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“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world.
In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the “Magic Man.” Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “Nemecia” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel” is a tragic love story about a mother’s declining health and her daughter’s helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink’s “Breatharians” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents’ estrangement.
“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.”
- Sales Rank: #188974 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-10-08
- Released on: 2013-10-08
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
In her introduction, editor Pitlor notes that, in the past, a period of distillation needed to pass before one could write about trauma. In today’s digital age, however, with the speed that our society shares news such as the Sandy Hook shooting last December, “while we are grieving, we are now writing.” Although none of the stories in this collection respond directly to current events, each story inhabits its own unique tragedy. These tragedies are those of everyday life, sometimes subtle and often humorous, and range from the acute loneliness of nineteenth-century New England farm life, to the doomed love between a teenage boy and a middle-aged woman, to divorce, to a strange neighbor arriving at a front door—naked—in the night. The setting of modern-day, nondescript America appears in these 20 stories to the point of feeling repetitive, but as a whole this collection is wildly divergent and entertaining, and each story is cultivated with a keen eye for voice and character. --Emily Roth
From the Inside Flap
“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world.
In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the “Magic Man.” Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “Nemecia” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel” is a tragic love story about a mother’s declining health and her daughter’s helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink’s “Breatharians” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents’ estrangement.
“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.”
From the Back Cover
The Best American Series®
First, Best, and Best-Selling
The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.
The Best American Short Stories 2013 includes
Daniel Alarcón, Junot Díaz, Gish Jen, David Means, Lorrie Moore, Antonya Nelson,
Kristin Valdez Quade, George Saunders, Jim Shepard, and others
Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London.
Look for the other best-selling titles in the Best American series:
THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS
THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS
THE BEST AMERICAN INFOGRAPHICS
THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES
THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING
THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING
THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING
THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING
Most helpful customer reviews
64 of 70 people found the following review helpful.
Another good entry into the series
By Jessica in NE
The "Best American Short Stories" series is in its 35th year. As usual, the stories come from well-known writers and tell (usually) exquisite story vignettes in less than 20 pages. It seems that many of the writers have participated in recent editions of "The Best..." While the time periods range from the late 1800s (Jim Shepard) through some unspecified dystopian future (George Saunders'), the historical period does not burden the character development. Even those stories I didn't like for one reason or another were worth reading. I found six stories that I liked (denoted by a (*)), and only three or four stories that completely disinterested me, so I'd still rate this book as "worth buying."
It's difficult to explain pros and cons for this series, and it's incredibly hard to boil these stories into something even shorter, so here's a very vague idea of who and what this series entry contains (without spoilers).
1. Daniel Alarcon, The Provincials. Son arrives in father's hometown.
2. Charles Baxter, Bravery. Wife and husband's disaffected relationship.
3. Michael Byers, Malaria. Mental illness.
4. Junot Diaz, Miss Lora. Ethnic-and-sexual maturation.
5. Karl Taro Greenfeld, Horned Men*. Introspection during loss and rebuilding.
6. Gish Jen, The Third Dumpster. Ethnic second-generation immigration.
7. Bret Anthony Johnston, Encounters with Unexpected Animals*. Man's effort to protect his son.
8. Sheila Kohler, Magic Men. Dashed childhood innocence.
9. David Means, The Chair. Fatherhood.
10. Steven Milhauser, A Voice in the Night. A boy named Samuel, influenced by his religious counterpart.
11. Lorrie Moore, Referential. Mental illness.
12. Alice Munro*, Train. Successive relationships on an introverted man.
13. Antonya Nelson, Chapter Two. Kooky neighbor's influence.
14. Kirstin Valdez Quade*, Nemecia. Youthful enmity.
15. Suzanne Rivecca, Philanthropy. Drug use without redemption.
16. George Saunders, The Semplica Girl Diaries. Materialism in some future dystopia.
17. Jim Shepard*, The World to Come. Illicit love set against pioneer poverty.
18. Elizabeth Tallent, The Wilderness. Existential confusion of an academic.
19. Joan Wickersham, The Tunnel, or The News From Spain. A woman's failing mid-life relationships.
20. Callan Wink*, Breatharians. Growing up leading two lives in a rural setting.
Happy reading.
37 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Not a good year
By K. Bunker
Since these "BASS" anthologies have a different guest editor each year, it's inevitable that, for any given reader, some years will be better than others. And I'm afraid the 2013 edition was distinctly an "off" year for me. Last year I enjoyed almost every story in the book; this year I found most of them to be a failure in one sense or another.
Some notes on selected stories, covering all of the good ones and some of the failures:
"Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz is a story that I'd read before and didn't much like. I found its stylistic gimmickry pretentious and annoying: Diaz frequently switches to Spanish for words, phrases, and sentences, uses a second person narrative, and doesn't put quotation marks around dialog. But I read the story again, and this time I loved it. In a quietly minimalist way it brings its title character and her relationship with the protagonist to vivid life, making for a moving story. Personally I think it would have worked better without the stylistic gimmicks, but it's good in spite of them.
"Encounters With Unexpected Animals" by Brett Anthony Johnston has a nice title, but goes downhill from there, focussing on a 17-year-old girl who talks and acts like no 17-year-old ever has in the history of the human race.
"Magic Man" by Sheila Kohler creates its only interest or tension by putting a young girl at peril from a child molester. This works, as far as building tension. Catching fish by dynamiting a pond also works, but few would make the mistake of calling it art.
"The Chair" by David Means is a sort of stream-of-consciousness ramble about being a stay at home dad. Stream-of-consciousness stories inevitably run the risk of feeling like a stream of pointless blather, and to my eye this story runs aground on that risk.
Lorrie Moore's "Referential" is the brilliant, diamond-like highlight of the book. Its scant few pages are so full of life and pain and honesty that it will (or ought to) leave you stunned and exhausted. Moore has a new collection coming out soon, and I for one, Can. Not. Wait.
"Train" is typical of Alice Munro's work: It's neatly crafted, but bloodlessly dry and lifeless, with lifeless characters drifting lifelessly through their lifeless lives. At one point the narrative rhetorically asks about two characters, "What was the matter with them? Were they falling in love?" Not frigging likely, I answered back. Not in an Alice Munro story.
"Philanthropy" by Suzanne Rivecca is a story to be admired, if not "enjoyed." It goes somewhat over the top in the relentlessness of its squaller and misery (the kitty-cancer was almost laughably gratuitous), but there's more going on here than squalor and misery for their own sake.
... Which is something I wouldn't say about George Saunders' "The Semplica-Girl Diaries". This story appeared in his best-selling collection Tenth of December, and is typical Saunders fare; I suppose some will find it darkly humorous, but personally I find little humor in inventing absurdly contrived situations for the sole purpose of inflicting pain on drab and stupid characters.
"The World to Come" by Jim Shepard contains about three pages worth of a sweet and tender love story. Unfortunately that story is buried in 29 pages of interminably tedious pseudo-diary writing about life on a nineteenth-century New England farm. I've read and enjoyed many of Shepard's stories in the past, but I found this one painfully boring.
Joan Wickersham's "The Tunnel, or The News From Spain" provides a welcome uptick near the end of the book. A portrait of a woman's relationship with her disabled and sickly mother may sound both dreary and trite, but this story is neither. It's full of life and wit and intelligence, and was a pleasure to read.
And one final, negative note about this anthology: in an annoying and amateurish flaw to the eBook edition, the table of contents lists only the stories' titles, without the authors' names.
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Worst year for Best American Short Stories
By Dan
I'm a big fan of this book and read it every year. But this year there was nothing impressive at all. I usually dog ear many of the stories and then look up the authors if I don't know them already, and try and find other things they've written. Not this year. I didn't dog ear even one story. Honestly, there are still two or three stories I haven't read, but that's because I just gave up. So the last few stories might be good. Many of the stories I couldn't even finish. (Those are the only pages I dog eared, thinking I might come back to finish, but that'll never happen.) The only story I liked was the Junot Diaz one, but that was a piece of his last novel, which I read already. So yeah--never been so disappointed with this series.
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