The Best American Short Stories 2005

by Katrina Kenison and Rachel Lacey

Book Overview

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618427058
• ISBN13: 9780618427055
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Redraw the Boundaries

As guest editor, Michael Chabon sets entertainment as the standard for good writing. Because for Chabon, entertainment is nothing less than human connection. If we derive pleasure from this connection, it is because through it we experience something real, visceral, and intellectual, albeit vicariously. His mission, therefore, is to restore the fallen status of entertainment. To do this, he casts a wide net over water "serious" writers and readers often find too shallow. He trawls the waterways for writing that reeks of ghost stories, science fiction, detective novels, action movies, and folklore. Anything that leads to new and unusual forms. (Not surprising for the man who wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.) To avoid an exhaustive list, I'll contain myself to quick descriptions of seven stories inside. "Until Gwen," by Denis Lehane, has the feel of a detective thriller, or film noir. It's a murder story told in the second person, with an accurate rendering of characters who have fallen so far, there's no bottom left to hit. "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand," by J. Robert Lennon, is a series of eight folktale-like vignettes that have continuity in recurring themes. "Death Defier," by Tom Bissell, is war story with an inescapable, catastrophic ending. "Anda's Game," by Cory Doctorow, is almost sci-fi. It's the story of a child's online role-playing game with real-world consequences. "The Secret Goldfish," by David Means, tells the story of the disintegration of a marriage from the perspective of the family goldfish. "The Cousins," by Joyce Carol Oates, tells, in letter form, the story of two cousins separated by World War II and the Holocaust. "Hart and Boot," by Tim Pratt, mythologizes the partly true, partly fictional lives of Wild West figures Pearl hart and John Boot. Perhaps the best way to judge the quality of an anthology such as this is to measure how successful the guest editor has been in achieving the goals he or she set forth in their introduction. If that suits you, then this is a high-quality product.

As always, a pleasure from start to finish

It's hard NOT to love this series, and this provides another great opportunity to catch up and sample contemporary authors.

Great collection

This collection is great. I enjoyed every story to some degree, and a couple are fantastic. Tom Perrotta's (ELECTION) "The Smile On Happy Chang's Face" is absurd and hilarious. Thomas McGuane's "Old Friends," "Death Defier" by Tom Bissell, "Old Boys, Old Girls" by Edward P. Jones, "The Secret Goldfish" by David Means and "Natasha" by David Bezmozgis are all excellent reads. But my favorite two are Dennis Lehane's (MYSTIC RIVER) "Until Gwen" and J. Robert Lennon's "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand," an excerpt from his book 100 Pieces for the Left Hand, a series of short vignettes that somehow hold together as a novel. Overall, this entire collection feels more cohesive than most, at least in tone if not in theme. I look to these collections to find new authors to read, and I found several here.

Estrangements

It's always a temptation to review a short story collection by summarizing lots of plots. Since temptation is one thing I can't resist here goes: Jock father has gay son. Grisly patricide. Ex-wife meets the family. Obnoxious WASP Yalie gets come-uppance. Urban legends. Haunted house. Piano teacher is a perv. Grifter girl needs love. Cult captures daughter. War reporters get in trouble.. Bloodless matricide. Video game causes weight gain. Kid cannot afford piano teacher. Murderer's family and friends. Goldfish outlasts a marriage. Holocaust survivor's fake cousin. Pedophilic sex fantasy. Lady outlaw outsmarts the law. Greenhorn adapts to America. Fake holocaust survivor. "American" is broadly interpreted. Apart from the Canadian presence, one story depends for its impact largely on the use of British slang, and another on Indian English - very effectively in both cases. Science fiction is, as usual in this annual collection, under-represented. (Asimov's and Analog are not listed among the magazines surveyed). Doctorow's story is the closest to SF. Parents and husbands come off badly. The stories mostly concern break-up of relationships. The compilers do not state that they have deliberately chosen estrangement as a theme but it is as if they wanted to reverse the fairytale ending. Two of the stories might have been better with a happy ending. Tom Bissell succumbs to a need to end with a bang. D'Ambrosio's "The Scheme of Things" flirts with a gooey sentimental happy ending, but then avoids it, in order, as I suspect, to preserve the kind of literary integrity that is marked by detached irony.

Strong Outing Deserving of the Title

Of course no "best" list will ever have all or many of a reader's favorites as no editor can please everyone. But the Best American series continues to be consistent. My only complaint is the policy to exclude people of other nationalities whose stories are published in American magazines. Where the story is published, not the writer's nationality, should be the criteria. For example, my favorte short story writer, Haruki Murakami, who is frequently published in the New Yorker, is excluded. To add insult to injury, the policy is arbitrary so that Canadian writer Alice Munro (one of my favorites, no disrespect toward her) is included. In any event, here are some highlights: 1. The Smile on Happy Chang's Face by Tom Perrotta. Vintage Perrotta fiction of adult children who are playing house while suffering from their infantile ways. The story could have been swiped from the pages of Perrotta's masterpiece novel The Little Children. Here a divorced husband who rejected his gay teenage son tries to resolve his family conflicts while umpiring Little Leage baseball games. 2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link. One of the most original young writers around, Link writes "ghost" stories full of domestic angst such as this one about a family moving into a strange house. 3. Silence by Alice Munro. A mother grieves the separation of her daughter who decides to flee from her parents' problems by joining a cult in the Canadian wilderness. The cult is headed by an elephantine half-witted, self-aggrandizing matriarch. You will despise this woman. 4. Death Defier by Tom Bissell, an American journalist covering the Middle-East conflict becomes more and more deranged leading to the story's climax. A great story about America's role in Afghanistan and Iraq and the complexities of being a journalist over there. 5. The Girls by Joy Williams. Perhaps inspired by Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People. Two thirty-something sisters, still living with their parents, seem like in part the reincarnation of O'Conner's Hulga. Like that grotesque, these sisters are full of intellectual pride while blind to their repulsive arrested development. They mentally torture their parents' houseguests. 6. Natasha by David Bezmozgis. Perhaps one of the best stories I've read in the last seven years. A Canadian boy hosts a Russian teenage girl and discovers that she made adult films to get by in the moral wasteland of modern Russia. This is one of the most devastating loss-of-innocence stories I've ever read.