The Best American Short Stories 2001 (The Best American Series) - Softcover

Katrina Kenison has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 1990. She currently resides in Massachusetts.

Foreword

IN THE 1942 VOLUME of The Best American Short Stories, the
anthology"s new annual editor, Martha Foley, attempted to define the
form. "A good short story," she wrote, "is a story which is not too
long and which gives the reader the feeling he has undergone a
memorable experience."
Over the past eleven years, during my own tenure as annual
editor of this eighty-six-year-old series, I"ve run across numerous
other writers" attempts to come up with some sort of standard by
which to measure the short story. Few have managed to add much to Ms.
Foley"s democratic and rather obvious criteria.
At symposiums and writers" conferences, I"ve learned to duck
and weave around the inevitable question "What do you look for in a
short story?" I wish I knew! Heart? Soul? Truth? Voice? Integrity of
intention and skill in execution? The answer is all of the above, and
none of the above. For I don"t really "look" for anything; when a
story works, I know it in my gut, not in my head, and only then —
after laughing, after brushing away a tear, after taking a moment to
catch my breath and return to the here and now — do I set about
analyzing the successes and failures of a writer"s effort. It would
certainly be nice to have a checklist, a foolproof grading system, a
tally sheet of pluses and minuses. But reading is a subjective
activity, even for those of us who are fortunate enough to read for a
living. We editors may read more pages than the average American, and
we may read faster, but when it comes right down to it, I believe we
all read for the same reason: in order to test our own knowledge of
life and to enlarge on it.
Out of the three thousand or so short stories I read in any
given year, I may file two hundred away. And I always marvel at how
precious this stash of chosen fiction seems to me; these are the
stories that, for one reason or another, exerted some kind of hold on
the priorities of my heart. Even now, I have boxes of old stories,
going back a decade and more, stacked up in the basement; I"ve saved
every file card I"ve filled out since 1990 as well — a treasure trove
of stories, a king"s ransom of human wisdom caught and held on those
hundreds of moldering pages. When it comes to cleaning closets, I"m
ruthless. But those stories . . . well, how could I throw them away?
Who knows when a particular bit of fiction will prove useful?
Someday, I think, someone will need that story about the emotional
roller coaster of new motherhood; or this one, which reminds us what
sixteen years old really feels like; or that one, which could help a
friend prepare for death . . .
Toward year"s end, I sift through the current piles and begin
to ship batches of tales off to the guest editor, always wondering
whether he or she will share my tastes and predilections and curious
to know whether the narrative voice that whispered so urgently in my
ear will speak with as much power to another. Truth be told, it is an
anxious time. Just as, when I was a teenager, I wanted my parents to
agree that my boyfriend was indeed Prince Charming, I can"t help but
hope that the guest editor will share my passion for the year"s
collection of short story suitors.
I have no clue about Barbara Kingsolver"s taste in men, but I
discovered right away that she and I could fall in love with the same
short stories. And when her introduction to this volume came spooling
through my fax machine, I stood there reading it page by page,
nodding in agreement with her discoveries and full of gratitude for
the pickiness (her word) and devotion she brought to this task of
reading, judging, and finally choosing. And then, as the next-to-last
page emerged into my waiting hands, I saw it: a new definition for
the short story, at last. To Martha Foley"s sixty-year-old criteria
we can now add Barbara Kingsolver"s useful dictum: "A good short
story cannot simply be Lit Lite, but the successful execution of
large truths delivered in tight spaces." Writers take heed!
In choosing this year"s collection of The Best American Short
Stories, Kingsolver has done writers and readers a great service, for
her own love for the form and her exacting standards have resulted in
a volume that is as varied in subject matter, style, voice, and
intent as even the most eclectic reader could wish for. Collectively,
these stories hum with the energy of twenty disparate voices raised
under one roof. They are a testament to our contemporary writers"
vigorous engagement with the world and to the robust good health of
American short fiction.
Some years ago, John Updike revealed, "Writing fiction, as
those of us who do it know, is, beneath the anxious travail of it, a
bliss, a healing, an elicitation of order from disorder, a praise of
what is, a salvaging of otherwise overlookable truths from the
ruthless sweep of generalization, a beating of daily dross into
something shimmering and absolute." Mr. Updike, who made his first
appearance in The Best American Short Stories in 1959, returns this
year for the twelfth time as a contributor. (He also served as guest
editor in 1984 and coedited The Best American Short Stories of the
Century, published in 1999.) He is the only writer in the history of
the series to appear in these pages for six consecutive decades — an
achievement that we feel is worth noting. May he continue to beat the
daily dross into such shimmering and absolute works as "Personal
Archeology," which begins on page 326.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published
between January 2000 and January 2001. 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 or Canada their home; (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 their short fiction to be considered for next year"s
edition should send their publications to Katrina Kenison, c/o The
Best American Short Stories, Houghton Mifflin Company, 222 Berkeley
Street, Boston, MA 02116.
K.K.
Introduction

I HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED why short stories aren"t more popular in this
country. We Americans are such busy people you"d think we"d jump at
the chance to have our literary wisdom served in doses that fit
handily between taking the trash to the curb and waiting for the
carpool. We should favor the short story and adore the poem. But we
don"t. Short story collections rarely sell half as well as novels;
they are never blockbusters. They are hardly ever even block-denters.
From what I gather, most Americans would sooner read a five-hundred-
page book about southern France or a boy attending wizard school or
how to make home decor from roadside trash or anything than pick up a
book offering them a dozen tales of the world complete in twenty
pages apiece. And I won"t even discuss what they will do to avoid
reading poetry.
Why on earth should this be? I enjoy the form so much myself
that when I was invited to be the guest editor for this collection,
forewarned that it would involve reading thousands of pages of short
fiction in a tight three-month period, I decided to do it. This trial
by fire, I thought, would disclose to me the heart of the form and
all its mysteries. Also, it would nicely fill the space that lay
ahead of me at the end of the year 2000, just after my planned
completion of a novel and before its publication the following
spring. The creative dead space between galley proofs and a book"s
first review is a dreaded time in an author"s life, comparable to the
tenth month of a pregnancy. (I"ve had two post-term babies, so I know
what I"m talking about.) I look at the prepublication epoch as a
Great Sargasso Sea and always try to fill it with satisfying short-
term projects. I reexamined the previous editions of this series on
my shelf and considered the assignment. Amy Tan, who edited The Best
American Short Stories 1999, described the organized pleasure of
reading one story a day for three months. That sounded like a tidy
plan to put on my calendar. Editing a story collection, plus a short
family vacation to Mexico and a week-long stint lecturing on a ship
in the Caribbean, would fill those months perfectly, providing just
enough distraction from my prepublication doldrums.
If you ever want to know what it sounds like when the
universe goes "Ha! Ha!" just put a tidy plan on your calendar.
My months of anticipated quiet at the end of 2000 turned out
to be the most eventful of my life, in which I was called upon to
attend to an astonishing number of unexpected duties, celebrations,
and crises. I weathered a tour and publicity storm with the release
of my new novel, eight months ahead of schedule. While handling this
plus the lectures at sea, I learned of a family member"s catastrophic
illness, I was invited to have dinner with President and Mrs.
Clinton, and I took my eighth-grader to the funeral of her beloved
friend — not to mention the normal background noise of family
urgencies. These two months of our lives were stitched together by
trains, automobiles, the M.S. Ryndam, and thirty-two separate
airplane flights. (A perverse impulse caused me to save my boarding
passes and count them.) Naturally this would be the year when I also
experienced a true airplane emergency, and I don"t mean the garden-
variety altitude plunge. I mean that I finally got to see what those
yellow masks look like.
Through it all, as best I could, I read stories. On a cold
Iowa afternoon with the white light of snowfall flooding the windows,
sitting quietly with a loved one enduring his new regime of
chemotherapy, I read about a nineteenth-century explorer losing his
grasp on life in the Himalayas. On another day, when I found myself
wide-eyed long after midnight on a ship so racked by storms that the
books were diving off the shelves of my cabin, I amused myself with a
droll fable about two feuding widows in the Pyrenees. I read my way
through a long afternoon sitting on the dirty carpet of Gate B-22 at
O"Hare, successfully tuning out all the mayhem and canceled-flight
refugees around me, except for one young woman who kept shouting into
her cell phone, "I"m almost out of minutes!" (This was not the same
day my airplane would lose its oxygen; the screenwriter of my life
isn"t that corny.) I read through a Saturday while my four-year-old
dozed in my lap with a mysterious fever that plastered her curls to
her forehead and burned my skin through her pajamas; I read in the
early mornings in Mexico while parrots chattered outside our window.
Some days I was able to read no stories at all — when my youngest was
not asleep on my lap, for instance — and on other days I read many.
Eighteen stories got lost in my luggage and took a trip of their very
own, but returned to me in time.
My ideas about what I would gain from this experience
collapsed as I began to wrestle instead with what I would be able to
give to it. How could I read 125 stories amid all this craziness and
compare them fairly? In the beginning I marked each one with a
ranking of minus, plus, or double-plus. That lasted for exactly three
stories. It soon became clear that what looks like double-plus on an
ordinary day can be a whole different thing when the oxygen masks are
dangling from the overhead compartment. I despaired of my wildly
uncontrolled circumstances, thinking constantly, If this were my
story, would I want some editor reading it under these conditions?
Maybe not. But the problem is, life is like that. Editors,
readers, all of us, have to work reading into our busy lives. The
best of it can stand up to the challenge — and if anything can do it,
it should be the genre of short fiction, with its economy of language
and revving plot-driven engine. We catch our reading on the fly, and
that is probably the whole point anyway. If we lived in silent white
rooms with no emergencies beyond the wilting of the single red rose
in the vase, we probably wouldn"t need fiction to help us explain the
inexplicable things, the storms at sea and deaths of too-young
friends. If we lived in a room like that, we would probably just
smile and take naps.
What makes writing good? That"s easy: the lyrical
description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true
on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where
it should. But these stories I was to choose among had been culled
from thousands of others, so all were beautifully written. I couldn"t
favor (or disfavor) the ones by my favorite writers, because their
authorship was concealed from me. I knew only that they had been
published in magazines in the last year and preselected by the series
editor, Katrina Kenison, who had done for me the heroic service of
separating distinguished stories from the run-of-the-mill. My task
was to choose, among the good, the truly great. How was I supposed to
do it?
With a pile of stories on my lap, I sat with this question
early on and tried to divine why it is that I love a short story when
I do, and the answer came to me quite clearly: I love it for what it
tells me about life. If it tells me something I didn"t already know,
or that I maybe suspected but never framed quite that way, or that
never before socked me divinely in the solar plexus, then the story
is worth the read.
From that moment my task became simple. I relaxed and read
for the pleasure of it, and when I finished each story, I wrote a
single sentence on the first page underneath the title, in the space
conveniently opened up for me where the author"s name had been masked
out. Just one sentence of pure truth, if I"d found it, which
generally I did. No bumpy air or fevers or chattering parrots could
change this one true thing the story had meant to tell me. This is
how I began to see the heart of the form. While nearly all the
stories were expertly written, and most were pleasant to read, they
varied enormously in the weight and value of what they carried — in
whether it was sand or gemstones I held in my palm when the words had
trickled away. Some beautifully written stories gave me truths so
self-evident that when I wrote them down, I was embarrassed. "Young
love is mostly selfish," some told me, and others were practically
lining up to declare, "Alcoholism ruins lives and devastates
children!" In the privacy of my reading, I probably made that special
face teenagers make when forced to attend to the obvious. Of all the
days of my life, these were the ones in which I was perhaps most
acutely aware that time is precious. So please, tell me something I
don"t already know. Sometimes I couldn"t find anything at all to
write in that little space under the story"s title, but most were
clear enough in their intent, and many were interesting enough to
give me pause. And then came one that rang like a bell. "An orphaned
child needs to find her own peculiar way to her mo...