostly wandering about feeling sorry for himself. Please.
“By the River” by Joyce Carol Oates: Well, that’s certainly a Joyce Carol Oates story. Very Biblical, boring until it’s horrifying, though she does a good job of subtly building the tension such that I was expecting something like that.
1970s:
“The School” by Donald Barthelme: Surrealist flash fiction, with a life-affirming message in the midst of death. I didn’t have a strong reaction to it but am curious about what else this author wrote.
“The Conventional Wisdom” by Stanley Elkin: That was an unexpected twist. Bold and different.
1980s:
“Friends” by Grace Paley: A group of middle-aged women travel to visit a friend who is dying of cancer. I can see why this story isn’t a standout for most people, but it intrigued me with its textured portrayal of the women’s lives. And what exactly did classmates see wrong with the daughter who died young? This story also contains perhaps the saddest line in the anthology so far, when
“The Harmony of the World” by Charles Baxter: On the surface this is the story of a failed musician failing at love, and I’m wrestling to understand it beyond the surface level (not too surprising since music and music-focused stories are not my forte). Is the narrator, who does indeed seem very emotionally restrained until he reams out his girlfriend for her failures as a singer, actually fatally lacking in passion? Or perhaps his problem wasn’t with his playing, but that he didn’t care enough to work on it and instead quit at the first discouragement? He and the composer of the eponymous symphony both produce apparently passionless works before their hidden reservoirs of emotion emerge in destructive ways—what does it all mean?
“Lawns” by Mona Simpson: The standout of the 80s stories, this one turns out to be sickening in content but deals with an important topic in a nuanced and powerful way: Simpson’s introducing the character with her problematic behavior before revealing her trauma is artful and recreates the way one is likely to encounter sufferers in real life. I’m concerned for the character at the end:
“Communist” by Richard Ford: Another boy-shooting-birds story that impressed me even less than Updike’s, with more diffuse themes. Or maybe I just didn’t care enough to search for them.
“Helping” by Robert Stone: A long story about a day in the life of a troubled veteran turned social worker, who gets triggered by a client, throws away his sobriety and is an ass to everyone around him. Reasonably well-written but the protagonist reminds me a little too much of my own asshole neighbor, the mutual contempt in this marriage is exhausting and it all builds up to nothing much. Surely there must have been better Vietnam vet stories available.
“Displacement” by David Wong Louie: There are definitely better immigrant stories—this one is pretty weak—but I suppose there was less competition in the 80s.
1990s:
“Friend of My Youth” by Alice Munro: This one left me with a lot to think about. On the surface, it’s a story of a farm woman in rural Canada in the early 20th century, and the choices she makes under difficult circumstances. But it’s told third- and fourth-hand, by a narrator who never met the protagonist and for whom the story is bound up with her youthful resentment and adult guilt about her treatment of her sick mother. In the end, everyone’s interpretation of Flora mostly tells us about themselves: the mother is straightforward and affectionate and, as she gets ill, wishes she had a caretaker like that; the narrator resents expectations of self-sacrifice, and so wants to knock Flora off her pedestal. I saw Flora as a woman with limited choices making the best of a bad situation, which probably tells you something about me.
“The Girl on the Plane” by Mary Gaitskill: So timely that if not for the descriptions of plane travel, you could mistake it for a 2020s story. A man meets a woman who reminds him of a college friend, and finally is forced to acknowledge his own complicity in a sexual assault.
“Xuela” by Jamaica Kincaid: Impressive writing on a technical level, but in content, this struck me as the first chapter in a run-of-the-mill post-colonial Caribbean novel—one that neither feels complete on its own, nor made me want to read on (for those who do, see The Autobiography of My Mother).
“If You Sing Like That For Me” by Akhil Sharma: Meh.
“Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Diaz: A Dominican immigrant family attends an extended family party, but all is not well at home, as seen through the eyes of a boy in his early teens(?). A common subject but I liked the story and found it well-written, fresh and raw.
2000s:
“The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri: A disappointment given the author’s literary stature. It feels like this story took the immigrant protagonist’s relationship with an elderly, ailing white landlady from “Displacement,” the Indian couple’s arranged marriage from “If You Sing,” which the groom has only entered to check off a life milestone, and made the whole thing saccharine instead of dismal, but with no greater depth. Clearly I have different taste in immigrant stories from the editors.
“Brownies” by ZZ Packer: I’d read this before and found it a little too on-the-nose, a story about a young girl learning that oppressed people too can hunger for and abuse power. This time I appreciated more the author’s keen eye for people, places and social dynamics. I also noticed the narrator’s passivity and near-absence from the story, and am on the fence about whether to read it as an observation of someone who can draw moral conclusions but not act on them, or simply unsatisfying.
“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie: I enjoyed this story a lot, and in fact read it twice—it’s heavy on dialogue that feels very real; it’s often funny, though always mixed with loss; and it has a satisfying ending. At the same time, I feel unqualified to review it. It’s the only Native American story in the book and hammers Indianness hard, which is also present in the whole structure of the story: a man who wants to acquire something but continuously resists accumulating money, instead immediately sharing everything he gains. But then this seems not only cultural, but also a result of the short-term thinking brought on by financial stress. There’s also a gaping, unnamed sense of loss throughout the story, and I’m told its level of despair is considered passé among Native American readers today.
“Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones: Oddly, I liked this one much better when I read it a few years ago in Jones’s collection. Out of that context, this level of violence and misery feels almost like trolling, like Jones pulled elements from over-the-top TV shows and is laughing at what white people will believe if written by someone with the right skin color. Of course, people in prison often do have over-the-top terrible lives, and it is well-written. But I was unsatisfied by the unanswered questions, particularly around the protagonist’s backstory (at first I assumed he ran away due to poverty or abuse at home, but by the end it appears not?). Of all Jones’s stories, this is definitely a choice.
Final 6 reviews in the comments due to length restrictions!
December 31, 2015
Writers who were new to me who I discovered through a love of their story in this collection: Edna Ferber, Stanley Elkin, Charles Baxter, Flannery O' Connor, Donald Barthelme, Mona Simpson
Writers whose stuff I'd read a little of but thought of as blah but may reconsider after enjoying their stories:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin
Writers I'd read little to none of that remained blah:
Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Lauren Groff
Writers whose heartbreaking story I'd already read that I read again because I must hate myself or something:
George Saunders' The Semplica-Girl Diaries
Writers whose story I described for years as 'About some weird Scottish religion or something and one of the sisters goes nuts because she doesn't have her period and the blood drives her insane and so she has to marry her sister's boyfriend then everyone starts dying or something', because I was given it to read at school and did not understand the point of it to such an extent that I thought 'If this teacher has read loads of short stories and this is the best he can come up with, I don't think literature is for me':
Why that would be Alice Munro's Friend of my Youth. (I didn't quite have such a violent reaction to it, now that I am no longer 15, and I do want to like Alice Munro and I have her Courtship, Friendship etc. TBR soon so I can watch the film with Kristen Wiig in it)
So, what a great filtering/ re-examination exercise this book was! And for what more could I have asked? There's no way I would have liked every story, but there's also a slim chance I would have discovered these new authors or re-evaluated those I had previously dismissed. So important to stay open, right? There's as much chance as there isn't that the first book you read by an author is representative of their whole oeuvre- who has time to plough through every book by all of them? Do you wonder some times how many books of great importance to you that you've lost?
Surely most if not all of these stories are available online, but there's something about a digital list that doesn't get given due attention. 4* experience, 3* content overall, 5* stories abound, though. Worlds and worlds!
Writers whose stuff I'd read a little of but thought of as blah but may reconsider after enjoying their stories:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin
Writers I'd read little to none of that remained blah:
Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Lauren Groff
Writers whose heartbreaking story I'd already read that I read again because I must hate myself or something:
George Saunders' The Semplica-Girl Diaries
Writers whose story I described for years as 'About some weird Scottish religion or something and one of the sisters goes nuts because she doesn't have her period and the blood drives her insane and so she has to marry her sister's boyfriend then everyone starts dying or something', because I was given it to read at school and did not understand the point of it to such an extent that I thought 'If this teacher has read loads of short stories and this is the best he can come up with, I don't think literature is for me':
Why that would be Alice Munro's Friend of my Youth. (I didn't quite have such a violent reaction to it, now that I am no longer 15, and I do want to like Alice Munro and I have her Courtship, Friendship etc. TBR soon so I can watch the film with Kristen Wiig in it)
So, what a great filtering/ re-examination exercise this book was! And for what more could I have asked? There's no way I would have liked every story, but there's also a slim chance I would have discovered these new authors or re-evaluated those I had previously dismissed. So important to stay open, right? There's as much chance as there isn't that the first book you read by an author is representative of their whole oeuvre- who has time to plough through every book by all of them? Do you wonder some times how many books of great importance to you that you've lost?
Surely most if not all of these stories are available online, but there's something about a digital list that doesn't get given due attention. 4* experience, 3* content overall, 5* stories abound, though. Worlds and worlds!
January 9, 2017
It took concerted effort to finish this book, but it became increasingly worth the work. The first half was represented by worthy writers, but I felt the stories chosen weren't among their best. As I moved into more recent decades, though, and especially to the recent past, the stories got better and better. The best part is that I got to read work by writers I hadn't read before, including Lauren Groff, Nathan Englander, and Julie Otsuka. This is one of the things I love about short stories: they introduce me to writers new to me. Recommended.
January 4, 2019
This should be five stars in terms of how fascinating this book is as an insight to American writing and culture over a century. I loved reading the Ferber story and was interested in the Sherwood Anderson (though I didn't like it, ultimately, for its valorising of male violence as a kind of reaching for the stars - over the dead bodies of women) and even the Ring Lardner was intriguing. The Fitzgerald story held up brilliantly; the Hemingway was good. But I ended up giving this four stars for a couple of reasons: the mid-century male writers did not hold up well, at least in the work chosen for this volume. The women did well - O'Connor, Munro (Canadian of course but anyway) etc though not too sure about the Oates tbh.
I was surprised by how much I disliked the Faulkner story - first time I've read Faulkner (edit: I tell a lie - of course I've read A Rose for Emily so...of course I'll try him again). But I didn't believe the wooden singlemindedness of his child narrator and the fact his entire family could go to hell all around him and all he cared about was his damn nickels - that's not a child, that's a sociopath. The framing felt coy and sentimental trying to sound tough. I am grateful for this story though because it clarified something for me that is far too common in literary writing which is this: it's really effing easy to achieve dramatic irony in your story when your narrator is a child. Too easy and it's a device used far too often. Of course the reader knows more than the child narrator and sees things the narrator doesn't. Shooting fish in a barrel. But Faulkner has gone too far here and made his narrator unbelievably obtuse, even for a child and I felt this story was manipulative and didn't buy it.
I took a strong dislike to the Updike story selected, not crazy about the Roth story though it was kind of okay, the Cheever was ...okay. I didn't like the Carver story selected either though I do like Carver - just not that one. I didn't like the Ford story selected either - these portrayals of American masculinity are well-written (not always sure how insightful they are) but it's so repellent, the sodden drunken self-pity over the wife's infidelity and so on.
I think Ford is well aware of how disgusting shooting down the exquisite snow geese is but I have no idea what he's really saying about it and it's so painful to read and by that point I'd already read Updike and his character shooting pigeons and their death giving him a religious epiphany (UGH)... You could argue that's the point though I'm not sure that the kind of people who'd read a Ford story really need to be shown that. Maybe. It then surprised me how much I liked Robert Stone's story about an alcoholic war vet with PTSD who may also be overfond of his rifle.
I LOVED the James Baldwin story though and many of the women were excellent - the Katherine Anne Porter was a find - will definitely seek out more of her work. I liked the Charles Baxter and Jamaica Kincaid but not the Diaz. The Wolff was excellent, as were the Englander and Groff stories.
But here's the real reason I couldn't give this book five stars: in the editorial intro to the final stories the editor says she'd like to read 'more genre-bending and experimental stories'. WTF? This is a solidly realist collection that in its final section doesn't even include a story by Kelly Link??? Are you for real? There's an okaaayish story by George Saunders and that's about it. And you couldn't find room for Kelly Link?? Or Ken Liu? Or Ted Chiang? Or Karen Joy Fowler? Or OR OR any of the literally dozens of great spec fic and genre-bending writers we are now blessed with? I hope even George Saunders is sick of his status as the token spec fic writer accepted by the literary establishment.
There is an insane lack of brilliant spec fic and horror stories in this book that are great and defining in the American canon - where is Flowers for Algernon? Or Jackson's The Lottery? Or Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, the definitive story of atomic age fear and melancholy? Or a short story by Stephen King - arguably the form he really shines in. I mean, Barthelme's The School is quite good but Flowers for Algernon is way better, come on, and is still relevant and becoming more so all the time. Or Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Even Oates' famous horror story Where are you going, where have you been? is much better than the one of hers chosen here. Or Robert Olen Butler's funny and moving fables such as Dead Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot. So much more interesting and very much part of mainstream literature.
The book does end well but there are many better genre-bending or experimental stories that could have been included if the editor was serious about her comment - makes you wonder what she's been reading. Anyway, the book is definitely fascinating and educational and well worth reading.
I was surprised by how much I disliked the Faulkner story - first time I've read Faulkner (edit: I tell a lie - of course I've read A Rose for Emily so...of course I'll try him again). But I didn't believe the wooden singlemindedness of his child narrator and the fact his entire family could go to hell all around him and all he cared about was his damn nickels - that's not a child, that's a sociopath. The framing felt coy and sentimental trying to sound tough. I am grateful for this story though because it clarified something for me that is far too common in literary writing which is this: it's really effing easy to achieve dramatic irony in your story when your narrator is a child. Too easy and it's a device used far too often. Of course the reader knows more than the child narrator and sees things the narrator doesn't. Shooting fish in a barrel. But Faulkner has gone too far here and made his narrator unbelievably obtuse, even for a child and I felt this story was manipulative and didn't buy it.
I took a strong dislike to the Updike story selected, not crazy about the Roth story though it was kind of okay, the Cheever was ...okay. I didn't like the Carver story selected either though I do like Carver - just not that one. I didn't like the Ford story selected either - these portrayals of American masculinity are well-written (not always sure how insightful they are) but it's so repellent, the sodden drunken self-pity over the wife's infidelity and so on.
I think Ford is well aware of how disgusting shooting down the exquisite snow geese is but I have no idea what he's really saying about it and it's so painful to read and by that point I'd already read Updike and his character shooting pigeons and their death giving him a religious epiphany (UGH)... You could argue that's the point though I'm not sure that the kind of people who'd read a Ford story really need to be shown that. Maybe. It then surprised me how much I liked Robert Stone's story about an alcoholic war vet with PTSD who may also be overfond of his rifle.
I LOVED the James Baldwin story though and many of the women were excellent - the Katherine Anne Porter was a find - will definitely seek out more of her work. I liked the Charles Baxter and Jamaica Kincaid but not the Diaz. The Wolff was excellent, as were the Englander and Groff stories.
But here's the real reason I couldn't give this book five stars: in the editorial intro to the final stories the editor says she'd like to read 'more genre-bending and experimental stories'. WTF? This is a solidly realist collection that in its final section doesn't even include a story by Kelly Link??? Are you for real? There's an okaaayish story by George Saunders and that's about it. And you couldn't find room for Kelly Link?? Or Ken Liu? Or Ted Chiang? Or Karen Joy Fowler? Or OR OR any of the literally dozens of great spec fic and genre-bending writers we are now blessed with? I hope even George Saunders is sick of his status as the token spec fic writer accepted by the literary establishment.
There is an insane lack of brilliant spec fic and horror stories in this book that are great and defining in the American canon - where is Flowers for Algernon? Or Jackson's The Lottery? Or Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, the definitive story of atomic age fear and melancholy? Or a short story by Stephen King - arguably the form he really shines in. I mean, Barthelme's The School is quite good but Flowers for Algernon is way better, come on, and is still relevant and becoming more so all the time. Or Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Even Oates' famous horror story Where are you going, where have you been? is much better than the one of hers chosen here. Or Robert Olen Butler's funny and moving fables such as Dead Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot. So much more interesting and very much part of mainstream literature.
The book does end well but there are many better genre-bending or experimental stories that could have been included if the editor was serious about her comment - makes you wonder what she's been reading. Anyway, the book is definitely fascinating and educational and well worth reading.
February 1, 2025
As with most short story collections, the quality of the work this lengthy volume varies, but what made this one special for me was its breadth. There are 40 stories here, spanning 100 years, and featured among them are works by more than a few literary giants, some of whom I hadn’t read, or whose work I’d only minimally encountered.
The earliest (1915-1940) and last (2000-2015) sections of this collection were its strongest. My overall favorites were stories by Edna Ferber, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Juniot Díaz, Sherman Alexie, Tobias Wolff, Julie Otsuka, and George Saunders. The best of these I still think about, even months after reading them.
The earliest (1915-1940) and last (2000-2015) sections of this collection were its strongest. My overall favorites were stories by Edna Ferber, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Juniot Díaz, Sherman Alexie, Tobias Wolff, Julie Otsuka, and George Saunders. The best of these I still think about, even months after reading them.
January 23, 2016
As expected, reading this book was like a crash course in the American short story over the last one hundred years. I’m sure it’s not exhaustive, I’m sure there are glaring omissions but for someone who has read so few of these authors, this was a gem!
There are the big names of the early and mid-twentieth century: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and those of the latter period; Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates. There were authors who I always associate with the short story like Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Edward P. Jones and then several I had never heard of- my TBR list grew exponentially as I discovered another gem hidden in the pages; Nancy Hale’s ‘Those that are broken’, Mona Simpson’s ‘Lawns’.
Many of the writers have catalogs of novels behind them while some have only just released their first full length book in the past year’, Mary Gaitskill and Akhil Sharma for example, while Lauren Groff’s story seems to have been chosen right before the success of ‘Fates and Furies’. Jhumpa Lahiri’s was the only one I’d already read –one of my favorites in ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ and I got my first introduction to authors like Sherman Alexie and Katherine Anne Porter which was a thrill.
I loved the small introductions to each author that prefaced their story as well as the introductions to each decade that outlined the history of the anthology itself, the enormous amounts of reading the editors have to do before releasing the final version and the insights into why what was being written was written at that particular time.
The introductions helped illustrate that not only is this is a crash course in American Literature but one in American history and culture as well, it’s changing face and concerns over the decades. I had to wonder if it was a struggle to find women authors for the early decades and it was interesting to note even now, how much more widely read the male authors from the early years are than the women, how it is harder to find the women in my local library system. Out of the forty stories, sixteen are written by women but this probably reflects what was published in the individual anthologies themselves, as does the proportion of non-white authors. It is the years from 1990 in which we begin to really see a diversity in voices and a greater proportion of women joining the ranks.
I wouldn’t want this to take away from the quality and breadth of the writing however. The full gamut of topics is covered, family, religion, war, immigration, violence, sense of place, money, childhood, crime, it’s all there although there is a line I loved in the introduction that I believe Lorrie Morre is quoting herself; ‘A short story is about love.’ Upon reading that, it’s at the back of your mind as you read each story and you quickly realize that this is true, whether fifty percent of the time that love is screwed up and twisted and denigrated, love is still the motivation or the undercurrent of each and every story in here; self-love, familial love, love of an object or money, it’s all there.
My least favorite period was the 1970-1980’s when it all starts to get a bit odd with the quirkiness of Donald Barthelme’s ‘School’ and Stanley Elkin’s disturbing picture of heaven and hell in ‘The Conventional Wisdom’ but again, perhaps an accurate picture of the kind of writing that was coming out at that time. My favorites, well I mentioned ‘Lawns’ and ‘Those that are broken’, James Baldwin’s, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ has a fantastic scene at the end intertwining suffering, family and music, I liked the minimalist styles of Raymond Carver and Julie Otsuka, Benjamin Percy’s ‘Refresh, Refresh’ brought tears and I look forward to reading Akhil Sharma’s ‘Family Life’ after really enjoying his ‘If you sing like that for me’.
This was just a fantastic reading experience and an introduction to and reminder of so many wonderful writers that it was like eating a good box of chocolates; not knowing what you will get each time you open the box but finding that even those that were not quite to your liking were still satisfying on some level, while others would merit a second bite! (sorry- any excuse to get chocolate into a review!)
There are the big names of the early and mid-twentieth century: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and those of the latter period; Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates. There were authors who I always associate with the short story like Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Edward P. Jones and then several I had never heard of- my TBR list grew exponentially as I discovered another gem hidden in the pages; Nancy Hale’s ‘Those that are broken’, Mona Simpson’s ‘Lawns’.
Many of the writers have catalogs of novels behind them while some have only just released their first full length book in the past year’, Mary Gaitskill and Akhil Sharma for example, while Lauren Groff’s story seems to have been chosen right before the success of ‘Fates and Furies’. Jhumpa Lahiri’s was the only one I’d already read –one of my favorites in ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ and I got my first introduction to authors like Sherman Alexie and Katherine Anne Porter which was a thrill.
I loved the small introductions to each author that prefaced their story as well as the introductions to each decade that outlined the history of the anthology itself, the enormous amounts of reading the editors have to do before releasing the final version and the insights into why what was being written was written at that particular time.
The introductions helped illustrate that not only is this is a crash course in American Literature but one in American history and culture as well, it’s changing face and concerns over the decades. I had to wonder if it was a struggle to find women authors for the early decades and it was interesting to note even now, how much more widely read the male authors from the early years are than the women, how it is harder to find the women in my local library system. Out of the forty stories, sixteen are written by women but this probably reflects what was published in the individual anthologies themselves, as does the proportion of non-white authors. It is the years from 1990 in which we begin to really see a diversity in voices and a greater proportion of women joining the ranks.
I wouldn’t want this to take away from the quality and breadth of the writing however. The full gamut of topics is covered, family, religion, war, immigration, violence, sense of place, money, childhood, crime, it’s all there although there is a line I loved in the introduction that I believe Lorrie Morre is quoting herself; ‘A short story is about love.’ Upon reading that, it’s at the back of your mind as you read each story and you quickly realize that this is true, whether fifty percent of the time that love is screwed up and twisted and denigrated, love is still the motivation or the undercurrent of each and every story in here; self-love, familial love, love of an object or money, it’s all there.
My least favorite period was the 1970-1980’s when it all starts to get a bit odd with the quirkiness of Donald Barthelme’s ‘School’ and Stanley Elkin’s disturbing picture of heaven and hell in ‘The Conventional Wisdom’ but again, perhaps an accurate picture of the kind of writing that was coming out at that time. My favorites, well I mentioned ‘Lawns’ and ‘Those that are broken’, James Baldwin’s, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ has a fantastic scene at the end intertwining suffering, family and music, I liked the minimalist styles of Raymond Carver and Julie Otsuka, Benjamin Percy’s ‘Refresh, Refresh’ brought tears and I look forward to reading Akhil Sharma’s ‘Family Life’ after really enjoying his ‘If you sing like that for me’.
This was just a fantastic reading experience and an introduction to and reminder of so many wonderful writers that it was like eating a good box of chocolates; not knowing what you will get each time you open the box but finding that even those that were not quite to your liking were still satisfying on some level, while others would merit a second bite! (sorry- any excuse to get chocolate into a review!)
April 2, 2019
I have not read all of the stories in this book, and probably will not get to all of them, but this collection is well-done and enjoyable. Moore and Pitlor have done a good job in selecting from the 2,000 stories that were previously published in the "Best of" series. The book has mini introductions to the authors before each story, which were also nicely written and illuminating.
My only quibble with the book is that John Cheever's "The Swimmer" should have be chosen over "The Enormous Radio," as it represents one of the finest stories written in the past century. Nonetheless, as a way of introducing readers to the story, or providing examples of deep craft to regular readers of stories, this is a book to have.
My only quibble with the book is that John Cheever's "The Swimmer" should have be chosen over "The Enormous Radio," as it represents one of the finest stories written in the past century. Nonetheless, as a way of introducing readers to the story, or providing examples of deep craft to regular readers of stories, this is a book to have.
February 6, 2017
It was interesting to see history unfold within this collection. The best of anything is always subjective. Most of the stories I liked, a few I didn't care for. There seemed to be a theme or pattern to the stories grouped by years - as with most anthologies and literary journals. A few of my favorites; Lawns, What You Pawn I Will Redeem, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and Diem Perdidi.
July 6, 2017
Look I know this took me two months to finish but I have a very good reason for that, alright? These stories are all so dense, each one like a rich, delicate cheesecake. You don't just eat 40 cheesecakes in a week, do you? No, you eat one whole cheesecake every day, like an average American. So that is what I did, I read a story each day or every other day, giving these stories time to sink in, enjoying each delicious sentence as I wandered through the history of one of America's finest publications.
A Goodreads review could not possibly cover the scope of these stories so I will just highlight the very best of the best. To start from the beginning, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" is a great story about a man's love for his daughter and the alcoholism that prevents their being together. It's so good that it makes me want to revisit Fitzgerald's other works even after attempting to read that boring Gatsby book (Come at me, nerds). John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio" is a strange tale of domestic life with a supernatural twist, while James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" tells the story of a drug-addicted jazz pianist from his brother's perspective, and describes music more beautifully than any writing I've ever seen.
As this tome moved into authors of more recent years, I worked my way through absurd and poignant stories like Mona Simpson's "Lawns", about a girl trying to break off a physical relationship with her father as she makes her way through college. There were also more diverse stories of people affected by colonialism and immigration, such as in Jamaica Kincaid's "Xuela" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent." There isn't much sci-fi or satire to speak of other than George Saunders' "The Semplica-Girls Diaries" which is an incredible story that makes you identify with people from two sides of a point of contention. But probably the best story of all, in my estimation, is "What You Pawn I will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie. No story in this volume is written more clearly, more effectively, or more humorously while relating very serious problems plaguing native American people. If you read only one story from the collection, that's the one to read.
There were some stories I skipped as you can only eat so many flavors of cheesecake before you find one that doesn't sit well, but even if it's not a perfect collection, it is still a great collection for its sheer coverage and scope. Reading from cover to cover provides a fascinating look at the history of the American short story, showing how our perspectives, ideals, and stories have changed so dramatically, while still remaining so essentially American. Now if you'll excuse me, I've eaten quite a bit of cheesecake and may need to regurgitate some of it onto my own paper. For isn't that what writing is at its most basic? Taking the ideas of others, digesting them, and creating your own projects from their inspiration? I don't know. The one thing I do know is that I could really go for some cheesecake.
A Goodreads review could not possibly cover the scope of these stories so I will just highlight the very best of the best. To start from the beginning, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" is a great story about a man's love for his daughter and the alcoholism that prevents their being together. It's so good that it makes me want to revisit Fitzgerald's other works even after attempting to read that boring Gatsby book (Come at me, nerds). John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio" is a strange tale of domestic life with a supernatural twist, while James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" tells the story of a drug-addicted jazz pianist from his brother's perspective, and describes music more beautifully than any writing I've ever seen.
As this tome moved into authors of more recent years, I worked my way through absurd and poignant stories like Mona Simpson's "Lawns", about a girl trying to break off a physical relationship with her father as she makes her way through college. There were also more diverse stories of people affected by colonialism and immigration, such as in Jamaica Kincaid's "Xuela" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent." There isn't much sci-fi or satire to speak of other than George Saunders' "The Semplica-Girls Diaries" which is an incredible story that makes you identify with people from two sides of a point of contention. But probably the best story of all, in my estimation, is "What You Pawn I will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie. No story in this volume is written more clearly, more effectively, or more humorously while relating very serious problems plaguing native American people. If you read only one story from the collection, that's the one to read.
There were some stories I skipped as you can only eat so many flavors of cheesecake before you find one that doesn't sit well, but even if it's not a perfect collection, it is still a great collection for its sheer coverage and scope. Reading from cover to cover provides a fascinating look at the history of the American short story, showing how our perspectives, ideals, and stories have changed so dramatically, while still remaining so essentially American. Now if you'll excuse me, I've eaten quite a bit of cheesecake and may need to regurgitate some of it onto my own paper. For isn't that what writing is at its most basic? Taking the ideas of others, digesting them, and creating your own projects from their inspiration? I don't know. The one thing I do know is that I could really go for some cheesecake.
December 18, 2020
A collection of Forty Short Stories written by both familiar and lesser known writers. This collection ranges from the years from 1915 through 2015. Multiple genres, social issues, and human relations are addressed in this collection. A worthy read.
January 5, 2021
I’ve read some of these stories previously but that is to expected in a large anthology.
The first five selections I had read ranging from Ferber, Anderson, and Ring Lardner to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. All good stories but none exemplary
The first I had not read was called “ The Cracked Looking Glass” by Katherine Anne Porter. I liked this story. Dennis is an elderly man, a septuagenarian who, in his early fifties, already a widower, had married a woman thirty years his junior. His wife, Rosaleen, regrets her youthful decision marrying a man who now is all but an invalid. She does not realize the people in their neighborhood think she is a woman doing things she shouldn’t with the young men who help around the farm or call selling the latest products. In fact, she has done nothing wrong, and complain as she might, she lives her husband
Next is William Faulkner’s “That Will Be Fine” which is splendid and humorous. A young boy is excited for a family gathering at Christmas. He is to see his Uncle Rodney who has been known to favor him with a dime for helping him with his work. We as a reader understand, as does the boys family, know that Rodney is a small time thief and seducer of married women. In this story Rodney might have trouble he can’t evade while the boy steadfastly expects his coins.
Nancy Hale’s “ Those Are As Brothers “ is a wonderful story. We follow a group of individuals in a small Connecticut town in the years around 1940. A German lady is a governess for a woman who escaped a bad marriage. There is a man who tries to court the woman but she realizes the fear in her blood from her first husband will never dissipate. A man named Mr. Loeb, a refugee from a concentration camp is the gardener next door. He too has permanent fear in his blood. A feeling of kindness permeates everyone
Eudora Welty’s “ The Whole World Knows” is a great story. Ran, Jinny, Maideen, and Dugan. With character names like this we know the geography of the story immediately. Ran and Dugan, two boys who grew up together, best friends, now work in adjoining teller cages at the bank. Jinny was their third, the girl next door growing up. Now married Ran has left Jinny, his wife now after discovering her affair with Dugan. Maideen is a sweet, talkative, eighteen year old now spending time with Ran. Evocative language. Well done.
“ The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever : This story is another of the more heavily anthologized. Still, reading it again it’s easy to see why. A couple in a large apartment building purchases a radio that allows them to listen into the going’s on at the many apartments in their building. First it’s illicitly understanding but soon disconcerting. Eventually the wife needs to be assured that they don’t seem like what they have heard to outsiders. The husband agrees but that might not be true.
Tillie Olsen is an author I had never heard of. That in itself surprised me. Her story “ I Stand Here Ironing “ is very good. A woman receives a call about her oldest daughter, now a young woman, and her troubles at school. The Mother remembers the child’s growing up and her many disadvantages as the oldest of a single mother.
James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is one of his more famous pieces. He writes in a wonderfully descriptive way. I have read and enjoyed much of Baldwins writing. This piece, the first half, describing his troubled relationship with his brother was very moving. The latter stages of the story cantering on a wordy, sort of prose poetry about Sonny’s battle with heroin and, later, describing a musical performance in a small club in great detail was a bit much for me. But, and this is crucial, I’m not the audience. I can recognize it’s beauty without feeling it myself
Philip Roth’s “ The Conversion of the Jews” is. Fantastic story from his debut collection. I’ve read it several times.
“ Everything That Rises Must Converge “ from Flannery O’Connor is another frequent story. A young man graduated from college but frustratingly for himself still lives at home. His Mother and her old ways embarrass him greatly. This culminates in a bus ride on the now integrated bus system that he first enjoys as her comeuppance but then realizes things may have gone too far.
“ Pigeon Feathers’ by John Updike follows an adolescent boy whose family has moved from rural Olinger to a much smaller home in Firetown. In looking through the books on the shelf he notices a work of HG Wells and, in perusing it, he sees Wells writing a criticism of the truth of Jesus and the Bible. This leads to a major upset for David who has always believed the Bible as whole cloth. Now it seems as if all those that had taught him were part of an in group that knew it was all a joke. Later, looking at the perfection of a dead pigeon he had shot in the barn he realized he had to still believe fully in God
“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver is one of the great story writers best. In it we follow a young couple as they meet at college, become teachers, get married and have children. This though, is a blip. The story is something that happened two years ago. At a party convinced his wife had done something untoward with another man he punched her in the face. Now tonight the subject comes up and both push and pull to talk or not talk about it. When the truth is revealed he does not know “ what a man should do.”
Joyce Carol Oates wrote “ By the River “ which is a typical Oates work. In it a young woman of 22 is returning to her small town, her husband and young child. She had run away to the city months before and lived with a much older man who she felt needed her. Her father picks her up at the station but we learn he has felt more shame than she expected over his actions
“ The School” by Donald Barthelme is an odd story. A very original writer from the sixties and seventies a schoolteacher recounts the season of death which seems to encircle his class and their families
“ The Conventional Wisdom “ by Stanley Elkin was a very odd selection. A man runs a couple of liquor stores and dies in a robbery. He is next greeted by St. Peter at the gate and is enthralled by his views of heaven. Yet he next finds himself in hell. Descriptions of hell abound but so also does his anger grow at being there
Grace Paley is a well regarded mid century writer. Her selection here, titled “ Friends,” does not really reverberate for me. Four older women visit another
member of their group who is dying of cancer.
“ Harmony of the World “ by Charles Baxter was a long, and overlong story that follows a young man who is a big fish in his small pond growing up. The star pianist of his town he does well when he goes to college but is no longer exceptional. When he goes to graduate school he realizes every small town has someone like him. His life becomes not what he expected when he thought out his life
“ Lawns” by Mona Simpson which I had read previously is a sneak attack of a story. Devastating when it happens and you realize what horror this college girl has dealt with in her life when her Fatger comes to visit her at college
Richard Ford’s “ Communist “ was not the Ford story I would anthologize as, while interesting, it is not his best while this reread of Robert Stone’s “ Helping” improved my assessment of both the story and his writing.
David Wong Louie’s “ Displacement “ was not a favoured story. Follows a married Chinese couple, refugees after World War Two living in America.
“Friend of My Youth “ by Alice Munro is a strong entry by the Nobel Prize Winner. A woman recounted to a story told to her by her Mother. When her Mom had been a young woman she had taken a job as a schoolteacher in a village. This led to her living with and learning the story of two sisters who were part of the Scottish sect known as Cameronians
Mary Gaitskill wrote “ The Girl on the Plane “ and it is wonderful. I’ve read just a couple pieces of hers and she has a marvellous turn of a phrase. In this story a man on a flight finds himself both attracted to and exasperated by a woman in the middle seat next to him. She makes him think of a woman he knew in his hometown, a woman he correctly feels guilt over his actions with. Some of her phrasing of how s certain kind of man thinks about women are written in such a way that one wonders at her ability to get inside the male mind
“Xuela “ by Jamaica Kincaid is a story like I have found much of her work I’ve read. More interesting for its style than its content. In this a young girl whose Mother dies at childbirth is taken by her Father to be raised by his laundress. At the age of seven, after he has remarried he reclaims her
“If You Sing Like That For Me “ by Akril Sharma follows a young Indian woman who has been married for seven months. Petrified and scared at first she feels marriage is a mistake, sex is a horrible experience. Yet as the story begins she tells us that today is the day she fell out of live with her husband. The story tells us how she grew to that live and had it ripped away
“ Fiesta” is one of Junot Diaz earlier stories. Featuring his Yunior character as a young boy he tells of his family going to a Puerto Rican house party. The largest dilemma in the story is his tendency to get sick each time he rides in his Fathers new VE van
“ The Third and Final Continent “ by Jhumpa Lahiri is a wonderful story that traces an Indian immigrant as he moves from East to West. At thirty migrating to Europe and then further to America to work in the library at MIT. He returns to India to marry a woman, and we see their relationship develop as they move to America. Very sweet
ZZ Packer wrote “ Brownies” a story about a troop of Atlanta based African American Brownies who come into conflict with another group of whites girls. It’s mostly an imagined conflict, which becomes spot when it’s discovered the girls are mentally challenged. Kind of an abrasive story
Sherman Alexie writes “ What You Pawn I Will Redeem” an oft anthologized story about a young man trying to regain his Grandmothers stolen headdress regalia from the pawn shop where he finds it.
Edward P Jones writes “ Old Boys, Old Girls” a long story that follows a man thru a seven year prison sentence and then his first months out of prison. Brutal, sad, effective
Tobias Wolff wrote “ Awaiting Orders “ about a closeted gay soldier ( in the time when they had to be ) who helps out a woman in desperate straits with her caring of the son of a recently shipped out soldier. One he had found himself attracted to
“Refresh, Refresh “ by Benjamin Percy I had read before. Strong story about a Pacific Northwest town where many men are away in a Guard mission in Iraq
It becomes apparent that when one reads as many stories as I do that in a long term anthology like this that many stories will be repeated for me.
Nathan Englander’s “ What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” and George Saunders “ The Semplica Girl Diaries “ are both stories I’ve read several times. Both exceptional for vastly different reasons.
Julie Otsaka wrote “ Diem Perdidi “ in which she takes a repetitive Beginning line of “ She Remembers “ or, conversely, “ She Doesn’t Remember “ to tell the reader about her Mother’s descent into dementia. A sad but ingenious story.
“ At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners “ by Lauren Groff tells the life story of a young man raised in the swamps of Florida by his Father, a heptologist and his Mother in the forties and fifties. His Mother leaves, he is a math genius growing up but never learns to let himself feel close. An odd story that never quite gets where it wants to be.
The first five selections I had read ranging from Ferber, Anderson, and Ring Lardner to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. All good stories but none exemplary
The first I had not read was called “ The Cracked Looking Glass” by Katherine Anne Porter. I liked this story. Dennis is an elderly man, a septuagenarian who, in his early fifties, already a widower, had married a woman thirty years his junior. His wife, Rosaleen, regrets her youthful decision marrying a man who now is all but an invalid. She does not realize the people in their neighborhood think she is a woman doing things she shouldn’t with the young men who help around the farm or call selling the latest products. In fact, she has done nothing wrong, and complain as she might, she lives her husband
Next is William Faulkner’s “That Will Be Fine” which is splendid and humorous. A young boy is excited for a family gathering at Christmas. He is to see his Uncle Rodney who has been known to favor him with a dime for helping him with his work. We as a reader understand, as does the boys family, know that Rodney is a small time thief and seducer of married women. In this story Rodney might have trouble he can’t evade while the boy steadfastly expects his coins.
Nancy Hale’s “ Those Are As Brothers “ is a wonderful story. We follow a group of individuals in a small Connecticut town in the years around 1940. A German lady is a governess for a woman who escaped a bad marriage. There is a man who tries to court the woman but she realizes the fear in her blood from her first husband will never dissipate. A man named Mr. Loeb, a refugee from a concentration camp is the gardener next door. He too has permanent fear in his blood. A feeling of kindness permeates everyone
Eudora Welty’s “ The Whole World Knows” is a great story. Ran, Jinny, Maideen, and Dugan. With character names like this we know the geography of the story immediately. Ran and Dugan, two boys who grew up together, best friends, now work in adjoining teller cages at the bank. Jinny was their third, the girl next door growing up. Now married Ran has left Jinny, his wife now after discovering her affair with Dugan. Maideen is a sweet, talkative, eighteen year old now spending time with Ran. Evocative language. Well done.
“ The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever : This story is another of the more heavily anthologized. Still, reading it again it’s easy to see why. A couple in a large apartment building purchases a radio that allows them to listen into the going’s on at the many apartments in their building. First it’s illicitly understanding but soon disconcerting. Eventually the wife needs to be assured that they don’t seem like what they have heard to outsiders. The husband agrees but that might not be true.
Tillie Olsen is an author I had never heard of. That in itself surprised me. Her story “ I Stand Here Ironing “ is very good. A woman receives a call about her oldest daughter, now a young woman, and her troubles at school. The Mother remembers the child’s growing up and her many disadvantages as the oldest of a single mother.
James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is one of his more famous pieces. He writes in a wonderfully descriptive way. I have read and enjoyed much of Baldwins writing. This piece, the first half, describing his troubled relationship with his brother was very moving. The latter stages of the story cantering on a wordy, sort of prose poetry about Sonny’s battle with heroin and, later, describing a musical performance in a small club in great detail was a bit much for me. But, and this is crucial, I’m not the audience. I can recognize it’s beauty without feeling it myself
Philip Roth’s “ The Conversion of the Jews” is. Fantastic story from his debut collection. I’ve read it several times.
“ Everything That Rises Must Converge “ from Flannery O’Connor is another frequent story. A young man graduated from college but frustratingly for himself still lives at home. His Mother and her old ways embarrass him greatly. This culminates in a bus ride on the now integrated bus system that he first enjoys as her comeuppance but then realizes things may have gone too far.
“ Pigeon Feathers’ by John Updike follows an adolescent boy whose family has moved from rural Olinger to a much smaller home in Firetown. In looking through the books on the shelf he notices a work of HG Wells and, in perusing it, he sees Wells writing a criticism of the truth of Jesus and the Bible. This leads to a major upset for David who has always believed the Bible as whole cloth. Now it seems as if all those that had taught him were part of an in group that knew it was all a joke. Later, looking at the perfection of a dead pigeon he had shot in the barn he realized he had to still believe fully in God
“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver is one of the great story writers best. In it we follow a young couple as they meet at college, become teachers, get married and have children. This though, is a blip. The story is something that happened two years ago. At a party convinced his wife had done something untoward with another man he punched her in the face. Now tonight the subject comes up and both push and pull to talk or not talk about it. When the truth is revealed he does not know “ what a man should do.”
Joyce Carol Oates wrote “ By the River “ which is a typical Oates work. In it a young woman of 22 is returning to her small town, her husband and young child. She had run away to the city months before and lived with a much older man who she felt needed her. Her father picks her up at the station but we learn he has felt more shame than she expected over his actions
“ The School” by Donald Barthelme is an odd story. A very original writer from the sixties and seventies a schoolteacher recounts the season of death which seems to encircle his class and their families
“ The Conventional Wisdom “ by Stanley Elkin was a very odd selection. A man runs a couple of liquor stores and dies in a robbery. He is next greeted by St. Peter at the gate and is enthralled by his views of heaven. Yet he next finds himself in hell. Descriptions of hell abound but so also does his anger grow at being there
Grace Paley is a well regarded mid century writer. Her selection here, titled “ Friends,” does not really reverberate for me. Four older women visit another
member of their group who is dying of cancer.
“ Harmony of the World “ by Charles Baxter was a long, and overlong story that follows a young man who is a big fish in his small pond growing up. The star pianist of his town he does well when he goes to college but is no longer exceptional. When he goes to graduate school he realizes every small town has someone like him. His life becomes not what he expected when he thought out his life
“ Lawns” by Mona Simpson which I had read previously is a sneak attack of a story. Devastating when it happens and you realize what horror this college girl has dealt with in her life when her Fatger comes to visit her at college
Richard Ford’s “ Communist “ was not the Ford story I would anthologize as, while interesting, it is not his best while this reread of Robert Stone’s “ Helping” improved my assessment of both the story and his writing.
David Wong Louie’s “ Displacement “ was not a favoured story. Follows a married Chinese couple, refugees after World War Two living in America.
“Friend of My Youth “ by Alice Munro is a strong entry by the Nobel Prize Winner. A woman recounted to a story told to her by her Mother. When her Mom had been a young woman she had taken a job as a schoolteacher in a village. This led to her living with and learning the story of two sisters who were part of the Scottish sect known as Cameronians
Mary Gaitskill wrote “ The Girl on the Plane “ and it is wonderful. I’ve read just a couple pieces of hers and she has a marvellous turn of a phrase. In this story a man on a flight finds himself both attracted to and exasperated by a woman in the middle seat next to him. She makes him think of a woman he knew in his hometown, a woman he correctly feels guilt over his actions with. Some of her phrasing of how s certain kind of man thinks about women are written in such a way that one wonders at her ability to get inside the male mind
“Xuela “ by Jamaica Kincaid is a story like I have found much of her work I’ve read. More interesting for its style than its content. In this a young girl whose Mother dies at childbirth is taken by her Father to be raised by his laundress. At the age of seven, after he has remarried he reclaims her
“If You Sing Like That For Me “ by Akril Sharma follows a young Indian woman who has been married for seven months. Petrified and scared at first she feels marriage is a mistake, sex is a horrible experience. Yet as the story begins she tells us that today is the day she fell out of live with her husband. The story tells us how she grew to that live and had it ripped away
“ Fiesta” is one of Junot Diaz earlier stories. Featuring his Yunior character as a young boy he tells of his family going to a Puerto Rican house party. The largest dilemma in the story is his tendency to get sick each time he rides in his Fathers new VE van
“ The Third and Final Continent “ by Jhumpa Lahiri is a wonderful story that traces an Indian immigrant as he moves from East to West. At thirty migrating to Europe and then further to America to work in the library at MIT. He returns to India to marry a woman, and we see their relationship develop as they move to America. Very sweet
ZZ Packer wrote “ Brownies” a story about a troop of Atlanta based African American Brownies who come into conflict with another group of whites girls. It’s mostly an imagined conflict, which becomes spot when it’s discovered the girls are mentally challenged. Kind of an abrasive story
Sherman Alexie writes “ What You Pawn I Will Redeem” an oft anthologized story about a young man trying to regain his Grandmothers stolen headdress regalia from the pawn shop where he finds it.
Edward P Jones writes “ Old Boys, Old Girls” a long story that follows a man thru a seven year prison sentence and then his first months out of prison. Brutal, sad, effective
Tobias Wolff wrote “ Awaiting Orders “ about a closeted gay soldier ( in the time when they had to be ) who helps out a woman in desperate straits with her caring of the son of a recently shipped out soldier. One he had found himself attracted to
“Refresh, Refresh “ by Benjamin Percy I had read before. Strong story about a Pacific Northwest town where many men are away in a Guard mission in Iraq
It becomes apparent that when one reads as many stories as I do that in a long term anthology like this that many stories will be repeated for me.
Nathan Englander’s “ What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” and George Saunders “ The Semplica Girl Diaries “ are both stories I’ve read several times. Both exceptional for vastly different reasons.
Julie Otsaka wrote “ Diem Perdidi “ in which she takes a repetitive Beginning line of “ She Remembers “ or, conversely, “ She Doesn’t Remember “ to tell the reader about her Mother’s descent into dementia. A sad but ingenious story.
“ At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners “ by Lauren Groff tells the life story of a young man raised in the swamps of Florida by his Father, a heptologist and his Mother in the forties and fifties. His Mother leaves, he is a math genius growing up but never learns to let himself feel close. An odd story that never quite gets where it wants to be.
December 2, 2015
Excellent, excellent collection! Not a sleeper in the whole bunch (40 stories and 723 pages).. My head is sore from wagging it back and forth in awe.
This anthology is divided into decades, some decades heavier than others. Earlier decades typically have only three entries while later decades have five or six. Why? I don't have an answer but all are exquisite and my hat is off my wagging head to the editors. Some have criticized guest editor Lorrie Moore because she did not preface each story with WHY it was chosen. Rather, current series editor Heidi Pitlor prefaced each decade with historical background and tracked short story development in that time.
Very much enjoyed rereading some old favorites like:
"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin (1958)
Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" (2004)
Also enjoyed having my socks knocked off by:
Ring Lardner's "Haircut" (1925)
John Updike's "Pigeon Feathers" ((1962)
Joyce Carol Oates', "By the River, (1969)
Mona Simpson's "Lawns" (1986)
Akhil Sharma's "If You Sing Like That For Me" (1996)
Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2012)
Julie Otsuka's "Diem Perdini" (2012).
Sockless,
KB
This anthology is divided into decades, some decades heavier than others. Earlier decades typically have only three entries while later decades have five or six. Why? I don't have an answer but all are exquisite and my hat is off my wagging head to the editors. Some have criticized guest editor Lorrie Moore because she did not preface each story with WHY it was chosen. Rather, current series editor Heidi Pitlor prefaced each decade with historical background and tracked short story development in that time.
Very much enjoyed rereading some old favorites like:
"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin (1958)
Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" (2004)
Also enjoyed having my socks knocked off by:
Ring Lardner's "Haircut" (1925)
John Updike's "Pigeon Feathers" ((1962)
Joyce Carol Oates', "By the River, (1969)
Mona Simpson's "Lawns" (1986)
Akhil Sharma's "If You Sing Like That For Me" (1996)
Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2012)
Julie Otsuka's "Diem Perdini" (2012).
Sockless,
KB
June 28, 2016
Plenty of gems here to merit a five-star review. The century-long tour of the American short story is fascinating and each decade juxtaposed against the others is enlightening. Sadly, few selections were of the "Wait! What??" variety which I dislike but which often come along with short fiction genre.
The covers of this book are too far apart. -Ambrose Bierce
The covers of this book are too far apart. -Ambrose Bierce
April 21, 2024
me, while reading a book of literally the best american short stories: wow, these are really good!
August 31, 2024
This is a 3.75 rounded up to a 4 for Goodreads.
At a certain point in American culture, the short story was the most popular writing form which appeared in several literary journals, magazines, and other publications. This collection of a century (1915-2015) of short stories edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor covers an entire cultural history of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The best thing about anthologies like this is that it introduces and refamiliarizes me with writers. Short stories are fun because reading a writer's longer work can be intimidating but short stories offer little nuggets to get to know these people.
As one could imagine, this book covers the heyday of The Saturday Evening Post, the pulpiness of postwar America, and the days of The New Yorker and The Paris Review. It was so cool to see the way writing styles changed through the years and each time an American writer that I grew up hearing about popped up, I felt a flutter of excitement for what was to come. I highly recommend this for people who are interested in pop culture history and reading the work of literary titans. For example, I love American classics but I haven't read Hemingway, Updike, Carver, Roth, or Gaitskill. It was cool getting to know these writers through this anthology.
As far as the way it's organized, I loved the way each decade or portion would open with background on how the literary world and American society were changing. Watching each section become more diverse in geographical regions with Deep South and rural writers, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and immigration patterns was very interesting.
At a certain point in American culture, the short story was the most popular writing form which appeared in several literary journals, magazines, and other publications. This collection of a century (1915-2015) of short stories edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor covers an entire cultural history of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The best thing about anthologies like this is that it introduces and refamiliarizes me with writers. Short stories are fun because reading a writer's longer work can be intimidating but short stories offer little nuggets to get to know these people.
As one could imagine, this book covers the heyday of The Saturday Evening Post, the pulpiness of postwar America, and the days of The New Yorker and The Paris Review. It was so cool to see the way writing styles changed through the years and each time an American writer that I grew up hearing about popped up, I felt a flutter of excitement for what was to come. I highly recommend this for people who are interested in pop culture history and reading the work of literary titans. For example, I love American classics but I haven't read Hemingway, Updike, Carver, Roth, or Gaitskill. It was cool getting to know these writers through this anthology.
As far as the way it's organized, I loved the way each decade or portion would open with background on how the literary world and American society were changing. Watching each section become more diverse in geographical regions with Deep South and rural writers, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and immigration patterns was very interesting.
December 18, 2015
When I saw that this book was 708 pages of tiny type comprising thirty-nine short stories, I was excited to think I was all set for reading matter for a month or more. The short story is a favorite form of mine, and the only fiction I read, being primarily a reader of nonfiction.
The stories are interspersed with brief bios of the writers, along with extended narratives tracing the history of the "Best Short Stories" series. The stories themselves are divided by decade or half-decade, starting in 1915 and ending in 2015. Favorite writers are here -- Ferber, Faulkner, Hemingway, Welty, Porter, etc. -- along with names I didn't know (Nancy Hale, Julie Otsuka). The bios were helpful, but the historical treatment of the series and its editors became tedious.
The collection overwhelmingly favors recent writers. Only 13 writers are represented from 1915 to 1960, but double that number (26) from 1960 to 2015. For me, that was a shame. I thoroughly enjoy writers from a century to a half century ago, but I find that recent writers create seedy storylines and rely on foul language, supposing they can create an impact where none otherwise would exist. I stopped reading after the 1960-1970 decade (O'Connor, Updike, Carver and Oates). Perhaps because I spend my summers reading in an outdoor oasis, where the sun always shines and a light breeze ripples the pages of my book, I just didn't want to go where the contemporary writers wanted to take me.
The stories are interspersed with brief bios of the writers, along with extended narratives tracing the history of the "Best Short Stories" series. The stories themselves are divided by decade or half-decade, starting in 1915 and ending in 2015. Favorite writers are here -- Ferber, Faulkner, Hemingway, Welty, Porter, etc. -- along with names I didn't know (Nancy Hale, Julie Otsuka). The bios were helpful, but the historical treatment of the series and its editors became tedious.
The collection overwhelmingly favors recent writers. Only 13 writers are represented from 1915 to 1960, but double that number (26) from 1960 to 2015. For me, that was a shame. I thoroughly enjoy writers from a century to a half century ago, but I find that recent writers create seedy storylines and rely on foul language, supposing they can create an impact where none otherwise would exist. I stopped reading after the 1960-1970 decade (O'Connor, Updike, Carver and Oates). Perhaps because I spend my summers reading in an outdoor oasis, where the sun always shines and a light breeze ripples the pages of my book, I just didn't want to go where the contemporary writers wanted to take me.
August 21, 2016
I got off to a slow start with this book, and didn't really start to connect with the stories until I got almost 100 pages in. In high school and college, the curriculum was heavy with dead white guys, and I got my fill then.
I loved how the editors divided up the stories by decade, though, and felt like I got a mini crash course in American history as I moved through the collection.
Some authors I'd read before and loved (or not), and some authors were new discoveries. Stories by women and people of color resonated more deeply with my own interests and experiences. I also was fascinated by stories that were weird or a bit creepy. Here are some of my highlights:
Katherine Anne Porter--"The Cracked Looking Glass"
Nancy Hale--"Those Are as Brothers"
John Cheever--"The Enormous Radio"
Tillie Olsen--"I Stand Here Ironing"
James Baldwin--"Sonny's Blues"
Joyce Carol Oates--"By the River"
Donald Barthelme--"The School"
Grace Paley--"Friends"
Mona Simpson--"Lawns"
Alice Munro-"Friend of My Youth"
Mary Gaitskill--"The Girl on the Plane"
Jamaica Kincaid--"Xuela"
Junot Díaz--"Fiesta, 1980"
Jhumpa Lahiri--"The Third and Final Continent"
Benjamin Percy--"Refresh, Refresh"
Julie Otsuka--"Diem Perdidi"
George Saunders--"The Semplica-Girl Diaries"
Sherman Alexie--"What You Pawn I Will Redeem"
I loved how the editors divided up the stories by decade, though, and felt like I got a mini crash course in American history as I moved through the collection.
Some authors I'd read before and loved (or not), and some authors were new discoveries. Stories by women and people of color resonated more deeply with my own interests and experiences. I also was fascinated by stories that were weird or a bit creepy. Here are some of my highlights:
Katherine Anne Porter--"The Cracked Looking Glass"
Nancy Hale--"Those Are as Brothers"
John Cheever--"The Enormous Radio"
Tillie Olsen--"I Stand Here Ironing"
James Baldwin--"Sonny's Blues"
Joyce Carol Oates--"By the River"
Donald Barthelme--"The School"
Grace Paley--"Friends"
Mona Simpson--"Lawns"
Alice Munro-"Friend of My Youth"
Mary Gaitskill--"The Girl on the Plane"
Jamaica Kincaid--"Xuela"
Junot Díaz--"Fiesta, 1980"
Jhumpa Lahiri--"The Third and Final Continent"
Benjamin Percy--"Refresh, Refresh"
Julie Otsuka--"Diem Perdidi"
George Saunders--"The Semplica-Girl Diaries"
Sherman Alexie--"What You Pawn I Will Redeem"
July 30, 2022
"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." —Edna Ferber, "The Gay Old Dog"
Delightful. I read everything except the introductions (so ponderous! What IS a short story, anyway?), some of the headnotes, and the Hemingway. It's always a pleasure to read Ring Lardner's "Haircut," which seems new even when I know the payoff. Great to see Edna Ferber and Tillie Olsen get the recognition they deserve. I really enjoyed the Nathan Englander story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank." Normally I don't enjoy Lauren Groff, but the story in this collection was vivid.
Content warnings: rape, many uses of the n-word, plus (in the newer stories) the word squaw and multiple uses of retarded
Delightful. I read everything except the introductions (so ponderous! What IS a short story, anyway?), some of the headnotes, and the Hemingway. It's always a pleasure to read Ring Lardner's "Haircut," which seems new even when I know the payoff. Great to see Edna Ferber and Tillie Olsen get the recognition they deserve. I really enjoyed the Nathan Englander story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank." Normally I don't enjoy Lauren Groff, but the story in this collection was vivid.
Content warnings: rape, many uses of the n-word, plus (in the newer stories) the word squaw and multiple uses of retarded
April 16, 2021
100 Years of the Best American Short Stories was a misnomer for this unwieldy tome. I tried to plod through it in the name of intellectual curiosity but couldn't. These were some of the most vapid stories I have ever read, and I love American literature. "The Gay Old Dog" was a surprising favorite. It seems like the editors threw Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" in the anthology as an afterthought. I gave up at Flannery O'Connor after having been subjected to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Blech. Life is too short to read bad books.
August 10, 2020
For the most part this was a great collection, but you’ll never love them all. I really enjoyed seeing the evolution of American short over the last 100 years and the obvious increase in diversity in modern times. The history of the series was interesting at times, but easily skipped. It’s epic but ultimately worth it. I definitely discovered some new authors I look forward to exploring more deeply.
November 30, 2022
SIX WORD REVIEW: Amazing...everyone's fav will be different
March 1, 2025
This is fantastic. All of these stories are uniquely written and deserve to be in this collection of America's best short stories. Some are short and written very poetically and some are longer and tell the story of a person's life. I didn't come across one that didn't catch my interest.
March 14, 2025
Overall this was a collection of high quality short stories, but they sometimes seemed either dated (which is a silly criticism for a historical collection) or poorly chosen.
High average ratings with only a few troughs and minimal peaks.
Individual stories rated below;
The gay old dog, 4/5. Touching story of a young man who pledges to care for his sisters on their mums deathbed. He gives up his youth and his love to take care of them. Then sees his love many years later mourning her son going off to fight in WWI. You robbed me of my son! Powerful.
Brothers. 2/5. A stripped down, clipped and monotone writing style tells a tale of a crazy old man rambling about being related to anyone and everyone to have some kind of connection while he dies of loneliness.
My Old Man, Hemingway. 3/5. Gruff tale of a young boy and his jockey dad. His dad dies and some people are bad-mouthing him, robbing the child of his ideals.
The Haircut. 4/5. Great gimmick narrative style, the story is told by a barber to you (the audience) as you get a haircut. Small town, high drama.
Babylon Revisited, F Scott Fitz. 5/5. Sad and characterful, with hope and despair and love. The clock is running out for the protagonist to have any kind of relationship with his daughter. Nobody’s being the bad guy, everyone’s trying to do what’s right. The ending is bleak and lonely with hope still glowing on the horizon.
The cracked looking glass. 2/5. Young Irish wife married to an old farmer. Has fantasies of a wilder life, remembering her childhood in Ireland. Sad, drab and helpless story.
Faulkner, That will be fine. 3/5. Hate Faulkner style. Each sentence a paragraph. A philanderer uncle scam artist enlisted his nephew as an accomplice. He gets shot by vengeful husbands.
Those are as brothers. 4/5. Post ww2, the ties of shared suffering that unite the survivors. It promises that they’ll resist tyranny.
The whole world knows. 2/5. A vague ramble about a cuckhold imagining revenge.
The enormous radio. 4/5. Early sci-fi about a radio that picks up noise from every apparent in the building.
I stand here ironing. 4/5. A lady explains how she feels remorse about her best efforts at mothering her first child. Very touching and candid.
Sonny’s Blues. 3/5. Ghetto tragedy, a younger brother goes to jail, his older brother remembers him coming alive through blues, jazz piano. A lot of talk about uplifting the self through music.
Philip Roth - The Conversion of the Jews. 7/10. Hebrew school kids throw a minor rebellion over the virgin birth. One kid climbs to the roof and threatens to jump unless his teacher, mom and classmates admit that “god can do anything”. Fun and quick but odd.
Everything That Rises Must Converge. 3/5. Pious spoiled son waspishly escorts his mum to bingo. Wants to show off how liberal he is and make fun of her outdated racism. She has a stroke and dies dramatically. The writing was good enough to put me in the scene but the subject was sour.
Pigeon feathers. 2/5. A young man has a crisis of faith that he resolves by…shooting all the pigeons in the barn? Not sure that’s a healthy coping mechanism.
Will you be quiet, please? DNF. Well written but I couldn’t keep reading, secondhand embarrassment was too intense.
The River. 3/5. Great character sketch and it made some sense, for the morals of the time. But it was about a father “honour killing” his adult daughter for her adultery. She was a piece of work but didn’t deserve that.
The School. 2/5. Surreal and depressing, but at least short.
The Conventional Wisdom. 4/5. Fun riff on how wrong we all are about the afterlife. It’s word for word from scripture so all of us, including the decent, moral protagonist are going to burn forever in hellfire.
Friends 2/5. Middle-aged Jewish ladies gather and chat.
Harmony on the world. 3/5. A relatable protagonist makes an ass of himself because he’s a musical purist and absolutely cannot enjoy music as folk art. Is a jerk about it.
Lawns. 1/5. DNF. Totally unlikeable narrator reveals herself to be the victim of incest, it goes into way too much detail and I threw in the towel.
Communist. 2/5. A young man goes on an impromptu hunting trip with his moms boyfriend, the eponymous Communist. None of the characters cares much about each other and the story just drifts to a halt after describing a vivid hunting scene.
Helping. 2/5. A therapist falls off the wagon due to PTSD and goads an angry biker who never materializes.
Displacement. 2/5. A dull slice of life follows a married couple of Asian immigrants about a day where they work for a senile woman, look at apartment, hoist a giant baby and ride a roller coaster.
Friend of my youth. 3/5. A sad story about a woman done wrong who persisted in her martyrdom so far past the point of common sense that she became the one to blame for her sad life, for accepting all the indignity without ever fighting back.
The girl on the plane. 2/5. Guy sits next to a girl on a plane and falls into his own navel during their conversation, admitting to being a rapist by accident.
Xuela. 2/5. A lonely child who lives without love moves through her sad life.
If you sing like that for me. 2/5. Yet another woman tells her story, this time finding love in her heart for her spouse for only one day, which he ruins by talking.
Fiesta 1980. 3/5. Better written than the past couple. Largely a slice of life with no plot or context, and I guess that was the style of storytelling at the time. Safe to say I’m not partial to it. This tale was about the unhappy family life of the narrator and his carsickness.
The Third and Final Continent. 4/5. Cute story of an immigrant setting himself up for life in the new world.
Brownies. 2/5. Small girls have drama at camp.
What you pawn I will redeem. 4/5. Great character sketch of homeless life, the surprise happy twist at the end was a cop out.
Old Boys, Old Girls. 4/5. The hopelessness of a life of crime, setting in to how it’ll be but then deciding to change tracks. A hopeful story of a rough time followed by potential redemption.
Refresh, Refresh. 4/5. Gripping and tough. A story of coming of age in militant america. Trying to live up to shitty fathers by turning into them and diving into the brutal meat grinder.
Awaiting Orders. 3/5. An interesting evening for a closeted gay man in the american military. He meets the sister of a deadbeat soldier and tries to help but all she wants is a sympathetic ear.
What We Talk About when we talk about Anne Frank. 4/5. Interesting coffee table conversation between hardcore orthodox Jews and affluent Florida Jews. Lots of confrontation to see things from the other's point of view. The Anne Frank game is a brutal thought exercise.
Diem Perdidi. 2/5. The authors work has been hailed as meditative and hypnotic and I'll grant it had that quality. But it was simply too recursive for me. A unique method of storytelling to illustrate the life of a Jappanese internment camp survivor as she drifts off into Alzheimer's.
The Semplica-Girl Diaries. 3/5. A weird slice of life where people hoist up actual little girls to show off their charity. Weirdly narrated in the form of a diary. Science Fiction.
At The Round Earths Imagined Corners. 5/5. A strong finale. A son grows up on a reptile farm at the edge of a university and lives his whole life in that house. Very real characters populate the whole story and the author does a lot in a short space. Risk, danger, love, heartbreak.
High average ratings with only a few troughs and minimal peaks.
Individual stories rated below;
The gay old dog, 4/5. Touching story of a young man who pledges to care for his sisters on their mums deathbed. He gives up his youth and his love to take care of them. Then sees his love many years later mourning her son going off to fight in WWI. You robbed me of my son! Powerful.
Brothers. 2/5. A stripped down, clipped and monotone writing style tells a tale of a crazy old man rambling about being related to anyone and everyone to have some kind of connection while he dies of loneliness.
My Old Man, Hemingway. 3/5. Gruff tale of a young boy and his jockey dad. His dad dies and some people are bad-mouthing him, robbing the child of his ideals.
The Haircut. 4/5. Great gimmick narrative style, the story is told by a barber to you (the audience) as you get a haircut. Small town, high drama.
Babylon Revisited, F Scott Fitz. 5/5. Sad and characterful, with hope and despair and love. The clock is running out for the protagonist to have any kind of relationship with his daughter. Nobody’s being the bad guy, everyone’s trying to do what’s right. The ending is bleak and lonely with hope still glowing on the horizon.
The cracked looking glass. 2/5. Young Irish wife married to an old farmer. Has fantasies of a wilder life, remembering her childhood in Ireland. Sad, drab and helpless story.
Faulkner, That will be fine. 3/5. Hate Faulkner style. Each sentence a paragraph. A philanderer uncle scam artist enlisted his nephew as an accomplice. He gets shot by vengeful husbands.
Those are as brothers. 4/5. Post ww2, the ties of shared suffering that unite the survivors. It promises that they’ll resist tyranny.
The whole world knows. 2/5. A vague ramble about a cuckhold imagining revenge.
The enormous radio. 4/5. Early sci-fi about a radio that picks up noise from every apparent in the building.
I stand here ironing. 4/5. A lady explains how she feels remorse about her best efforts at mothering her first child. Very touching and candid.
Sonny’s Blues. 3/5. Ghetto tragedy, a younger brother goes to jail, his older brother remembers him coming alive through blues, jazz piano. A lot of talk about uplifting the self through music.
Philip Roth - The Conversion of the Jews. 7/10. Hebrew school kids throw a minor rebellion over the virgin birth. One kid climbs to the roof and threatens to jump unless his teacher, mom and classmates admit that “god can do anything”. Fun and quick but odd.
Everything That Rises Must Converge. 3/5. Pious spoiled son waspishly escorts his mum to bingo. Wants to show off how liberal he is and make fun of her outdated racism. She has a stroke and dies dramatically. The writing was good enough to put me in the scene but the subject was sour.
Pigeon feathers. 2/5. A young man has a crisis of faith that he resolves by…shooting all the pigeons in the barn? Not sure that’s a healthy coping mechanism.
Will you be quiet, please? DNF. Well written but I couldn’t keep reading, secondhand embarrassment was too intense.
The River. 3/5. Great character sketch and it made some sense, for the morals of the time. But it was about a father “honour killing” his adult daughter for her adultery. She was a piece of work but didn’t deserve that.
The School. 2/5. Surreal and depressing, but at least short.
The Conventional Wisdom. 4/5. Fun riff on how wrong we all are about the afterlife. It’s word for word from scripture so all of us, including the decent, moral protagonist are going to burn forever in hellfire.
Friends 2/5. Middle-aged Jewish ladies gather and chat.
Harmony on the world. 3/5. A relatable protagonist makes an ass of himself because he’s a musical purist and absolutely cannot enjoy music as folk art. Is a jerk about it.
Lawns. 1/5. DNF. Totally unlikeable narrator reveals herself to be the victim of incest, it goes into way too much detail and I threw in the towel.
Communist. 2/5. A young man goes on an impromptu hunting trip with his moms boyfriend, the eponymous Communist. None of the characters cares much about each other and the story just drifts to a halt after describing a vivid hunting scene.
Helping. 2/5. A therapist falls off the wagon due to PTSD and goads an angry biker who never materializes.
Displacement. 2/5. A dull slice of life follows a married couple of Asian immigrants about a day where they work for a senile woman, look at apartment, hoist a giant baby and ride a roller coaster.
Friend of my youth. 3/5. A sad story about a woman done wrong who persisted in her martyrdom so far past the point of common sense that she became the one to blame for her sad life, for accepting all the indignity without ever fighting back.
The girl on the plane. 2/5. Guy sits next to a girl on a plane and falls into his own navel during their conversation, admitting to being a rapist by accident.
Xuela. 2/5. A lonely child who lives without love moves through her sad life.
If you sing like that for me. 2/5. Yet another woman tells her story, this time finding love in her heart for her spouse for only one day, which he ruins by talking.
Fiesta 1980. 3/5. Better written than the past couple. Largely a slice of life with no plot or context, and I guess that was the style of storytelling at the time. Safe to say I’m not partial to it. This tale was about the unhappy family life of the narrator and his carsickness.
The Third and Final Continent. 4/5. Cute story of an immigrant setting himself up for life in the new world.
Brownies. 2/5. Small girls have drama at camp.
What you pawn I will redeem. 4/5. Great character sketch of homeless life, the surprise happy twist at the end was a cop out.
Old Boys, Old Girls. 4/5. The hopelessness of a life of crime, setting in to how it’ll be but then deciding to change tracks. A hopeful story of a rough time followed by potential redemption.
Refresh, Refresh. 4/5. Gripping and tough. A story of coming of age in militant america. Trying to live up to shitty fathers by turning into them and diving into the brutal meat grinder.
Awaiting Orders. 3/5. An interesting evening for a closeted gay man in the american military. He meets the sister of a deadbeat soldier and tries to help but all she wants is a sympathetic ear.
What We Talk About when we talk about Anne Frank. 4/5. Interesting coffee table conversation between hardcore orthodox Jews and affluent Florida Jews. Lots of confrontation to see things from the other's point of view. The Anne Frank game is a brutal thought exercise.
Diem Perdidi. 2/5. The authors work has been hailed as meditative and hypnotic and I'll grant it had that quality. But it was simply too recursive for me. A unique method of storytelling to illustrate the life of a Jappanese internment camp survivor as she drifts off into Alzheimer's.
The Semplica-Girl Diaries. 3/5. A weird slice of life where people hoist up actual little girls to show off their charity. Weirdly narrated in the form of a diary. Science Fiction.
At The Round Earths Imagined Corners. 5/5. A strong finale. A son grows up on a reptile farm at the edge of a university and lives his whole life in that house. Very real characters populate the whole story and the author does a lot in a short space. Risk, danger, love, heartbreak.
February 23, 2023
I am a teacher and I was expecting a great book. Unfortunately, this is one of the worst books I have ever read. Do not waste your time with it. Many of the authors are actually Pulitzer Prize winners. Don’t ask me how. These stories and authors may have been popular in literary circles or among critics, but they are nearly all slice of life stories that are both boring and disturbing.
For me, the best story was The Old Gay Dog, a sad story about a man who makes a deathbed promise to his mother to take care of his sisters, and his selfish sisters destroy his life. At least the story had a point. Halfway through the book, I decided to look up the remaining story titles online, to see if the rear were worth reading. I found three stories that were worth reading. I’m actually very sorry I close this book as the stories have left me feeling depressed, pointless, and like I wasted my time.
I think I agree with Ray Bradbury who said the best short stories were written before steam of consciousness became popular. Pre-WWI stories, or stories from the 1800s, are much better and and hold the readers interest.
Do not waste your time with this book or with these writers.
For me, the best story was The Old Gay Dog, a sad story about a man who makes a deathbed promise to his mother to take care of his sisters, and his selfish sisters destroy his life. At least the story had a point. Halfway through the book, I decided to look up the remaining story titles online, to see if the rear were worth reading. I found three stories that were worth reading. I’m actually very sorry I close this book as the stories have left me feeling depressed, pointless, and like I wasted my time.
I think I agree with Ray Bradbury who said the best short stories were written before steam of consciousness became popular. Pre-WWI stories, or stories from the 1800s, are much better and and hold the readers interest.
Do not waste your time with this book or with these writers.
April 20, 2022
An excellent volume that lives up to its name. "Sonny's Blues" and "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" were favorites, but there were many stories that I loved. A few didn't hit me right, but that's true of most anthologies. Still, I'd give this one a shot just for perspective across the century.
January 5, 2017
Some super good ones and some boring ones. So skip around and read what you like.
January 16, 2019
The Best?
Jeepers, I sure hope not!
Jeepers, I sure hope not!
July 17, 2022
100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is a collection of 40 stories celebrating 100 years of publishing "The Best American Short Stories" series. These stories were chosen to represent both the time period they were originally published and because they stand the test of time. It was noted that there is no overlap in stories from the ones chosen by John Updike for his Best of the Century book.
I'm a big fan of short stories, especially when published in anthologies with multiple authors. They give variety in short, digestible chunks. The book is 723 pages but it's not daunting. If I don't like a story, I know it will be over soon. If I like a story, it serves as a launchpad to seek out more of that author's work. This isn't a 'sit down and read cover to cover' book. I read a story or two at a time over the course of 2 months.
I like that the stories are presented chronologically so the reader can also see patterns or shifts over time. It also begins each decade with a little background info of the times and culture. I also appreciate the author bio introducing each story instead of having one long list at the end.
I recognized most of the authors in the 1960-70 decade. Other than the most recent decade I've apparently read this timeframe often.
I made a few notes on each story as I read them and include them below.
The Gay Old Dog
That was an excellent story. I'm glad he finally had a chance to stand up for himself against his meddling sisters.
Other than some of the terminology (using "gay" for "happy", mostly), it did not appear outdated at all.
Brothers
That was a quiet story. I didn't know where it was going and now that it's over I would still struggle to say what it was about. But the pages turned quickly and it was a good read.
My Old Man
Meh. I feel like I should've liked this more since it's written by Hemingway but I didn't find the topic interesting and my mind wandered while reading it. He also used an slur for Italians a lot which may have been okay at the time but even if he had substituted something innocuous like 'Italian' or 'man' every time he said the slur, it would've been repetitive and unnecessary (saying someone's nationality every other sentence isn't a typical descriptor).
Haircut
That was an interesting story. The author did a good job of using a 'folksy' tone for the narrator without it going overboard into mockery. I have my theory on what actually happened on the boat but it would be a good one to discuss with a group because it was left open-ended.
Babylon Revisited
That read very quickly. I felt really bad for the main character but then the ending left ambiguity about his actual intentions. I'll be thinking about it for a little bit before moving on.
The Cracked Looking-Glass
I didn't like this story. It felt especially long because there were a lot of words but nothing really happening, and the ending didn't give any explanation at all so it felt pointless to have read it.
That Will Be Fine
This was a quick read. Having a short story from a child's point of view helped condense the plot since he's only reporting what he sees and the adult reader is filling in the blanks of what actually happened.
Those Are As Brothers
The story itself was good but the ending was abrupt and jarring. I wanted more.
The Whole World Knows
I can see why it was popular in its time but it was very outdated to me, both with language and with situations. Because of the unfamiliarity, I had trouble keeping track of what was real and what was imagined.
The Enormous Radio
Wow, that one packed a punch! It's amazing that even though the mode has changed (radio vs. Internet), this story written in 1948 still rings true about the nature of human comparison and curiosity.
I Stand Here Ironing
Before reading, there is not a title that sums up the '50s more accurately.
WOW. My heart ached, both for the mother reminiscing and the daughter she was reminiscing about. To add in the ironing gives a realness - who doesn't let their mind wander to the past when doing menial chores (and who doesn't have those wanderings skew to failings when you're a mother)?
Sonny's Blues
James Baldwin is an excellent writer and I loved this story. There was so much packed into this short story but it didn't feel overdone. This story was one I felt but can't necessarily describe.
The Conversion of the Jews
I understand why the author has won many awards. Even in this earlier start of his writing, it was impossible to look away from the deceivingly simple story.
Everything That Rises Must Converge
That was an unexpected ending. I wish I could say people like the mother only existed in the past but the story would still apply today.
Pigeon Feathers
John Updike requires concentration so it took more than one sitting to get through this story because I was distracted. It's interesting that this is the second story from this decade about the disillusionment of religion; it may be a sign of the times.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
The situation felt realistic. Things spiral out so quickly once a threshold is crossed. I'm glad it didn't end in violence like I thought it would.
By the River
That was unexpected. I could feel the tension building and I'm glad the ending wasn't drawn out.
The School
That was short but so creepy.
The Conventional Wisdom
That was a really good and unique story. I'll be thinking about it for awhile.
Friends
That was interesting. There wasn't a specific story arc so I wasn't sure what was going to happen or what details were important. It was like listening in to a public conversation so you don't know the backstory and you don't know how it continued after they walked away.
Harmony of the World
I wavered in and out of interest reading this story. The personalities of the characters were interesting to read about but the information about the music was too technical and having it interspersed throughout the story was jarring and took me out of the relationship the characters were building. I understand the point the author was making relating the similarities between the two but I would've been happier with just the present-day story.
Lawns
I had a visceral reaction as I was reading. I can't say I liked it because it turned my stomach but it was well-written and generated an honest reaction.
Communist
That was a winding story but the main thread was there the whole time and it ended before it turned from winding to rambling.
Helping
That was an engrossing story. It captured the haziness of the narrator and how quickly one bad decision leads to another until everything is out of control.
Displacement
This story kept me on edge the whole time because I was waiting for something big to happen, the other shoe to drop.
Friend of My Youth
I've always liked her writing and this story was no exception. It was nice to read fully fleshed-out female characters that had nothing to do with relationships or men.
The Girl on the Plane
It was a compelling story but it made me uncomfortable because the characters were written so realistically I felt horrible for Patty.
Xuela
I loved this author's writing. I would've read a million more pages of the story.
If You Sing Like That For Me
I felt all the emotions of that one. It was a little gut punch at the end.
Fiesta, 1980
The author was able to set an enveloping scene with just a few descriptive words. My head hurt from the tension of the unsaid.
The Third and Final Continent
That was a wonderful story. I'm glad I'm finding new authors to look into.
Brownies
It's getting repetitive to say I liked this story. Using kids to tell the stories kept observations surface-level but the reader knew what was going on even if they didn't.
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
This one hurt my heart. I'm glad it ended well because Jackson could not get out of his own way and I wanted better for him.
Old Boys, Old Girls
This story was absorbing. It ended abruptly and I wanted more.
Refresh, Refresh
That was well-written but tough to read. So much unnecessary violence.
Awaiting Orders
That was brief. It was interesting to have Billy, the character everyone was focused on, never be seen or heard. Someone can continue to interfere with people's lives even when they're not around.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
The conversation would teeter on the edge of going too far but then someone would bring it back just in time. The ending brought an abrupt stop to the jolliness and it felt realistic; you don't know the line until you cross it and then it's too late.
Diem Perdidi
This one used short sentences with memories that changed each time they were shared to help convey the uncertainty of her mom's cognitive decline.
The Semplica-Girl Diaries
I understood the overall moral arc of the story but the actual details were confusing. It took longer than it should have to figure out SGs are human because there was no explanation.
At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners
It was sad but not despairing. He made the best life he could even though he was resigned to something less than true happiness.
Find all my reviews at: https://readingatrandom.blogspot.com
I'm a big fan of short stories, especially when published in anthologies with multiple authors. They give variety in short, digestible chunks. The book is 723 pages but it's not daunting. If I don't like a story, I know it will be over soon. If I like a story, it serves as a launchpad to seek out more of that author's work. This isn't a 'sit down and read cover to cover' book. I read a story or two at a time over the course of 2 months.
I like that the stories are presented chronologically so the reader can also see patterns or shifts over time. It also begins each decade with a little background info of the times and culture. I also appreciate the author bio introducing each story instead of having one long list at the end.
I recognized most of the authors in the 1960-70 decade. Other than the most recent decade I've apparently read this timeframe often.
I made a few notes on each story as I read them and include them below.
The Gay Old Dog
That was an excellent story. I'm glad he finally had a chance to stand up for himself against his meddling sisters.
Other than some of the terminology (using "gay" for "happy", mostly), it did not appear outdated at all.
Brothers
That was a quiet story. I didn't know where it was going and now that it's over I would still struggle to say what it was about. But the pages turned quickly and it was a good read.
My Old Man
Meh. I feel like I should've liked this more since it's written by Hemingway but I didn't find the topic interesting and my mind wandered while reading it. He also used an slur for Italians a lot which may have been okay at the time but even if he had substituted something innocuous like 'Italian' or 'man' every time he said the slur, it would've been repetitive and unnecessary (saying someone's nationality every other sentence isn't a typical descriptor).
Haircut
That was an interesting story. The author did a good job of using a 'folksy' tone for the narrator without it going overboard into mockery. I have my theory on what actually happened on the boat but it would be a good one to discuss with a group because it was left open-ended.
Babylon Revisited
That read very quickly. I felt really bad for the main character but then the ending left ambiguity about his actual intentions. I'll be thinking about it for a little bit before moving on.
The Cracked Looking-Glass
I didn't like this story. It felt especially long because there were a lot of words but nothing really happening, and the ending didn't give any explanation at all so it felt pointless to have read it.
That Will Be Fine
This was a quick read. Having a short story from a child's point of view helped condense the plot since he's only reporting what he sees and the adult reader is filling in the blanks of what actually happened.
Those Are As Brothers
The story itself was good but the ending was abrupt and jarring. I wanted more.
The Whole World Knows
I can see why it was popular in its time but it was very outdated to me, both with language and with situations. Because of the unfamiliarity, I had trouble keeping track of what was real and what was imagined.
The Enormous Radio
Wow, that one packed a punch! It's amazing that even though the mode has changed (radio vs. Internet), this story written in 1948 still rings true about the nature of human comparison and curiosity.
I Stand Here Ironing
Before reading, there is not a title that sums up the '50s more accurately.
WOW. My heart ached, both for the mother reminiscing and the daughter she was reminiscing about. To add in the ironing gives a realness - who doesn't let their mind wander to the past when doing menial chores (and who doesn't have those wanderings skew to failings when you're a mother)?
Sonny's Blues
James Baldwin is an excellent writer and I loved this story. There was so much packed into this short story but it didn't feel overdone. This story was one I felt but can't necessarily describe.
The Conversion of the Jews
I understand why the author has won many awards. Even in this earlier start of his writing, it was impossible to look away from the deceivingly simple story.
Everything That Rises Must Converge
That was an unexpected ending. I wish I could say people like the mother only existed in the past but the story would still apply today.
Pigeon Feathers
John Updike requires concentration so it took more than one sitting to get through this story because I was distracted. It's interesting that this is the second story from this decade about the disillusionment of religion; it may be a sign of the times.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
The situation felt realistic. Things spiral out so quickly once a threshold is crossed. I'm glad it didn't end in violence like I thought it would.
By the River
That was unexpected. I could feel the tension building and I'm glad the ending wasn't drawn out.
The School
That was short but so creepy.
The Conventional Wisdom
That was a really good and unique story. I'll be thinking about it for awhile.
Friends
That was interesting. There wasn't a specific story arc so I wasn't sure what was going to happen or what details were important. It was like listening in to a public conversation so you don't know the backstory and you don't know how it continued after they walked away.
Harmony of the World
I wavered in and out of interest reading this story. The personalities of the characters were interesting to read about but the information about the music was too technical and having it interspersed throughout the story was jarring and took me out of the relationship the characters were building. I understand the point the author was making relating the similarities between the two but I would've been happier with just the present-day story.
Lawns
I had a visceral reaction as I was reading. I can't say I liked it because it turned my stomach but it was well-written and generated an honest reaction.
Communist
That was a winding story but the main thread was there the whole time and it ended before it turned from winding to rambling.
Helping
That was an engrossing story. It captured the haziness of the narrator and how quickly one bad decision leads to another until everything is out of control.
Displacement
This story kept me on edge the whole time because I was waiting for something big to happen, the other shoe to drop.
Friend of My Youth
I've always liked her writing and this story was no exception. It was nice to read fully fleshed-out female characters that had nothing to do with relationships or men.
The Girl on the Plane
It was a compelling story but it made me uncomfortable because the characters were written so realistically I felt horrible for Patty.
Xuela
I loved this author's writing. I would've read a million more pages of the story.
If You Sing Like That For Me
I felt all the emotions of that one. It was a little gut punch at the end.
Fiesta, 1980
The author was able to set an enveloping scene with just a few descriptive words. My head hurt from the tension of the unsaid.
The Third and Final Continent
That was a wonderful story. I'm glad I'm finding new authors to look into.
Brownies
It's getting repetitive to say I liked this story. Using kids to tell the stories kept observations surface-level but the reader knew what was going on even if they didn't.
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
This one hurt my heart. I'm glad it ended well because Jackson could not get out of his own way and I wanted better for him.
Old Boys, Old Girls
This story was absorbing. It ended abruptly and I wanted more.
Refresh, Refresh
That was well-written but tough to read. So much unnecessary violence.
Awaiting Orders
That was brief. It was interesting to have Billy, the character everyone was focused on, never be seen or heard. Someone can continue to interfere with people's lives even when they're not around.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
The conversation would teeter on the edge of going too far but then someone would bring it back just in time. The ending brought an abrupt stop to the jolliness and it felt realistic; you don't know the line until you cross it and then it's too late.
Diem Perdidi
This one used short sentences with memories that changed each time they were shared to help convey the uncertainty of her mom's cognitive decline.
The Semplica-Girl Diaries
I understood the overall moral arc of the story but the actual details were confusing. It took longer than it should have to figure out SGs are human because there was no explanation.
At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners
It was sad but not despairing. He made the best life he could even though he was resigned to something less than true happiness.
Find all my reviews at: https://readingatrandom.blogspot.com
January 18, 2024
This book delighted me! More importantly though it educated me, introducing me to writers whom I've neglected out of bias for the contemporary.
My high school teacher got this book for me five years ago. At the time I remember not being able to get past the first short story: Edna Ferber's "The Gay Old Dog." How things change! This time I picked it up and ate it in one big two-week-long bite.
The reviews are in:
1915-1920
"The Gay Old Dog" by Edna Ferber - 7/10 memorable, loved the ending, slow in the middle
1920-1930
"Brothers" by Sherwood Anderson - 10/10 effective and efficient portrait of human loneliness
"My Old Man" by Ernest Hemingway - 5/10 characterization was there but nothing else was
"Haircut" by Ring Lardner - 8/10 strong unique voice, engaging plot
1930-194o
"Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - 9/10 slow burn about family, love, mistakes, and change
"The Cracked Looking-Glass" by Katherine Anne Porter - 4/10 slow, and for what?
"That Will Be Fine" by William Faulkner - 3/10 confusing at times and not too engaging
1940-1950
"Those Are as Brothers" by Nancy Hale - 10/10 stunner; short and sweet.
"The Whole World Knows" by Eudora Welty - 3/10 bland pacing and mediocre plot for its length
"The Enormous Radio" by John Cheever - 9.5/10 wonderful, allegorical, and all too relevant today
1950-1960
"I Stand Here Ironing" Tillie Olsen - 7/10 solidly good
"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin - 10/10 slow burn but magnificent at the end, I mean wow
"The Conversion of the Jews" by Philip Roth - 7/10 funny and I liked the ending
1960-1970
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor - 10/10 unbeatable characterization
"Pigeon Feathers" by John Updike - 6.5/10 erudite and sometimes too much so
"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" by Raymond Carver - 7.5/10 solid but I wasn't gagging
"By the River" by Joyce Carol Oates - 5/10 meh
1970-1980.
"The School" by Donald Barthelme - 7/10 silly and joyful but at the end it was a little like... what?
"The Conventional Wisdom" by Stanley Elkin - 8.5/10 epic twist but needed a little more from it
1980-1990
"Friends" by Grace Paley - 10/10 touching, humorous, great characters
"Harmony of the World" by Charles Baxter - 8/10 beautifully composed
"Lawns" by Mona Simpson - 9/10 excellently layered
"Communist" by Richard Ford - 7.5/10 solid but ending was a bit O.K.
"Helping" by Robert Stone - 7/10 good
"Displacement" by David Wong Louie - 8/10 wonderful beginning but strange place to end
1990-2000
"Friend of My Youth" by Alice Munro - 8.5/10 fantastic surprises and characterization
"The Girl on the Plane" by Mary Gaitskill - 9/10 epic mic-drop
"Xuela" by Jamaica Kincaid - 6/10 fine
"If You Sing Like That for Me" by Akhil Sharma - 9/10 great emotional range and complexity
"Fiesta, 1980" by Junot Díaz - 9/10 my favorite child narrator
2000-2010
"The Third and Final Continent" by Jhumpa Lahiri - 10/10 tender, reaching everything
"Brownies" by ZZ Packer - 9/10 my other favorite child narrator, and good plot
"What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie - 11/10 tender, humorous, sharp, and real
"Old Boys, Old Girls" by Edward P. Jones - 8.5/10 wonderful just a little slow sometimes
"Refresh, Refresh" by Benjamin Percy - 7/10 needed a moment of surprise and complexity
"Awaiting Orders" by Tobias Wolff - 7.5/10 fantastic narrator, plot was O.K.
2010-2015
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander - 11/10 wonderful
"Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka - 9/10 heartbreaking
"The Semplica-Girl Diaries" by George Saunders - 8/10 kudos for unique form and style
"At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners" by Lauren Groff - 8/10 great but better off as a novel
Top 3:
1. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie
2. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander
3. "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin
I can't find who, but someone said that exclusively reading short stories is like being on a champagne-only diet. Cheers!
My high school teacher got this book for me five years ago. At the time I remember not being able to get past the first short story: Edna Ferber's "The Gay Old Dog." How things change! This time I picked it up and ate it in one big two-week-long bite.
The reviews are in:
1915-1920
"The Gay Old Dog" by Edna Ferber - 7/10 memorable, loved the ending, slow in the middle
1920-1930
"Brothers" by Sherwood Anderson - 10/10 effective and efficient portrait of human loneliness
"My Old Man" by Ernest Hemingway - 5/10 characterization was there but nothing else was
"Haircut" by Ring Lardner - 8/10 strong unique voice, engaging plot
1930-194o
"Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - 9/10 slow burn about family, love, mistakes, and change
"The Cracked Looking-Glass" by Katherine Anne Porter - 4/10 slow, and for what?
"That Will Be Fine" by William Faulkner - 3/10 confusing at times and not too engaging
1940-1950
"Those Are as Brothers" by Nancy Hale - 10/10 stunner; short and sweet.
"The Whole World Knows" by Eudora Welty - 3/10 bland pacing and mediocre plot for its length
"The Enormous Radio" by John Cheever - 9.5/10 wonderful, allegorical, and all too relevant today
1950-1960
"I Stand Here Ironing" Tillie Olsen - 7/10 solidly good
"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin - 10/10 slow burn but magnificent at the end, I mean wow
"The Conversion of the Jews" by Philip Roth - 7/10 funny and I liked the ending
1960-1970
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor - 10/10 unbeatable characterization
"Pigeon Feathers" by John Updike - 6.5/10 erudite and sometimes too much so
"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" by Raymond Carver - 7.5/10 solid but I wasn't gagging
"By the River" by Joyce Carol Oates - 5/10 meh
1970-1980.
"The School" by Donald Barthelme - 7/10 silly and joyful but at the end it was a little like... what?
"The Conventional Wisdom" by Stanley Elkin - 8.5/10 epic twist but needed a little more from it
1980-1990
"Friends" by Grace Paley - 10/10 touching, humorous, great characters
"Harmony of the World" by Charles Baxter - 8/10 beautifully composed
"Lawns" by Mona Simpson - 9/10 excellently layered
"Communist" by Richard Ford - 7.5/10 solid but ending was a bit O.K.
"Helping" by Robert Stone - 7/10 good
"Displacement" by David Wong Louie - 8/10 wonderful beginning but strange place to end
1990-2000
"Friend of My Youth" by Alice Munro - 8.5/10 fantastic surprises and characterization
"The Girl on the Plane" by Mary Gaitskill - 9/10 epic mic-drop
"Xuela" by Jamaica Kincaid - 6/10 fine
"If You Sing Like That for Me" by Akhil Sharma - 9/10 great emotional range and complexity
"Fiesta, 1980" by Junot Díaz - 9/10 my favorite child narrator
2000-2010
"The Third and Final Continent" by Jhumpa Lahiri - 10/10 tender, reaching everything
"Brownies" by ZZ Packer - 9/10 my other favorite child narrator, and good plot
"What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie - 11/10 tender, humorous, sharp, and real
"Old Boys, Old Girls" by Edward P. Jones - 8.5/10 wonderful just a little slow sometimes
"Refresh, Refresh" by Benjamin Percy - 7/10 needed a moment of surprise and complexity
"Awaiting Orders" by Tobias Wolff - 7.5/10 fantastic narrator, plot was O.K.
2010-2015
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander - 11/10 wonderful
"Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka - 9/10 heartbreaking
"The Semplica-Girl Diaries" by George Saunders - 8/10 kudos for unique form and style
"At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners" by Lauren Groff - 8/10 great but better off as a novel
Top 3:
1. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie
2. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander
3. "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin
I can't find who, but someone said that exclusively reading short stories is like being on a champagne-only diet. Cheers!
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