Yes, it's autumn and the new Best American Short Stories has hit the shelves! Sporting a dark, brooding black cover for the first time in memory, BASS lept off the shelf to my eager hands. I paged through it and... I'm not in it. This is how I find out?
Okay, that's kind of a silly joke. What I really did was page through the table of contents to see if I'd read any of them already. Then I counted up which magazines had the most entries. Usually this ends up being the New Yorker. They publish over 50 stories a year, most of them acceptable, so just by numbers they end up swamping the competition. However this year they did not. Tin House, the quarterly from Portland, managed to land and astounding 4 entries, 20 percent of the collection. The Atlantic, which published only six pieces or so a year, and that in a special 'writer's ghetto' edition, managed to place three of their stories, or half their year's lot, into the best of the best. McSweeney's, bellweather of what's hip and snarky and stridently alt-moral, landed three as well. (I do not subscribe to McSweeney's, though they have in the past surprised me with some incredible, lucent, off-center, indespensible prose.) The New Yorker, slipping from their perch of tastemaker for modern fiction, only scrounged up two entries this year. The rest of the entries came from high-level college quarterlies or literary institutions: The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, etc.
In short and on first glance, this year's editor, Richard Russo, seems to have taken few risks to go outside the boundaries of mainstream literary fiction. Half the selections come from just three sources, meaning if you follow short stories with any dedication, you've seen these already. I'm sure all the Tin House stories will come back to me on starting them.
Anyway, I look forward to diving in and reporting back, gentle reader, on the foibles and endearing quirks of this latest check on the pulse of American short fiction.
