The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  CHARLES BAXTER Charity

  ANN BEATTIE The Indian Uprising

  T. C. BOYLE The Night of the Satellite

  PETER CAMERON After the Flood

  NICOLE CULLEN Long Tom Lookout

  CRAIG DAVIDSON Medium Tough

  JOSHUA FERRIS The Breeze

  NELL FREUDENBERGER Hover

  DAVID GATES A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

  LAUREN GROFF At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners

  RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA The Judge’s Will

  O. A. LINDSEY Evie M.

  WILL MACKIN Kattekoppen

  BRENDAN MATHEWS This Is Not a Love Song

  MOLLY McNETT La Pulchra Nota

  BENJAMIN NUGENT God

  JOYCE CAROL OATES Mastiff

  STEPHEN O’CONNOR Next to Nothing

  KAREN RUSSELL Madame Bovary’s Greyhound

  LAURA VAN DEN BERG Antarctica

  Contributors’ Notes

  Other Distinguished Stories of 2013

  Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Egan

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® and The Best American Short Stories® are registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISSN 0067-6233

  ISBN 978-0-547-81922-8

  ISBN 978-0-547-86886-8 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-547-81924-2

  v1.0914

  “Charity” by Charles Baxter. First published in McSweeney’s, Issue 43. Copyright © 2013 by Charles Baxter. Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff and Verrill literary agency.

  “The Indian Uprising” by Ann Beattie. First published in Granta, No. 126. Copyright © 2014 by Anne Beattie. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Night of the Satellite” by T. Coraghessan Boyle. First published in The New Yorker, April 15, 2013. from T. C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, copyright © 2013 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  “After the Flood” by Peter Cameron. First published in Subtropics, Issue 15. Copyright © 2013 by Peter Cameron. Reprinted by permission of Irene Skolnick Literary Agency.

  “Long Tom Lookout” by Nicole Cullen. First published in Idaho Review, vol. XIII. Copyright © 2013 by Nicole Cullen. Reprinted by permission of Nicole Cullen.

  “Medium Tough” by Craig Davidson. First published in Agni, #77. Copyright © 2013 by Craig Davidson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Breeze” by Joshua Ferris. First published in The New Yorker, September 30, 2013. Copyright © 2014 by Joshua Ferris. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Hover” by Nell Freudenberger. First published in The Paris Review, #207. Copyright © 2013 by Nell Freudenberger. Reprinted by permission of Nell Freudenberger.

  “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me” by David Gates. First published in Granta, no. 126. Copyright © 2013 by David Gates. Reprinted by permission of David Gates.

  “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” by Lauren Groff. First published in Five Points. Copyright © 2013 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Judge’s Will” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. First published in The New Yorker, March 25, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Reprinted by permission of C.S.H. Jhabvala.

  “Evie M.” by O. A. Lindsey. First published in Iowa Review, vol. 43, no. 1. Copyright © 2014 by O. A. Lindsey. Reprinted by permission of O. A. Lindsey.

  “Kattekoppen” by Will Mackin. First published in The New Yorker, March 11, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Will Mackin. Reprinted by permission of Will Mackin.

  “This Is Not a Love Song” by Brendan Mathews. First published in Virginia Quarterly Review, 89/3. Copyright © 2013 by Brendan Mathews. Reprinted by permission of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

  “La Pulchra Nota” by Molly McNett. First published in Image, no. 78. Copyright © 2014 by Molly McNett. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “God” by Benjamin Nugent. First published in The Paris Review, #206. Copyright © 2013 by Benjamin Nugent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Mastiff” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in The New Yorker, July 1, 2013. Copyright © 2014 by Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Joyce Carol Oates.

  “Next to Nothing” by Stephen O’Connor. First published in Conjunctions: 60. Copyright © 2013 by Stephen O’Connor. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound” by Karen Russell. First published in Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 17, no. 2. Copyright © 2013 by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

  “Antarctica” by Laura van den Berg. First published in Glimmer Train, Issue 88, Fall 2013. From The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg. Copyright © 2013 by Laura van den Berg. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Foreword

  SOMETIMES IT SEEMS as if the aspiring—and financially well enough endowed—American writer is offered more than the reader. For the young writer, there are a fast-growing number of MFA programs, fellowships, summer workshops, residencies, creative writing centers, endless books that teach about writing and publishing. For evidence of the opportunities and widespread desire to write in our country, note the sheer number of blogs that populate the Internet, the comment sections of said blogs, Facebook and Twitter (where everyone gets to be a published writer, at least within the confines of a status update or tweet), the self-published army on Amazon.com.

  This year, I detected a certain uncertainty in short stories, a sense of disorientation, perhaps a reflection of these unsteady times for publishing and readers. A lot of story writers relied on a character’s intuition or impulse to fuel the forward motion of their stories. As a result, many stories tended to wander—sometimes intriguingly, often into unsettling territory—rather than accelerate toward some definitive endpoint. While some stories that I read this year were built around or upon some narrative roadway—and many of those appear in this volume—plenty were not.

  From my vantage point, there are moments when it seems that more people in this country want to write than read. Many people who read this book are in fact writers in training, reading in order to learn to write better. I myself came to serious reading relatively late, halfway through college, and this was in a class where both reading and creative writing were taught. I soon wanted to give to others the singular high that
I felt when reading an Alice Munro or a Margaret Atwood story. I should say that I went to college in Canada.

  There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to write and seeking help in that endeavor. I am the proud owner of an MFA, a shelf full of books about how to write fiction and how to get published, memoirs by fiction writers, and at least a dozen story anthologies that I bought before I was lucky enough to land this job. But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become—or are we already—a nation of performers with no audience?

  For the reader of books, there are book clubs, many informally initiated by friends or neighbors, a smattering of independent bookstores that serve as meeting places for readers and writers, libraries, some websites. Getting books has become easy—click on Amazon.com, and from the sound of it, a drone will soon be able to deliver a book to your door in the time it takes to say “drone.” But I’m talking about accessible, widespread support for reading. Brick-and-mortar bookstores accessible to everyone who would patronize them. Also, a sense in our country that reading fiction is necessary and, dare I say, a wee bit glamorous. Like writing.

  I had the good luck to take part in a reading and trivia night the other week at a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was a fundraiser for 826 Boston, a fabulous organization that offers writing support for kids. Four of us were invited to read for a few minutes, and then came a rowdy, rambunctious game of literary trivia for the mostly twenty-something audience. In order to win, players needed to have read things. There were questions about Mrs. Dalloway and Let the Great World Spin and Frankenstein. The place was packed. Drinks were served, fun was had. Reading became a galvanizing force rather than a solitary chore.

  Soapbox alert. We—editors, writers, teachers, publishers—need to do whatever we can to enliven readers, to help create communities for them if we want to continue to have readers at all. Our independent bookstores are the frontlines, and many booksellers are fighting the good fight. Here, books stimulate conversation. Conversation stimulates a sense of community. Listening happens. Thinking. The exchange of thoughts.

  Here’s the thing: I am guilty of spending evenings scrolling through my Facebook and Twitter feeds, telling myself that after a day of reading stories, why not give myself a break? Why on earth would I want to read more fiction? I have a list three miles long of books that I want to read. I have twenty-five books on my bedside table. It’s all a little overwhelming. Why not take a few minutes or maybe an hour and see what’s going on with all my “friends” and the people whom I “follow”? But then I start to become a little groggy from staring at the screen, a little glum from reading other people’s opinions of the day’s news, which is so rarely good. I’ve been trying to spend more time during the evening with books, less online, to keep myself engaged in some book, any book, at all times. Because really, what I’ve done all day, whether it was reading short fiction or writing longer fiction or shepherding children, does not matter. We’re all tired at night. We are all entitled to some self-indulgence, be that taking a self-test on BuzzFeed or smiling at the humorous tweets from the perplexingly enormous number of writers who watch The Bachelor each week. But we all know the drill: if we eat only candy, if we cultivate our friendships and relationships primarily online, if we forget to walk to town sometimes instead of drive, a crucial part of us will wither. You don’t have to read all the books on your list at once. Just pick up the one that grabs you right now. If you don’t love it, put it down. Move on.

  This year, I’m not going to vow never to dip into Facebook or Twitter, but maybe I’ll go online a little less. I’m going to try to keep reading some book each night. I’m going to start asking people which books they’re reading instead of which movies they have seen. I’m going to see if I can’t talk a few bookstore people into starting weekly trivia nights at their stores.

  One other thing. I was more aware this year than usual that American short fiction, for so long primarily the domain of the privileged white, is becoming even more so. Voices of nonwhite and nonprivileged authors and characters are too rare. We need to do better. The short story has typically been the gateway form for young authors. Our MFA programs, literary journals, summer workshops, and providers of fellowships need to send representatives into different neighborhoods, libraries, and schools to seek a broader range of voices. If there are more proactively diverse magazines that I should be reading in addition to those listed at the back of this book, please let me know. My contact information can be found at the end of this foreword.

  Working with Jennifer Egan was an honor, as well as ridiculously easy. She was a thoughtful, serious reader, never satisfied with embellishments of language nor easily tempted by likable characters. She wanted the stories to go somewhere new and strange, to surprise and confound. Every story that she chose for this book achieves these difficult feats.

  The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2013 and January 2014. 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; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not 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 publications or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, c/o The Best American Short Stories, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116.

  HEIDI PITLOR

  Introduction

  AS WITH ANY “best of” or “top ten” list—or any prize, for that matter—the authority of an anthology like this one stands in direct contradiction to its essential arbitrariness. Winning, or inclusion, is a matter of managing to delight the right combination of tastes—in this case, that of the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, who superhumanly winnowed the contents of 208 publications to 120 individual stories, and then my own, as chooser of the final 20. In other words, getting into this book is largely a matter of luck.

  And yet a volume titled The Best American Short Stories casts an iconic shadow—as I know all too well, having published short stories for twenty-one years before I managed to eke one into these pages! The self-endowed authority of a collection of “bests” can feel onerous not just to the many whose work is passed over, but to readers who disagree with the selection of contents—namely, just about everyone who opens this book. Can you recall reading a collection of “bests” and not musing, at least once, of the editor, “Was she out of her mind?” A different sensibility—yours, for example—would doubtless have produced a different volume. So much for authority!

  But there are excellent—even crucial—reasons to publish a book like The Best American Short Stories: it generates excitement around the practice of writing fiction, celebrates the short story form, and energizes the fragile ecosystem of magazines that sustain it. Worthy goals at any time, and never more so than now, when copyright is hanging in the balance, publishers are beset by uncertainties, and fiction writers are wondering, rightly, how important our work really is to the cultural conversation. True, some of the people gazing at their iPhones on the train may be reading short stories, but a great many more are playing games, listening to music, watching movies, or checking the stock market. I’m struck by how often, even among a gathering of literary folk, the talk turns to television.

  However, as anyone who loves reading fiction knows, there is no activity quite like it. In fact, my primary motive for accepting the role of guest editor this year is that I welcome any excuse to call reading work. I had other reasons too: I wanted to explore, systematically, what I think makes a short story great—to identify my own aesthetic standards in a more rigorous way than I’ve done before. And having spent the past couple of years reading early-twentieth-century fiction, I was eager to get a sna
pshot of what short fiction writers working in America (120 of them, anyway) are doing and thinking about at present—formally, stylistically, culturally. I wanted to see what I might glean from their preoccupations, both about the state of the contemporary short story and about the wider world, whose synthesis is a writer’s job.

  To put my biases—and therefore handicaps—directly on the table: I don’t care very much about genre, either as a reader or as a writer. To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don’t think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes.

  I read fiction for the same reason I write it: to escape. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I’m always happy to leave, and I’m always happy to come back. It’s fair to say that I read in a childlike way, for fun. That sounds frivolous, I know, but I can’t find a better word that doesn’t sound pretentious (and entertainment is too evocative of reclining chairs and surround sound). Classic novels—a vexed category, granted—are, for the most part, incredibly fun to read. Jane Austen? A page-turner. Charles Dickens? Catnip. George Eliot? Un-put-downable. Wilkie Collins? Prepare to lose a night’s sleep.

  I recognize, of course, that one person’s fun can be another person’s slog. We’d probably all agree that we want gripping stories full of characters that move us. For me, that stuff can’t be achieved without intelligence, nuance, and fresh language. The fun I’m talking about is fully compatible with fear, discomfort, and great sadness; I weep every time I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but I feel permanently enriched by it. The best fun, for me, comes from reading something that feels different from anything else. Originality is hard to gauge, of course—the fact that I haven’t seen it before doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done—but for our purposes, let’s say that I’m biased toward writers who take an obvious risk, formally, structurally, or in terms of subject matter, over those who do a familiar thing exquisitely.