The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  The story grew as I began to study the history of the Isles of Shoals and to read not only about Celia Thaxter but also some of the guides to the seashore written and illustrated by women naturalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The headnotes beginning each section of the story are freely adapted from one of them.

  SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine Is Sleeping. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

  • I wrote the first two thousand words of this story over a decade ago. I wrote them while at a beautiful writers’ residency in the Hudson Valley, and just before I arrived, I’d learned that I was pregnant. It was too early in the pregnancy to announce it, and I spent most of my two-week stay feeling as if I was hiding something, and also experiencing fairly mild yet constant morning sickness. I remember lying on the floor of my room and reading The Man Who Loved Children and a biography of Montgomery Clift. Through the farmhouse walls I could hear the sound of the other writers tapping on their keyboards. I escaped by taking long walks along the highway, and since I found myself with nothing else to write about, I would return each day and write down a few sentences about what I’d seen on my walk. That was all I managed to produce during the residency, and I didn’t have high hopes that it would turn into anything.

  Many years later, I thought I should try taking the advice that I often give my students who have difficulty with plot, which is to borrow one from somewhere else. The pages I had written and abandoned long before seemed like good material to experiment on. I turned to fairy tales for guidance, as I often do, and for a while I imagined that the marvelous house that so enchants the narrator might turn out to be a sort of Bluebeard’s castle, with a cache of dead wives waiting inside. But somehow this didn’t feel correct: too redolent of Angela Carter. I also thought about the story of Hansel and Gretel, the ways in which the house and all its trappings stir the narrator’s hunger—and then I pushed away this possibility because I couldn’t imagine introducing a Hansel. I wanted the narrator to act alone. And maybe it was the idea of a woman wandering, curious and alone, that led me to remember Goldilocks, and the more I considered it, the more inevitable it felt. Inevitable because William James had appeared in the draft ten years earlier, a detail that had surfaced mysteriously and served, as far as I could tell, no real purpose. Once I knew what story I was writing, however, James then brought his bear into the tale; his presence no longer seemed accidental, but in fact quite right. I am grateful to Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown for giving the story a wonderful home.

  TED CHIANG is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards. His collection Stories of Your Life and Others has appeared in ten languages and was recently reissued. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

  • There are actually two pieces titled “The Great Silence,” only one of which can fit in this anthology. This requires a little explanation.

  Back in 2011 I was a participant in a conference called Bridge the Gap, whose purpose was to promote dialogue between the arts and the sciences. One of the other participants was Jennifer Allora, half of the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla. I was completely unfamiliar with the kind of art they created—hybrids of performance art, sculpture, and sound—but I was fascinated by Jennifer’s explanation of the ideas they were engaged with.

  In 2014 Jennifer got in touch with me about the possibility of collaborating with her and her partner, Guillermo. They wanted to create a multi-screen video installation about anthropomorphism, technology, and the connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. Their plan was to juxtapose footage of the radio telescope in Arecibo with footage of the endangered Puerto Rican Parrots that live in a nearby forest, and they asked if I would write subtitle text that would appear on a third screen, a fable told from the point of view of one of the parrots, “a form of interspecies translation.” I was hesitant, not only because I had no experience with video art, but also because fables aren’t what I usually write. But after they showed me a little preliminary footage I decided to give it a try, and in the following weeks we exchanged thoughts on topics like glossolalia and the extinction of languages.

  The resulting video installation, titled “The Great Silence,” was shown at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum as part of an exhibition of Allora & Calzadilla’s work. I have to admit that when I saw the finished work, I regretted a decision I made earlier. Jennifer and Guillermo had previously invited me to visit the Arecibo Observatory myself, but I had declined because I didn’t think it was necessary for me in writing the text. Seeing footage of Arecibo on a wall-sized screen, I wished I had said yes.

  In 2015, Jennifer and Guillermo were asked to contribute to a special issue of the art journal e-flux as part of the 56th Venice Biennale, and they suggested publishing the text from our collaboration. I hadn’t written the text to stand alone, but it turned out to work pretty well even when removed from its intended context. That was how “The Great Silence,” the short story, came to be.

  LOUISE ERDRICH is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and lives in Minnesota. She has written poetry, memoirs, and novels, including The Plague of Doves and The Round House, her most recent, which won the National Book Award. She and her daughters own Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis.

  • This story has its roots in journals kept by fur traders, traditional Ojibwe and Cree stories, and descriptions of early missions on Madeline Island. I worked on it very slowly, over years, accumulating it as background for a character in a novel. It became a story, then dispersed into the novel LaRose, then collected into a story again. I have four daughters, and the competence and decisiveness of young girls, like The Flower, has always astounded me.

  YALITZA FERRERAS was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. Her writing appears in Colorado Review and the anthologies Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and Daring to Write: Contemporary Narratives by Dominican Women. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won the Delbanco Thesis Prize, and is the recipient of fellowships from Djerassi Resident Artists, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and Voices of Our Nation. She was raised in New York and the Dominican Republic and currently lives in San Francisco, where she is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

  • When I was five years old I became obsessed with the power of volcanoes after watching a documentary about Pompeii. The reenactments of people’s last moments, as fire and ash rained from the sky, were horrifying and beautiful—all the things you don’t want a five-year-old to see. I then embarked on a lifelong investigation into what made the earth kill all those people in such a dramatic fashion.

  My obsession came at a time when I was being shuffled back and forth between family in the Dominican Republic and New York out of necessity, as my parents worked double shifts in Brooklyn factories. At the time, I didn’t fully understand why I couldn’t be with them and all the reasons why people leave their homes for faraway lands. I missed my parents so much, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to be Dominican or American, but I did know that I wanted to be a part of something solid and immovable. I wanted to stay put, and I also wanted to be a force even though I felt small and voiceless.

  Years later, my geological explorations led me to a terrifying incident at a Hawaiian lava field, which I wrote about in “An Alphabetical List of Famous Geologists and the Failed Geologist Who Loved Them,” an essay for Yiyun Li’s undergraduate creative nonfiction class at Mills College. I felt infinitely inspired to take creative chances and used an alphabetized list of geologists and their discoveries as the narrative drive. When I fictionalized the essay to exp
and its scope, I realized the list was made up mostly of men and was devoid of people of color. This exposed the real engine of the story: the quest for power by someone who feels powerless. The story became about how Leticia embodies this desire.

  LAUREN GROFF is the author of a story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, and the novels The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. Her latest novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Prize. Her short fiction has been published in journals including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Ploughshares, and in the PEN/O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Groff’s work has also appeared in three previous editions of The Best American Short Stories and in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

  • Years ago, when I had almost no money, I took a friend up on an offer she’d made, out of spontaneous generosity, to spend a month with her family in the house they were renting for the summer in Champagne, France. They are gracious. They hid their surprise when I showed up. My friends are nothing like the characters in the story, but they do have wealth greater than mine by orders of magnitude, and not only could I not treat them to the dinners they had in Michelin-starred restaurants nearly every night, I couldn’t pay for my own seat at the table. The only way I could thank them was to do some of the more menial tasks around the house: cleaning the kitchen after our late nights drinking old champagnes, running to the village to buy viennoiserie at dawn, trying to get stains out of the rugs, picking the cherries from the tree next to the house. By the end of the visit, we were all brimming with emotion, and though I was grateful, a mean little part of me was resentful at having to put myself in the position of toady. My friends, on the other hand, acted beautifully, but since then they’ve vacationed only with friends of equal means.

  Also, I love the song “Au Clair de la Lune”; it was the lullaby I sang to my boys every night for the first few years of their lives, and they can sing it too, without knowing the French words—which is useful, because, like all great children’s entertainment, the song contains a double-entendre for the parents who have to sing it over and over, a story of lusty Harlequin trying to get into his friend Pierrot’s pants, failing, and then having a wild night with the neighbor lady.

  MERON HADERO was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child after living briefly in Germany. She graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School before receiving an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her other stories have appeared in Boulevard, The Offing, The Normal School (online), and the anthology Addis Ababa Noir (forthcoming). She’s a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection.

  • I got the idea for this story when a relative was traveling to Addis Ababa, and I was going store to store with family, rushing to find a special type of cereal with raisins and a very specific style of stretch pants for someone in Ethiopia. I thought this was a pretty funny, almost surreal mission, but these two countries can feel so removed from each other that this experience felt heightened and urgent.

  When I thought about this suitcase, I imagined a little portal between two worlds opening up for just a moment, then closing, and then another little portal would open up again somewhere new when someone else was making the trip, then it too would slam shut, and so on. I imagined all of these tiny channels between hard-to-bridge worlds opening and closing, which felt very personal, whimsical, and also tense. Because of the inherent scarcity of physical exchange between such communities, every opportunity for connection, even a seemingly mundane one, has weight. This scarcity, I thought, might also call into question, shift, or emphasize interpersonal dynamics and relationships in complicated ways. I came to recognize this as a complex, ripe moment to explore through fiction.

  SMITH HENDERSON is the author of Fourth of July Creek, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. This novel won the 2015 John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger Award and the 2014 Montana Book Award and was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the James Tait Black Prize, the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel, and the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction. The book was also long-listed for the 2016 Dublin Literary Award, the Folio Prize, and the VCU Cabel First Novelist Award. Henderson’s short fiction has appeared in anthologies and in journals such as Tin House, American Short Fiction, One Story, New Orleans Review, Witness, and Makeout Creek.

  Born and raised in Montana, Henderson now lives in Los Angeles, California.

  • For some reason, “Treasure State” didn’t require much to get into shape. I’d read an article about some clever rural burglars, and the whole story just fell out of my head—thunk!—like an ingot onto the desk. I knew why the brothers were doing what they were doing. I knew they would be traveling in a long circle—on the run, but not quite, not really—and I knew where the story would end. Above all, I knew the characters and the deep impoverishment that spooked them into their desperation.

  Sometimes you get lucky and the gods just give you a whole story instead of a sentence or an evocative moment or whatever scant thing it is that sets you off searching. It might happen again, but I’m not counting on it.

  LISA KO is the author of The Leavers, the novel that won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction; it will be published in 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in Apogee Journal, Narrative, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. A fiction editor at Drunken Boat, she has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony. She was born and lives in New York City.

  • I’ve been working, sporadically, on a linked collection about the Kwan family for years, and “Pat + Sam” is the family’s origin story. I wrote the first draft in a fever dream at an artists’ residency in 2010, after three weeks of binge-editing my novel. It took me two days to get that first draft out of my head and five years of revisions and submissions to get it out into the world.

  I’d previously written stories with the two characters in the present day, as retirees, and others from the points of view of their daughters, but always wondered what got them together in the first place. I started the story knowing how I wanted it to end, with a particular image that had been chasing me, a man and woman in bed, physically close but emotionally distant, weighing the compromises they’re about to make. I often write to find out why my characters make the choices they do, the deals they make with themselves, the decisions that reverberate—in this case, as a very long marriage. I built the scenes leading up to that ending on what I already knew about Pat’s daughters and her first husband’s recent death, Sam’s immigration, what it was like to be Chinese American in Jersey and NYC in the early 1970s. The story came together when I stopped resisting the alternate points of view. Although Pat and Sam don’t know what the other is thinking, the reader does.

  I listened to two songs on repeat while writing, both of which worked their way into the narrative: James Brown’s “Lost Someone” (live at the Apollo Theater in 1962) and “I’ll Be Waiting” by The Lotus, a sixties Hong Kong band. Both songs are about yearning, but they share a sweetness as well, a ramp-up to a screaming chorus, a sense of youthful anticipation and a wistfulness for something that might not have even happened yet. That crackly vintage sound doesn’t hurt, either. I gave these songs to Sam for his personal soundtrack, which then gave the story the texture it craved.

  BEN MARCUS is the author of several books, including The Flame Alphabet (2012) and The Age of Wire and String (1995). His most recent book is Leaving the Sea (2014). His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, Tablet, and other publications. He has also edited two story anthologies: New American Stories (2014) and The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004). He lives in New Yo
rk with his family.

  • This story began for me with a kid pulling away from his parents, declaring he no longer loves them. Not in a rebellious or antic way, but coldly, rationally. The parents have to figure out how to respond. Do they make room for this development or wagon-circle their child with even more love? And then they have to navigate each other as well. Coparenting, such a mysterious and fraught collaboration. From these opening conditions in the story it seemed important to keep things plausible and see how the drama played out.

  CAILLE MILLNER is the author of The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Paris Review Daily, Joyland, and other publications.

  • “The Politics of the Quotidian” is my first published short story. It took me a year to write it—eighteen drafts. I made most of the big choices at the beginning. The heroine is facing a common contemporary problem. She’s talented, she’s a striver, and she’s a person of color who’s failing to make her way in a historically homogeneous institution. I knew that I wanted to start the story not with anger but with her feelings of exhaustion, shame, and sadness. I knew that there should be a few laughs, because the setting is academia and academia’s a bit ridiculous. One of my favorite books is Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful academic comedy, Pnin.

  Finally, I knew that I would take one big risk—identifying only those characters who had been accepted by the institution. It fit with the themes of the story and with the heroine’s discipline, philosophy. But many drafts later, it still wasn’t right. The missing piece, I realized on draft seventeen, was why she became interested in philosophy in the first place.

  What’s your character’s motivation? The question is such a cliché. It’s probably the first chapter of Screenwriting for Dummies. But once I answered it, every other element took on a new resonance. That’s when I knew the story was finished.