Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

• “Proof of God” was initially inspired by a crime that took place several years ago on a college campus near my hometown in Kentucky, though of course I’ve altered events so much that I have to remind myself now where the real horror leaves off and my fictionalized version begins. I recall that I was so haunted and disturbed by what happened to the young woman upon whom Felicia is loosely based that I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and I knew that I had to try to write myself toward an understanding, or at least an acceptance, of the crime. So I did write about it, and my first attempt was a story called “Parts” (the Hudson Review ), told from the perspective of the dead girl’s mother. My writing professor at the time, Lee K. Abbott, mentioned in an offhand way to me that the hardest story to tell is the bad guy’s, and so I decided, okay: I’d accept the challenge. Getting into Simon’s head — making him on some level sympathetic — was one of the hardest things I’ve done as a writer. I want to thank Lee for encouraging me to try it and for believing, more than I did, that I’d be able to pull it off.

Peter LaSalleis the author of a novel, Strange Sunlight, and three short-story collections, most recently Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and in 2005 he received the Award for Distinguished Prose from the Antioch Review. He currently divides his time between Austin, Texas, and Narragansett in his native Rhode Island.

• Well, to be honest, I’m always hesitant about offering outright explanatory comment on a story. I guess I’m dead scared of undermining the fragile magic that a writer has to hope for in any narrative. But I am willing — and happy — to note that the setting of “Tunis and Time” stemmed from an ongoing project I’ve embarked on in recent years — writing essays for literary magazines about going on trips to places where literature I love is set, as I try to see if anything different happens while reading the work “on the premises,” so to speak. I’ve packed a bag and headed off to reread Borges’s stories in Argentina; and the twin essential documents of French surrealism — Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and Andre Breton’s Nadja — in Paris; and Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel about ancient Carthage, in Tunisia. The last of these excursions, of course, is almost exactly what I have my melancholy, Harvard-educated ex-FBI agent, Layton, use as a cover while on assignment there in this story. When I was in Tunis in mid-2003, it wasn’t long after the unfortunate U.S. invasion of Iraq, and believe me, in the train stations and in the cafés, wherever people talked, political matters were certainly in the air, as would be expected in an Arab World country at a time like that. I do hope such edginess comes through here, along with the sheer, undeniable beauty of that wonderful city and environs, a place of so much startling history. As for the created character of Layton himself, immersed in both soul-searching and labyrinthine international intrigue, I’ll spare explanatory comment entirely and simply let the man lead his own life somewhat in the shadows — the way anybody in his line of risky work, for better or worse, maybe should.

Kyle Minoris the author of In the Devil’s Territory , the collection of stories and novellas in which “A Day Meant to Do Less” appears, and coeditor (with Okla Elliott) of The Other Chekhov, a selection of Anton Chekhov’s lesser-known and more lurid stories. His work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Southern Review, Surreal South, and Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. He is at work on a novel, a graphic novel, and a screenplay and corresponds with readers at http:// www. myspace.com/kvleminor.

• “A Day Meant to Do Less” owes a few things to writers I admire, among them Katherine Anne Porter, Christopher Coake, and Donald Ray Pollock. I wanted to explore a consciousness altered by illness, as Porter does in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and I wanted to play with structure and point of view as Coake does in almost all his stories, and I wanted to give breath and dignity to a kind of character I know in life but rarely find in literature, which is what I’ve learned from Pollock. I’m grateful to those who read sketchy early drafts and encouraged me to continue, among them Debbie Oesch-Minor, Joe Oestreich, Doug Watson, Bart Skarzynski, Maureen Traverse, and most of all Lee Abbott, and to Mark Drew, Peter Sitt, and Kim Dana Kupperman at the Gettysburg Review, for giving my story a good home.

Alice Munrogrew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven new collections of stories — Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship. Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock; and a volume of Selected Stories — as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

• The story grew out of my memories of summer camp, and the almost casual yet ritualistic brutality of children. An irresistible, terrible act, to be carried through life by two decent, normal women. How do they manage it? Two mysteries, really: Why do they do it? And how do they live with it?

Thisbe Nissenis the author of the novels Osprey Island and The Good People of New York and the story collection Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night. She’s also the coauthor/illustrator of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook. A graduate of Oberlin College and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’s taught in the M.F.A. programs at Iowa and Columbia, at numerous conferences including Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise, and is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She’s at work on a novel. The Screen Doors of Discretion, and a story collection, How Other People Make Love, in which “Win’s Girl” will appear.

• I wrote “Win’s Girl” out of a desperate yearning for some sort of revenge against the electrician who (ostensibly) rewired my house when I was a brand-new first-time homeowner. He told me practically every one of the stories Rich Randall tells Doreen and then, five thousand dollars later, disappeared. Feeling like a moron, I thought of something my mother always says when my life isn’t going the way I’d like it to and I’m heartbroken or otherwise miserable. She says, “Thiz, you’ll write this. You’ll write this.” It doesn’t usually make me feel much better, but this time I thought: I’ll write this. I’ll show you, you mean nasty electrician. And so it is with no small amount of smirking, gloating self-satisfaction that I express my honor and thrill at seeing “Win’s Girl” included in this anthology. I revel in my tiny vindication!