100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1990–2000

AT THE END OF 1989, SHANNON RAVENEL RESIGNED as the series editor, moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and continued her work with Algonquin Books. Again Houghton Mifflin had to find a replacement. They chose Katrina Kenison, a young in-house editor. She said, “Reading wasn’t something I did as a child, it was who I was.” After graduating from Smith College, Kenison got a job at Macy’s selling lingerie… One day an article in the Sunday New York Times caught my eye: a feature about a small literary imprint of Houghton Mifflin Company being launched in New Haven, where we were living. I looked up the editor in chief in the phone book, typed a letter saying I would do anything, and mailed it to his home address. Within a week I was installed on a stool in the kitchen (the offices were in a newly renovated Victorian house), with scissors, a stack of news clippings, and a jar of rubber cement… It wasn’t long before I was writing jacket copy, copy editing manuscripts, and reading the slush pile. And when I found a first novel that was good enough to publish, I was allowed to edit it.

She spent nine years working as an editor for Houghton Mifflin, first in New Haven, then in New York, and finally in the Boston office.

Kenison’s first son was only a month old when she became the fourth series editor of The Best American Short Stories. She said, “I hired a baby sitter, bought my first computer, and learned to use FileMaker Pro so I could keep track of the more than 200 magazine subscriptions I’d suddenly inherited.”

Ravenel told Kenison, “Read everything. Stay open-minded. Never write someone off just because you’ve read twenty-five of his stories and none of them has worked; the twenty-sixth might be wonderful.” When she sent her first volume of stories to Houghton Mifflin, Kenison included a letter suggesting that someone look into two new writers she had come across in her reading: Robert Olen Butler and Charles D’Ambrosio.

Kenison reinstated the series editor’s foreword. In her first foreword, she defined her taste almost as broadly as Foley had: “A good story has a way of announcing itself, rendering irrelevant any preconceived maxims of standards of excellence.” She assured readers that any fears of the homogenization of literary short fiction because of the proliferation of writing programs were unfounded, that “our best fiction writers are in no danger.”

Like Foley, Kenison kept a file card for every story she read: “Title, author, magazine, date, plot synopsis, opinion. I ripped out and filed the stories I liked most and piled the magazines I was done with into boxes in the basement to make room in my small home office for the next mail delivery. Failing to stay on top of the tide was to drown in unread literary journals.”

The 1990s saw a return to straight realism in literary fiction. Kenison noted that “this fiction was largely rooted in the middle range of the American experience — a critic might have judged it ‘safe,’ a reader might have gratefully called it a return to tradition, or to our roots.” These were also the years in which annual sales of The Best American Short Stories hit their peak. Kenison guessed that this return to the mainstream “can be seen as a natural response to the antirealism of the late sixties and seventies, the nonlinear, stylistically and structurally experimental fiction of the seventies, the minimalism and metafiction of the eighties. American writers will always experiment, they will continue to nudge at the boundaries of the form, they will try anything once — but the one generalization I’d venture to make is that realism was and still is the bedrock of our literature.”

Many short stories remained topical, although concerns were changing. The faltering state of our natural environment was addressed by Rick Bass, while humankind’s relationship to our wilderness was explored by Annie Proulx and T. C. Boyle. Stories by Jamaica Kincaid, Akhil Sharma, and Lan Samantha Chang explored rituals of family and love in other countries. Advances in technology crept into short fiction as well; the Internet, e-mail, and cell phones began to make appearances. Stories by realists such as Mary Gordon and Antonya Nelson were published beside work by more voice-driven writers such as Denis Johnson and Junot Díaz. The shadowy line between humor and desolation was explored with no small amount of irony by writers like Lorrie Moore, Tim Gautreaux, and Thom Jones.

In 1996 Kenison noted the evaporation of federal arts funding and the threat of technology to readers’ leisure time. She began reading fiction on the Internet in 1997: “As I click from one Web site to another, I feel rather like a dowser, my restless mouse the divining rod. There are now scores of electronic magazines publishing literary fiction.” There was a new dilemma for editors of print literary journals: to remain print or to migrate online?

As the turn of the century approached, Kenison worked with John Updike to assemble The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She said, “It was very striking to me as I began to read the early collections, first of all what a different world it was in 1915… John Updike said when he was just starting out he supported his family just writing short stories for The New Yorker. And that has changed. I don’t think we’ll ever get back there… It’s been a generation since anybody supported themselves writing short stories for magazines.”