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Customer Review :
The BEST? : The Best American Short Stories 2002 (The Best American Series)
There are twenty stories in the 2002 BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. The best out of how many? I did the math.
In the back of the book is a list of 227 American and Canadian magazines. These aren't the only magazines that publish short stories, but they are the ones (it is claimed - though I doubt that Alligator Juniper or Porcupine are truly in the running) from which the gems were selected. I did some research and averaging and came up with a number for their yearly submissions: 817,200.
Of course, only a minuscule fraction of these stories get accepted for publication. The great mass of them were written, they were submitted, they were rejected. So we are unable to judge their quality. We can only evaluate the ones that do see the light of day. And now, on the pages of BEST, we have before us the creme de la creme.
Interesting, that out of the 227 magazines, eight of the twenty stories are from The New Yorker and nine others are from prestigious publications. As for the authors, I recognized ten of the names in the table of contents. When I checked out the brief biographies at the back of the book, I found that those unknown to me have impressive credentials.
Of course, you could say that the best authors write the best stories and submit to the best magazines, and thus they congregate on the pages of BEST.
What contradicts this assumption is the stories themselves.
Not that they aren't well-written. Someone who's been through a writing program at Columbia or Iowa - or who teaches creative writing - knows not to use the word "resonant" twice in the same sentence. The stories aren't outright bad (except for two BOMBS); most have their virtues. But are they the best? The recurring problem has to do with content.
A story fails in its own way, but I finished many with the ultimate question WHY looming before me. Why was it written? Why was it published? Why did I just read it? I'm not asking for a message or a social purpose - nothing so shallow as that - but I do want to feel that some meaningful and truthful and completed interaction took place between me and the world created on the page. Many of these stories are insular and artificial - roses with no fragrance, waxy to the touch.
Many.... Since quality should always be recognized, I want to acknowledge the stories in the collection that I thought were worthy - to varying degrees - of being there:
Ann Cummins' "The Red Ant House"
Jhumpa Lahiri's "Nobody's Business"
Jill McCorkle's "Billy Goats"
Tom McNeal's "Watermelon Days"
Akhil Sharma's "Surrounded by Sleep"
Five out of twenty (with the McCorkle story being the only one that is wholly successful). Where does that leave us, as regards the state of literature? To my thinking, nowhere good. What could be the cause?
