on the best of one hundred short stories.

The background for the short story challenge and the complete list of short stories I read in 2011 is located in the last post.  Of all of the stories I read this year, some very clearly stood out to me from the rest of the pack as particularly moving, or memorable, or profound.  The ten best stories, based largely on my own intuitions/feelings/preferences, are as follows:

1. “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” Amy Hempel (1983)
2. “King of the Bingo Game,” Ralph Ellison (1944)
3. “Cathedral,” Raymond Carver (1983)
4. “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor (1965)
5. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” Sherman Alexie (2003)
6. “Cadillac Flambé,” Ralph Ellison (1973)
7. “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes),” Lorrie Moore (1985)
8. “A Temporary Matter,” Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
9. “The Fat Girl,” Andre Dubus (1977)
10. “How I Contemplated the World From the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again,” Joyce Carol Oates (1969)

I thought about scaling down the larger list for quite a while and put more than a bit of thought into the choices I’ve made.  Ryan and I had some great conversations about some of the stories and about the genre in general; we talked about what makes great literature great and what makes some literature better than other literature (FYI: I am not a student of English literature—Ryan is, and he’s very good at what he does—I certainly feel less qualified to talk about and analyze fiction, because I teach a “great books” course where we read very little fiction).  Nothing I say about this list will probably be particularly insightful in terms of literary analysis, but I do feel compelled to justify my choices.

There are some pretty interesting things to be said about this list just from my initial observation.  The dates of publication, for one thing: with the exception of the Alexie story, the remaining nine are 20th century, and eight are from the second half of the 20th century alone.  This is in part due to the fact that I didn’t really read any stories that were published before the 20th century—which I definitely didn’t realize until I looked at the entire list at the end of the challenge.  Ryan’s belief is that the short story as a genre existed as sort of a microcosm in the 20th century and that it’s a dying genre in the 21st century.  I have a strong preference for 20th century American literature in general, which explains my choices for the challenge in the first place.  Another interesting fact is that the list is slightly lopsided in terms of male and female writers;  Ralph Ellison has two stories in the top ten because I really couldn’t choose between the two.  The disparity in gender here is, I believe, unintentional, and in part a result of having read a collection by Amy Hempel and one and a half collections by Lorrie Moore, but I’d need to look more closely at the list to see what the breakdown of male/female writers was exactly.

As for the stories themselves, one striking thing is that I read a few of what became the top stories pretty early on in the challenge.  “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” was easily the best story I read this year; I suspected it might be my favorite shortly after reading it and sure enough, nothing else came close.  It is probably the saddest thing I have ever read, and it left me with such a profound feeling of emptiness when I finished it and that feeling just refused to leave.  What really struck me about it was how I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days and weeks later.  I’d be in the middle of washing dishes and think of a scene from that story and feel this hollow, sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach.   That story will stay with me forever, I’m sure of it.

I legitimately could not choose between the two Ralph Ellison stories.  Ryan can vouch for the fact that I wouldn’t shut up about “King of the Bingo Game” for weeks after I read it, and that story began an obsession with Ralph Ellison’s work that currently remains as I trudge through Invisible Man now.  There is absolutely nothing I can say about Ellison’s work that even borders on helpful or intelligent, but I started reading both of these stories with a tenuous grip on reality, and somewhere in each story that reality was yanked out from underneath my feet by Ellison’s masterful prose.  He builds up to these incredible explosions in the narrative and I re-read and re-read parts to make sure I understand what’s happening.  Both stories are nothing short of amazing.  I read several great Flannery O’Connor stories this year, but “Everything That Rises Must Converge” was, I think, her best showing in this challenge (I did not read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” which is oft-cited and of course is really great, but I wanted to read mostly new-to-me stories).  Like Ellison, she builds up to a single defining moment with a fantastic crescendo.  She so accurately captures the human condition in this one and it packs such a wicked punch.

I discovered Lorrie Moore this year and quickly devoured a ton of her stories; most of them were good but I still loved the first one I read by her the best; it was raw and real.  The Sherman Alexie story was a recommendation of Ryan’s; Alexie weaves a masterful narrative in this one and it is so heartbreakingly happy and sad all at once that I think about it often.  “Cathedral” is a masterpiece; I can’t say anything else about it at all.   The final three on the list were tough choices (at least in that I settled the first seven pretty quickly but had to think longer about the final three) but after mulling it over it seemed quite obvious that the Joyce Carol Oates story belonged in the top ten: I read it early on but it still left a pretty solid impression and convinced me that Oates is worthy of a second glance (her widely anthologized “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is also missing for the same reason that “A Good Man is Hard To Find” is).  I don’t know why I didn’t try to get my hands on more by Andre Dubus (goals for next year are coming in a future post) but I thought this selection was quite good.  I’m surprised  he doesn’t show up in more collections.  And finally, the Jhumpa Lahiri story, while I read it pretty late in the challenge when I finally decided to pick up the copy of Interpreter of Maladies that had been sitting on my shelf for a while, left me with a similar empty sadness that Amy Hempel’s work did.

So there they are.  I read some amazing short stories this year.  One thing I learned from this challenge is that stories that are highly anthologized generally are the best representations of the genre.  It sounds obvious, but I’m taught to both teach from a canon and simultaneously question that canon.  I am suspicious of anthologies because of what gets put in them and what gets left out of them: but there is a reason that “Cathedral” shows up in so many literature textbooks and anthologies.  It is that fucking good.  I am taking a break from short stories for the remainder of this year in hopes of knocking out a few longer projects (cough: Invisible Man) but I’m looking forward to taking the challenge again next year.  In the final post of this three-part series I’ll outline some of the goals I have for next year’s challenge and list some of the authors I plan on reading then.