The Best American Short Stories 2014

By Jennifer Egan and Heidi Pitlor

“The literary ‘Oscars’ features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” — Shelf Awareness for Readers

The Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as “a new classic of American fiction.” Egan “possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart” (New York Times Book Review).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780547819242

Heidi Pitlor

Heidi Pitlor is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays, The Daylight Marriage, and Impersonation.

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Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Egan

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ISSN 0067-6233

ISBN 978-0-547-81922-8

ISBN 978-0-547-86886-8 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-547-81924-2

v1.0914

Charity by Charles Baxter. First published in McSweeney’s, Issue 43. Copyright © 2013 by Charles Baxter. Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff and Verrill literary agency.

The Indian Uprising by Ann Beattie. First published in Granta, No. 126. Copyright © 2014 by Anne Beattie. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Night of the Satellite by T. Coraghessan Boyle. First published in The New Yorker, April 15, 2013. from T. C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, copyright © 2013 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

After the Flood by Peter Cameron. First published in Subtropics, Issue 15. Copyright © 2013 by Peter Cameron. Reprinted by permission of Irene Skolnick Literary Agency.

Long Tom Lookout by Nicole Cullen. First published in Idaho Review, vol. XIII. Copyright © 2013 by Nicole Cullen. Reprinted by permission of Nicole Cullen.

Medium Tough by Craig Davidson. First published in Agni, #77. Copyright © 2013 by Craig Davidson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Breeze by Joshua Ferris. First published in The New Yorker, September 30, 2013. Copyright © 2014 by Joshua Ferris. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Hover by Nell Freudenberger. First published in The Paris Review, #207. Copyright © 2013 by Nell Freudenberger. Reprinted by permission of Nell Freudenberger.

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me by David Gates. First published in Granta, no. 126. Copyright © 2013 by David Gates. Reprinted by permission of David Gates.

At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners by Lauren Groff. First published in Five Points. Copyright © 2013 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Judge’s Will by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. First published in The New Yorker, March 25, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Reprinted by permission of C.S.H. Jhabvala.

Evie M. by O. A. Lindsey. First published in Iowa Review, vol. 43, no. 1. Copyright © 2014 by O. A. Lindsey. Reprinted by permission of O. A. Lindsey.

Kattekoppen by Will Mackin. First published in The New Yorker, March 11, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Will Mackin. Reprinted by permission of Will Mackin.

This Is Not a Love Song by Brendan Mathews. First published in Virginia Quarterly Review, 89/3. Copyright © 2013 by Brendan Mathews. Reprinted by permission of Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

La Pulchra Nota by Molly McNett. First published in Image, no. 78. Copyright © 2014 by Molly McNett. Reprinted by permission of the author.

God by Benjamin Nugent. First published in The Paris Review, #206. Copyright © 2013 by Benjamin Nugent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Mastiff by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in The New Yorker, July 1, 2013. Copyright © 2014 by Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Joyce Carol Oates.

Next to Nothing by Stephen O’Connor. First published in Conjunctions: 60. Copyright © 2013 by Stephen O’Connor. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Madame Bovary’s Greyhound by Karen Russell. First published in Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 17, no. 2. Copyright © 2013 by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

Antarctica by Laura van den Berg. First published in Glimmer Train, Issue 88, Fall 2013. From The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg. Copyright © 2013 by Laura van den Berg. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Foreword

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS as if the aspiring—and financially well enough endowed—American writer is offered more than the reader. For the young writer, there are a fast-growing number of MFA programs, fellowships, summer workshops, residencies, creative writing centers, endless books that teach about writing and publishing. For evidence of the opportunities and widespread desire to write in our country, note the sheer number of blogs that populate the Internet, the comment sections of said blogs, Facebook and Twitter (where everyone gets to be a published writer, at least within the confines of a status update or tweet), the self-published army on Amazon.com.

This year, I detected a certain uncertainty in short stories, a sense of disorientation, perhaps a reflection of these unsteady times for publishing and readers. A lot of story writers relied on a character’s intuition or impulse to fuel the forward motion of their stories. As a result, many stories tended to wander—sometimes intriguingly, often into unsettling territory—rather than accelerate toward some definitive endpoint. While some stories that I read this year were built around or upon some narrative roadway—and many of those appear in this volume—plenty were not.

From my vantage point, there are moments when it seems that more people in this country want to write than read. Many people who read this book are in fact writers in training, reading in order to learn to write better. I myself came to serious reading relatively late, halfway through college, and this was in a class where both reading and creative writing were taught. I soon wanted to give to others the singular high that I felt when reading an Alice Munro or a Margaret Atwood story. I should say that I went to college in Canada.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to write and seeking help in that endeavor. I am the proud owner of an MFA, a shelf full of books about how to write fiction and how to get published, memoirs by fiction writers, and at least a dozen story anthologies that I bought before I was lucky enough to land this job. But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become—or are we already—a nation of performers with no audience?

For the reader of books, there are book clubs, many informally initiated by friends or neighbors, a smattering of independent bookstores that serve as meeting places for readers and writers, libraries, some websites. Getting books has become easy—click on Amazon.com, and from the sound of it, a drone will soon be able to deliver a book to your door in the time it takes to say drone. But I’m talking about accessible, widespread support for reading. Brick-and-mortar bookstores accessible to everyone who would patronize them. Also, a sense in our country that reading fiction is necessary and, dare I say, a wee bit glamorous. Like writing.

I had the good luck to take part in a reading and trivia night the other week at a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was a fundraiser for 826 Boston, a fabulous organization that offers writing support for kids. Four of us were invited to read for a few minutes, and then came a rowdy, rambunctious game of literary trivia for the mostly twenty-something audience. In order to win, players needed to have read things. There were questions about Mrs. Dalloway and Let the Great World Spin and Frankenstein. The place was packed. Drinks were served, fun was had. Reading became a galvanizing force rather than a solitary chore.

Soapbox alert. We—editors, writers, teachers, publishers—need to do whatever we can to enliven readers, to help create communities for them if we want to continue to have readers at all. Our independent bookstores are the frontlines, and many booksellers are fighting the good fight. Here, books stimulate conversation. Conversation stimulates a sense of community. Listening happens. Thinking. The exchange of thoughts.

Here’s the thing: I am guilty of spending evenings scrolling through my Facebook and Twitter feeds, telling myself that after a day of reading stories, why not give myself a break? Why on earth would I want to read more fiction? I have a list three miles long of books that I want to read. I have twenty-five books on my bedside table. It’s all a little overwhelming. Why not take a few minutes or maybe an hour and see what’s going on with all my friends and the people whom I follow? But then I start to become a little groggy from staring at the screen, a little glum from reading other people’s opinions of the day’s news, which is so rarely good. I’ve been trying to spend more time during the evening with books, less online, to keep myself engaged in some book, any book, at all times. Because really, what I’ve done all day, whether it was reading short fiction or writing longer fiction or shepherding children, does not matter. We’re all tired at night. We are all entitled to some self-indulgence, be that taking a self-test on BuzzFeed or smiling at the humorous tweets from the perplexingly enormous number of writers who watch The Bachelor each week. But we all know the drill: if we eat only candy, if we cultivate our friendships and relationships primarily online, if we forget to walk to town sometimes instead of drive, a crucial part of us will wither. You don’t have to read all the books on your list at once. Just pick up the one that grabs you right now. If you don’t love it, put it down. Move on.

This year, I’m not going to vow never to dip into Facebook or Twitter, but maybe I’ll go online a little less. I’m going to try to keep reading some book each night. I’m going to start asking people which books they’re reading instead of which movies they have seen. I’m going to see if I can’t talk a few bookstore people into starting weekly trivia nights at their stores.

One other thing. I was more aware this year than usual that American short fiction, for so long primarily the domain of the privileged white, is becoming even more so. Voices of nonwhite and nonprivileged authors and characters are too rare. We need to do better. The short story has typically been the gateway form for young authors. Our MFA programs, literary journals, summer workshops, and providers of fellowships need to send representatives into different neighborhoods, libraries, and schools to seek a broader range of voices. If there are more proactively diverse magazines that I should be reading in addition to those listed at the back of this book, please let me know. My contact information can be found at the end of this foreword.

Working with Jennifer Egan was an honor, as well as ridiculously easy. She was a thoughtful, serious reader, never satisfied with embellishments of language nor easily tempted by likable characters. She wanted the stories to go somewhere new and strange, to surprise and confound. Every story that she chose for this book achieves these difficult feats.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2013 and January 2014. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or who have made the United States their home; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish for their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publications or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, c/o The Best American Short Stories, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116.

HEIDI PITLOR

Introduction

AS WITH ANY best of or top ten list—or any prize, for that matter—the authority of an anthology like this one stands in direct contradiction to its essential arbitrariness. Winning, or inclusion, is a matter of managing to delight the right combination of tastes—in this case, that of the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, who superhumanly winnowed the contents of 208 publications to 120 individual stories, and then my own, as chooser of the final 20. In other words, getting into this book is largely a matter of luck.

And yet a volume titled The Best American Short Stories casts an iconic shadow—as I know all too well, having published short stories for twenty-one years before I managed to eke one into these pages! The self-endowed authority of a collection of bests can feel onerous not just to the many whose work is passed over, but to readers who disagree with the selection of contents—namely, just about everyone who opens this book. Can you recall reading a collection of bests and not musing, at least once, of the editor, Was she out of her mind? A different sensibility—yours, for example—would doubtless have produced a different volume. So much for authority!

But there are excellent—even crucial—reasons to publish a book like The Best American Short Stories: it generates excitement around the practice of writing fiction, celebrates the short story form, and energizes the fragile ecosystem of magazines that sustain it. Worthy goals at any time, and never more so than now, when copyright is hanging in the balance, publishers are beset by uncertainties, and fiction writers are wondering, rightly, how important our work really is to the cultural conversation. True, some of the people gazing at their iPhones on the train may be reading short stories, but a great many more are playing games, listening to music, watching movies, or checking the stock market. I’m struck by how often, even among a gathering of literary folk, the talk turns to television.

However, as anyone who loves reading fiction knows, there is no activity quite like it. In fact, my primary motive for accepting the role of guest editor this year is that I welcome any excuse to call reading work. I had other reasons too: I wanted to explore, systematically, what I think makes a short story great—to identify my own aesthetic standards in a more rigorous way than I’ve done before. And having spent the past couple of years reading early-twentieth-century fiction, I was eager to get a snapshot of what short fiction writers working in America (120 of them, anyway) are doing and thinking about at present—formally, stylistically, culturally. I wanted to see what I might glean from their preoccupations, both about the state of the contemporary short story and about the wider world, whose synthesis is a writer’s job.

To put my biases—and therefore handicaps—directly on the table: I don’t care very much about genre, either as a reader or as a writer. To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don’t think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes.

I read fiction for the same reason I write it: to escape. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I’m always happy to leave, and I’m always happy to come back. It’s fair to say that I read in a childlike way, for fun. That sounds frivolous, I know, but I can’t find a better word that doesn’t sound pretentious (and entertainment is too evocative of reclining chairs and surround sound). Classic novels—a vexed category, granted—are, for the most part, incredibly fun to read. Jane Austen? A page-turner. Charles Dickens? Catnip. George Eliot? Un-put-downable. Wilkie Collins? Prepare to lose a night’s sleep.

I recognize, of course, that one person’s fun can be another person’s slog. We’d probably all agree that we want gripping stories full of characters that move us. For me, that stuff can’t be achieved without intelligence, nuance, and fresh language. The fun I’m talking about is fully compatible with fear, discomfort, and great sadness; I weep every time I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but I feel permanently enriched by it. The best fun, for me, comes from reading something that feels different from anything else. Originality is hard to gauge, of course—the fact that I haven’t seen it before doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done—but for our purposes, let’s say that I’m biased toward writers who take an obvious risk, formally, structurally, or in terms of subject matter, over those who do a familiar thing exquisitely.

If there was a single factor that decided whether a story ended up in my ongoing pile of contenders, it was its basic power to make me lose my bearings, to envelop me in a fictional world. In the case of Molly McNett’s La Pulchra Nota, that world unfolds in the year 1399, when a devout singing teacher named John Fuller narrates his own mystical, heartbreaking downfall. In Laura van den Berg’s Antarctica, it is the end-of-the-earth landscape of the story’s title, a setting for grief and forensic investigation. Charles Baxter’s Charity manages, in three paragraphs, to gyre its protagonist from teaching English in Ethiopia into homelessness and drug addiction in Minneapolis. And Benjamin Nugent’s God is imbued with the cloistered bonhomie of college fraternity life, made perilous by the homosexual longings of its fraternity-brother narrator.

The vehicle for this transport into alternate worlds is vivid, specific language. Consider Craig Davidson’s Medium Tough, which subsumes the reader in the hyper-medicalized sensibility of Dr. Jasper Railsback, a surgeon of newborns who is beset with a physical abnormality he attributes to his mother’s alcohol abuse while he was in utero. Railsback observes, The air in the NICU was heavy with pheromones: aliphatic acids, which waft from the pores of women who’ve just delivered. A distinctive scent. An undertone of caramelized sugar. The language is technical, lyrical, and sensory—qualities whose seeming incompatibility makes their fusion even more potent.

It seems silly to continue quoting from stories that are printed in this volume (though I’m tempted), but suffice it to say that there’s plenty more where that came from. Karen Russell’s Madame Bovary’s Greyhound is the imagined story of Emma Bovary’s lost pet, Djali, told from the animal’s perspective. An intriguing conceit, to be sure, but what gives the story its energy and tenderness is the play of Russell’s inimitable prose. And Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Judge’s Will owes its idiosyncratic power to the crystalline precision of her sentences.

So: a compelling premise and distinctive language to get in the door. Then what?

I read many stories that met both those requirements at first, but ultimately settled into predictable patterns, or seemed to stop short of something truly interesting. Each one of the twenty stories I chose had at least one move—often several—that genuinely surprised me, pushing past the obvious possibilities into territory that felt mysterious, or extreme. In Joyce Carol Oates’s Mastiff, a dog attack—which the reader half-expects—prompts an unlikely intimacy between the quasi-strangers who undergo it. Stephen O’Connor’s Next to Nothing has the aura of a modern-day Grimms’ fairy tale, featuring a pair of blunt, affectless sisters who insist on ignoring warnings of an impending flood as they summer together with their children.

The surprise in David Gates’s A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, a story about the long friendship between an alcoholic musician and his one-time devotee, is its final destination: happiness. Gates’s protagonist winds up happy—a striking outcome in a year when optimism was in short supply. The stories I read were predominantly dark, even grim, reflecting a mood of anxiety and unease that I guess is no surprise at all, given that Americans have endured six years of recession and eleven years of a war whose point—and endpoint—remain unclear. I’m proud to include two excellent stories that engage directly with the lives of soldiers: Will Mackin’s Kattekoppen, set among American forces in Afghanistan, and O. A. Lindsey’s Evie M., about a female veteran struggling to function in a corporate workplace as she contemplates suicide. The British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico figured in more than one story I read, including Nicole Cullen’s Long Tom Lookout, included here, about a woman who spirits away the autistic, out-of-wedlock child of her husband, who is working long-term on the Gulf cleanup.

For the most part, the locus of anxiety in the larger pool of stories I read was the domestic sphere: illness and addiction, dead or imperiled children, cheating spouses, dissolving marriages. There was a curious predominance of pivotal roles played by wildlife, including crows, elk, bear (both brown and polar), turtles, deer, fish, and the aforementioned dogs. The prevailing narrative approach was the first-person singular, past tense. It was a year without much humor, but I welcomed the laughs that came, and was reminded that the funniest stuff is usually quite serious. I’ve included T. C. Boyle’s riotous The Night of the Satellite, in which a relationship’s precipitous unraveling culminates in a dispute over whether a mysterious piece of hardware has fallen to earth from outer space. In Nell Freudenberger’s Hover, about a divorcing woman who begins levitating involuntarily, humor offsets a fierce account of a mother protecting her gentle, quirky son. In Ann Beattie’s The Indian Uprising, caustic repartee between a retired professor and his former student masks their shared understanding that he is dying. And the deadpan delivery of Peter Cameron’s After the Flood, in which an elderly couple agrees, at the behest of their pastor, to house a family left homeless by a flood, allows the story’s horrific underpinnings to surface very slowly.

Although the majority of the 120 stories I read had contemporary settings, many could as easily have been set twenty years ago without anachronism. This is odd when you consider that a present-day photograph of any American location containing humans—a school, a street corner, a concert, a ball game—would be impossible to confuse with an image of the same scene, circa 1994. I’m not talking about facial hair or width of pants; I’m talking about the devices people walk around with, hold in their hands, and use to communicate—in some cases, almost constantly.

That revolution is the biggest change I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Between the year I was born and when I went to college in 1981, I knew of exactly three telephonic possibilities: a busy signal, or a person picking up, or endless ringing. Eighteen years of telecommunications stasis! Hard to imagine that happening ever again. I’m not a proselyte; as a parent, journalist, music fan, and believer in copyright, I find my responses to our warp-speed technological change falling mainly on a spectrum from anxiety to terror. But there is no denying that a transformation is upon us, pervasive, dramatic, ongoing. And it is inseparable from many other seismic shifts of the past twenty years: modern terrorism, globalization, climate change.

How can such topics be manifest in a short story? Not all of them can at once, of course—or not directly. But my love of escape notwithstanding, I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges. In each of the twenty stories I chose—even those set in the past—I felt an engagement with the wider world at this specific point in time. It was my last criterion, but possibly the most important.

One way that cultural engagement can show itself is in the form a short story takes. Brendan Mathews’s This Is Not a Love Song tells of the rise and fall of an early-1990s indie rocker, using artifacts assembled by her self-appointed documentarian: descriptions of photographs and interviews transcribed from cassette tapes. The story’s inventive structure allows it to ask what separates homage from exploitation, and its setting in a precise technological moment (about twenty years ago, as it happens) suggests a shared understanding with the reader of all that has changed since then.

Another formally ambitious story I’ve included is Lauren Groff’s At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners, which begins in the 1940s and reaches to the present. The sweeping tale of a man who spends the bulk of his life in a serpent-infested Florida swamp that gradually becomes surrounded by a university, it vividly juxtaposes primordial mystery with sprawling modernity. Joshua Ferris’s The Breeze dramatizes a young woman’s ineffable craving for intensity and authenticity in her dealings with her new husband. By conjuring the relationship in a series of scenes that don’t quite add up—and often seem to contradict each other—Ferris manages, as in a cubist painting, to evoke a larger whole without ever quite pinpointing it.

Of course, there’s a long relationship between literary innovation and seismic cultural change: the modernists absorbed the impact of Freud, a world war, and the popularization of film (James Joyce managed a Dublin movie theater); the postmodernists reacted to television, structural theory, and the counterculture. Personally, I could do without any further isms (is anyone actually drawn to fiction called postmodern?), but I’m stirred by the question of how novels and short stories will evolve to accommodate and represent our ongoing cultural transformation. Prose fiction was invented as a means of flexible, eclectic storytelling, after all; from the very start, fiction writers have greedily absorbed whatever forms were around and bent them to their will. Pamela, one of the first novels written in English, is epistolary, and Tristram Shandy and Robinson Crusoe include legal documents, fake autobiography, and (in Sterne’s case) weird graphics. It would be uncharacteristic if our literary production didn’t seek out new ways to embody the novelties of twenty-first-century life: the commingling of online with actual experience; the disappearance of a certain kind of solitude; the illusion of safety that goes along with being in touch; surveillance as a fact of everyday life; the gulf between those who are technologically connected and those still isolated. To name just a few.

All of this brings me back to fiction’s relevance to the cultural conversation. Will people continue to read short stories and novels, now that virtually every alternative that exists can fit more easily into our pocket than a paperback? People have been asking this question for a long time now—through the arrival of movies, TV, the Walkman, video games, cable, VCRs, personal computers, the Internet, and smartphones. By the time this introduction is printed (the very word outmoded), there may be some new threat. And while I do occasionally cower before the question, I also know that the answer is finally simple: people will keep reading fiction as long as it provides an experience of pleasure and insight they can’t find anywhere else. The twenty stories in this collection did exactly that—for me. Now I cordially invite you to agree, object, call me crazy, and begin the conversation.

JENNIFER EGAN

CHARLES BAXTER

Charity

FROM McSweeney’s

1

HE HAD FALLEN into bad trouble. He had worked in Ethiopia for a year—teaching in a school and lending a hand at a medical clinic. He had eaten all the local foods and been stung by the many airborne insects. When he’d returned to the States, he’d brought back an infection—the inflammation in his knees and his back and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up. Probably a viral arthritis, his doctor said. It happens. Here: have some painkillers.

Borrowing a car, he drove from Minneapolis down to the Mayo Clinic, where after two days of tests the doctors informed him that they would have no firm diagnosis for the next month or so. Back in Minneapolis, through a friend of a friend, he visited a wildcat homeopathy treatment center known for traumatic-pain-relief treatments. The center, in a strip mall storefront claiming to be a weight-loss clinic (WEIGHT NO MORE), gave him megadoses of meadowsweet, a compound chemically related to aspirin. After two months without health insurance or prescription coverage, he had emptied his bank account, and he gazed at the future with shy dread.

Through another friend of a friend, he managed to get his hands on a few superb prescription painkillers, the big ones, gifts from heaven. With the aid of these pills, he felt like himself again. He blessed his own life. He cooked some decent meals; he called his boyfriend in Seattle; he went around town looking for a job; he made plans to get himself to the Pacific Northwest. When the drugs ran out and the pain returned, worse this time, like being stabbed in his elbows and shoulders, along with the novelty of addiction’s chills and fevers, the friend of a friend told him that if he wanted more pills at the going street rate, he had better go see Black Bird. He could find Black Bird at the bar of a club, the Inner Circle, on Hennepin Avenue. He’s always there, the friend of a friend said. He’s there now. He reads. The guy sits there studying Shakespeare. Used to be a scholar or something. Pretends to be a Native American, one of those imposter types. Very easy to spot. I’ll tell him you’re coming.

The next Wednesday, he found Black Bird at the end of the Inner Circle bar near the broken jukebox and the sign for the men’s room. The club’s walls had been built from limestone and rust-red brick and sported no decorative motifs of any kind. If you needed decorations around you when you drank, you went somewhere else. The peculiar orange lighting was so dim that Quinn couldn’t figure out how Black Bird could read at all.

Quinn approached him gingerly. Black Bird’s hair went down to his shoulders. The gray in it looked as if it had been applied with chalk. He wore bifocals and moved his finger down the page as he read. Nearby was a half-consumed bottle of 7 Up.

Excuse me. Are you Black Bird?

Without looking up, the man said, Why do you ask?

I’m Quinn. He held out his hand. Black Bird did not take it. My friend Morrow told me about you.

Ah huh, Black Bird said. He glanced up with an impatient expression before returning to his book. Quinn examined the text. Black Bird was reading Othello, the third act.

Morrow said I should come see you. There’s something I need.

Black Bird said nothing.

I need it pretty bad, Quinn said, his hand trembling inside his pocket. He wasn’t used to talking to people like this. When Black Bird didn’t respond, Quinn said, "You’re reading Othello. Quinn had acquired a liberal arts degree from a college in Iowa, where he had majored in global political solutions, and he felt that he had to assert himself. The handkerchief. And Iago, right?"

Black Bird nodded. "This isn’t College Bowl, he said dismissively. With his finger stopped on the page, he said, What do you want from me?"

Quinn whispered the name of the drug that made him feel human.

What a surprise, said Black Bird. Well, well. How do I know that you’re not a cop? You a cop, Mr. Quinn?

No.

Because I don’t know what you’re asking me or what you’re talking about. I’m a peaceful man sitting here reading this book and drinking this 7 Up.

Yes, Quinn said.

You could always come back in four days, Black Bird said. You could always bring some money. He mentioned a price for a certain number of painkillers. I have to get the ducks in a row.

That’s a lot of cash, Quinn said. Then, after thinking it over, he said, All right. He did not feel that he had many options these days.

Black Bird looked up at him with an expression devoid of interest or curiosity.

Do you read, Mr. Quinn? he asked. Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. Black Bird spoke these words in a bland monotone.

I don’t know what to read, Quinn told him, his legs shaking.

Too bad, Black Bird said. Next time you come here, bring a book. I need proof you exist. The Minneapolis Public Library is two blocks away. But if you come back, bring the money. Otherwise, there’s no show.

Quinn was living very temporarily in a friend’s basement in Northeast Minneapolis. His parents, in a traditional Old World gesture, had disowned him after he had come out, so he couldn’t call on them for support. They had uttered several unforgettable verdicts about his character, sworn they would never see him again, and that was that.

He had a sister who lived in Des Moines with her husband and two children. She did not like what she called Quinn’s sexual preferences and had a tendency to hang up on him. None of his friends from high school had any money he could borrow; the acquaintance in whose basement he was staying was behind on his rent. His student debt had been taken up by a collection agency, which was calling him three times a day.

Quinn’s boyfriend in Seattle, a field rep for a medical supply company, had a thing about people borrowing money. He might break up with Quinn if Quinn asked him for a loan. He could be prickly, the boyfriend, and the two of them were still on a trial basis anyway. They had met in Africa and had fallen in love over there. The love might not travel if Quinn brought up the subject of debts or his viral arthritis and inflammation or the drug habit he had recently acquired.

Now that the painkillers had run out, a kind of groggy unfocused physical discomfort had become Quinn’s companion day and night. He lived in the house that the pain had designed for him. The Mayo Clinic had not called him back, and the meadowsweet’s effect was like a cup of water dropped on a house fire. Sometimes the pain started in Quinn’s knees and circled around Quinn’s back until it located itself in his shoulders, like exploratory surgery performed using a Swiss Army knife. He had acquired the jitters and a runny nose and a swollen tongue and cramps. He couldn’t sleep and had diarrhea. He was a mess, and the knowledge of the mess he had become made the mess worse. The necessity of opiates became a supreme idea that forced out all the other ideas until only one thought occupied Quinn’s mind: Get those painkillers. He didn’t think he was a goner yet, though.

He could no longer tell his dreams from his waking life. The things around him began to take on the appearance of stage props made from cardboard. Other people—pedestrians—looked like shadow creatures giving off a stinky perfume.

In the basement room where he slept, there was, leaning against the wall, a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, and one night after dark, in a dreamlike hallucinatory fever, he took it across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to a park along the Mississippi, where he hid hotly shivering behind a tree until the right sort of prosperous person walked by. Quinn felt as if he were under orders to do what he was about to do. The man he chose wore a T-shirt and jeans and seemed fit but not so strong as to be dangerous, and after rushing out from the shadows, Quinn hit him with the baseball bat in the back of his legs. He had aimed for the back of the legs so he wouldn’t shatter the guy’s kneecaps. When Quinn’s victim fell down, Quinn reached into the man’s trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet and ran away with it, dropping the Slugger into the river as he crossed the bridge.

Back in his friend’s basement, Quinn examined the wallet’s contents. His hands were trembling again, and he couldn’t see properly, and he wasn’t sure he was awake, but he could make out that the name on the driver’s license was Benjamin Takemitsu. The man didn’t look Japanese in the driver’s license photo, but Quinn didn’t think much about it until he’d finished counting the cash, which amounted to $321, an adequate sum for a few days’ relief. At that point he gazed more closely at the photo and saw that Takemitsu appeared to be intelligently thoughtful. What had he done to this man? Familiar pain flared behind Quinn’s knees and in his neck, punishment he recognized that he deserved, and the pain pushed out everything else.

He called his boyfriend in Seattle. In a panic he told him that he had robbed someone named Benny Takemitsu, that he had used a baseball bat. The boyfriend said, You’ve had a bad dream, Matty. That didn’t happen. You would never do such a thing. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, and I’ll call you tomorrow.

After that he lay awake wondering what had become of the person he had once been, the one who had gone to Africa. To the ceiling he said, I am no longer myself. He did not know who this new person was, the man whom he had become, but when he finally fell asleep, he saw in his dream one of those shabby castoffs with whom you wouldn’t want to have any encounters, any business at all, someone who belonged on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign that read HELP ME. The man was crouched behind a tree in the dark, peering out with feverish eyes. His own face was the face of the castoff.

Somehow he would have to make it up to Benny Takemitsu.

In the Inner Circle, when Quinn entered, Black Bird did not look up. He was seated in his usual place, and once again his finger was traveling down the page. Cymbeline, this time, a play that Quinn had never read.

It’s you, Black Bird said.

Yes, Quinn said.

Did you bring a book of your own?

No.

All right, Black Bird said. I can’t say I’m surprised.

He then issued elaborate instructions to Quinn about where in the men’s room to put the money, and when he, Black Bird, would retrieve it. The entire exchange took over half an hour, though the procedure hardly seemed secret or designed to fool anyone. When Quinn finally returned to his basement room, he had already gulped down two of the pills, and his relief soon grew to a great size. He felt his humanity restored until his mottled face appeared before him in the bathroom mirror, and then he realized belatedly what terrible trouble he was in.

Two days later he disappeared.

2

That was as far as I got whenever I tried to compose an account of what happened to Matty Quinn—my boyfriend, my soulmate, my future life—the man who mistakenly thought I was a tightwad. I was very thrifty in Ethiopia, convinced that Americans should not spend large sums in front of people who owned next to nothing. But to Matty I would have given anything. Upon his return to Minneapolis he had called me up and texted and e-mailed me with these small clues about the medical ordeal he was going through, and I had not understood; then he had called to say that he had robbed this Takemitsu, and I had not believed him. Then he disappeared from the world, from his existence and mine.

Two weeks later the investigating officer in the Minneapolis Police Department (whom I had contacted in my desperation) told me that I could certainly come to survey the city if I wished to. After all, this Officer Erickson said, nothing is stopping you from trying to find your friend, although I understand that your permanent home is in Seattle and you do not know anyone here. It’s a free country, so you’re welcome to try. However, circumstances being what they are, I wouldn’t get your hopes up if I were you. The odds are against it. People go missing, he said. Addicts especially. The street absorbs them. Your friend might be living in a ditch.

He did not say these words with the distancing sarcasm or condescension that straight men sometimes use on queers. He simply sounded bored and hopeless.

Matthew Quinn. First he was Matt. Then he was Matty. These two syllables formed on my tongue as I spoke his name repeatedly into his ear and then into his mouth. That was before he was gone.

This is how we’d met: I had come by the clinic, the one where he worked, to deliver some medical supplies from the company I was then working for, and I saw him near a window whose slatted light fell across the face of a feverish young woman who lay on a bed under mosquito netting. She was resting quietly with her eyes closed and her hand rising to her forehead in an almost unconscious gesture. She was very thin. You could see it in her skinny veined forearms and her prominent cheekbones. On one cheekbone was a J-shaped scar.

Close by, a boy about nine years old sat on a chair, watching her. I had the impression that they had both been there, mother and son, for a week or so. Four other patients immobilized by illness were in other beds scattered around the room. Outside a dog barked in the local language, Amharic, and the air inside remained motionless except for some random agitation under a rattling ceiling fan. The hour was just past midday, and very hot.

That’s when I noticed Quinn: he was approaching the woman with a cup in his hand, and after getting himself underneath the mosquito netting, he supported her head as he helped her drink the water, or medicine (I couldn’t see what it was), in the cup. Then he turned and, still under the mosquito netting, spoke to the boy in Amharic. His Amharic was better than mine,

Reviews for The Best American Short Stories 2014

[paul9the9well9read · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I but these "Best American Short Stories" collections every year along with a couple of other titles in the "Best American" series. Sometimes, the editor has made selections that I very much enjoy, and other times, not so much. This particular collection was one of the best, if not THE best I've been able to read. The editor selected stories which demonstrated not only wonderful writing skill, but also one that told riveting, or, at least, interesting stories. There were a couple I didn't like, so I skipped them. After all, that's what anthologies are for. But generally speaking, I was pleased to have read this book and found myself reading from one story to the next in much the same way I would a good novel. It was just too good to put down.
Every year, there is a new editor for these collections. Future editors should work on learning and applying Jennifer Egan's secrets to their task. They worked extremely well for her.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sifting through the hundreds, maybe thousands, of short stories published in North America in any one year must be an arduous but rewarding task. Jennifer Egan’s selection here tends towards fairly traditional short stories but with enough variation that the collection still has room to surprise. A quarter of the stories in the short list come from The New Yorker, a much higher representation than in the long list, so Egan’s preferences do show through. However, since at least some of those stories are the best ones in this collection, nothing turns on it.For me the stories that stood out were Joyce Carol Oates’ “Mastiff”, O. A. Lindsey’s “Evie M.”, Joshua Ferris’ “The Breeze”, and Ann Beattie’s “The Indian Uprising”. Is it surprising that Oates and Beattie can still astound? Probably not since they are clearly masters of their craft. I was surprised by the Joshua Ferris because I’d recently been disappointed by one of his novels. Here he shows that he deserves his reputation despite my reservations. And Lindsey’s story is perhaps the most raw and harrowing of the bunch. Altogether a worthy collection that continues to remind us of the enduring power of the short story form.

[upstairsgirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Usually there's at least a few stories where I think, "Gosh, I wish I'd written that," but this is - to me - a collection of exceptionally sad stories (in tone, not in quality), and while they're all excellent short stories, none of them held that bit of magic for me. They're mostly not unpleasant to read, but a bit more like reading your vegetables, if you follow, than past editions have been for me.

[carolynschroeder · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I absolutely loved this year's anthology of the "best of" short stories. I had all but given up on this series due to recent uprising of violent, shock-value, experimental and "magic realism" stories. It seemed there was just this trend to be weird and shocking just to get published/noticed. This year is a quieter bunch on some level and although many tend towards depressing or sad, gone is the extreme darkness and violence that plagued many short stories of the last couple of years. These are more about relationships, being different and the fears we have that we may never connect with other human beings. Jennifer Egan did a great job paring down to the final 20 and maybe it was criteria she used that I resonated with, but I thought her choices were interesting, exciting and brought a new spark to possibilities for the contemporary short story. I felt only two stories were mediocre, not memorable, but not horrible either ("The Breeze" by Joshua Ferris - not so much the subject matter and writing which were good, but the ridiculous choppy back/forth "what if" form, it was very done before and took a LOT away from just enjoying a story about a crumbling contemporary relationship; and "Next to Nothing" by Stephen O'Connor, simply because it was hard to believe. It was, however, a right chilling/spooky story). The remainders I would call 5-star. It was a pleasure to see some of the masters of the form, e.g., Charles Baxter, T.C Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, but also wow, some of the newcomers were awesome ,e.g., Benjamin Nugent ("God"), Mollly McNett ("La Pulchra Nota") and Laura Van Den Berg ("Antarctica"). This book really brought back some great joy in not only reading fiction, but short stories. Highly recommended if you might like to try venturing into short stories, but especially if you already love them.