The Best American Short Stories 1991, edited by Alice Adams and Katrina Kenison

Short story anthologies are always a mixed bag, and anything claiming to be ‘best’ of anything makes the selection more dubious and worthy of skepticism. That being said, this post is concerned more with individual stories within the collection than the book as a whole for the purposes of ‘must read.’ However uneven an assembled grouping of stories (or poems, essays, or anything for that matter) may be there are always a few essential treasures to be found among the mediocre or the misfires.

I have read many editions of this anthology series before this installment. Below is the complete list in roughly chronological order of when I read each (not when each was published, obviously):

Best American Short Stories 2004 (BASS ’04 for short) ed. Lorrie Moore, Katrina Kenison*

BASS ’06 ed. Ann Patchett, Kenison

BASS ’07 ed. Stephen King, Heidi Pitlor

BASS ’01 ed. Barbara Kingsolver, Kenison

BASS ’10 ed. Richard Russo, Pitlor

BASS ’12 ed. Tom Perrotta, Pitlor

BASS ’14 ed. Jennifer Egan, Pitlor

BASS ’00 ed. E.L. Doctorow, Kenison

Which makes BASS ’91 the ninth edition I’ve read. I’ve got a big stack of others, new and old, to read yet, but big plans are on the horizon, so I won't get back into it until 2019. I’m not dedicated to reading as I used to be. I remember lazy summers where it seemed all I did was read, but those days are long gone. My life is full now with responsibility, people I work with and care about, and numerous distractions every bit as enticing as sitting down with a good book. At least with the Best American series I can tell myself that if I read one story a night then I can be done in 21 days, or three weeks (20 stories in each installment plus editors’ forwards/introductions). That’s not too bad since there are so many years to catch up on and a new edition comes out every year.

For the complete list of stories from ’91 I refer you to the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_American_Short_Stories_1991

I’m interested in talking about only a handful that made me very glad to read the whole collection.

Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” was the first story (aside from Rick Bass’s “The Legend of Pig-Eye,” but I’m partial to Bass) to really enthrall me from the start. The title is tricky, because I went in expecting one kind of story and getting a whole other kind completely. I had read Braverman once before though I can't recall her story now, but this one grabbed me and didn’t let me go. A woman in the wasteland of LA meets a character who I think is the prototype for the role Tom Cruise is played in American Made, and he sweeps her up in an improbable romance that is both sweet and dangerous. When I read this story I was almost two years out of a nearly 14 year relationship, so I was lonely and identified with the main character immediately. It’s one of those stories that caught me at the right moment, but it’s also paced brilliantly, there’s never a dull scene or line throughout, which is hard to do most of the time, I’ve found.

Robert Olen Butler’s “The Trip Back” is about a Vietnamese immigrant living in Louisiana with his family and he drives to Texas to pick up his wife’s uncle to come and live with them. Almost the entirety of the story is the main character in the car, first driving with the anticipation of meeting this important but long unseen relative, then driving back with him in the car, anticipating the incredibly significant reunion that will take place at home. Butler won the Pulitzer for the novel in stories that “The Trip Back” appears in, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. It’s easy to see why after reading this story. I’ve done more than my fair share of driving in my life, living so many years in the Southwest where you must drive everywhere, and the time spent in my head in the car I found to be rendered so marvelously in prose in this story. It’s a contemplative story, and it ends bittersweetly, so it was easy for me to love.

Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point” tells the story of a young teen who becomes the designated adult for his mother and her group of neighbors when they party and get too drunk to walk themselves home. The young main character has lost his father in Vietnam and so he is literally the man of the house now. It’s a coming of age story, but it’s told with an odd honesty. The details of feeling and fact throughout are all unusual and interesting, and the young teen has an opportunity for sexual experience that he doesn’t quite take advantage of, because the true denouement is tied to his grief over his lost father. It sounds like a bait and switch, and it kind of is, but D’Ambrosio is so confident in his characters and his story that it worked for me.

Millicent Dillon’s “Oil and Water” tells the story of a solitary young woman who goes to work at an oil refinery out in the middle of nowhere. She befriends men and women who work there in different roles, and ultimately she begins to open up a bit in her life, though she misses an opportunity for sex at the end of the story that points to something she lost in her past (and accounts for where we found her at the beginning of the story). The charm of the story is in the main character’s bravery to change her life into something she cannot possibly imagine, and then make the best of it. So many of these stories I loved best have been about lonely characters who either deal with their solitude or work to change it, and so they affected me more at this point in my life than they might have at another time. Maybe that’s another thing wrong with anthologies. They collect stories that would all be best at different points in your life, but simply can’t all connect if read at once straight through.

Alice Munro’s “Friend of My Youth” was the last great story I read. Munro, like Updike (who also appears in this edition) is a staple of the Best American series, and it’s rare to come across a year where one or the other is not present. The story is framed as a narrator remembering her mother’s young adulthood before marriage living with a family on a farm and befriending a middle aged spinster who we come to find has been done wrong throughout her life, first from her sister and then her sister’s husband. Of course the narrative is constructed, from memory, correspondence, and some useful invention, like most history has been, and the result is magnetic. The narrator shatters the narrative at the end talking of telling the story as a story in any number of ways, and the reflexivity adds another whole layer to what has happened and what we actually know, if anything. It’s one of the more technically adventurous and rewarding of Munro’s stories that I’ve read, and also satisfied a love I have of ‘historical fiction’ as it’s known in various guises across genres. I can't wait to read her collection for which this story provides the title.

A few notable stories I left out include the aforementioned Bass story, Leonard Michaels’ “Viva la Tropicana,” Siri Hustvedt’s “Houdini,” David Jauss’s “Glossolalia,” Lorrie Moore’s “Willing,” and Mikhail Iossel’s “Bologove.” I had read the Michaels and Moore stories before, so while excellent, they weren’t new experiences. Iossel’s story was another loner, this time behind the iron curtain, who is making the best of life before he gets out. “Glossolalia” is about a father having a breakdown and how it deeply affects his son, with a crying scene that resonated all too well with me. Hustvedt’s story was amazing, but so disheartening to read that I was profoundly depressed after reading it. It worked too well. You should probably read it anyway.

I am ashamed to say I also enjoyed Updike’s story. I am weak, and I'm sorry.

*A note on the editorial structure of this anthology series: There is a series editor responsible for reading an insane amount of short fiction for the year and then narrowing the list down to 100 top choices. The year’s guest editor then reads these 100 (with the series editor reading along a second time) and chooses 20 to include for the volume. It sounds both like a dream job to me and also one of the most exhausting tasks imaginable. Both Kenison and Pitlor are writers with families and lives on top of this Herculean effort every year and so I am humbled by their hard work every time I sit down to read one of these books. And I will continue to do so as long as I can. The very first edition I read has my favorite short story of all time, where I discovered it: Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn, I Will Redeem.” While I never love every story in a BASS, I do know that I will always find one or more that I’ll never forget, and that’s not something you can count on when you sit down with just any book.