The Best American Short Stories 2015 Read Free Page B

the selections were made. In addition, he included an alphabetical listing of the authors of all the noteworthy stories he’d come across, replete with asterisks for the ones deserving of readers’ special attention. In the same spirit, the editors of the 2015 volume list the 100 Distinguished Stories of the year and some 277 magazines. (In a wonderfully fussy way—and by way of encouraging competition—O’Brien also produced a graph of all the magazines, showing how many stories each periodical published and figuring the percentage of those he considered exceptional.) Finally, O’Brien made no apologies. The stories he presented were the best of the year by his lights—and his lights were the only ones that mattered.
    I have to confess that I came to my role as guest editor this year with just a tad less assurance. This was my show, yes, but those hundred years of history—that tunnel of time—was daunting. Ultimately, though, what I was looking for wasn’t much different from what O’Brien was: stories that grabbed me in any number of ways, stories that stood out from the merely earnest and competent, that revealed some core truth I hadn’t suspected when I picked them up. Another editor might have chosen another lineup altogether from the 120 finalists, but that only speaks to the subjectivity each reader brings to his or her encounter with any work of art. If I expected anything, I expected to be surprised, because surprise is what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year’s selections.
    For one thing, I was struck by the intricate narrative development and length of many of these stories, some of which, like the two powerful missing-child stories that appear back-to-back here due to the happy accident of the alphabetical listing O’Brien ordained at the outset (Colum McCann’s “Sh’khol” and Elizabeth McCracken’s “Thunderstruck”), seem like compressed novels in the richness of their characterization and their steady, careful development. So too with Megan Mayhew Bergman’s elegant historical piece, “The Siege at Whale Cay,” which presents a deeply plumbed love triangle involving the young protagonist, her mannish lover, and, convincingly, touchingly, the cinema star Marlene Dietrich. (What
did
Marlene do on vacation during those grim war years? Where did she go? Who was she? It’s testimony to Bergman’s imagination that such a familiar real-life figure can seem so naturally integrated into the world she creates that we’re never pulled out of the story.) Likewise, Diane Cook’s feminist fable, “Moving On,” with its dark shades of Kafka, Atwood, and Orwellian control, develops with the pace and power of a much longer work, as does Julia Elliott’s delicious and wickedly funny examination of the ascetic versus the sensual in the convent that provides the setting for “Bride.” Long stories all. Very long stories.
    Which begs the question, eternally batted about by critics, theorists, and editors of anthologies like this one: what, exactly, constitutes a short story? Is it solely length (the 20,000-word maximum that the how-to manuals prescribe)? Is it intention? Is it a building beyond the single scene of the anecdote or vignette but stopping short of the shuffled complexity of the novel? Lorrie Moore, in her introduction to the 2004 edition of this series, quipped, “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.” And: “A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Yes, true enough, and best to get at any sense of definition metaphorically rather than try to pin down the form with word and page limits. For my part, I like to keep it simple, as in Norman Friedman’s reductive assertion that a short story “is a short fictional narrative in prose.” Of course, that brings us back to the question of what,