100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

2000–2010

With the events of 9/11 came a sense that fiction and even literature was irrelevant. The irony so popular in the 1990s suddenly seemed beside the point. New York, home to so many writers and publishers, was shaken to its core. In her foreword to the 2002 volume, series editor Katrina Kenison wrote, “Preoccupied with the unfathomable changes in our world at large, it was almost impossible to focus on the details of a smaller picture.” In the 2003 volume, Nicole Krauss’s story “Future Emergencies” indirectly addressed the attacks in New York. In 2004 Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace published stories that featured, directly and indirectly, 9/11. Despite the preponderance of flags raised and anthems sung across the country, though, few stories romanticized patriotism or “denaturalized” (in series editor Edward O’Brien’s words) the event.

Before long, short stories began to address, with both irony and outrage, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 economic collapse. Perhaps because of the Internet and its ability to connect people instantaneously — or because of the location of the 9/11 attacks, closer to home than ever before — the grieving period necessary for earlier generations to write effectively of war seemed to have shrunk.

Writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Daniel Alarcón, and David Bezmozgis explored the immigrant experience in the United States. Ha Jin, Mary Yukari Waters, and Aleksandar Hemon portrayed current and historic postwar daily realities and cultural norms in other countries.

The Great Recession brought about a sea change in magazine and book publishing. The struggling economy coupled with the flood of new e-readers that offered major discounts led to decreased circulations in magazines as well as decreased book sales. Book publishers became less willing to take chances on story collections by new writers. Cuts were made at publishing houses. The Atlantic annexed its fiction to a separate fiction-only issue offered just once a year, and eventually stopped publishing this issue altogether in favor of occasionally featuring fiction in its monthly. Many magazines, such as TriQuarterly, opted to save production costs by moving entirely online.

There came a hunger for more entertaining short fiction. Genre-bending or — blending became popular. In 2005 guest editor Michael Chabon wrote:

The original sense of the word entertainment is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining… between reader and writer… We ought not to restrict ourselves to one type or category. Science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction — all these genres and others have rich traditions in the American short story, reaching straight back to Poe and Hawthorne… But the same process of commercialization and mass appeal that discredited entertainment, or the idea of literature as entertainment, also devastated our notion of the kinds of short stories that belong in college syllabi, prestigious magazines, or yearly anthologies of the best American short stories (another victory, in my view, for the enemies of pleasure, in their corporate or ivory towers).

After Story magazine folded, new magazines like Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story became instrumental in discovering and publishing new talent.

In 2006 I was offered the role of series editor. At the time I was, like Ravenel and Kenison had been, an editor at Houghton Mifflin. I was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, attended McGill University in Montreal as an undergraduate, and got my MFA at Emerson College in Boston. I got a temp job as the receptionist at Houghton Mifflin, and before long I was hired as an assistant to an editor who published travel guides. When Houghton sold off this line of books, I was lucky to be hired as an assistant to a fiction editor, who went on to become publisher. I worked as an assistant and eventually an editor for nine years.

I suspect that my first year as series editor will be one of my most memorable. I published my first novel, gave birth to twins, and worked with Stephen King, who insisted on reading along with me to ensure that I gave close consideration to science fiction and horror. In my first foreword, I wrote, “I was drawn to stories that transcended something… the stories I chose twisted and turned away from the familiar and ultimately took flight, demanding their own particular characters and structure and prose.” I also mentioned my predilection for surprise, “[a story] that quietly taps the reader on the shoulder and then takes her breath away without revealing any of its secrets.”

For the remainder of the decade I worked with Salman Rushdie, who was jarred by the number of stories about golf that Americans wrote; Alice Sebold, reluctant to have to name “the best” of anything; and Richard Russo, who, like Chabon, called in his introduction for stories to be entertaining as well as instructive.

My reading process is probably messier than my predecessors’. I mark up literary journals as I read, making comments beside the tables of contents about the stories that I like and why. I pull any story that I finish reading.

Long ago, Edward O’Brien wrote letters to notify authors that their story had been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. When I started as series editor, I e-mailed all the contributors. Occasionally I must reach them on Facebook. All my correspondence with authors and guest editors and magazine editors is now done online. Although I occasionally read online, I prefer that magazines print out digital stories and submit them to me via snailmail.