The Best American Short Stories 2015 Read Free

twenty best stories was to distinguish the artists from the commercial hacks, the original from the conventional. “There are many signs,” he wrote in his introduction, “that literature in America stands at a parting of ways. The technical-commercial method has been fully exploited, and, I think, found wanting in essential results” and was responsible for “the pitiful gray shabbiness of American fiction.” It’s difficult to grasp just what he’s militating against here, unless we consider how the function of short stories on the page was co-opted first by radio serials and films, then television, and more recently the Internet, with its panoply of blogs, tweets, and postings. That there
was
a commercial short story to denigrate is fairly astonishing in itself, like learning that a new Dead Sea scroll has been unearthed. O’Brien can rest assured that we no longer have to worry about the commercialization of the short story for the obvious reason that there is no commerce to speak of. Our stories—and the stories in this volume stand as a representative sample—are conceived and composed solely for the numinous pleasure artistic creation imbues us with, the out-of-body experience writer and reader share alike.
    Still, then as now, the short story was considered inferior to the novel, a mere stepping-stone to higher things, and the less dedicated (less addicted? less fou?) could find their métier in writing longer works, or better yet, writing for the screen. This was great good news for O’Brien: “The commercialized short story writer has less enthusiasm in writing for editors nowadays. The ‘movies’ have captured him. Why write stories when scenarios are not only much less exhausting, but actually more remunerative?” So much for the money-grubbers. Let them stand out there in the blaze of Hollywood sun, at the beck and call of actors, directors, producers, and their mothers, while the serious practitioners of the form rise up to take their rightful place in the popular and literary magazines.
    An evangelist of the literary story, O’Brien went beyond praising the individual writers he’d chosen for the inaugural volume to applaud and promote the magazines that met his standards as well, including
The Bellman
, in which the top story of the year appeared (“Zelig,” by Benjamin Rosenblatt), and a new monthly,
Midland
, which though it published but ten stories that year, found its writers displaying “the most vital interpretation in fiction of our national life that many years have been able to show.” And more: “Since the most brilliant days of the New England men of letters, no such group of writers has defined its position with such assurance and modesty.” Hyperbole? Yes, of course, when viewed from the far end of the long tunnel of a hundred years’ time, but hyperbole in a good cause. He also singled out stories by writers like Stacy Aumonier, Maxwell Struthers Burt, and Wilbur Daniel as achieving the highest honor he could bestow, that of being of lasting value—and if he was wrong, carried away in his enthusiasm, give him credit here too. After all, who can say with any certainty what literature will endure and what will die with the generation that produced it? Make no mistake about it, O’Brien was on a mission to cultivate the taste of the reading public and champion the homegrown story, and he was feisty over it too, singling out British critics like James Stephens, who, in his estimation, insufficiently appreciated the American novel and seemed barely aware of the achievement of the American story.
    But what of the stories themselves, the selection from 1915 that included pieces from Fannie Hurst and Ben Hecht (the only names I recognized, both of whom would, traitorously, go on to careers in film)? I’d like to report that there are hidden gems here, works equal in depth and color to