Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

OCCASIONALLY SOMETHING HORRIFIC transpires—and in what seems like a minute, this something changes us. It changes us as sentient beings with souls and minds. It changes us as parents and siblings and children, as travelers and citizens and individuals. Certainly as artists and readers, certainly as writers.

After 9/11, writers wondered how or even if it was possible to understand the events that occurred. How and what and why to write now? What to read? Little seemed relevant or urgent enough. Were we as Americans anywhere near as savvy or admired as we had thought? One of our toughest, bravest, proudest cities was revealed to be susceptible. Even baldly vulnerable.

To me, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, was similar to 9/11 in its ability to demolish a country’s posture, not to mention its values and even aesthetics. As the news broke that day, disbelief rippled throughout the country and the world. No, we thought. Many of us glanced at each other, wondering whether this or that person was thinking the same thing: This cannot be right. THIS cannot have happened. This, here. And then, as confirmations came of all that had occurred in that school, a collective shudder and the impulse to turn away, perhaps inward, to regain our breath. To hold our children and our parents for dear life. And later, the impulse to assign blame (to graft meaning onto the meaningless)—to blame gun makers, the country’s health-care system for abandoning its mentally ill, politicians, a culture that glamorizes violence, video games that do the same, and the media for shining its spotlight on mass killers.

Again, the human capacity for violence has proven to be greater than we previously thought. Again, a dark cloud has settled over our country.

This unthinkable event, the sixteenth mass shooting of 2012, occurred toward the end of my reading cycle, just in time for me to freeze up each time I read a story featuring groups of children in harm’s way or gun violence or, heaven forbid, a school shooting. Pity the writers who may have still been trying to comprehend the shooting at Columbine High School. This was not the time to publish a short story about such matters.

A few months later, I write this with a still-jumpy heart. The reality and possibility of mass shootings have come to occupy my thoughts many times daily. When I walk my twin children into their kindergarten classrooms in their small elementary school. When I return to their school in order to drop off forgotten sneakers, when I stand beneath the camera that is now mounted beside the school entry in order to identify myself. When I go to any large, enclosed, crowded space. Malls, movie theaters—or not even large spaces. The subway, the train, any place where strangers find themselves in close proximity. There is a heavy stone in my chest during these moments that was not there before the shooting at Newtown.

I am enormously lucky—I have never witnessed or known anyone who was killed in a mass shooting. I do not and have never lived anywhere near where such a thing took place. I can only imagine how different every inch of the world looks to those who did lose a loved one.

In 1946, my predecessor, Martha Foley, wrote, “It is a literary truism that there must be a period of distillation before the real impact of some tremendous event, either historical or personal, can emerge in writing.” Now, due to the speed with which we receive our news and the graphic nature of its delivery, I think that the actual distillation time has shrunk, although I’m not certain that this yields writing as rich in perspective or depth of emotion. Before now, the strongest and most timeless stories about a transformative event had been written after a good amount of time elapsed. Now, writers’ frequent use of the present tense combined with our widespread exposure to up-to-the-minute news has led to a rise in stories and novels that trace the microscopic jigs and jags of grief itself. In other words, while we are grieving, we are now writing.

We may be sacrificing perspective or depth, but this does not necessarily amount to lesser writing. If anything, there is a new sort of immediacy, a newfound intimacy and urgency in our fiction these days. Witness, in the following pages, Karl Taro Greenfeld’s story of one man’s clumsy grappling with being let go from his job. Or David Means or Steven Millhauser as they tunnel so deep inside their characters’ fears and hopes that at least this reader was rendered nearly breathless. For evidence of technology’s increasing impact, see Elizabeth Tallent’s magnificent “The Wilderness,” which scrolls before us as if on a computer screen.

As I read in 2013, I will listen for a slightly faster heartbeat, one closer to our schools and children, one differently attuned to crowds and violence. And in years beyond, I hope to find a glimmer of meaning and the salve of perspective in some wise story about one of our saddest days.

Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content. Some years I work closely with guest editors as they read and hone their list. Other years, they prefer to read and select privately. Elizabeth was the latter sort, and delivered to me a terrifically diverse, interesting, and impressive table of contents. There was a bit of back-and-forth, but very little was needed in the end. Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2012 and January 2013. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or who have made the United States their home; and (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not knowingly considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish for their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publication or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02116.

THERE WAS A TIME when a telephone was something that hung on the wall or sat on a table, and when it rang you had no idea who was calling. “Hello?” People had different ways of saying this, of course. Those expecting disaster (my grandmother) would say the word with quiet dread. Those who wanted to appear friendly (my mother) would say it with perkiness: “ Hel -lo!” Or a self-conscious adolescent might mumble “Hullo?” It was a question, more than a greeting. Before answering machines and caller ID, that word asked, Who’s there? What are you calling about? What is it you have to tell me? Rarely was one more attuned to the sound of voice than in the moment before the answer. Whoever had telephoned had done so for a reason: to deliver bad news or good, to report something overheard in the grocery store, to spread gossip or stop it, or to express concerns about the world. One anticipated the tone of the voice as much as the words.

A reader is in the position of saying hello. Tentatively, enthusiastically, or even with trepidation, the reader approaches a piece of writing with the unspoken question What do you have to say? And the writer answers, This. I have this to say, and I want you to listen to my voice, to the tone of my voice, because that will tell you what I have to say . In fact, in the first story of this collection, the narrator, an out-of-work actor, observes, “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.”