About book The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010)
Just the introduction about Isaac Bashevis Singer is worth the price of the book. One way or another I enjoyed all twenty stories, but my least favorites were McSweeney's futuristic experimental stories, which both started off promising but went on too long and fell flat at certain crucial points. Some of my favorites were: Safari by Jennifer Egan: Excellent writing, the sudden leaps into the future were so well done. Someone ought to tell her by Danielle Evans: But the characters, whom I later found out are supposed to be black, didn't strike me at all that way.The Hollow by James Lasdun: A beautiful contrast of the old tradition vs the new. Painted Ocean, Painted Ship by Rebecca Makkai: I fell in love with the main character and wanted to read this again as soon as I finished it, it was quite hilarious at times.The Ascent by Ron Rash: A kid caught in a bad situation. So beautiful yet haunting. Everyone should read a story like this. Also, PS was very fun to read, as was My Last Attempt to Explain. Further Interpretations and Into Silence were very moving portraits of the relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. But my two best stories were: Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff: An observation on the effects of war on people, it's so wonderfully written yet subtle in its effects, building slowly until its inevitable satisfying conclusion. Cowboy Tango by Maggie Shipstead: You simply have to read this story. Unrequited love is a pain in the ass. All in all, an excellent collection. I adore the Best American Short Stories series. The short story is a difficult form, and I have such respect for writers who can carry it off. The short story is basically the middle child of writing. Longer than the poem, which can contain a flash of brilliance or insight and stand on its own, but shorter than the novel which can create a backstory and layers of conflict and self-discovery that the characters must work through. At it's worst, the short story can be perfectly awful - boring or self-important or incomprehensible. But at it's best, the short story can live inside of you and continue to grow, such as Jhumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" or Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain", one of the greatest stories I've ever heard read in my entire life.This short story collection, like all short story collections, will live in my car, to be pulled out and read at rest stops and doctor's offices and restaurants and any other place where I find myself stuck for a 30 minute interval.I just hit two stories that immediately became lodged in my brain. In each collection, there are always a handful that stand out as needing to be mentioned specifically. These two came one right after the other this time. (2.4.2014) The first one to leap off the page was The Hollow by James Lasdun. It tackles so many questions within its slim form - what it means to be ever moving with the force of industry and technology and what that does not only to the land we all live on but to the people who care for it and work it. What it is to be "neighborly" and how well we actually know and care for the people who form the tapestry of our everyday lives. The difference between how we perceive someone and what they actually are like. The difference between the stories we hear about someone and the reality they exist in. Plus, I just loved the voice of this particular narrator.The second story was Painted Ocean, Painted Ship by Rebecca Makkai. I think that, in part, this one appealed to me because the main character in it is a woman who is going through the engagement and wedding planning process, something I'm currently doing in my own life. Unlike me, though, she becomes more and more upset with the entire process, what her emotions related to it actually mean, and who she thinks her fiancee is. I loved the parallels between this story and Rime of the Ancient Mariner, loved how this once incident in her life set in motion this chain of events which caused the world she thought she know to come crashing down around her. I don't know how much insight she had into her own hand in this - it seemed like the protagonist really struggled to see the world as anything more than "against her" and that she kept wanting anyone but her to take responsibility for things in life. But I loved seeing the inner workings of that struggle, of accidental loss and purposeful shoving away of things. And I loved the insight of how *little* insight she actually had. "But she wondered, even as she told the story, if she wasn't still missing the point." Don't we all sometimes wonder that about the stories we have told so frequently that we no longer take the time to look at the meaning behind them?
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Richard Russo did an outstanding job pulling together some of the darkest stories of the year!
—patsong
Not the best year. The stories just didn't grab me.
—flor
