The Best American Short Stories 2016
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE. Apollo
MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI. Ravalushan
TAHMIMA ANAM. Garments
ANDREA BARRETT. Wonders of the Shore
SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM. The Bears
TED CHIANG. The Great Silence
LOUISE ERDRICH. The Flower
YALITZA FERRERAS. The Letician Age
LAUREN GROFF. For the God of Love, for the Love of God
MERON HADERO. The Suitcase
SMITH HENDERSON. Treasure State
LISA KO. Pat + Sam
BEN MARCUS. Cold Little Bird
CAILLE MILLNER. The Politics of the Quotidian
DANIEL J. O’MALLEY. Bridge
KAREN RUSSELL. The Prospectors
YUKO SAKATA. On This Side
SHARON SOLWITZ. Gifted
HÉCTOR TOBAR. Secret Stream
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN. Williamsburg Bridge
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Stories of 2015
American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories
Read More from The Best American Series®
About the Editors
Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Junot Díaz
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ISSN 0067-6233
ISBN 978-0-544-58275-0
ISBN 978-0-544-58289-7 (pbk.)
eISBN 978-0-544-86709-3
v1.0916
Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
“Apollo” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. First published in The New Yorker, April 13, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Ravalushan” by Mohammed Naseehu Ali. First published in Bomb, No. 131, Spring 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Mohammed Naseehu Ali. Reprinted by permission of Mohammed Naseehu Ali.
“Garments” by Tahmima Anam. First published in Freeman’s, October 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Tahmima Anam. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Wonders of the Shore” by Andrea Barrett. First published in Tin House, vol. 17, no. 2. Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Barrett. Used by permission of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
“The Bears” by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. First published in Glimmer Train, Spring/Summer 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang. First published in e-flux. Copyright © 2015 by Ted Chiang. Reprinted by permission of Ted Chiang.
“The Flower” by Louise Erdrich. First published in The New Yorker, June 29, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“The Letician Age” by Yalitza Ferreras. First published in Colorado Review, vol. 42, No. 2, Summer 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Colorado Review. Reprinted by permission of Yalitza Ferreras.
“For the God of Love, for the Love of God” by Lauren Groff. First published in American Short Fiction, vol. 18, Issue 60. Copyright © 2015 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Suitcase” by Meron Hadero. First published in the Missouri Review, vol. 38, no. 3, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Meron Hadero. Reprinted by permission of Meron Hadero.
“Treasure State” by Smith Henderson. First published in Tin House 64, Summer Reading 2015, vol.16, no. 4. Copyright © 2016 by Smith Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Aragi, Inc.
“Pat + Sam” by Lisa Ko. First published in Copper Nickel, Number 21, Fall 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Ko. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Cold Little Bird” by Ben Marcus. First published in The New Yorker, October 19, 2015. Copyright © 2017 by Ben Marcus, included in a forthcoming collection from Alfred A. Knopf. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
“The Politics of the Quotidian” by Caille Millner. First published in ZYZZYVA, no. 104. Copyright © 2015 by Caille Millner. Reprinted by permission of Caille Millner.
“Bridge” by Daniel J. O’Malley. First published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 32, nos. 1 and 2. Copyright © 2015 by Daniel J. O’Malley. Reprinted by permission of Daniel J. O’Malley.
“The Prospectors” by Karen Russell. First published in The New Yorker, June 8 and 15, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.
“On This Side” by Yuko Sakata. First published in the Iowa Review, vol. 45, no. 1, Spring 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Yuko Sakata. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Gifted” by Sharon Solwitz. First published in New England Review, vol. 36, no. 2. Copyright © 2015 by Sharon Solwitz. Reprinted by permission of Sharon Solwitz.
“Secret Stream” by Héctor Tobar. First published in ZYZZYVA, no. 103. Copyright © 2015 by Héctor Tobar. Reprinted by permission of ZYZZYVA. “The Idea of Order at Key West” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Williamsburg Bridge” by John Edgar Wideman. First published in Harper’s Magazine, November 2015. Copyright © 2015 by John Edgar Wideman. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
Foreword
THIS WAS MY tenth year as the series editor of The Best American Short Stories. A decade! How quickly we grow older. I had my children—twins—near the end of my first year reading for this series, and now the twins are in third grade, physical reminders of my tenure at this job. I used to try to read them stories when they were strapped in their bouncy seats. It never went well. One would cry, the other would scream. A bottle would spill on The New Yorker. Someone would gum the latest Southwest Review. Now they navigate technology better than I can. My son collects Pokémon cards and is enamored of Minecraft and pizza. My daughter listens to Taylor Swift and Rachel Platten and loves animals.
Over the past ten years, the world has grown noisier. Within seconds, my kids can find the answer to whatever question they can conjure. I don’t have to tell anyone that we now have more information at our fingertips than at any time in history. The first year that I read for this series, the iP
hone had not been introduced to the public. Nor had Instagram, Pinterest, or Tumblr. Nor had Amazon’s Kindle, Google Chrome, or Netflix streaming.
Right now, as I write this foreword, Donald J. Trump is running for president of the United States. NASA just announced that for three consecutive months, the earth has broken high-temperature records. Americans passionately, dangerously disagree over everything from Syrian refugees to gun control to when and how a new Supreme Court justice should be nominated. There is no shortage of subjects with the power to hijack our attention.
Here are some other things that held my attention this year: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me; Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts; Lily King’s Euphoria; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven; the Harry Potter books, which I am reading to my kids; the movies Brooklyn and Spotlight; the TV shows Transparent, House of Cards, and American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson. My children, my family, our bank account, my elderly father, my new dog, my friends, my email inbox, my Facebook account, my Twitter feed. Over the past year, I published and toured for my second novel and edited The Best American Short Stories 2015 and 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. I worked to develop a new short story app. I wrote book reviews, consulted, and began writing my third novel.
Still, I don’t suspect that my life was much busier than anyone else’s—anyone else who reads fiction.
Right now, writers of short fiction face more competition for readers’ attention than ever before. We, as writers and editors, need for our work to remain relevant and engaging and compelling and new and honest. More than anything, honest. Thankfully, none of these things are impossible.
Each year, I read more than three thousand short stories. The best ones not only hold their own when faced with the noise of the world, they silence it. They command our attention with eloquence and honesty and guts. In this age of information overload, these three characteristics are rare yet necessary. A good short story can ground the reader. It can give hope, solace, comfort—things that are more crucial than ever.
Over the past ten years, while reading for this series, I’ve had the joy of encountering for the first time writers such as Lauren Groff, Mia Alvar, Adam Johnson, Maggie Shipstead, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Roxane Gay, Taiye Selasi, Daniyal Mueenuddin. A great pleasure of my job is the rush that comes with discovery. Sometimes, reading so many pages of so many stories has a lulling effect. I feel my mind slow, my focus wander. I must work to pay attention to the words before me. And then, when I least expect it (for great writing can appear in any magazine at any time), I’m reading a new story and not checking how long it is or what time I have to pick up the kids. I’m reading and feeling and thinking and, if I’m lucky, laughing too. I’m not working at all. A great story has that power: it removes you from your life. It lifts you away for a while.
Junot Díaz and I found much to discover this year: Caille Millner, Yuko Sakata, Meron Hadero, and Lisa Ko, for starters. This year, the best stories presented themselves clearly. Some years there is much back-and-forthing between me and my guest editor, but Mr. Díaz presented me with his list and I saw that it nearly matched my own. We talked through a couple of stories. He introduced me to a few that I hadn’t found myself, and that was that. I am grateful to Mr. Díaz for his commitment to these stories and to the form, and for his generosity and openness.
A quick plea: I am able to read only the stories that are submitted to me. I receive relatively few stories from online magazines. To all editors of online magazines that publish short fiction: please send hard copies of your stories to me at the address below.
The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2015 and January 2016. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who have made the United States their home; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publications or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, c/o The Best American Short Stories, 125 High St., Boston, MA 02110.
HEIDI PITLOR
Introduction
I’VE SPENT THE past twenty years reading and writing short stories—which, given some careers, ain’t all that much, but it is more than half my adult life. I guess you could say I’m one of those true believers. I teach the form every year without fail, and when I’m asked to give a lecture on a literary form (a rarity), the short story is inevitably my craft subject du jour. Even now that my writing is focused entirely on novels, short fiction is still the genre I feel most protective of. The end-of-the-novel bullshit that erupts with measles-like regularity among a certain strain of literary folks doesn’t exercise me as much as when people tell me they never read short stories. At these moments I find myself proselytizing like a madman and I will go as far as to mail favorite collections to the person in question. (For real, I do this.) I hate the endless shade thrown at the short story—whether from publishers or editors or writers who talk the form down, who don’t think it’s practical or sufficiently remunerative—and I always cheer when a story collection takes a prize or becomes a surprise bestseller (rare and getting rarer). I always have at least one story collection on my desk or near my bed for reading—and there’s never a week when I don’t have a story I just read kicking around inside my head.
I am as much in awe of the form’s surpassing beauty as I am bowled over by its extraordinary mutability and generativity. I love the form’s spooky effects, how in contradistinction to the novel, which gains its majesty from its expansiveness, from its size, the short story’s colossal power extends from its brevity and restraint. Or, as Dagoberto Gilb has said, in the story “the small is large, strength is economy, simplicity, not verbosity.” If the novel is our culture’s favored literary form, upon which we heap all our desiccated literary laurels, if the novel is, say, our Jaime Lannister, then the short story is our very own Tyrion: the disdained little brother, the perennial underdog. But what an underdog. Give a short story a dozen pages and it can break hearts bones vanities and cages. And in the right hands there’s more oomph in a gram of short story than in almost any literary form. It’s precisely this exhilarating atomic compound of economy + power that has entranced readers and practitioners alike for generations, and also explains why the story continues to attract our finest writers.
But such power does not come without a price. This is a form that is unforgiving as fuck, and demands from its acolytes unnerving levels of exactitude. A novel, after all, can absorb a whole lot of slackness and slapdash and still kick massive ass, but a short story can unravel over a pair of injudicious sentences. And while novels can dawdle for chapters before sparking into brilliance, the short story needs to be about its business from its opening line. Short stories are acts of bravura, and for a form junkie like me, to read a good one has all the thrill of watching a high-wire act. When the writer pulls it off sentence by sentence scene by scene page after page from first touch to last, you almost forget to breathe.
Novels might be able to summon entire worlds, but few literary forms can match the story at putting a reader in touch with life’s fleeting, inexorable rhythm. It’s the one great benefit of the form’s defining limitation.
Stories, after all, are short, just like our human moments. (We’re all Tyrion, narratively speaking.) Compared to the novel, stories strike like life and end with its merciless abruptness as well. Just as you’re settling into the world of a story, that’s usually when the narrative closes, ejecting you from its embrace, typically forever. With a novel there’s a more generous contact. When you read a novel you know implicitly that it ain’t going to end for a good long while. Characters might die, families might leave their home nations, generations might rise and fall, but the world of the novel, which is its
heart, endures . . . as long as there are pages. A novel’s bulk is a respite from life’s implacable uncertainty. You and I can end in a heartbeat, without warning, but no novel ends until that last page is turned. There’s something deeply consoling about that contract the novel makes with its reader.
No such consolation when you read stories. That’s the thing—just as they’re beginning they’re ending. As with stories, so with us. To me this form captures better than any other what it is to be human—the brevity of our moments, the cruel irrevocability when those times places and people we hold the most dear slip through our fingers.
Some friends have told me that their lives resemble novels. That’s super-cool. Mine, alas, never has. Maybe it’s my Caribbean immigrant multiplicity, the incommensurate distances between the worlds I inhabit, but my life has always worked better when understood as a collection of short stories than anything else. Thing is, I’m all these strange pieces that don’t assemble into anything remotely coherent. Hard for me to square that kid in Santo Domingo climbing avocado trees with the teen in Central NJ bringing a gun to school with the man who now writes these words on the campus of MIT. Forget the same narrator—these moments don’t feel like they’re in the same book or even the same genre. Those years when I was running around in the South Bronx, helping my boys drag their congas to their shows—that time feels like it happened to someone else. (That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?) I guess some of us have crossed too many worlds and lived too many lives for unity.
Here’s the funny part, though. For all that rah-rah on how super-duper-amazing stories are, I didn’t actually start out wanting to write them. Surprise surprise: I started out like a practical fiction person—wanting to write novels.