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While I have read only 30% of the stories so far, I'd like to make a preliminary comment,while recognizing that such a way of judging a work of art is both dangerous and subject to change. However, since we are dealing with unrelated short stories ,the problem is not so severe. To begin,all editor's are subject to their prejudices when selecting "the best" of anything. Rushdie admits as much in the introduction,which ,thankfully says a lot more than series editor,Heidi Pitlor, does. Ms.Pitlor
A great collection of short stories with a lot of variety. Stand outs for me were Kevin Brockmeier's The Year of Silence, Alice Munro's Child's Play, and Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove.
Bear with me, I did a little write-up on each story. It’s hard to say which story was my favorite and there definitely are some klunkers that didn’t fit my style. I gave the collection five stars because it’s hard to rate a collection. But read below for my specific thoughts on each story.Admiral - great detail, I love that the entire story is more of a metaphor for Nisha’s feelings about her other and her seemingly dead-end life. But the details of this story are what get me - I can easily pict...
As is the case with every volume of "Best American", this year's edition is filled with all quality writing. Not every story will appeal to every reader, nor did every story appeal to me, but I can't say anything in here just didn't work. Again, it's all quality writing.That said, the stories from this series can usually be broken down into three categories, "Meh", "Decent", and "Great", and the 2008 edition is no different.The GreatThere were a handful of stories that really jumped out at me, a...
Since 1978, the best American short stories have been collected annually in a series plainly enough titled The Best American Short Stories. The Houghton Mifflin Company publishes it and Heidi Pitlor is the series editor. She does the heavy lifting, reading thousands of short stories published in such well-respected literary magazines as The New Yorker and in many more obscure publications, as well as the stories published by various university presses. It’s Pitlor’s job to whittle the collectio
There are only a handful of stories I enjoyed among those compiled here. My favorite was "The Worst You Ever Feel", by Rebecca Makkai, richly imagined and infused with music and history. Having just read Chabon's entreaty to put action back into fiction, which I fully support, I couldn't help but notice the preponderence of slice-of-life stories. I put the book down, forgot about it, picked it up again. I went through the first lines of all of the stories, and the first paragraphs. "Make somethi...
This is a nice collection of short stories; it’s edited by Salman Rushdie, although he doesn’t say much. As titles go, this is more hyperbole than most, but there are some very good stories; there are also some horribly clichéd stories, including one about blacks and one about Mormons.There are a couple that are very low-level science fiction or fantasy, such as the one about the cloned dog (and the activists who will do anything to discredit cloning), and the one about random acts of silence by...
I really like this series. The different editors each year ensure that (across the series anyway) you don't get that sense that you're just rereading the same story over and over again. I have to admit that I accidentally left the book on an airplane, so I didn't read the last two stories. But, even if they were exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, my rating would probably still stand. My one issue was with the story, "Missionaries". I'm OK with the fact that one elder was portrayed as a for...
The best BASS collection in years, mainly due to the fact that Salman Rushdie is the editor. It's obvious that he chose these stories to form a book that culls from an incredible diversity of voices and styles, not merely stories that he "likes" or that are similar to his own work. Stephen King, last year's editor, could take a huge lesson from this. It certainly upped my enjoyment factor that some of my favorite writers are included this year: A.M. Homes, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, and T.C. Boy...
