The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Read Free

take up more space now, in their nonvirgin state. This seems fitting to me: a page that has been read, pored over, should stake claim to more territory.
    Another difference: on the front page of each is scrawled a single word:
    Yes (or, in a few cases, Yes!!)
    Maybe
    And then a very large pile with the very small word, No.
    It was not as hard as I thought it might be, to do this initial triage. Like the battlefield nurse dropping color-coded tags atop casualties, I moved with a kind of professional detachment from story to story. Triage is provisional, after all. It is a guess. It does not determine outcome. It was only when I went back, under deadline pressure, that the task became suddenly onerous, morally taxing. Now I was not the triage nurse but the euthanizer. No meant no. A story, often a very good story, would not be deemed among the best, because I said so. There are some I can barely look at as I go through the pile. They rebuke me, like a neglected friend, a jilted ex. "I still love you, but it just didn't work out..."
    And who was I, anyway, to be making this call? I, who had never written a short story. (Okay, one. In the tenth grade. A dark sci-fi romance, destined for our school literary magazine, which we published on a hand-cranked Gestetner that reeked of wax and solvent.) In my adult writing life, I had leapt recklessly from journalism and narrative nonfiction to writing novels. I looked sideways at short stories, like a nervy horse at an unknown rider. I wasn't quite sure how they worked.
    Not long after I started reading that first batch of stories, I found myself at a literary event in Dayton. After the dinner and the speeches, a few of the writers adjourned to a bar. During the first round of drinks, someone started telling jokes. We took it in turns then, dredging up ethnic jokes, light-bulb riddles, and shaggy dog stories from forgotten vaults of memory. Most of us ran out of material fairly quickly, but one had the recall of a Homeric bard, and kept us laughing at joke after joke until the bartender called time and kicked us out into the night. That jokester was Richard Bausch, master of the short story.
    This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs.
    I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content.
    I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube.
    A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom