I continue to read stories about the Iraq war. I read stories about the mentally ill, the homeless and/or unemployed. I read stories about genetics, our manipulation of the environment, the undeniable presence of global warming. Thankfully, I’ve begun reading more stories that directly address homosexuality and transgender characters, too long all but absent from the series.
In my relatively short tenure, I have noticed an easing of tone in many American short stories, a more conversational vernacular that can be traced to the stories of Sherwood Anderson but also, more recently, to the blogosphere and Internet, where even many news headlines seem to have shed a certain level of formality. Of course, some things never change. For the past hundred years people have wondered about the relevance of fiction, the state of publishing, and the death of print. People have grappled with the definition of a short story: How long should it be? What parameters dictate its format?
For the past several years I’ve read every volume of The Best American Short Stories in order to cull stories for this book while reading for the annual volumes. Sometimes it’s been difficult not to compare the present and the past, to view certain stories objectively from the vantage of their own very different time. Worming my way through the history of a country via its short stories has been a strange, wonderful, and utterly singular experience. I’ve developed and discarded theory after theory of influence. One of my earliest was that transportation must have been the basis for decades of fictional trends. At the start of the series, so many stories were set on ships or in pubs peopled by sailors and captains. Bravery at sea was the thing — man against nature, as well as the trustworthiness of told tales themselves. With the rise of the railroad came a sense of the vastness of our own country — an opening of communication between family members previously kept apart, lovers previously out of contact. Characters desired freedom and were held back not by geographical distance but by family and historical norms. The most influential mode of transportation had to be the automobile and the building of interstates — and with them came a dramatic increase in time spent alone. Not until the 1940s did interiority of character really catch on in American short stories. As people grew more isolated but free, writers delved into the human consciousness for a new sort of conflict. Happy endings grew even less common. Of course I could not ignore the impact of war, the economy, and civil rights on short fiction. But I was surprisingly aware the entire time that I read of the fact that how we move — how we are able to come together — defines how we think and therefore express ourselves.
One other trend has been undeniable. There has been a slow but steady movement toward diversity in American short stories: diversity of the gender and race and class of authors published in the series, too late when one looks back over the past 100 years; diversity of voice and structure, of style and content; finally and fortunately, diversity of format and genre and content. The history of the series and, if one is to extrapolate and generalize, of the American short story is a history of opening and acceptance. We still have a ways to go. There is plenty of room for more writers of color, as well as writers of diverse sexual and socioeconomic orientations. I wish I read more deftly handled humor, more genre-bending and experimental stories. That said, one can assert that the goals of the founders of the series — to highlight exceptional literary fiction, to provide an alternative to formulaic, commercial fiction — have certainly been and will continue to be met.
I have relied on a number of sources in order to gather the many voices, anecdotes, and other material, not to mention the stories, that appear in this book. In addition to the 100 volumes of The Best American Short Stories, and Fifty Best American Short Stories and 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, both edited by Martha Foley, as well as The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison, I consulted Roy S. Simmonds’s Edward J. O’Brien and His Role in the Rise of the American Short Story in the 1920s and 1930s; Martha Foley’s memoir, The Story of Story Magazine; and the editorial files at the office of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Houghton Mifflin Archives at Harvard University. The author interviews in The Paris Review were invaluable to me, as were the New York Times and the Washington Post. I consulted a wide variety of magazines, from People to Writer’s Digest to The Daily Beast. Thank you to Edward O’Brien, Martha Foley, Shannon Ravenel, and Katrina Kenison for your invaluable work, and for paving the way for me. Thanks to the latter two for being candid and wise in speaking about your work. Thank you to Nicole Angeloro, my unfathomably capable editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and to Andrea Schulz, Liz Duvall, and Laura Brady.
Lorrie Moore met the challenge of this project with great enthusiasm and a deep knowledge of her subject. To select but a few dozen short stories that both signified and transcended their time was no small feat. Admittedly, we bumbled forward at times. We wanted this book to serve as a retrospective of a century, a march through time looking through the lens of the American short story. Moore was a serious, thoughtful guest editor, uncomfortable, as was I, with the number of landmark stories that had to fall away from the final list. No book can contain all the best stories of a century. Any attempt at such a thing has to reflect its editors’ tastes and biases. That said, I am proud of our efforts and hope that this time capsule will provide future readers a guided tour through a century. A last note: Lorrie Moore refused to include any of her own stories in this book, despite my best efforts to convince her otherwise. I had to settle for her involvement on only one level. She has my deep gratitude for introducing and coediting this book.
H.P.
2012 NATHAN ENGLANDER. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank from The New Yorker
NATHAN ENGLANDER was born on Long Island, New York, in 1970. He says, “I grew up in an Orthodox home in New York, where I had a right-wing, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, fire-and-brimstone, free-thought free, shtetl-mentality, substandard education. And so I began to look elsewhere; I began to read literature. Simple as that.” Englander graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
His first book, a story collection titled For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published in 1999. He later published a novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, and another story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Berlin Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The New York Times Book Review said of Englander’s work, “Echoes of the two Isaacs, Bashevis Singer and Babel, can be heard throughout his pages, though Gogol is somewhere in the neighborhood too.”