The Best American Short Stories 2013

The short story is an interesting art form. Reading a good one can be a thrilling experience, but some stories are frustrating, because they start out great and then trail away, dissolving at the end and making one wonder, "What was that all about?"

Short story writing is certainly not a lucrative enterprise, and those who practice it are to be commended. Alice Munro, who has devoted her entire career to the shorty story, never having written a novel, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She has a story in the latest collection The Best American Short Stories 2013, and it's one of those frustrating stories. Titled "Train," it's about a drifter who jumps off a train and finds himself on a farm run by a spinster, and he ends up staying there for years. But the story doesn't have an ending that made me finish and think, "God, that was good."

There are other stories like that in the book, which was edited by Elizabeth Strout. "Nemecia," by Kirstin Valdez Quade, is a first-person account about a young girl and her cousin in a Spanish community in New Mexico in the 1920s. Terrific writing, but no ending. Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite writers, has a story here called "Referential," about a couple with a deranged son in an institution, but, at least to me, the resolution is not complete.

I like stories with a strong narrative, and there are those in the collection. My favorites were "Chapter Two," by Antonya Nelson, a rollicking tale about a weird neighbor woman, and "Philanthropy," by Suzanne Rivecca, which has a worker at a shelter for troubled woman (and a former troubled woman herself) trying to solicit a donation from a Danielle Steele-like author. "Breatharians," by Callan Wink, is also terrific, which has a farm boy dealing with his parents' separation while on a mission to kill cats in the barn.

I also liked "The Tunnel, or The News from Spain," by Joan Wickersham, which concerns a woman and her nursing-home bound mother, and the marvelously odd "The Semplica-Girl Diaries," a sort of science-fiction story by George Saunders, which seems at first to be just a man envying his rich neighbors, but then introduces a bizarre twist. Bret Anthony Johnston has a very short but powerful story of a man and a teenage girl with "Encounters With Unexpected Animals."

Though I like narrative in my short stories, I have to admit that my favorite piece of all may be "The Wilderness," by Elizabeth Tallent, which is sort of an essay on the life on an English professor. I read this story in a Chinese restaurant on Halloween, an experience that I think I shall always remember. I could quote any part of this valentine to the study and teaching of literature, but I'll settle for this: "Her corner of the museum is in English, which she has always loved--which she will love to her dying breath. Here come students. Why do they love it? What do they want? Is the end of such love inevitable--will there be a last English major? Will he be eyebrow-pierced and tattooed, awkward as any culture's newest young hunter, a prowling, scanning searcher-boy invoking the name DeLillo; could she be that Raggedy Ann-haired anorexic cross-legged in the last chair in the line of four chairs outside the professor's door, this girl with tattered paperback upheld? They come. They are enthralled."

I was enthralled. There have been alarms raised that the humanities in academia are dying. But as long as there are wonderful writers like Tallent and others in these collections, they will never completely wink out.