The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Read Free Page A

Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime.
    Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented mother's Jamaican night nurse in "The Call of Blood," by Jess Row. And in "Ceiling," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie perfectly captures the yearning spirit of a man who has settled for the wrong wife, the wrong life, in the stultifying salons of Lagos's corrupt upper class.
    Two stories in opposite settings got at large truths about friendships under stress. In "Soldier of Fortune," by Bret Anthony Johnston, the accidental scalding of a toddler severs and remakes bonds in a Texas military town. In "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart," by Rebecca Makkai, a gay man tries to help his once dazzling best friend as he staggers through a public breakdown amid Chicago's artistic elite. Three beautifully crafted stories examined, with great originality, the parent-child bond. "ID," by Joyce Carol Oates, is a plangent tragedy with an unforgettable protagonist. The troubled savant of Ricardo Nuila's "Dog Bites" struggles to see his father through the overbright glare of his quirky vision. And in "The Dungeon Master," by Sam Lipsyte, a role-playing game bleeds into real life and seeps into the story's quirky prose.
    In the end, the stories I fell upon with perhaps the greatest delight were the outliers, the handful or so that defied the overwhelming gravitational pull toward small-canvas contemporary realism. "Phantoms," by Steven Millhauser, takes the form of a dispassionate evaluation by one citizen of a town long visited by ghostlike apparitions. The assessor's cool tone plays beautifully against the eerie events he is describing. " The Sleep," by Caitlin Horrocks, is a suave, unexpectedly exhilarating satire about a beaten, blizzard-scoured prairie town that takes up hibernation as a way to manage the pain of ordinary living. And "Escape from Spiderhead," by George Saunders, was that rare example of full-bore speculative fiction to make it through the literary magazines' anti-sci-fi force field. Coming across this story elicited the same joyful surprise I once felt when offered a glass of wine after a dry week in Riyadh. In "Spiderhead," convict volunteers are the human test subjects for an array of psychoactive drugs that manipulate the deepest workings of the soul. The setting is fantastical and futuristic, but the heart is achingly familiar, and real human dilemmas are enacted against the highly imaginative backdrop. I would like to raise a small, vigorously waving hand in favor of releasing more such stories out of the genre ghetto and into the literary mainstream.
    While I'm up here on the soapbox, I might as well set down a few more carps of the day:
Enuf adultery eds. Too many stories about the wrong cock in the wrong cunt/anus/armpit/Airedale.
Eros ≠ thanatos necessarily. Not all love stories have to have bleak outcomes.
Foreign countries exist.
There's a war on. The war in Afghanistan, in the year it became America's longest, appeared as a brief aside in only two of one hundred and twenty stories.
Consider the following: Caravaggio's
Conversion of Saint Paul
, Handel's
Messiah
,