Megan Abbott, "The Little Men," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Bibliomysteries.
To be quite honest I am not entirely sure what happened in this story. The narrative so effectively evoked the main character's increasing paranoia that it collapses the line between the real and the imagined, leaving the reader with the unmistakable smell of gas and the indisputable fact of death.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "Apollo," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in The New Yorker, April 13, 2015.
There is more going on beneath the surface of this eleven page story than on the surface of most novels. Bonus points for any reader who can pinpoint the ways the narrator of this story subtly undermines his own contentions and beliefs.
Steve Almond, "Okay, Now Do You Surrender?" from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Cincinnati Review, vol. 11, no. 2.
When my meds are out of whack I bear a bit too much resemblance to the protagonist of this story. The daughter seems a bit too young to support the twist, but it was otherwise entertaining enough that I decided to suspend disbelief.
Tahmima Anam, "Garments," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Freeman's, October 2015.
The challenge of writing a good sweatshop story is that it is hard to convey exhaustion if one has not lived it, and hard to find the time to write if one is living through that exhaustion. While there may be some sweatshop poets in Bengali, few if any of them have been translated. Anglophone residents of the republic of letters have to trust that Anam has bridged this gap well enough to tell us about life at the other end of the supply chain.
Charlie Jane Anders, "Rat Catcher's Yellows" from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in Press Start to Play.
I read this story when it first came out in a themed anthology, and already considered it to be one of the better pieces from 2015. A compelling portrayal of how love manages to survive the circumstances, and even the minds, which first gave rise to it, it holds up well on a second reading.
Andrea Barrett, "Wonders of the Shore," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Tin House
This is a very bookish story--literally--but I am a very bookish person. A kind of 19th Century "Missed Connection" unfolds in the margins of some popularized natural history.
Charles Baxter, "Avarice," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review.
This is either the most anti-capitalist Jesus story of the year, or the most Jesus-y anti-capitalist story. And so much more besides.
Matt Bell, "Toward the Company of Others," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Tin House 65.
A novel excerpt that works on its own as a short story, and thus makes me want to seek out and read Scrapper, whence it came. The world needs as many Detroit stories as possible.
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, "The Bears," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Glimmer Train, Spring/Summer 2015.
More than a hundred years later, our writers and our neuroscientists are still catching up with William James's early psychological insights. Along the way Bynum refashions the Goldilocks story into an allegory of the clueless disconnection of contemporary life.
Ted Chiang, "The Great Silence," from Best American Short Stories 2016 and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in e-flux.
This may be the best story of 2015, though I did not have occasion to read it until it was reprinted in the May/June 2016 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (the same issue in which my story "Caribou: Documentary Fragments" appeared). My message to Ted Chiang: "You be good. I love you."
Chris Drangle, "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in The Oxford American.
What passes for country music these days isn't really country music any more. This story is like an old-time country song in prose form, complete with war, tragedy, sex, liquor, and the love of a dog.
Louise Erdrich, "The Flower," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in The New Yorker, June 29, 2015.
I loved this story when it was first published. In a different layout, I found more to love--it's odd, but certain sentences stand out better when stretching across a full page than when in a third-of-a-page column, and vice versa. Such as, for example, Anishinaabe practices in the naming of girls.
Yalitza Ferreras, "The Letician Age," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Colorado Review, vol. 42, no. 2.
Reminds me, peculiarly, of N. K. Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season, insofar as, when geological time and human time intersect, pliable organic matter usually ends up singed or crushed.
Kendra Fortmeyer, "Things I Know to Be True," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in One Story.
I suspect this was set in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, rather than contemporaneously, in the wake of our Endless Wars, because today the story told would be encompassed within a few abbreviations and stock phrases, such as PTSD or paranoid schizophrenia. Fortmeyer set herself the challenge of telling a story through a narrator whose words, literally, escape him, and met it admirably.
Tom Franklin, "Christians," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Murder under the Oaks.
Some Southern Gothic worthy of Flannery O'Connor, except this one appears to have been based upon real yet obscure incidents of the class struggle in southern Alabama.
Meron Hadero, "The Suitcase," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Missouri Review, vol. 38, no. 3.
An Ethiopian-American O'Henry story, redolent of injera and berbere. There are many world cultures in which hospitality and honor are bound up with one another, so I also ended up chuckling with recognition in those places where Ethiopians sounded strangely like Greeks or Ashkenazi Jews.
Smith Henderson, "Treasure State," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Tin House 64.
Haven't we all wished we could cave in our fathers' heads like pumpkins? Oh, is that not quite a universal sentiment? Well, the pumpkin was asking for it.
Robert Lopresti, "Street of the Dead House," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in nEvermore!
There are a few too many Poe retellings in the world, but this among the better ones that I have seen. There is something in the intellectual atmosphere that is leading many a writer to try to give voice to the beasts.
Elizabeth McCracken, "Mistress Mickle All at Sea," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story.
The story accretes, like a pearl on a grain of sand, around this aphorism: "The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone."
Erin McGraw, "Priest," from 2017 Pushcart Prize 2017. First appeared in Image.
Pascal's wager does not always work.
Caille Millner, "The Politics of the Quotidian," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in ZYZZYVA no. 104.
I wanted to dislike the story. After all, I am so sick of stories and novels set in academia, have a general, principled stance that the world would be better with fewer of them, not more. But at a certain point it hit that this was my story--the impostor syndrome, the unexpected failure to play a game one scarcely knew existed--and then it became more than my story, with added intersections overdetermining the outcome. Roland Barthes looms large in the text, but Pierre Bourdieu lurks in the subtext.
Michael Noll, "The Tank Yard," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 2015.
This could have been one of the best stories of all time, not merely one of the best stories of 2015, had it not taken a moralistic turn toward the end. The turn was ambiguous enough, however, to keep the story from melting into a puddle of cant. Rural desperation and methamphetamine bond to one another as tightly as anhydrous ammonia and H2O.
Dominica Phetteplace, "The Story of a True Artist," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in ZYZZYVA
The difference between being "Gen X" and "Millennial" seems to be roughly the difference between being imprisoned in the Panopticon, and being born into it. Dominica Phetteplace's writing brings me the closest I can be to understanding what that difference means.
Karen Russell, "The Prospectors," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in The New Yorker, June 8, 2015.
To snatch back life from death is the biggest steal of them all. To know the fact of one's death well enough to be able to forget it is what it takes to become a ghost.
Sofia Samatar, "Meet Me in Iram," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in Meet Me in Iram / Those Are Pearls.
A lost city, or a tribe, of which one may imagine oneself to be a part.
Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared on Tor.com.
Vandana Singh is so comprehensively, multi-facetedly brilliant as to vaporize all trace of writerly ego. No one else can write about the possibility space of impossible machines half so convincingly.
Micah Stack, "The G.R.I.E.F." from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in The Oxford American
It's hard out there for us queer hip-hop heads. A little bit of fantasy helps the hate flow smooth.
Lisa Taddeo, "Forty-Two," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in New England Review.
Is there any Schadenfreude better than watching terrible people make one another, and themselves, miserable?
Brian Tobin, "Entwined," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, June 2015.
I like this as a voice-driven driven story, capturing the iterative nature of guilt and depression, despite the somewhat contrived nature of its revelations along the way. I like the fact that redemption and forgiveness cannot be given by facts, when the person who feels the guilt does not wish for either.
Catherynne M. Valente, "Planet Lion," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in Uncanny Magazine May/June 2015.
"What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?" I like stories that begin as jokes but become sublime.
John Edgar Wideman, "Williamsburg Bridge," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Harper's Magazine, November 2015.
I recently had a story rejection pounce on one of my meta-fictional digressions, so it is a relief to see that someone can get away with them in print. To be fair, Wideman does it better.
