The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story

462 Pages·2021·3.37 MB·English

by  John Freeman (editor)

PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2021 by John Freeman
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Freeman, John, 1974–, editor.
Title: The Penguin book of the modern American short story / edited by John Freeman.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020056441 (print) |
LCCN 2020056442 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984877802 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984877819 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Short stories, American—20th century. | Short stories, American—21st century.
Classification: LCC PS648.S5 P47 2021 (print) | LCC PS648.S5 (ebook) | DDC 813/.0108—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056441
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056442
Cover design: Stephanie Ross
Cover art: Brian Alfred
pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Introduction by John Freeman
THE LESSON • Toni Cade Bambara, 1972
A CONVERSATION WITH MY FATHER • Grace Paley, 1972
THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS • Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973
BICYCLES, MUSCLES, CIGARETTES • Raymond Carver, 1973
THE FLOWERS • Alice Walker, 1973
GIRL • Jamaica Kincaid, 1978
THE RED CONVERTIBLE • Louise Erdrich, 1981
THE REENCOUNTER • Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1982
TAKING CARE • Joy Williams, 1982
STORY • Lydia Davis, 1983
CHINA • Charles Johnson, 1984
PET MILK • Stuart Dybek, 1984
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW • Susan Sontag, 1986
SALVADOR LATE OR EARLY • Sandra Cisneros, 1986
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED • Tim O’Brien, 1986
RIVER OF NAMES • Dorothy Allison, 1988
EMERGENCY • Denis Johnson, 1991
STICKS • George Saunders, 1994
FIESTA, 1980 • Junot Díaz, 1996
SILENCE • Lucia Berlin, 1998
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MAN • Nathan Englander, 1998
BULLET IN THE BRAIN • Tobias Wolff, 1998
THE HERMIT’S STORY • Rick Bass, 1998
A TEMPORARY MATTER • Jhumpa Lahiri, 1998
THE PENTHOUSE • Andrew Holleran, 1999
THE FIX • Percival Everett, 1999
WATER CHILD • Edwidge Danticat, 2000
THE AMERICAN EMBASSY • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2003
THE CONDUCTOR • Aleksandar Hemon, 2005
ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES • Karen Russell, 2007
THE LAST THING WE NEED • Claire Vaye Watkins, 2010
THE PAPER MENAGERIE • Ken Liu, 2011
THE DUNE • Stephen King, 2011
DIEM PERDIDI • Julie Otsuka, 2011
THE GREAT SILENCE • Ted Chiang, 2015
THE MIDNIGHT ZONE • Lauren Groff, 2016
ANYONE CAN DO IT • Manuel Muñoz, 2019
About the Contributors
Credits
INTRODUCTION
John Freeman
F
or a long time, the 1960s have been seen as a pivotal point for the
modern short story. Not just the actual time period, but a version of
the 1960s in popular culture. These 1960s are a time of tumult and
expansion. Sexual freedom, suburbanization, growth, and wealth. It was
when a great nation lost its innocence and began its march toward greater
liberties.
More than fifty years on from this period, the 1960s seem a very
different era. One in which it took riots, assassinations, and televised public
beatings to wake up white Americans. Towns and cities across the country
fought desegregation with violence, and even federal legislation couldn’t
end discriminatory practices. It just started a new movement. From the
moments of their passage, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil
Rights Act of 1968 met concerted pushback. Indeed, they jump-started a
right wing movement in its ascendancy today.
—
E
ven more interesting than uprisings are their aftermaths, when norms
and laws resettle, and the imaginations of people adjust to new
horizons. In recent years, the 1970s have begun to seem like one of the
most fertile periods of American life, grim as they were with stagflation,
war, and the financial collapse of cities. It was also a time of environmental
activism, a rising Black Arts Movement, the emergence within film and
literature of genres for reimagining society. In one five-year period, Toni
Morrison, Stephen King, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Rudolfo Anaya all
made their debuts.
This anthology, though it tracks the high points of the short story, is
enabled by spaces these writers opened up. For some this was not a
metaphorical activity. Starting in 1967, Toni Morrison began editing fiction
for Random House, a post from which she nurtured books by new Black
voices, including Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love (1972), which
included the first story in this collection, “The Lesson,” about school kids
on a trip from Brooklyn into Manhattan, to a fancy toy store.
American irreality took on a new cast in 1972, as the separation between
official life and actual life in America began to yawn. The Dow closed over
1,000 for the first time, yet indicators of malaise defined the US economy.
Nixon was reelected in a landslide with historically low turnouts; a year
later he’d be gone. Angela Davis was released from prison, finally
pronounced not guilty of murder, and was able to begin her next half
century of activism.
All across America, community spaces evolved to educate and create
storytellers, citizens. In her memoir, Vice President Kamala Harris
describes Maya Angelou and Alice Walker coming to her after-school
program in Oakland. June Jordan ran poetry workshops at Church of the
Open Door in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
In the meantime, in the country’s center, a new journal called Science
Fiction Studies dedicated a whole issue to the work of Ursula K. Le Guin.
By the time “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” was published, Le
Guin had been setting tales in Orsina, her fictional country, for over a
decade. This classic dystopia disassembles one of the founding engines of
so many nations, real or imagined. Whose suffering gets to be invisible for
the sake of everyone else?
The 1970s also saw the aftermath of second-wave feminism. One hears
its questions in Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” in which
her narrator adapts the weave of a story to make it more believable to him,
then changes course, giving it a happy ending.
What children learn is beautifully dramatized across several stories. In
Raymond Carver’s “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes,” a child’s father tries to
officiate a dispute between two boys over bikes and winds up in a fight
himself. In Alice Walker’s triumphantly brief “The Flowers,” a young girl
playing outdoors stumbles upon the remains of a person, not unlike how the
past mulches right in front of us. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” tells all the
lessons a young child in the Caribbean is meant to learn from her mother.
Meantime, across the country, in a desert, the child protagonist of Lucia
Berlin’s phenomenal “Silence” pays attention to what she’s not supposed to
know, growing up in the shadow of unhappy people.
—
H
ow much more fresh air there is in the American short story when it’s
not presumed to be realistic. When it isn’t bent toward an American
Dream. Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible” sets fire to such
expectations with its tale of two Native American brothers and the car
meant to symbolize their happiness. Isaac Bashevis Singer often made
humor from the bleakest threads of American life, as he does in “The
Reencounter,” where a man meets his mistress in the afterlife. The hero of
Joy Williams’s “Taking Care” stands between his wife and that next stage,
whatever it be, facing down an overwhelming loss.
It would take us decades to appreciate what a time the 1980s were for
writers. In “Story,” Lydia Davis puts down the driving, intense prose style
that became her signature, and for which she was rediscovered
—“overnight”—in the 2010s. Andrew Holleran hasn’t had this moment yet,
but “The Penthouse,” his fabulous and devastating long story, should make
clear he deserves one. It’s as if Maupassant were set loose on downtown
New York as it careened toward the AIDS crisis.
Love, in all its angles, animates these stories. In “Pet Milk,” Stuart
Dybek carries two young Chicagoans aloft with the same natural grace of a
new love affair. Meantime, in “China,” Charles Johnson crawls inside a
decades-old marriage that’s begun to crack. In “The Way We Live Now,”
Susan Sontag’s story pours from one voice to the next, launching a daisy
chain of concern among friends, some of whom were terrified of
contracting HIV—and, then, did.
The stakes across so many stories are unbearably high, even when they
chronicle why a child comes to school late, as in Sandra Cisneros’s
masterpiece of flash fiction, “Salvador Late or Early.” In his Vietnam War
story, “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien returns individuality to his
soldier characters in dehumanizing circumstances. And in “River of
Names,” the narrator of Dorothy Allison’s tale of growing up poor in the
rural South—of all the things she’s had to carry— steps through the scrim
of fiction to ask if this suffering has moved us yet.
—
T
o choose these stories, I read about a thousand works of short fiction
over two years. Allison’s question to the reader—Is this enough, have I
flayed you?—is an apt one. How can a story move us and remain somehow
true to itself, not a trick? For this reason, when a story made a mark on me,
I read it aloud, and often then the difference between manipulation and
magic became very clear. Sadness alone never made a story great.
In some stories, though, hilarity and melancholy approach a provocative
meeting point, as in Denis Johnson’s “Emergency,” which unfolds
overnight in a hospital as orderlies and nurses try to maintain their sanity.
At one point the main character—high and going for a drive—believes he’s
wandered into a land of gargantuan angels. Actually, it’s an all-night drive-
in theater playing a film as snow begins to fall.
How hard it is in a tale to capture the unexpected, the clobber of time.
George Saunders does both in just 392 words in “Sticks,” maybe the best
piece of flash fiction of all time; fast on the heels of which is Tobias Wolff’s
“Bullet in the Brain,” wherein a book critic mouths off during a bank
robbery and watches his entire life flash before his eyes as he pays the
consequences.
America is a violent country, and brutality does seep into these tales.
Nathan Englander’s “The Twenty-seventh Man” reimagines Stalin’s round-
up of poets, depicting the denial, absurdity and terror of a state at war with