Meta-Anthology 2018

Repeating myself from last year, with slight modifications: I make no pretense to this representing the best short stories of the year 2018. First of all, because they are not of that year, having all first appeared in 2017. But also, since I could not possibly keep up with all short fiction publications of interest, I have culled them from four key anthologies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Best American series, in its Short Story, Mystery Story, and Science Fiction and Fantasy instances, and the Pushcart Prize. Despite the names of those anthologies, it represents not the best of the best, but a selection of what was deemed "best" by others that I found nonetheless to be worth reading. This version of the meta-anthology, my sixth, comes the latest of any, due to my having completed an interstate move. Why do I keep doing it? I find that it brings or renews good authors to my attention, and also brings or renews to my attention strong publications, the sorts of venues in which I might be honored to have my own work appear. Was 2017 a good year for short fiction? Let me answer a question with a question: Was it a good year for anything?

Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in Boston Review: Global Dystopias.

Anders is not the most politically insightful of contemporary speculative fiction writers, but what she brings to her work far more reliably than most is style.

Michael Bracken, "Smoked," from The Best American Mystery Stories 2018. First published in Noir at the Salad Bar: Culinary Tales with a Bite.

I can't resist barbecue, or shoot-'em-ups.

Yoon Choi, "The Art of Losing," from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in New England Review, vol. 38, no. 2.

Love and care can survive the loss of memory and mind, just barely. Somehow, a pair of Korean immigrant grandparents call to mind my own first-generation Jewish-American ones.

Gwendolyn Clare, "Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2017.

I suspect this transcends the author's intention, but this story is a perfect illustration of Walter Benjamin's dictum that "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

Olabajo Dada, "The Bar Beach Show" from 2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII. First appeared in The Southamption Review.

Military cynicism mastered the politics of the spectacle long before practitioners of mass politics recognized it as a thing in the world.

Samuel R. Delany, "The Hermit of Houston," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2017.

This was my favorite science fiction story to appear in 2017, and it holds up. Not because it was perfectly realized--it wasn't--but because it was one of the few that I read that was not averse to the risk of failure.

Alicia Elliott, "Unearth" from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in Grain vol. 44.3.

I was in tears by the end of my reading, and glad in this case that the word "American" is used, by the series editor, in a sense that includes anglophone Canada.

Jaymee Goh, "The Last Cheng Beng Gift," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in Lightspeed.

Some day human beings will outgrow the need for stories about parents needing, and failing, to unlearn a proprietary attitude toward their adult children. Until that day, this was one of the more imaginative examples of such a story that I have seen.

Jacob Guajardo, "What Got into Us," from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in Passages North no. 38.

A well-imagined scenario that any queer boy can relate to, strong characterization, and precise control of language that allows the writer to do test the limits of English with past, present, and future tenses.

Maria Dahvana Headley, "The Orange Tree," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in The Weight of Words.

With more brilliant sentences in its few pages than in many of the rest of the stories published in that year, this sexual, intertextual piece immerses the reader in Mediterranean brine and the juice of bitter oranges.

Cristina Henríquez, "Everything Is Far from Here," from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in The New Yorker, July 24, 2017.

I somehow don't remember having read this earlier, even though I am a New Yorker subscriber. A horrifying story that is both weakened and made more horrifying by the knowledge that its horrors are already being outstripped by reality. Read it before it is made so far out of date that its horrors seem quaint.

Micah Dean Hicks, "Church of Birds," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in Kenyon Review March/April 2017.

The greatest curse is a malformed wish.

J. M. Holmes, "What's Wrong with You? What's Wrong with Me?" from 2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII. First appeared in The Paris Review.

A story that left me smelling the funk of weed smoke and testosterone-charged man sweat.

Victor LaValle, "Spectral Evidence," from 2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII. First appeared in Ploughshares.

This felt to me like the way Raymond Carver would tell a ghost story if he ever allowed himself to tell a ghost story, which he did not, so that leaves space for LaValle to do his thing.

David Naimon, "Acceptance Speech," from 2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII. First appeared in Boulevard.

Human consciousness as the fever-dream of a rampant microbiome trying to think itself out of existence.

Alan Orloff, "Rule Number One," from The Best American Mystery Stories 2018. First appeared in Snowbound.

I thought I saw the end coming, and then I saw the end coming, and then I didn't.

Lettie Prell, "Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in Clarkesworld Issue 124.

To be frank, when it comes to science fiction stories about alternate legal systems that appeared in 2017, I prefer my own "Menistaria...", which appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of Lackington's. But that had been rejected by Clarkesworld years before, and CW has a larger audience than Lackington's. What I do like about this story are the things that it shares with my own: The willingness to imagine that things could be better, and recognition of the moral stunting of those who cannot imagine things being other than they are.

Karen Russell, "The Tornado Auction," from 2019 Pushcart Prize XLIII. First appeared in Zoetrope: All Story.

Sometimes the bravest thing to do is the least destructive.

Amy Silverberg, "Suburbia!" from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in The Southern Review, vol. 53, no. 2.

You can never go home again because why on earth would you want to? A good example of fiction as literalized metaphor.

Curtis Sittenfeld, "The Prairie Wife," from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2017.

This one I remember consciously deciding not to read when it was first published. The confessed Twitter addiction of both the author and the main character interacted poorly with my own; often when I am reading The New Yorker, I am logged into Twitter, and reading about a Twitter-obsessed character while being on Twitter seemed a bit too--as the main character in Silverberg's story would say--"meta". The presence of this story on the list shows how arbitrary this list really is. My reception of a story varies in part depending on the medium in which I am trying to read it. I am least receptive to fiction when it is on a screen, and stories that work in a fat volume may turn me off on a three-column page.

Turning to the story itself: It has some manipulative tricks, like not stating the gender of the main character's spouse until more than midway through. Though anyone who ends up surprised at that reveal, only reveals themselves, as a clueless hetero. Nonetheless, I am glad of its all-too-relatable depiction of having-kids-in-one's-forties, of getting nostalgic for the erotic abandon of one's teenage self, and its frank descriptions of vigorous scromping. A more ambiguous story might have ended up more cynical, perhaps too much so for The New Yorker, so perhaps I ought to write that more ambiguous story.

Rivers Solomon, "Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver," from The Best American Short Stories 2018. First published in Emrys Journal vol. 34.

A story that aims high, higher, more ambitious, than most stories published today, so that even if it does not quite hit its target, one savors the miss, the kickback, the smell of powder.

Cadwell Turnbull, "Loneliness Is in Your Blood," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. First appeared in Nightmare Magazine issue 52.

The first literary treatment I have seen of a soucouyant (I know there are more, but this is the first that I've read), which more than makes up for the single-sentence opening paragraph.