Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

The American world we see reflected historically in the short story, as captured in the heroic century-long endeavor that is The Best American Short Stories , is one of predictably astonishing and thrilling variety. From 1915 to 2015: in this volume we see America in all its wildnesses of character and voice. James Baldwin’s sorrowful valentine to brotherhood and jazz in “Sonny’s Blues”; a child’s desperate religious questioning in Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” and John Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers”; the adult defiance of an unreasonable God in Stanley Elkin’s “The Conventional Wisdom.” We see the psychological aftermath of war in stories by Robert Stone and Benjamin Percy. Lives of crime are given all sorts of unexpected angles in Eudora Welty, Mary Gaitskill, and Edward P. Jones. And sometimes the landscape is not only American but those places on the globe that have fed the American experience. Included here are Hemingway’s France, Fitzgerald’s France, Sharma’s India, Lahiri’s India, Ireland conjured by Katherine Anne Porter’s aging, heartbroken immigrants. Israel sticks its head in the door in the work of Nathan Englander; the Dominican Republic lives everywhere in Junot Díaz’s New Jersey. China is both sharply and hazily recalled by David Wong Louie’s resilient refugees. Uncontainability rounded up and contained in a small container. The short story captures and cages, though first it seeks, just as the reader seeks. Within these pages are Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia and ZZ Packer’s Georgia. We go to them all to see how other people make sense of things in their own individual voices and ways, to see what has hounded their hearts and caught their eye. Jamaica Kincaid’s loveless Caribbean child-narrators who speak their quiet rage and loneliness in formal, contractionless speech; Joyce Carol Oates’s uncertain families whose estrangement is enacted in neogothic violence: in the work of both of these authors, time-swept cultures allow youth and their parents to hate each other as easily as to love. Or sometimes children are betrayed in the ordinary ways, as in Fitzgerald’s famous story “Babylon Revisited.” There is the hilariously weary existentialism of Donald Barthelme’s teacher in “The School,” trying to spin his lesson so as to keep the children more childlike. There is the Holocaust seen and spoken of from the margins and from the hypothetical future, by Nancy Hale and Nathan Englander. There is war in the Mideast viewed and absorbed from slightly closer in by the characters in the Tobias Wolff and Benjamin Percy stories. And there is the oddly cheerful and degraded language uttered by the denizens of George Saunders’s capitalist dystopias.

We read short stories to see — quickly — how other people manage, what they know, what they are saying, what, privately, they are thinking and doing. According to Saunders, short stories are “the deep, encoded crystallizations of all human knowledge. They are rarefied, dense meaning machines.” The meaning is seldom pretty, sometimes hard to believe, and not always precisely factual. But it is the truth of dreams: when, working in an inspired way, the imagination merges a moment of action with a moment of interiority and a moment of truth is born; with luck and skill, there is the perfect voice to speak it, the perfect gesture to perform it. Put together over time, these stories cause an entire world to be glimpsed through the hearing of it. This is where the story owes its powers to poetry and plays: it is (perhaps) an aural art made from visual observation. Hence its origins around the spiky wattage of a campfire.

How do you know when you’ve come to the end?

An anthology is a small gathering of flowers from a large field. That is the word’s etymology from the ancient Greek as well as its action. It is not a contest, and this anthology especially is not one. Many favorite American short stories will be found here, and some will not. As with any cultural institution, this will be for various reasons. Perhaps the stories were not in this grand but fallible series to begin with. Perhaps John Updike put them into his Best of the Century book (we decided on no overlaps, but picking over his gemlike crumbs, I still found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best story, Flannery O’Connor’s best story, James Baldwin’s best story). Perhaps a story just plain could not fit into the very limited space Heidi Pitlor and I had available — only a handful of stories per decade. Perhaps the lovely Heidi mischievously hid some from me. Perhaps some were being held hostage by the Salinger estate and guarded like national security secrets. (Could we publish a Salinger story even in completely redacted form, like a Jenny Holzer exhibit? We would have had better luck with the Defense Department.) Often if the story was very long — the Best American series can proudly claim to have awarded Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café” a place within its pages — the adhesive weaknesses of the bookbinding glue for this anniversary volume prevented us from including it. (Nor did the problematic bookbinding glue help us readhere the wads of hair we had torn from our heads in editorial anguish.)

Although a mechanism of literary canonization, a short story anthology, like the beautiful game of soccer, contains some of the unfortunate facts, restrictions, and hauntings of life: the score does not always reflect the playing. For it to be any good, its intentions must be quixotic, as the very word best implies, and one takes one’s hat off to it with gratitude and awe. Some favorite stories of mine — by Annie Proulx, Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Rick Bass, T. C. Boyle, Thomas McGuane, Susan Minot, Tony Earley, Amy Hempel, Amy Tan, Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Ethan Canin, Stuart Dybek, to name but a few — are not here, for one of the several aforementioned reasons. Missing as well are Toni Cade Bambara’s exuberant child noticers, whose encounters with the adult world express the worried questions we all should ask ourselves regarding its injustices. Also missing are Karen Russell’s roaming vampires in the lemon grove, whose float, drift, and deathless hunger express the artist at society’s peripheries, thinly disguised as an ordinary citizen (a timeless literary illustration but one there is no room for except in this sentence). Absent too are the stories of Don DeLillo, whose great work as a novelist has too often eclipsed his brilliant shorter work.

But we could wring our hands forever. The powerful stories that are here — owing to the steady presence of a diligent and questing hundred-year-old enterprise — are full of heat and song and argument, depictions of life and its traps, its home fires and circling passions. This volume is also a celebration not just of authors but of the editors and readers who experienced the stories here in the way they were intended: as serious art. What has been gathered reveals a scrutiny of the editorial eye as well as a devotion to talent, diversity, originality, and our deep history as storytellers. A bouquet of beautiful, piercing, lonely voices. Perhaps a chorus. Along with a purposefully stray measure of “O Canada,” these pages comprise our own literary version of a national anthem.

L.M.

At the turn of the twentieth century, short stories were a preferred form of entertainment in the United States. This was a boom time for magazine publishing, owing in part to developments in offset printing technology as well as to the Postal Act of 1879, which had granted magazines discounted mailing rates. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post , and The Delineator , all of which published short stories, sold more than a half million copies per issue. The authors of these stories were well known at the time and often well paid.