The Best American Short Stories 2015

396 Pages·2015·2.36 MB·English

by  T.C. Boyle

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
MEGHAN MAYHEW BERGMAN, The Siege at Whale Cay
JUSTIN BIGOS, Fingerprints
KEVIN CANTY, Happy Endings
DIANE COOK, Moving On
JULIA ELLIOTT, Bride
LOUISE ERDRICH, The Big Cat
BEN FOWLKES, You’ll Apologize If You Have To
ARNA BONTEMPS HEMENWAY, The Fugue
DENIS JOHNSON, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
SARAH KOKERNOT, M & L
VICTOR LODATO, Jack, July
COLUM MCCANN, Sh’khol
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN, Thunderstruck
THOMAS MCGUANE, Motherlode
MAILE MELOY, Madame Lazarus
SHOBHA RAO, Kavitha and Mustafa
JOAN SILBER, About My Aunt
ARIA BETH SLOSS, North
LAURA LEE SMITH, Unsafe at Any Speed
JESS WALTER, Mr. Voice
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Stories of 2014
Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short
Stories
Read More from The Best American Series®
About the Editors
Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2015 by T. C. Boyle

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ISSN 0067-6233
ISBN 978-0-547-93940-7
ISBN 978-0-547-93941-4 (pbk.)

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

eISBN 978-0-547-93943-8
v1.1015

“The Siege at Whale Cay” by Megan Mayhew Bergman. First published in
the Kenyon Review, vol. xxxvi, no: 4. Copyright © 2015 by Megan Mayhew
Bergman. From Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Reprinted
with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights
reserved.
“Fingerprints” by Justin Bigos. First published in McSweeney’s Quarterly 47.
Copyright © 2014 by Justin Bigos. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Happy Endings” by Kevin Canty. First published in the New Ohio Review,
#15. Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Canty. Reprinted by permission of Denise
Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.
“Moving On” by Diane Cook. First published in Tin House, vol. 15, no. 3.
From Man v. Nature (pp. 3–19) by Diane Cook. Copyright © 2014 by Diane
Cook. Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.
“Bride” by Julia Elliott. First published in Conjunctions, 63. Copyright ©
2014 by Julia Elliott. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary
Agency, Inc.
“The Big Cat” by Louise Erdrich. First published in The New Yorker, March
31, 2014. Copyright © 2015 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of the
Wylie Agency, LLC.
“You’ll Apologize If You Have To” by Ben Fowlkes. First published in
Crazyhorse, no. 85. Copyright © 2014 by Ben Fowlkes. Reprinted by permission
of Ben Fowlkes.
“The Fugue” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway. First published in the Alaska
Quarterly Review, vol. 31, nos 1 & 2. From Elegy on Kinderklavier. Copyright
© 2014 by Arna Bontemps Hemenway. Reprinted with the permission of The
Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Sarabande Books,
www.sarabandebooks.org.
“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson. First published in The
New Yorker, March 3, 2014. Copyright © 2015 by Denis Johnson. Reprinted by
permission of Aragi Inc.
“M & L” by Sarah Kokernot. First published in West Branch, no. 76.
Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Kokernot. Reprinted by permission of Sarah
Kokernot.
“Jack, July” by Victor Lodato. First published in The New Yorker, September
22, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Victor Lodato. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
“Sh’khol” by Colum McCann. First published by Byliner. Copyright © 2014
by Colum McCann. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Thunderstruck” by Elizabeth McCracken. First published in StoryQuarterly,
46/47. From Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken,
compilation copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth McCracken. Used by permission of
the Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Motherlode” by Thomas McGuane. First published in The New Yorker,
September 8, 2014. From Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane, copyright ©
2015 by Thomas McGuane. 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.
“Madame Lazarus” by Maile Meloy. First published in The New Yorker, June
23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Maile Meloy. Reprinted by permission of Maile
Meloy.
“Kavitha and Mustafa” by Shobha Rao. First published in Nimrod, vol. 58.
From An Unrestored Woman, copyright © 2016 by Shobha Rao. Reprinted by
permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
“About My Aunt” by Joan Silber. First published in Tin House, vol. 15, no. 4.
Copyright © 2014 by Joan Silber. Reprinted by permission of Joan Silber.
“North” by Aria Beth Sloss. First published in One Story, no. 197. Copyright
© 2014 by Aria Beth Sloss. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Unsafe at Any Speed” by Laura Lee Smith. First published in the New
England Review, vol. 35, no. 1. Copyright © 2014 by Laura Lee Smith.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Mr. Voice” by Jess Walter. First published in Tin House, vol. 16, no. 1.
Copyright © 2014 by Jess Walter. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins &
Associates, Inc.
Foreword
THIS IS THE hundredth volume of The Best American Short Stories. Over the past
century, series editors have provided early support and exposure to such writers
as Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Thomas
Wolfe, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Coover, John
Updike, Shirley Jackson, and Raymond Carver, among countless others. I am
deeply honored to be the editor of this esteemed, long-lasting series and to have
been for the past nine years. For more about the series, its history, and a
sampling of the gems that have appeared in its pages, see 100 Years of The Best
American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore, coedited by yours truly.
When I think back over some of the characters from this series that have
stayed with me most, I think of Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel, the
bewildered and imperfect schoolteacher from “Yurt,” which appeared in the
2009 volume. I think of the lapsed recovering alcoholic therapist, Elliot, from
Robert Stone’s story “Helping,” featured in the 1988 volume, and in 1982, the
narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” whose discomfort with his blind
guest is palpable. I think of all the tough-as-nails mothers: Mabel, in Bobby Ann
Mason’s “Shiloh”; the bigoted woman known only as Julian’s mother in
Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” I think of writers
like Mary Gaitskill and Ann Beattie and Joyce Carol Oates and John Cheever
and Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, writers whose characters are
complex, whose conflicts are often internal and unspoken, and whose decisions
some people might deem “unlikable.”
Lately I’ve been mulling over the idea of likability of fictional characters. The
topic received a burst of attention a couple of years ago, after the writer Claire
Messud was asked about the protagonist of her novel The Woman Upstairs, “I
wouldn’t want to be friends with [her], would you? Her outlook is almost
unbearably grim.” Messud famously responded to the interviewer, “Would you
want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with
Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao?
Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the
characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever
written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If
you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all
its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but
‘Is this character alive?’” Messud’s answer ignited both readers and writers,
many glad for her illumination of a troubling but increasingly prominent trend in
how readers talk about fiction.
Soon after, The New Yorker interviewed a group of fiction writers about the
issue. Donald Antrim said, “Reading into persona is a waste of time and life; our
empathy will not be engaged but our narcissism might, and our experience will
likely come without deeper emotional and spiritual recognitions and awakenings.
The author maneuvering for love is commonplace and ordinary, and the work of
fiction that seductively asserts the brilliance or importance or easy affability of
its creator is an insubstantial thing. I have no problem with liking a character.
But if that’s the reason I’m reading, I’ll put the book down.” And Margaret
Atwood answered, “I myself have been idiotically told that I write ‘awful’ books
because the people in them are unpleasant. Intelligent readers do not confuse the
quality of a book with the moral rectitude of the characters. For those who want
goodigoodiness, there are some Victorian good-girl religious novels that would
suit them fine.”
And yet in the couple of years since then, I still somewhat regularly encounter
reviews that attack a character’s or even a writer’s likability. To like a story or a
novel is still, it seems, to like its characters. One female protagonist was just last
week labeled a “morose, insufferable American narcissist” in a major Sunday
book review. Another renowned book review laments that in a well-received
debut novel, one character “isn’t much of a heroine. She’s annoying, self-
centered and tragically naive.” The female narrator of one of my favorite novels
of last year was called “irritatingly self-obsessed” by yet another major
newspaper. Dip a toe into the reviews of fiction on GoodReads or Amazon, and
you’ll find the question of likability everywhere. I’d hazard a guess that more
female characters written by female writers are deemed unlikable than male
characters or really any characters written by men. Hopefully VIDA, the
organization that studies women in the literary arts, and other similar groups will
research this question.
In this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, we are treated to
characters like Kavitha, the emotionally numb wife who comes alive only in the
face of violence, in Shobha Rao’s gorgeous story, “Kavitha and Mustafa.” We
meet a desperate absentee father in Justin Bigos’s devastating “Fingerprints” and
an emasculated man who sells dental equipment in the hilarious and profound
“Unsafe at Any Speed,” by Laura Lee Smith. And Joe Carstairs, a ruthless
champion speedboat racer and oil heiress in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s
unforgettable “The Siege at Whale Cay.” Here are living, breathing people who
screw up terribly and want and need and think uneasy thoughts. Did I like these
characters? I very much liked reading their stories, as did T. C. Boyle. I liked the
honesty of the portrayals, and their poetry and humor and surprise. Would I want
to be friends with these characters? Who cares? To me, that question is
tantamount to asking someone at an art exhibit if she would like to be friends
with the color green, or someone listening to music if he would care to befriend
a drum.
To readers who tend to think primarily in terms of liking or disliking
characters: these people are fictional. They do not stand before us asking to be
liked. They stand before us asking to be read. They ask to be seen and heard and
maybe even understood, or at least for their motives to be understood, if that is
what the author is after. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend these
characters are in fact real, that they are human beings standing before us. Let us
open up at least a little to those we might not like—in their presence, we might
experience something new. To me, facing those we might not want to face is
crucial to living in a diverse world. To echo Donald Antrim, when we
instinctively turn away from something different or uncomfortable or what we
deem “incapable of being liked,” we shortchange ourselves. Maybe we
unwittingly dislike characters who do or say what we ourselves cannot or
simply, for whatever reason, do not. As the fiction writer and critic Roxane Gay
wrote, “Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human,
are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us
uncomfortable because we don’t dare be so alive.” If reading fiction has the
power to enlarge our understanding of others and enliven ourselves, let us try to
no longer shrink from these things.
What an honor it has been to work with T. C. Boyle, whose own stories have
appeared in this series many times. He came at the job of guest editorship with
the deep knowledge and experience of a master. He chose twenty thrillingly
diverse and stellar stories by established and exciting new writers.
The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between
January 2013 and January 2014. The qualifications for selection are (1) original
publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2)
publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or 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 for 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, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116.
HEIDI PITLOR