Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Although most of the story came quickly, I did labor over the ending. The woman is unraveling, and I wanted the language to do that, too, for that final image to be one not of stasis but of movement, reflecting the change within the character, but also to evoke a kind of lyricism at odds with the bleakness of that change.

KRISTEN ISKANDRIAN’s debut novel Motherest was published by Twelve/Hachette in 2017 and was chosen as a monthly pick by Shondaland, Vanity Fair, The Millions, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as being named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Lenny Letter . Her short fiction has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Joyland, and Epoch, among others. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama. For more information visit kristeniskandrian.com.

■ My class in elementary school did an overnight at a museum of natural history, although I don’t remember much about it beyond possibly sleeping beneath a terrarium of spiders, and even that detail may be an invention of memory. And, like my narrator, I adore E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler . But mostly I wanted to explore longing from the point of view of a preteen, a child, because I think we forget that children experience desire in all kinds of powerful and devastating and transgressive ways. Jill knows who she is and what her strengths are; she doesn’t need anyone to tell her how to be. From that self-assurance springs both her sense of humor and her capacity for deep hurt. I’m unendingly fascinated by where and how our two most human conditions—pain and pleasure—meet, blur, and swallow one another whole.

JOCELYN NICOLE JOHNSON’s essays and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Prime Number, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Johnson lives, writes, and loves on her people—her son, husband, friends, and art students—in Charlottesville, Virginia.

■ In 2014, years before Charlottesville became known for a deadly white supremacists’ rally, a black University of Virginia student was detained by local law enforcement after he was turned away from a bar near campus. Moments later, a video showed Martese Johnson pinned to the ground, blood pouring down his face. “I go to UVA!” he shouted, as if he’d once believed those words would shield him. The next week, I recognized his image in the local paper: a boy in a suit, flanked by lawyers, his forehead marked by ten fresh sutures. Looking on, I received some share of this young man’s bewilderment and heartache; it collected in me. A year later, “Control Negro” spilled out.

This short story contains fragments of my mother, my father, my brother; I borrowed details, real and imagined, from their lives growing up in the ’50s and ’60s in the sand hills of South Carolina, a community perverted by Jim Crow racism. It contains a speck of bitterness that settled in me, years ago, after a conversation with a close college friend, who was white. She told me, excitedly, that she’d learned in class about a professor who’d “definitely” disproved the effects of racism. His method, she explained, was to compare the barriers faced by black communities—bondage, violence, discrimination—to comparable difficulties other ethnic groups had contended with—though not in aggregate, she conceded. The professor found that other groups had overcome the same hurdles that crippled black communities. And so, the logic seemed to go, the problem must be with blackness itself, and not the brutality it inspired. What I remember most was my friend’s gleeful conclusion: “He was black!” she said. “The professor, who did the study, was a black man!”

It was only after “Control Negro” found a home at Guernica that I recognized myself in the story. Hadn’t I felt curated during moments of my middle-class upbringing, choreographed even? And now I was watching my own biracial boy come of age in a newly vitriolic and outraged America.

MATTHEW LYONS is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Black Dandy , Kzine , and Daily Science Fiction among others. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and more. Born in Colorado, he lives in New York City with his wife.

■ I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomenon of American male rage, and how it’s communicated down from generation to generation, from fathers to sons, more often than not mutating into something far worse than what it was before. In so many ways, that rage is a central driver in our society, and even if our bad decisions sometimes seem sensible, it’s not difficult to track the destruction that they can cause as we flirt with total annihilation. Gods, humans, or something in-between, we all inherit the damage that was done before us. Even though we like to think of ourselves as better, sometimes all we can hope to do is redirect it. Sometimes we can only make things worse.

DINA NAYERI was born in Tehran and arrived in America at ten years old, after two years as a refugee. She is the author of the acclaimed Guardian Long Read “The Ungrateful Refugee” (soon to be a book by the same name), and the winner of an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, and fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages and recently published in the New York Times , the Guardian, Los Angeles Times , New Republic , and others. Her second novel, Refuge, was published by Riverhead Books in 2017.

■ “A Big True” began as an experiment. For months my mother and I had fought about my fiction, which she thinks of as an excuse to twist the truth. “You write these loser parents all the time and you use my details. You lie about me.” “But they’re not you!” I’d say again and again. She said, “And yet somehow you can’t write a parent who’s not a loser, or a child who isn’t perfect.” She was so wrong, but still I set out to prove her even more wrong (yes, I know). I said, “What if I write a story about a parent who’s wildly different from you, a man maybe, whose daughter refuses to understand him? What if I make him an artist and she’s the bland one? What if I show the color in a simple life and the dreariness in a seemingly successful one?” She loved the idea. So I wrote the story. I sent the first draft to her, and I was so nervous about how she’d react. She called me and after a silent beat, she said, “You did it again! Another loser immigrant parent and their amazing kid who knows everything!” A loser? I was in shock. Didn’t she see what I saw, all the love in my story? Didn’t she see that I adored Rahad? That I had adored every displaced mother and father I had ever created from the parts of her and of my father and my grandparents and myself? We fought, of course. I edited. We fought again. Finally, she threw me a bone. “Wyatt is funny,” she said. “I understand the trick he plays at the end. It’s very moving. Very true.”

TÉA OBREHT’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and a New York Times best seller. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker , Zoetrope: All-Story, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, and Esquire, among others. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York and teaches at Hunter College. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2019.