O UNDERSTAND the trajectory of modern America, there’s no better cannon/canon than the short stories rocketing from contributing editor John Freeman has gathered “the unexpected, the clobber of time” into an anthology as diverse as the landscape of America itself. Toni Cade Bambara begins this Route 66 of literature with “The Lesson,” told by a young Black girl who attends a neighborhood field trip to the famous toy store FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, led by the college-educated Miss Moore. At the store, the kids spy a paperweight for $480. Their response? “White folks crazy.” And so we begin Freeman’s coast-to-coast road trip of economic imbalance, paved by ecological collapse, race, class, sexual freedom, migration, wealth, poverty, love, loss, humor, memory, domesticity, and revolution. The collection ends on the other side of America in Manuel Muñoz’s story of migrant workers in California, which begins: “Her immediate concern was money,” with those five words lighting up all the highways in between.
