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THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1999

The latest in this 85-year-old series continues the tradition of putting the timely and new into a kind of yearbook of the American literary scene, this time with Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995, etc.) picking the sides and calling the shots. “The best stories do change us,” writes Tan. “They help us live interesting lives.” That’s a pretty tall order, especially nowadays, when literary fiction in general and the short story in particular become increasingly self-referential and esoteric. But there’s still some life to be found on these pages. Rick Bass, in “The Hermit’s Story,” takes us into Jack London territory with an old-fashioned campfire yarn about a dog trainer and her frozen passage through the snows of Canada with her sledding team. At the other extreme (in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars—), Junot Diaz heads from New Jersey to Santo Domingo, where Dominican narrator Yunior takes his Nuyorican girlfriend Magdalena on a doomed holiday in the hope of patching up their shaky relationship. The best stories here, in fact, all tend to be regional: Ha Jin portrays the metaphoric claustrophobia of a Communist boarding school (—In the Kindergarten—), while A. Hemon’s family portrait (—Islands—) offers a microcosmic study of the survivors of Stalin’s gulags. Domestic life American-style doesn—t seem to have the same resonance: Heidi Julavits’s deconstruction of a wedding album (—Marry the One Who Gets There First—) is too clever by half, whereas Lorrie Moore’s “Real Estate” does nothing very original with the tired theme of the malcontent woman looking for her dream house. Similarly, Stephen Dobyns’s interior fantasy “Kansas” (the hero reimagines the story’s end over and over) becomes quickly tedious, while Tim Gatreaux’s more straightforward account of loneliness redeemed through art (—The Piano Tuner—) succeeds with less commotion. Perhaps less is more, after all: the more ambitious pieces here disappoint almost without exception, whereas the authors who are old-fashioned enough to want to tell a story usually manage to do just that—and quite nicely, too.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-92683-1

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999

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THE COMPLETE STORIES

The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971

ISBN: 0374515360

Page Count: 555

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971

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RUNAWAY

STORIES

In a word: magnificent.

Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection.

Each of its eight long tales in the Canadian author’s latest gathering (after Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001, etc.) bears a one-word title, and all together embrace a multiplicity of reactions to the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting, and confronting one’s mortality. Three pieces focus on Juliet Henderson, a student and sometime teacher of classical culture, who waits years (in “Chance”) before rediscovering romantic happiness with the middle-aged man with whom she had shared an unusual experience during a long train journey. In “Soon,” Juliet and her baby daughter Penelope visit Juliet’s aging parents, and she learns how her unconventional life has impacted on theirs. Then, in “Silence,” a much older Juliet comes sorrowfully to terms with the emptiness in her that had forever alienated Penelope, “now living the life of a prosperous, practical matron” in a world far from her mother’s. Generational and familial incompatibility also figure crucially in “Passion,” the story (somewhat initially reminiscent of Forster’s Howards End) of a rural girl’s transformative relationship with her boyfriend’s cultured, “perfect” family—and her realization that their imperfections adumbrate her own compromised future. Further complexities—and borderline believable coincidences and recognitions—make mixed successes of “Trespasses,” in which a young girl’s unease about her impulsive parents is shown to stem from a secret long kept from her, and “Tricks,” an excruciatingly sad account of a lonely girl’s happenstance relationship with the immigrant clockmaker she meets while attending a Shakespeare festival, the promise she tries and helplessly fails to keep, and the damaging misunderstanding that, she ruefully reasons, “Shakespeare should have prepared her.” Then there are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella “Powers,” which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive “reality.”

In a word: magnificent.

Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2004

ISBN: 1-4000-4281-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004

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