The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  NATHAN ENGLANDER is the author of the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. He is currently at work on a play based on his short story "The Twenty-seventh Man."

  ▪ I will pretty much get on a plane to anywhere in the world if it's to do an event with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret (and yes, the little boy in the story is named after him). So a couple of years back, I flew to Rome to give a talk with Etgar, and—a nice surprise—there in the first row of the audience was an Italian friend of mine. After the talk, we ended up on the roof of her building telling stories for hours. One of those stories was about Etgar's father, and matching uniforms, and the Sinai Campaign. I really never (at least until now) write stories about things overheard, or based on the tales friends tell—it's just not how I work. And I don't think I'd have dared to write this one if not for the confusion caused when you mix American overpoliteness with Israeli straight talk. I wanted to tell Etgar something about the narrative structure of the story. But I didn't want to be rude and talk about a personal account in an inconsiderate way. So I asked, in Hebrew, "Would you mind if I engaged with that story as a story?" And Etgar turned and said, "Sure. Take it." As in, It's yours, go write it. And there I was backpedaling and apologizing and saying, No, no, that wasn't my intent. But Etgar made it clear. He writes about talking fish and fake angels and women that turn into hairy men after dark, and really, this is not the kind of thing he would do. So a year went by, and I was living in Berlin for a few months and thinking about history and the Holocaust and Israel, and that's when I sat down to write "Free Fruit."

  ALLEGRA GOODMAN is the author of five novels— The Cookbook Collector, The Other Side of the Island, Intuition, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls—and two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, and American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is writing a new novel.

  ▪ Whenever I finish a novel, I write a couple of short stories. It's a chance to play and to experiment. In this case, I'd finished a long, richly layered novel, The Cookbook Collector, and I thought, Now for something completely different! "La Vita Nuova" is shorter than most of my stories. The style is spare. Every word counts, and every detail has particular weight. I tried dozens of beginnings before I decided on Amanda and her wedding dress. Once I settled into her point of view, the wry narrative followed. While the story is quite structured, I wrote it without a plan, improvising all the way through the last line. In the weeks I worked on it, I dreamed about it all the time.

  EHUD HAVAZELET has written three books, the story collections What Is It Then Between Us? and Like Never Before and the novel Bearing the Body. The latter two were named New York Times Notable Books. Other awards include California and Oregon book awards, the Wallant Award, and fellowships from Stanford University and the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations. He teaches writing at the University of Oregon and lives with his family in Corvallis, Oregon.

  ▪ Stories begin in autobiography, a bit of occasion you investigate for meaning, consequence. This one began that way, with reaching that age where women don't look at you anymore the way they once did; with cold mornings on Riverside Drive thirty years ago; with me trying to show off to my girlfriend how well I could drive (I couldn't) and rear-ending a lieutenant in the Mineola Police Department on my first road trip after getting my license.

  Another source is Chekhov and his great story "The Lady with the Dog." I've been fascinated a long time by the moment when Gurov, before taking the acquiescent Anna to bed, pauses for a leisurely-seeming snack. It seems to me a wonderful example of what Chekhov creates better than anyone, and what I tried to capture for my own Gurov—a moment where nothing at all seems to happen and yet everything has changed.

  CAITLIN HORROCKS is the author of the story collection This Is Not Your City. Her work appears in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, The Atlantic, The Paris Review), One Story, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches at Grand Valley State University.

  ▪ I am a good and dedicated sleeper. It's a state I look forward to and find very difficult to let go of in the mornings, especially dark winter ones. When I read an article a few years ago about historical sleep patterns, including alleged winter hibernation, I was immediately intrigued, and frankly a bit jealous.

  "The Sleep" was a pretty direct attempt to imagine what hibernation might look like in a modern town; once I'd put the Rasmussens to bed, it looked tempting enough to me that it had to spread. But when most of the population was participating, the sleep became more complicated. That arc, of an entire town hibernating, and what might drive them to it, and whether that sleep was a good or bad thing, was in place from the beginning.

  As I worked, I had to solve smaller questions, like how much explanation the reader might need of the logistics of the hibernation (there used to be a lot more about canned goods) and what triggered Al's initial decision. Jeannie was alive in the earliest drafts, and at first killing her off felt like a cheap trick. But it soon felt necessary, and it made the sleep more explicitly an escape, a refusal to engage with certain kinds of pain: her death, Reggie's return, whether and how the town itself was dying. I began the story sort of envious of them all, but I think by the end I'd convinced myself to prefer wakefulness.

  BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON holds degrees from Texas A&M Corpus Christi, Miami University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. He's on the core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and he's the director of creative writing at Harvard University. More information can be found online at www.bretanthonyjohn-ston.com.

  ▪ In an ideal world, I would have the composed restraint to lay out, in a pithy and revelatory paragraph, how "Soldier of Fortune" came to be written. I would also position myself as totally unaffected by the story's inclusion in this anthology; I would have you believe I'm jaded to this kind of thing, maybe even a little resentful of having been asked to write such a paragraph because doing so would be a distraction from my Very Important Real Work. I would come off as serious and enigmatic, intimidatingly so. Brooding, too. I would definitely be a brooder. Or I would leave you with the impression that I don't much care for this story—"That old thing? I wrote it in an hour! I had one hand tied behind my back and both eyes closed!"—and you, in turn, would be struck by my aloofness, my authenticity and smarts, so struck that you'd buy multiple copies of my books. (You'd want spares lying around for folks who visited, but you'd also be worried about thieves and fires. You'd keep extra copies of the books at your office and in your car, just in case.) The problem, though, is how embarrassingly excited I am about this news, and how my embarrassing excitement has pretty much wiped from my memory every piece of data relating to this story except, of course, that it's been selected for the anthology. Honestly, right now, I hardly remember writing it. I know I wrote it when I was, to quote Flannery O'Connor, "on vacation" from writing a novel, and I know the whole story came from a chunk of the first line, the chunk about Holly's family having lived across the street from the narrator's for all but two years. I have no clue about the origin of that line; I'd been walking around with the sentence in my head for as long as I could remember. But then, on my vacation from the novel, those missing two years really started to needle me, and because they were so conspicuous in the sentence, I suspected I'd find a story if I went digging around in
that pocket of lost time. So I did. Then, once the narrator's friend revealed himself to be an aficionado of camouflage pants, I bid on and won (!) a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine from eBay. The magazine was from 1986, so that became the year the story takes place. And the year got me thinking about Reagan, et al. And somewhere in here I remembered this horrible thing that happened to an elementary school friend's younger brother, an accident involving water and a microwave oven. The name Hensley comes from the skateboarding legend Matt Hensley, although the fact that the name Matt also appears in the story didn't register with me until much later, after the thing was published. There's also an embedded reference to a song by the band Tool in the story. Would it be weird or ill-advised to admit I'm not nearly as convinced about the geology teacher's relationship to Sam as other folks seem to be? If you've never been to a truck stop in Texas, you should know that hats like the one Holly buys Sam for his birthday do exist. I lived, for much of my youth, across the street from a very nice family with a collie and an aboveground pool, and I went to the high school with a mustang for a mascot; I tried to get a joke about the statue's staggering anatomical correctness into that scene, but couldn't make it work. The story was revised upwards of ten or twelve times, and it's severely indebted to Linda B. Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown over at Glimmer Train. I'm also deeply indebted to them, and to Heidi Pitlor and Geraldine Brooks, and to eBay seller Guntimes007, for whom I should have obviously left much better feedback.

  CLAIRE KEEGAN was raised in Ireland. Her first collection, Antarctica (1999), a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the William Trevor Prize. Walk the Blue Fields (2007) was published to huge critical acclaim and won the Edge Hill Prize. "Foster" won the Davy Byrnes Award, judged by Richard Ford. The story was abridged for The New Yorker and published in its original form by Faber & Faber. Keegan lives in rural Ireland.

  ▪ The story began with the image of the girl's hand reaching over the water. That stayed in the back of my mind for a long time. And then I started thinking about the well we used at home. People always said that the water from the well made better tea. The well wasn't on our land but down from us in a field called Byrne's Lawn. Remembering how it felt to go down there to fetch water, I made a start. Then I was given a deadline, switched, and finished another story. Winter came and I went for a walk on the strand in Wexford with a friend of mine. There were two lights on the water when we came up across the dunes. By the time we were leaving, he noticed three. I went back to the story in the new year, wrote the walk into the text, and found the character of Kinsella. Maybe I wanted to write about a man who has lost his son. I knew little except that it needed to be written from a child's point of view and, later, that it would have to take place in summer. At no point in the writing of the story did I have clear feelings about where the story was going, much less how it would conclude.

  SAM LIPSYTE is the author of the story collection Venus Drive and three novels: The Ask, a New York Times Notable Book for 2010, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the first annual Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Open City, The Paris Review, n+1, The Quarterly, Tin House, Noon, and many other places. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, Lipsyte lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

  ▪ This was one of those stories that took twenty years but also happened very quickly. I tried to write a version of it when I was right out of college. It was unbelievably awful. All the fiction I wrote then was awful, but I recall being especially disappointed because I could feel the charge of this piece, hear the rhythms, see the images. I just wasn't ready to transmit. I tried several drafts and showed it to some people, even though I knew already it was dead on the page. The story remained a stern reminder of how much of writing is failure. The percentages don't necessarily improve.

  But somehow I got lucky with this one. Two decades later I was sitting at the computer wrestling with a new story, although wrestling is probably too macho and romantic a description of what I was doing. What I was doing was more like grooming a corpse for visitors. Eventually I shut off the machine and sat there in disgust. What I usually do in this situation is stand and pace, or distract myself with music or coffee or books, or else just lurk at a window and mutter obscenities. Instead I clicked open a new blank document and, without thinking about it, typed a first sentence. The words were different, but I knew exactly what I had written. My old story had returned to me. I want to say it came rushing out but it was more like a calm, steady stream. I can only think of the long life cycles of certain cicadas, the way they spend most of their seventeen years buried. "The Dungeon Master" just needed to gestate.

  REBECCA MAKKAI'S debut novel, The Borrower, was published in June. This is her fourth consecutive appearance in The Best American Short Stories, and her short fiction appears regularly in journals including Tin House, Ploughshares, and New England Review. She lives north of Chicago with her husband and daughters.

  ▪ This story was five years in the writing, and it changed more in that time than anything else I've done. (Suffice it to say that at one point it was called "Frost" and was about, among other things, buying babies at the supermarket.) Two elements stayed constant throughout its long and painful genesis, however: the character of poor Peter, who had forgotten how to act, and the sense of aching loss.

  When I started the story, I was at that point in my twenties when I realized that the adult world to which I had worked so hard to acclimate myself was in fact changing and disappearing. I felt this transformation around me in Chicago: two local icons, Marshall Fields and the Berghoff, went up in smoke at around the same time (although the Berghoff has since reinvented and reopened), while the Art Institute hid its armor upstairs and put its crown jewel, Marc Chagall's America Windows, in storage. And I felt it in those people whose entire lives and personalities changed before my eyes, just when I thought I had them all figured out. (As I write this note in March, I'm saddened that even Drew's NPR is now fighting for its life.) I wanted to write about the metamorphosis of one person—someone around whom the narrator's adult personality had grown like a vine—whose existential crisis would seem, to his friend, like a crumbling of the entire known world.

  It should be noted that Rob Spillman of Tin House edited this story under the most heroic of circumstances. Shortly after his hand was badly injured when a water-filled light fixture fell on it, I e-mailed him to say (rather hormonally, I fear) that my C-section was scheduled in a week, and if he wanted anything changed, he'd better act fast. Between the two of us—he typing one-handed, I separated from my desk by an enormous belly—we managed to get it done.

  And speaking of miracles of artistic collaboration ... I realize that the event Drew coordinates would be impractical and even financially irresponsible, but nevertheless I hereby challenge the Art Institute of Chicago: make it happen, and I'll be your first volunteer.

  ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry (stories), The Giant's House and Niagara Falls All Over Again (novels), and An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (memoir). She is at work at another novel and is currently the James A. Michener Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

  ▪ "Property" happened.

  The characters are entirely made up, but the house isn't, and neither is the plot. I'd been living in Europe; I was supposed to come back to the States for a job; someone died; my husband and I delayed our arrival by several months; when we arrived, the house was in a bad state. The picture of Pablo Picasso was of another famous twentieth-century figure, in a field relevant to the actual landlord, but the mess: that's true, from Teddy Gra-hams to condom wrappers to disgusting bathmat. Nearly a year later, we moved out and went away for the weekend and received a series of phone calls from the landlords, who were genuinely bewildered that we'd thrown out their old spices. Suddenly the insult of the filthy house
months back was fresh again, and in a fury I began to write this story.

  Not till I got to the end did I realize the truth: Our landlords loved their house. They loved their broken things. They even loved their sticky elderly grocery store spices. It was incomprehensible to them that we did not love these things too. I don't think I would have realized that had I not written the story; even now, I would still be muttering about the salad spinner.

  As a younger person I wrote nearly nothing that was particularly autobiographical. This is, I think now, not because I was philosophically opposed to it nor because I lacked material. What I lacked was the ability to work myself into a tizzy about everyday things: my passionate feelings were reserved for things deserving of passion, most of which were enormous and abstract and therefore hard to make into interesting fiction. Though there's a buzz of grief behind this story (as there was everywhere at that moment in my life), what prompted the actual writing of it was a landlord-tenant dispute. Not a love affair, not a death, not a birth. I suppose I'm grateful that the story helped me understand them, but still, I would like to make it clear: my motivation was not connection, but revenge.