The Best American Short Stories 2017

Last year's edition of The Best American Short Stories, guest-edited by Meg Wolitzer, nearly batted a thousand. A few of the stories I didn't dig, but most of them I did, some of them quite a bit.

I was grateful that there were no stories about children in peril, which is something that is not only tiresome but too manipulative. Instead, I found this edition had more sex in it, which may upset Mike Pence but for goodness' sake, sex is part of the human condition, why not include it in fiction?

The sexiest stories were the last two--"Gender Studies," by Curtis Sittenfield, and "Famous Actor," by Jess Walter. Only coincidentally they are two of my favorites of the collection. The former is about a professor of women's studies who attends a conference and ends up in a one-night stand with a shuttle driver. There's a lot rich irony to the story, not only that a feminist scholar would end up with a young galoot, but that she is trading sex for getting her driver's license back. It also has a gloriously ironic opening sentence: "Nell and Henry always said that they would wait until marriage was legal for everyone in America, and now this is the case—it’s August 2015—but earlier in the week Henry eloped with his graduate student Bridget."

"Famous Actor" is also about a one-night stand, this time a young woman in Bend, Oregon gets picked up by the title thespian, who is in town for a movie shoot. She narrates, and Walter is great in creating a filmography for the actor. She is a troubled person, though, and makes him feel like shit. The great sentence here is: "I disliked him from the moment I decided to sleep with him."

Other top-notch stories include "Are We Not Men?" by T.C. Boyle, perhaps the greatest living American short-story writer, who often pens stories with concepts ripped from the headlines. This time he explores the notion of DNA manipulation: "Now not only could you choose the sex of the child at conception; you could choose its other features, too, as if having a child were like going to the car dealership and picking which options to add onto the basic model." Animals are also spliced, so there are DogCats and other weird combinations (some of them actually exist). And the story begins with a line only Boyle could write: "The dog was the color of a maraschino cherry, and what it had in its jaws I couldn’t quite make out at first, not until it parked itself under the hydrangeas and began throttling the thing."

Kevin Canty's "God's Work" is an excellent tale about door-to-door proselytizers for a revival church, a mother and son. The son falls for a typical teenage girl who begins coming to the meetings. "Hog for Sorrow" is an odd but transfixing story about two prostitutes who become friends. The sex in this story is not erotic, but ghastly. I'm all for sex worker rights, but my god, what they must have to go through on a daily basis. "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain" by Danielle Evans, is not a story about the hunchbacked king, but instead a wedding from Hell: "The bridesmaids’ dresses are rainbow, not individually multicolored, but ROY-G-BIV-ordered, and each bridesmaid appears to have been mandated to wear her assigned color all weekend; the red bridesmaid, for example, wore a red T-shirt to the airport, a red cocktail dress to dinner, and now red stilettos and a red sash reading BRIDESMAID for the bachelorette party. When assembled in a group, Dori’s bridesmaids look like a team of bridal Power Rangers."

More of the good: "Telemachus," by Jim Shepard, is an old-fashioned adventure story about a British submarine during World War II. Lauren Groff's "The Midnight Zone" has a mother, with two small children, falling and banging her head severely. She is in a cabin with no communication device, and waits for her husband to return home. "Ancient Rome," by Kyle McCarthy, is about a tutor hired by a rich family for their precocious daughter, and "The Last Day on Earth" is a poignant story by Eric Puchner about a mother and son traveling to have two dogs put down, but taking a detour to the beach.

And my favorite story of the collection? That would be Mary Gordon's "Ugly." This story spoke to me. I guess it was the part about the narrator quitting working on her Ph.d. in English and ending up in a job in human resources: "Where would I end up, if I finished my dissertation? An underpaid peon at a third-rate institution God knew where, fighting with other overqualified, underpaid cohorts for the scraps left on the table of the dying liberal arts?" She feels like an impostor in her corporate world, as if she is going to be found out at any time. She goes on a business trip and ends up befriending the proprietor of an antique furniture store, a woman who is, to put it bluntly, ugly. But she is surrounded by beautiful things. It's a bittersweet story, and we can see that her relationship with her boyfriend may not be ideal: "We were talking seriously about marriage now; we’d been talking about it in a desultory, slackish way for almost two years, the way you might talk about buying a refrigerator with an icemaker in the door, something you’d quite like but didn’t really require."

All in all, another excellent edition of this series, which I've enjoyed now for several years.