The Best American Short Stories 2000

by Doctorow, E. L.

• ISBN13: 9780395926864
• ISBN10: 0395926866
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-19
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Despite increasing competition, this annual collection remains the place to find the most compelling short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada" (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY). To usher in the new millennium, THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2000 brims with a rich variety of lyrical and wise stories about our countrys past, present, and future. This years editor, the best-selling author E. L. Doctorow, has chosen new works by Raymond Carver, Amy Bloom, Ha Jin, Walter Mosley, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. The most popular compendium of its kind, THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the only volume that offers the finest short fiction each year, chosen by a distinguished author.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Introduction	xiii
E. L. Doctorow
Black Elvis	1	(11)
Geoffrey Becker
The Story	12	(11)
Amy Bloom
The Beautiful Days	23	(26)
Michael Byers
The Ordinary Son	49	(18)
Ron Carlson
Call If You Need Me	67	(11)
Raymond Carver
Bones of the Inner Ear	78	(11)
Kiana Davenport
Nilda	89	(9)
Junot Diaz
The Gilgul of Park Avenue	98	(23)
Nathan Englander
The Fix	121	(14)
Percival Everett
Good for the Soul	135	(16)
Tim Gautreaux
He's at the Office	151	(15)
Allan Gurganus
Blind Jozef Pronek	166	(16)
Aleksandar Hemon
The Anointed	182	(26)
Kathleen Hill
The Bridegroom	208	(20)
Ha Jin
The Thing Around Them	228	(20)
Marilyn Krysl
The Third and Final Continent	248	(18)
Jhumpa Lahiri
Pet Fly	266	(14)
Walter Mosley
Brownies	280	(21)
Zz Packer
Allog	301	(15)
Edith Pearlman
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water	316	(16)
Annie Proulx
Basil the Dog	332	(17)
Frances Sher Wood
Contributors' Notes	349	(12)
100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1999	361	(4)
Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories	365

Excerpts

IntroductionHere in the year 2000 we lack a proprietary critic of the short story as, for example, Professor Helen Vendler is a proprietary critic of the lyric poem. Given the great story writers Chekhov, or Joyce, or Hemingway we might wonder about this, except that Hemingway turned to novels after In Our Time just as Joyce didafter Dubliners. Chekhov in his maturity turned to drama. While there are exceptions Isaac Babel or Grace Paley, for example, writers-for-life of brilliant, tightly sprung prose designedly inhospitable to the long forms we may say that short stories are what young writers produce on their way to their first novels, or what older writers produce in between novels. The critic of fiction will hold title to all its estates, and the novel is a major act of the culture. Apart from that, it may be that the short story, as it has shifted historically from the episodic tale to the compressive illumination, can't sustain that much formal analysis. Some years ago, the late Frank O'Connor published a study of the genre entitled The Lonely Voice. O'Connor, himself a masterful writer of short stories, wanted to find some means of distinguishing the form from the novella and the novel. His title suggests the nature of his conclusion: it is not any particular technique of the short story that sets it apart, because as a selective rather than an inclusive art, it can construct itself in an endless number of ways. Nor is its length definitive, for, as he points out, not a few of the great examples of the genre are quite long. What makes the short story a distinct literary form, says O'Connor, is "its intense awareness of human loneliness." Sprung from Gogol's seminal story "The Overcoat," in which an impoverished clerk in winter manages to buy a warm overcoat only to have it stolen, a disaster that drives him to his death, the modern short story is a genre that deals with members of "submerged population groups," excluded by one means or another from living in the certainties of civilization people of a minority, outsiders, marginalists, for whom society provides no place or means of self-respect. By contrast, according to O'Connor, the fiction of the novel assumes that man is "an animal who lives in community, as in Jane Austen and Trollope it obviously does." But one can think immediately of stories rising from nonsubmerged populations, stories of people centrally located in community as they are in many of Katherine Mansfield's or Henry James's stories who are not of the alienated and marginalized, though they may come to be from their own actions. Perhaps anticipating this problem, O'Connor modifies his thesis to include in his submerged population groups people who are notmaterially but spiritually isolated artists, dreamers, idealists, antiheroes, visionaries, and so forth. But then who does not belong to a submerged population group? The lonely voice is a universal chorus, and we are left with the not terribly useful

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