The initial impulse upon receipt of books like 100 Years of ohe Best American Short Stories is to argue with the editorial selections. Why F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” and not “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz “? Why Hemingway’s “My Old Man” and not “Hills Like White Elephants” or “The Three Day Blow” or any other Nick Adams story? Why Raymond Carver’s “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and not “A Small, Good Thing” or “So Much Water So Close to Home”? Why no stories by Amy Hempl?! (This last oversight is acknowledged by series co-editor Lorrie Moore, along with several other notable omissions, including Deborah Eisenberg and T.C. Boyle.)
Whether you find this sort of speculation delightful or maddening, Moore correctly observes “we could wring our hands forever” over why certain stories appear in this volume while others do not. Better instead to invoke short fiction’s sterling qualities: its smallness, its portability, its pithy nature. In the time before cell phones, people read short stories to entertain themselves whilst riding public transit or waiting in line. This morning on Bay Area Rapid Transit, I was the only person reading a physical book: everyone else stared at or tapped into cell phones, which, along with other computerized gadgets, have largely eradicated many reasons why we once waited in lines.
Happily, the short story carries on, even persisting in old-fashioned paper formats, like the 700-odd-page book resting beside me now. Once I stopped being upset over the lack of Amy Hempl stories, specifically, “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” I enjoyed 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories immensely.
Indeed, there’s much to love about 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, which begins with Edna Ferber’s 1917 story “The Gay Old Dog”, and closes nearly a century later with Lauren Groff’s 2014 story “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners”. The many changes American society undergoes in that 100-year interval occur largely in the world of things: human transport moves from horses to cars, media shifts from print to television to the Internet. Linguistic changes evidence themselves in adjectives and proper names, a fact seen in Ferber’s title, which refers neither to animals nor sexual orientation, but to a lonely man who finds no comfort in his wealth. American values and mores change, shifting from Victorian prudery to a more accepting society, reflected here in stories by Jews, African-Americans, and multicultural Americans.
Yet the short story’s core remains unchanged; regardless of time or place, the short story is an attempt to succinctly capture the human condition. And that condition is unchanging, for humans are a desirous lot, prone to unhappiness, often desperate, lonely, and heartsick. We yearn, continually, toward happiness.
Many of these stories are well-known and widely anthologized, making for popular curricula in high school and college literature courses. Readers are familiar with Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing”, Flannery O’Conner’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, and John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”. Yet the sheer size of this volume means readers will find stories that are new to them, or encounter familiar work afresh with time and, one hopes, maturity.
Perhaps, like me, you knew of Ring Lardner only as a favorite of Holden Caulfield and Ernest Hemingway. In “Haircut”, Lardner draws a small town of even smaller-minded people, an ugly place where practical jokes are the common denominator and human decency is absent. Nancy Hale’s “Those Are as Brothers”, published in 1942, draws touching parallels between an abused divorcee and a Holocaust survivor. In “Sonny’s Blues” (1958) James Baldwin describes one of life’s most difficult relationships: unequal siblings. Here, the elder brother, a married father with a stable life, tries to understand his heroin-addicted younger brother, Sonny, a gifted musician whose self-destructive streak threatens to engulf him.
Later stories reflect increasing racial diversity both in American society and literature; while editor Heidi Pitlor rightly laments the dearth of LGBT short fiction, writers like Akhil Sharma and Jhumpa Lahiri represent the experience of arranged Indian marriage. Interestingly, Sharma explores this subject from the wife’s point of view with the heartbreaking “If You Sing Like That for Me” (1996), whereas Lahiri explores it from the husband’s point of view in the happier “The Third and Final Continent” (2000).
In ZZ Packer’s “Brownies”, a group of African-American girls hoping start to a race-based fight select a group of girls that are the wrong choice beyond their wildest imaginings. In “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”, Sherman Alexie’s homeless, alcoholic Native American protagonist is painfully perceptive regarding his plight. In “Lawns”, the adopted Mona Simpson takes her early obsession with father figures to extremes with the perfect family gone nightmarishly wrong.
In her concluding statements, series editor Heidi Pitlor writes of her co-editor: “Lorrie Moore refused to include any of her own stories in this book, despite my best efforts to convince her otherwise.”
This explains a final serious omission. Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here”, which appears in Birds of America, would have been a wonderful inclusion. Selected by Garrison Keillor for The Best American Short Stories 1998, the story contains some of contemporary short fiction’s most devastating lines, like this one: “Baby and Chemo, she thinks: they should never even appear in the same sentence together, let alone the same life.”
The size of 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories makes comprehensive reviewing impossible. There are too many terrific stories. Buy the book. Open it anywhere, randomly. Begin reading. Reassure yourself this won’t take long. I’ll just dip in for a few minutes. Two hours later you’ll surface, blinking. The sky has darkened. You are a different person, a person who has spent the day reading: Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Baxter, Mary Gaitskill. You are the better for it.
While I was reading and reviewing 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories my father-in-law, a professor at the University of Southern California, died suddenly. A brilliant, at times difficult man, he was not always easy to get along with. Despite our many disagreements, we shared two deep loves: of his eldest son, my husband, and fine literature. He would have taken deep pleasure in the range, depth, and intelligence of 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. I can offer no higher recommendation.