The Best American Short Stories 2011

This year's volume of Best American Short Stories, edited by Geraldine Brooks, offers the usual eclectic fare, in stories ranging from comic to tragic, and located in such far-flung places as Ireland, Nigeria, Jerusalem and Rome. They range from the starkly realistic to the fantastic. All of them are interesting, but of course I liked some much better than others. I will say that I found none of them out-and-out bad.

I also found the opening essays interesting, both by Brooks and series editor Heidi Pitlor, who writes about the typical story: "Disaffected child protagonist (I'll  call him Wally), in the face of parents' recent divorce, finds solace as well as self-awareness in nonconformist flute teacher (I'll call her Ms. Note). The voice in the story would be quirky but not overly oddball, and the story might be told in the present tense, using a first-person point of view. The setting would be Wally's house and Ms. Note's living room--and maybe this living room would double as a dining room and bedroom, and maybe Ms. Note would have recently lost her job as a chef, and maybe Wally's father had several food allergies, which had always secretly irked Wall's mother. The ending would suggest resolution but hint at its opposite...In my five years on this job, I have been lucky to work alongside guest editors with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and tastes. Still, nearly all of them have been surprised a the enormous number of stories that share at least some facets of Wally's."

I think the word best describing what Pitlor notes is "preciousness," which I can think any discerning reader can sniff out at a hundred paces. It's a tricky business to be interesting without being precious, and most of the stories here manage to do that.

My favorite stories are those that strive more toward the humdrum: "Housewifely Arts," by Megan Mayhew Bergman, about a woman trying to track down her late mother's parrot, "The Dungeon Master," by Sam Lipsyte, about some high school kids and role-playing games, "La Vita Nuova," by Allegra Goodman, that concerns the life of a young woman as she gets over a break-up, "Property," by Elizabeth McCracken, about a man and his landlady, "Bridge Under Water," by Tom Bissell, about a honeymoon in Rome gone bad, and my favorite story of the collection, "Soldier of Fortune," about a teenage boy and the crush he has on the girl that lives across the street.

For those who like their fiction with a bit more experimentation, there's Steven Millhauser's "Phantoms," told in journalistic first-person plural, about a town that is over run with apparitions; Richard Powers' "To the Measures Fall," in second person, about how an obscure second-hand book can haunt a person through their whole adult life; Caitlin Horrocks' "The Sleep," about a town where people have decided to literally hibernate; or the sci-fi "Escape from Spiderhead," from the imaginative George Saunders, in which prisoners are tested with various chemicals that make them fall in love.

In Geraldine Brooks' introduction, she gives the prospective short story writers some rules:

1. Enuf adultery eds. Too many stories about the wrong cock in the wrong cunt/anus/armpit/Airedale.
2. Eros does not equal thanatos necessarily. Not all love stories have to have bleak outcomes.
3. Foreign countries exist.
4. There's a war on. The war in Afghanistan, in the year it became America's longest, appeared as a brief aside in only two of one hundred and twenty stories.
5. Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Female genital mutilation, military-funeral picketers, abortion-doctor assassins. So why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?
6. Not that I want to discourage humor. There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone..."La belle dame sans levity that thee in thrall, and no mirth rings."