They liked the 'Best' stories. As for the rest ...
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The most provocative writing in this year's collection "The Best American Short Stories" is the introductions, both of which complain about the quality of American short stories.
The editor of the series, which began in 1978, lamented from the opening paragraph of her foreword that most stories written by Americans sounded the same.
Heidi Pitlor called them "domestic realist fiction" usually featuring a "disaffected child protagonist" with a "quirky but not overly oddball voice." The locales are familiar domestic places like living rooms peopled by characters with a bit of difficulty in their lives such as a food allergy.
"The ending would suggest resolution, but hint at its opposite," she writes. "I just mean to demonstrate some of the most common elements that I come across in the many short stories I read every year."
What does she want?
"In fact I would love to read more stories about war ... and the wide world outside the United States and our impact on the environment," Ms. Pitlor admits. "But I fear that a new normal has evolved ... one conspicuously void of momentum and uninterested in maintaining the reader's attention."
The person responsible for selecting the 20 stories in this collection is Geraldine Brooks, journalist turned novelist, author of this year's "Caleb's Crossing" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "March."
Her introduction [read it here] echoes the foreword. In a list of complaints, Ms. Brooks reminds writers:
"Foreign countries exist.
"There's a war on. The war in Afghanistan, in the year it became America's longest, appeared as a brief aside in only two of 120 stories."
She then repeats Ms. Pitlor's gripe about ordinary settings. "There's nothing wrong with writing stories set in bedrooms, classrooms, kitchens. ... But the air becomes stale there. And after a dozen -- a hundred -- such stories, I became claustrophobic."
What's going on here? I don't think I've read such rejection of a generation of writers before and by two editors responsible for selecting "the best" of those writers' work.
First Published October 9, 2011 12:00 am
