The Best American Short Stories 2017 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  CHAD B. ANDERSON: Maidencane

  T. C. BOYLE: Are We Not Men?

  KEVIN CANTY: God’s Work

  JAI CHAKRABARTI: A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

  EMMA CLINE: Arcadia

  LEOPOLDINE CORE: Hog for Sorrow

  PATRICIA ENGEL: Campoamor

  DANIELLE EVANS: Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain

  MARY GORDON: Ugly

  LAUREN GROFF: The Midnight Zone

  AMY HEMPEL: The Chicane

  NOY HOLLAND: Tally

  SONYA LARSON: Gabe Dove

  FIONA MAAZEL: Let’s Go to the Videotape

  KYLE MCCARTHY: Ancient Rome

  ERIC PUCHNER: Last Day on Earth

  MARIA REVA: Novostroïka

  JIM SHEPARD: Telemachus

  CURTIS SITTENFELD: Gender Studies

  JESS WALTER: Famous Actor

  Contributors’ Notes

  Other Distinguished Stories of 2016

  American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Meg Wolitzer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® and The Best American Short Stories® are registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISSN 0067-6233 (print)

  ISSN 2573-4784 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-0-544-58276-7

  ISBN 978-0-544-58290-3 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-328-76673-1 (ebook)

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  v1.0817

  Excerpt from “A Milk Bottle” from A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 2000, 2002 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

  “Maidencane” by Chad B. Anderson. First published in Nimrod. Copyright © 2016 by Chad B. Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Chad B. Anderson.

  “Are We Not Men?” by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Copyright © 2016 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Originally published in the November 7, 2016, issue of The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

  “God’s Work” by Kevin Canty. First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Canty. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

  “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness” by Jai Chakrabarti. First published in A Public Space. Copyright © 2016 by Jai Chakrabarti. Reprinted by permission of Jai Chakrabarti.

  “Arcadia” by Emma Cline. First published in Granta. Copyright © 2016 by Emma Cline. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Hog for Sorrow” by Leopoldine Core. First published in Bomb. From When Watched: Stories by Leopoldine Core, copyright © 2016 by Leopoldine Core. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

  “Campoamor” by Patricia Engel. First published in Chicago Quarterly Review. Copyright © 2016 by Patricia Engel. Reprinted by permission of Patricia Engel.

  “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” by Danielle Evans. First published in American Short Fiction. Copyright © 2016 by Danielle Evans. Reprinted by permission of Danielle Evans.

  “Ugly” by Mary Gordon. First published in the Yale Review. Copyright © 2016 by Mary Gordon. Reprinted by permission of Mary Gordon.

  “The Midnight Zone” by Lauren Groff. First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2016 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Chicane” by Amy Hempel. First published in Washington Square Review. Copyright © 2016 by Amy Hempel. Reprinted by permission of Amy Hempel.

  “Tally” by Noy Holland. Copyright © 2016 by Noy Holland. Originally published in Epoch, vol. 65, no. 3. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

  “Gabe Dove” by Sonya Larson. First published in Salamander. Copyright © 2016 by Sonya Larson. Reprinted by permission of Sonya Larson.

  “Let’s Go to the Videotape” by Fiona Maazel. First published in Harper’s Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Fiona Maazel. Reprinted by permission of Fiona Maazel.

  “Ancient Rome” by Kyle McCarthy. First published in American Short Fiction. Copyright © 2016 by Kyle McCarthy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Last Day on Earth” by Eric Puchner. First published in Granta. From Last Days on Earth: Stories by Eric Puchner, copyright © 2017 by Eric Puchner. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  “Novostroïka” by Maria Reva. First published in The Atlantic. Copyright © 2016 by Maria Reva. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Telemachus” by Jim Shepard. First published in Zoetrope. From The World to Come: Stories by Jim Shepard, compilation copyright © 2017 by Jim Shepard. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

  “Gender Studies” by Curtis Sittenfeld. First published in The New Yorker, August 29, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Curtis Sittenfeld. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Sittenfeld.

  “Famous Actor” by Jess Walter. First published in Tin House. Copyright © 2016 by Big Text Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  In Memory of Carla Gray

  1965–2017

  Around us the meantime is already overflowing.

  Wherever I turn its own almost-invisibility

  Streams and sparkles over everything.

  —Galway Kinnell

  Foreword

  Each volume of The Best American Short Stories is a literary time capsule, a gathering of characters, settings, styles, voices, and conflicts more or less specific to their moment in history. The Best American Short Stories 2017 features some of the last stories written and published before November 8, 2016, and what must have been one of the most acrimonious and wearying presidential elections for Americans.

  I have a theory that it’s more difficult to hide ourselves when writing fiction than nonfiction, even certain memoirs. So much is revealed in the poses that we choose to strike, the silences we allow, and the conflicts we dramatize. And if fiction te
nds to be more successful without forceful agendas, the genre does tend to offer at least a window onto an author’s aesthetics and emotionality, and often their values.

  The stories in this volume—bold, intimate, enlightening, entertaining—reflect a country profoundly divided. In Mary Gordon’s “Ugly,” a New York City woman temporarily moves to the Midwest and reckons with her own calcified urban superiority. The faithful chafe against the faithless in Kevin Canty’s “God’s Work.” The young Asian woman in Sonya Larson’s “Gabe Dove” grapples with internalized racism when dating an Asian man for the first time. The public and the private spheres go head-to-head in Fiona Maazel’s “Let’s Go to the Videotape.” The wealthy grate against the support staff in Kyle McCarthy’s “Ancient Rome.” Misogyny brews beneath the surface of Eric Puchner’s “Last Day on Earth.” Acrimony between the genders appears often in these pages. After meeting a celebrity at a party, the narrator of Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” says, “I disliked him from the moment I decided to sleep with him.” Amy Hempel explores the devastating echoes of a failed marriage in “The Chicane.” The fractured condition of our country is most overtly referenced in Curtis Sittenfeld’s story, in which a professor of gender and women’s studies and a Trump-supporting shuttle driver have an awkward and ill-fated one-night stand: “Again when they look at each other, she is close to puncturing the theatrics of her own anger . . . but she hasn’t yet selected the words that she’ll use to cause the puncture.”

  Guest editor Meg Wolitzer and I spoke soon after the election, and we admitted to feeling daunted by the task before us. How did one even read short stories now? How could one read anything but the rapid-fire revelations that came in November, December, and January (and as of now, continue to come) about everything from fake news to the Russian involvement in our electoral process to the spike in hate crimes? And how was it possible to stay informed without becoming inundated and overwhelmed? After 9/11, series editor Katrina Kenison wrote, “All of [these stories] had been written well before September 11, and yet often I found it hard to believe that this could be the case; the truths they spoke seemed so timely, so necessary now.” Back in 1942, series editor Martha Foley wrote, “In its short stories, America can hear something being said that can be heard even above the crashing of bombs and the march of Panzer divisions. That is the fact that America is aware of human values as never before, posed as they are against a Nazi conception of a world dead to such values.” The difference now is the widespread availability of news—fake and real—due to the primacy of the Internet. I have friends and family who read no news and others who read just some. I must say that at the moment, I am working through a rampant news addiction. If you share this affliction, you know that it’s no good, that it stimulates anxiety and robs you of the ability to be mindful in your day-to-day life. The antidote to depletion is, of course, nourishment. This year, the best stories provide necessary sustenance.

  Ms. Wolitzer and I went back and forth about these stories numerous times. The job felt different this year. In a time when truth has become a pawn in a dangerous game of partisanship and influence, honest and emotionally true writing felt especially important. We strove for a mix of content and style, a collection of stories that gave voice to something urgent and meaningful.

  The Best American Short Stories 2017 celebrates all that is our country: crowded and lonely, funny and sad, fame-obsessed and fame-wary. Here are immigrants, a cabdriver, a person with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, a bartender, a racecar driver, sex workers, a human resources manager, a Ukrainian packaging specialist, a bridesmaid, a Cuban writer. Here are trapped naval officers, a contestant on America’s Funniest Home Videos, a gay man desperate to be a father.

  I love these stories. I feel irrationally proud and protective of these characters, these Americans in their fragility and grace, their division and desire, all of them unaware of what is to come. I am eager to read next year’s stories and to meet their characters, and to encounter their strength and resilience and wisdom.

  The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2016 and January 2017. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who have made the United States their home; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publications or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, c/o The Best American Short Stories, 125 High St., Boston, MA 02110.

  Heidi Pitlor

  Introduction

  It starts, sometimes, with an ending. The portal leading to a lifetime of slavish short story love can come in the final passage of a piece of fiction, which might contain some kind of full-body startle or revelatory shock. Teachers know this—after all, students return year after year, too big for the classroom and bringing tales of How I’ve Grown as a Reader, Thanks to You—and so when we’re young and our brains are still forming and cooling, we may be given an Amway hard-sell of de Maupassant and O. Henry by a well-meaning teacher.

  Or at least that used to happen. Do teachers still teach those stories, or is everything different now? Friends with school-age kids tell me they lament the fact that the Common Core has moved the curriculum away from the supposedly soft shoals of fiction and instead into the harder and more overtly preparatory realm of nonfiction, a place where facts line up like sharp stones, and truth rules. (Unless, of course, you’re a fiction writer, in which case you might feel that nonfiction practitioners have no corner on truth, and you are willing to go toe to toe on this particular point.)

  Maybe in assigning surprise-ending stories again and again, our teachers did us the favor of digging new neural pathways in our brains, and somehow actually created in us an unconscious, communal thirst for a big finish. I am certain that my earliest dips into reading short fiction included the de rigueur electric jolt that closed the thing; and so, after a while, armed with my new-smelling reader, which was published by a company such as Ginn (I am drawing that name up from my brainpan, though I haven’t thought of it in several decades), and called, perhaps, Paths of Imagination, Third Edition (okay, I made that one up, but maybe it exists), I came to deliberately trawl for the big moment at the end of a story, and to expect that it would definitely be there. My classmates and I were positive that such an ending was inevitably waiting for us, and we were monomaniacal about finding it, as if we were nonviolent little versions of the killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, who were convinced that the Clutter family definitely had a safe in their Kansas home. A big ending began to seem to me like a requirement—the single element that could somehow make any story memorable. I had a jones for it; I wanted it every time. To me it was distinctive, necessary, a singular taste to be craved and hunted down: a literary kind of umami.

  But of course if everything is surprising, then nothing is. Because we had all been raised on the power of surprise, the short stories that my class wrote for the creative writing unit, which has by now maybe been expunged from the curriculum like asbestos from an old school building, sometimes attempted a cheap and lazy mimicry of the kinds of fiction we’d already read. I recall more than one kid standing up and reading his or her own short story aloud; it was invariably full of action and suspense and a touch of Borges-like surrealism, and finally there came the last line, the kicker: “Then I woke up, and it was all a dream!”

  Oh ho, a dream, you say? Teachers were tolerant of dreams, but we other students could be sour, exacting critics. Those clever endings taught us not only what to want and expect, but also what not to want: an unearned surprise for a surprise’s sake.

  While “The Gift of the Magi” is perhaps the standard-bearer of surprise-ending fiction, not to mention the winner of the M. Night Shyamalan Prize for Unexpected Closure, i
t was a somewhat lesser-known O. Henry story, “The Last Leaf,” that first obsessed me. The plot concerns two girls who are roommates in Greenwich Village. It’s wintertime, and one of them becomes gravely ill with what’s referred to as “Mr. Pneumonia.” Day after day, as she gets no better, she becomes preoccupied with the vine growing on a wall across the way, visible from her window. As the weather grows worse, she insists to her roommate that her fate is coupled with that of the leaves on the vine. When the last leaf falls, she knows she will die.

  One night a tremendous storm hits, and by morning there’s no way that the last leaf could have hung on. Raise the shade! the ill girl demands of her roommate, who is terrified to do so, knowing that the vision of the naked vine will cause her friend to lose the will to live. But when the shade is raised, a single leaf still clings to that vine, and the ill girl finally feels encouraged. Soon, her fever breaks and she begins to get better. But what she doesn’t know is that the old artist who lives across the way, and who knew of the girl’s obsession, went out at night in the snowstorm to paint the leaf on the wall, and in doing so, he himself got sick (also with pneumonia), and died.

  Oh god, I loved this story, with its focus on magical thinking and death. To me, the notion that death was under our personal jurisdiction was a big draw—this idea that if only you had the right attitude, you could control death as if it were a thermostat in a hotel room. The story is really a sentimental sketch, and here is a bit of dialogue, spoken by the artist when he hears of the ill girl’s conviction: “Vass! . . . Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing.”

  If you stay with “The Last Leaf” all the way through, you wind up at the ending, which you just know William Sydney Porter had worked out before or at least at the same time that he came up with the rest of it. For without the ending, the story rests on shaky legs, and the whole thing could easily blow away like an eponymous leaf in even the lightest of storms.