Alongside this reading, where we explored the political ambitions of each work and what it taught us about writing a political novel, the students wrote political novels of their own. They engaged with the Cuban diaspora, the natural world and its endangered status by way of global warming, how soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress when returning to their lives after war, technology and reproduction, the oppressive cultural norms women navigate, and homosexuality in China. The students produced astonishing work in such a short amount of time. They each wrote a story where something important was at stake for the characters and the world of their novel and the world into which they might someday publish that novel. They did so without compromising the level of craft demanded of a good novel. I couldn’t have been happier with how the workshop progressed and the ways in which these writers were willing to take their own stands.
As I considered the 120 stories I read for The Best American Short Stories 2018, I thought about this cultural moment and what it means to both write politically and read politically. If writers have a responsibility for how they narrate the world, certainly readers have a responsibility for what they consume and from whom. I wanted to read through these stories with as open a mind as possible, but I also wanted to make sure I was as open to stories from smaller, lesser-known magazines as I was to the reliably excellent stories published in The New Yorker and Granta and Tin House. I wanted to make sure that the diversity of identity was represented in terms of the writers I selected and the stories they told and how those stories were told. Reading for this year’s anthology was as much a political act, and a way of taking a stand, as my writing. I was comfortable reading this way because the excellence of these stories was the one known quantity.
The twenty stories I finally chose, after no small amount of tense deliberation, are all stories I still remember with distinct admiration, months after first reading them. They are stories that engage with the world and reflect the diversity of the world. They are stories that offer fascinating insights into the human condition and the terrible ways people can treat one another and how beautifully people can love. These writers accomplished great feats of imagination and wrote stories that surprised me in the most unexpected ways. These stories challenged me and reminded me of how vibrant the short story form can be.
In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Danielle Evans writes a sly, subtle story about friendship and grief, but also about race and youth and small transgressions that become unintended acts of damage and defiance. “Boys Go to Jupiter” is one of the finest short stories I’ve ever read, and it embodies the ways in which fiction can be political without being heavy-handed or unnecessarily didactic. Esmé Weijun Wang wrote the one story in this year’s anthology that explicitly addressed the 2016 election: “What Terrible Thing It Was.” The story is about far more than the election, but it captures so well the chaos and confusion of that November night when so many things changed, while also capturing the chaos and confusion of a woman dealing with mental illness.
I am always drawn to darkness in fiction, and “The Brothers Brujo,” by Matthew Lyons, did not disappoint with a story about dark magic and two hardscrabble brothers trying to survive their abusive father. The prose is brutal and bold. The story itself made me uncomfortable. It made me cringe. It made me read it three times, four, as it got under my skin. In “The Art of Losing,” by Yoon Choi, there is tenderness and poignancy as the author details a man losing his memory but trying hard to hold on to what he knows and who he is. “Control Negro,” by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, depicts a father using his son in a social experiment to challenge what he knows about race in America. The story is strange but funny in that way where you laugh rather than cry through painful truths. “Everything Is Far from Here,” by Cristina Henríquez, takes on immigration detention centers, where people are housed until the government decides whether or not to treat them like people. Many people are willfully excluded from the American dream because they have brown skin, and this story serves as a necessary reminder. My expectations were brilliantly upended by Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Prairie Wife,” and when I finished the story, I was forced to consider the assumptions I make when I am reading a story and think I know everything I need to know about a narrator.
In everything I read and ultimately selected for this year’s Best American Short Stories, writers were engaging with the political, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, always brilliantly and creatively. These writers used their craft to take a stand, and how. They represent the best of what short fiction can be.
Maria Anderson
Cougar
from The Iowa Review
Our trailer sat on cinder blocks in a half-acre lot a four-cigarette drive outside of town. There wasn’t much else around except Jenny’s trailer and forest that started at the end of the lot and went on for as far as you could see, dim and impenetrable. Dad kept pink healing quartz on the porch steps, rocks he’d found in the deepest parts of forests, back when there was still old-growth forest to be logged. He was a sad, quiet guy. Never argued with me or knocked me around like dads of guys I used to know. We played cards with his old logging friends when they came through town. Summers we shot coyotes in the Rattlesnakes. Slept outside without tents or bear spray. I never felt safer. We hunted elk and deer. I loved having my hands deep inside something just barely dead, seeing what organs and muscles and fat looked like from the inside. Better than any science class. We had a decent, quiet life in that trailer.
Dad’s logging operation went under. He got even quieter. When he wasn’t sleeping, he would drink Heinekens and sit in the living room, which was really just a wide hallway between the bedrooms and kitchen, and watch the forest through the window. Most dads I knew drank Bud, but mine liked Heineken and was okay with paying more for it. Koda would sit protectively next to him. She was a mute Pyrenees, who like my father was parted from her natural vocation—her ancestral duties were keeping livestock alive—and so cared for us instead, herding our trucks out of the driveway and guiding them back in whenever we returned, that kind of thing.
What was Dad thinking about when he sat like this? Just going over things in his head? All the trees he’d run chainsaws through with crews of guys from all over, the few women he’d slept with, wobbly nights driving back from Bonner bars with old logging buddies. Dad loved the woods, and, I think, for him, felling the oldest trees in the oldest forests didn’t mean he loved them any less. Maybe he was thinking about my mother, who left when I was two. Maybe he was just watching the trees and not thinking about anything at all. Maybe he was hoping to spot the cougar I’d seen a few times now, the one folks were saying killed Shively’s new colt and came back for the rest of her before they could get her buried.