The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Read Free Page B

Martin Luther King. Female genital mutilation, military-funeral picketers, abortion-doctor assassins. So why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?
Not that I want to discourage humor. There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone...
La belle dame sans levity hath thee in thrall,
And no mirth rings.
    I should stipulate that the above carps refer to a hive mind that became apparent only because I read a mass of stories in a compressed time frame. There's nothing wrong with writing stories set in bedrooms, classrooms, kitchens. These are the places where we spend large slabs of our lives. But the air becomes stale there. And after a dozen—a hundred—such stories, I became claustrophobic.
    When I was in journalism school I had a professor, Melvin Mencher, for whom the description "crusty" did scant justice. The man was a day-old baguette. When I tried to hide thin reporting under stylistic flourish, he would put a red line through my fine prose and scrawl:
You can't write writing.
    Later, reporting for the
Wall Street Journal
, I had an editor named Paul Ingrassia, whose pet hate was to catch someone in his newsroom looking up something online. He would creep up to the terminal and bark: "The story's not on Nexus. It's on the street.
Get out there!
"
    So, for whatever it is worth, I'm passing on this advice to the next generation of short story writers, those
jeunesse dorée
who will come to the form at what might be the most perfect time in its history—a golden age to rival and perhaps surpass the era of the popular weeklies. The form is perfectly suited not only to the emerging platforms of our times but also to the users of those platforms, a new generation of young readers who love and demand good stories, their imaginations nourished by a decade-long boom in children's fiction. The right short stories, with their highly skilled writing, tough-minded, somber adult themes, but undaunting length, can be the perfect form for young readers still developing and experimenting with their fictional tastes. But here's the caveat: these kids have been raised on actual stories with plot, where
x
leads inexorably to
y
, with
x
being interesting and
y
being more interesting; on wizards and dragon riders, on Eoin Colfer's inspired
Die Hard
-with-fairies mashup and Philip Pullman's Milton meets string theory. I might be wrong, but I don't think affectless Carveresque minimalism, no matter how liminal or luminous, is going to cut it for them.
    So, at the risk of calling down the wrath of the MFAfia, my advice to young writers is, read this book. Enjoy the stories, admire the craft. Then put it in your backpack and go. As far as you can, for as long as you can afford it. Preferably someplace where you have to think in one language and buy groceries in another. Get a job there. Rent a room. Stick around. Do something. If it doesn't work out, do something else. Whatever it is, you will be able to use it in the stories you will write later. And if that story turns out to be about grungy sex in an East Coast dorm room with an emotionally withholding semiotics major, that's okay. It will be a better story for the fact that you have been somewhere and carried part of it home with you in your soul.
     
    G ERALDINE B ROOKS

Ceiling
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
FROM
Granta
    W HEN OBINZE FIRST saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Land Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued to his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First he skimmed the e-mail, dampened that it was not longer.
Ceiling
, kedu?
I saw Amaka yesterday in New York and she said you were doing well with work, wife—and a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I'm still