The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  MICHAEL BYERS has taught creative writing at the MFA program of the University of Michigan since 2006. He is the author of The Coast of Good Intentions (stories) and two novels, Long for This World and Percival’s Planet. His stories have been anthologized several times in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories, and his work has received recognition from the Henfield Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whiting Foundation. His novella The Broken Man was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

  ■ My first love as a reader and writer was science fiction, and I’m so thrilled to see this story find a wider audience. I suppose this story came about from sitting with friends on that porch (the porch in the story is our porch in Michigan), all of us watching our children get older in that unreal, jerky, all-too-sudden way they do, and recognizing that their lives, and their own children’s lives, would differ from ours in ways that we wouldn’t be able to really get our heads around. And I wanted to get my head around it. Given current circumstances, the world this story depicts looks like a pretty benign one, all things considered, a world in which people still sit on porches and have friends and find moments in which to consider who and why they are. I hope it’s accurate in that way, at least.

  Also, this story took six years to get published! It got rejected so many times! Once on the very day I submitted it! So, you know, take heart, friends. Don’t lose hope. Keep at it. If you love a story, as I happen to (I’ll confess) love this one—well, keep plugging until it finds a home. “Sibling Rivalry” exists in print thanks to the fierce and lovely people at the estimable Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, to whom I am happily indebted, as I am to Curtis Sittenfeld, for finding a spot in her heart for it in this year’s anthology.

  And of course we all owe a debt of gratitude to the brilliant and tireless Heidi Pitlor, who labors all year in the service of this funny art we’re all devoted to. Thank you, Heidi. You deserve a statue!

  EMMA CLINE is the author of the novel The Girls and the forthcoming story collection Daddy. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and the New York Times, and she is a winner of the Plimpton Prize. In 2017 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

  ■ A few years ago there was a stretch of tabloid stories about celebrity affairs, often involving nannies. I was struck by a paparazzi photo of one of the young women; she looked so confident, almost smirking, but then seemed, at the same time, obviously afraid, obviously in over her head. I wanted to explore that mindset—the bravado of youth covering up terror, the desire to try to take ownership of bad things as a way to make them less painful. Kayla is desperate to avoid being seen as a victim, to forestall pity or self-reflection by any means necessary, even if that means rebuffing actual kindness and connection. Tabloid dramas often have a built-in moral code, like modern-day fairy tales: the nanny as the evil interloper, the wife as the wronged queen, the husband as a hapless and pitiable oaf. They act, in their weird way, as parables, tales of how we think life should go and what should happen to people who deviate. I wanted Kayla’s character to resist being taught a lesson, resist the collective moral read of the situation—she might feel differently later on, but for now Kayla is trying hard to leach this experience of meaning, even as it radically reshapes her life.

  MARIAN CROTTY is the author of the short story collection What Counts as Love, which was published through the University of Iowa Short Fiction Awards (John Simmons Award). The collection was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short stories have appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Southern Review, and the Kenyon Review. She is an assistant editor at The Common and teaches at Loyola University Maryland. She lives in Baltimore and is currently working on a novel.

  ■ I began this story in response to a discussion I had with my first-year writing students about subjects for short memoirs that tend to rely on clichés. Essays about the death of a grandparent were at the top of the list. They were often boring, almost always sentimental, and one grandma or grandpa usually felt indistinguishable from the next. And yet, because I was convinced that a story about the death of a grandparent could be compelling, I challenged myself to write one. My initial plan was to write the story in the form of a long social media memorial, and although I couldn’t make this approach work, it gave life to Jan, Jules, and a story that departed from the initial prompt I’d given myself. Jen Logan Meyer provided many helpful notes on the first draft, including the suggestion to name the frozen yogurt shop Yotopia!

  CAROLYN FERRELL is the author of the story collection Don’t Erase Me, awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Story, Scoundrel Time, Electric Literature, and other places; her story “Proper Library” was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Ferrell has been a recipient of grants from the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her family. Her debut novel, Dear Miss Metropolitan, is forthcoming.

  ■ Many thanks to Michael Nye for choosing “Something Street” for publication in Story magazine. “Something Street” was inspired by news events and by my own loyalty to characters who are eternal underdogs. I’d wanted to use the various settings of Parthenia and Craw Daddy as organizing tools for this piece but came to the realization—with the help of my great reading angel, Martha Upton—that plot was missing in that approach. I wanted to make the fragments of Parthenia’s life cohere, illustrate her transformation. I also thought about challenging the notion of the good old days—which we hear about from those allegedly wanting to make America great again. Latin lessons notwithstanding, the good old days are forever in the making. They are actually here, as reality and dream. And isn’t it already a given that fiction is what makes the world great in the first place?

  MARY GAITSKILL was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in the Detroit area of Michigan. She left home at the age of sixteen when she went to live in Canada; at nineteen she decided she wanted to become a writer and returned to America to attend community college. From there she went to the University of Michigan, where she took a BA, and then moved to New York City in 1981. She published her first book, a story collection titled Bad Behavior, in 1988; she has since published two more collections of stories (Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry) and three novels (Two Girls, Fat and Thin; Veronica; and The Mare) as well as a collection of essays titled Somebody with a Little Hammer. She has taught writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels since 1993, most recently at Claremont McKenna College.

  ■ I wrote “This Is Pleasure” from a place of confusion and, as one of the characters says, “heart pain.” Pain really for everyone involved. Much of what happens in the story is flippant and ridiculous—some of it is sublimated cruelty, both on the part of Quin and some of his accusers. But underneath that the story is so mixed and unclear, with real tenderness and wish for connection shining or at least trying to shine through the murk. I wanted to write from this place of uncertainty because it seemed necessary in a climate of total certainty from all sides. I am not in any way against moral certainty; that too is necessary. But fiction for me exists at least in part to describe the moment when you are not certain, you are just feeling all kinds of contradictory things, and reality is clear but prismatic: several things at once. In this case, the moment before the hammer falls.

  MENG JIN was born in Shanghai and now lives in San Francisco. Her first novel, Little Gods, was published in January 2020.

  ■ In late summer of 2017, I moved to California after a year spent writing abroad. For much of my life I had willfully disregarded the concept of place, but something had shifted inside m
e and suddenly it was all I could see: how my body responded to and situated within a new climate, a new architecture, a new demography and geography. I’d mailed in my absentee ballot for the 2016 election from England; afterward I’d sunk into a lonely despair. It was supposed to be a time of joyful creation, but I felt totally alienated from my work, and spent most of my days, like many, reading the news and crying. Now I was back in America. I was aware I had entered a new disasterscape. Writing “In the Event” was one attempt at navigating this disasterscape and of trying to find inside it a place of meaning and art.

  ANDREA LEE is the author of numerous books, including Russian Journal, Sarah Phillips, Interesting Women, and Lost Hearts in Italy. Her work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker and other publications, and her new book, Red Island House, a novel set in Madagascar, will be published in early 2021. She lives in Turin, Italy.

  ■ For me, the subject matter of “The Children” is a perennial one. I’m obsessed by the concept of exoticism, foreignness, and by the theme of encounters between strangers. Whether I’m writing about being an American in Soviet Russia or recording the different social and racial dimensions of a middle-class African American childhood or chronicling the life of an expatriate in Italy, I’ve always explored the confrontation of different worlds. Some years ago I heard a fragmentary story about an exiled French aristocrat, who, centuries ago, fathered numerous children with tribal women all around the Indian Ocean, and I was immediately captivated. The tale had everything that fascinates me: class, race, injustice, desert-island fantasy. My first feeling was that it resembled a myth, or an Elizabethan comedy. Soon I began to play with the idea of bringing that narrative into contemporary reality, and then the story started to write itself.

  The story also gave me the opportunity to shine a light on one of my own favorite pieces of writing on exoticism: Victor Segalen’s eccentric Essay on Exoticism, over which the two major characters bond. That strange little work records the author’s attempt to keep foreign peoples and places mysterious and glamorous by fitting them into an artistic form—exoticizing them, in effect. Art can strike at the heart, making the ordinary events of life deeply comprehensible, but, conversely, it can also create emotional distance from reality. Absorbed in their rarefied intellectual world, Shay and Giustinia meddle in real affairs with callousness and end by causing pain.

  I bookended the story with reports of serial killings I heard about in Madagascar. The serial killer’s crimes are intended as a misguided form of revenge on the foreigners who have taken advantage of the country, and they parallel the tale of the absent Western father, who took casual advantage of young Malagasy women. In the end it seems that it’s the innocent and powerless people who suffer.

  SARAH THANKAM MATHEWS grew up in India and Oman, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She was recently a Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She has been published by the Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed Reader, AGNI, and Platypus Press. A novel is at work on her.

  ■ The seed of what became “Rubberdust” was a lie I told for no reason. I was in a new town, meeting new people. A solar eclipse was happening, and people were passing around those paper glasses. With no motive in mind, I impulsively told the man I was taking a walk with that I feared looking directly at the sun because I had a friend in the second grade who did this every day and lost his sight. Wow, he said. I know, I said, vaguely appalled and amused at myself. I was nervous and wanted to be thought interesting by the new people around me. My lizard brain had complied with a story.

  But why that story, and why had it materialized so easily? I cast around in my memory and realized that I had made a friend in second grade, this charming little boy, and our friendship had been based primarily on the joint production of eraser shavings, which we stored in our wooden desks. I could not remember why we did this. I thought back to my schooldays in Oman and felt a sharp ache. It was the twinge of memories in a setting so far removed from the reality of the people all around you that you fear they are unintelligible to anyone but you. This is the immigrant’s pain, I thought, aside from bureaucracy, privation, uncertainty, and missing people from the old life; you also have to translate your past, or decide to not even try.

  I wrote in a notebook gifted to me by my friend Praveen what I thought would be a first line: “Please listen. I grew up in a place that I cannot return to.” It was wrong somehow. All of a sudden I knew better what I wanted to tell, and it was not a lament. I wanted to write a story of the secret lives, peculiar logic, and intense emotion of children. Of the fear that you are not at your deepest level a Good Person. Of what it is to have to translate for an audience your (foreign) past, which is to say, your (foreign) self. Some room was flung open in my brain; I began writing, the story poured out of me.

  ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of six books of fiction; her seventh, a short story collection called The Souvenir Museum, will be published in 2021.

  ■ When I was a young writer trying to come up with ideas for short stories, I felt, always, desperate. Lonely, even, not for characters but for ideas. I sat in my apartment and waited for ideas to find me; I read other, better writers and wondered if I could plagiarize them; I skimmed the newspaper and thought I might write a short story about the day’s Peanuts. I took a walk and a bread truck drove past: was there a short story in that? Nothing could happen without an idea, I thought then, even though in those days that wasn’t how I wrote. My actual stories—the ones that panned out—arrived in my head as a single sentence in a stranger’s voice.

  Now that I’m middle-aged, I think ideas are essential for novels but in some ways beside the point in short stories. My short stories, I mean. My short stories now generally begin with some scraps of material I have scavenged from my life. Nothing essential or personal, just locations and events, often picked up when I’m traveling between university semesters. (I write this as the world is sheltering in place and it occurs to me: Can I come up with short stories if I stay at home? I’m honestly not sure.) These stories, I insist, aren’t autobiographical. Sure, the characters go where I go, but they’re not me, not anyone I’m related to.

  In the case of “It’s Not You,” I’d traveled with my husband, Edward Carey, and our kids to Galveston. (I’d already written a story that took place in Galveston, based on another trip.) On our way home to Austin we stopped at a hotel in Houston that upgraded us to a suite: two rooms, two bathrooms, a dining room table with room for eight, a couple of chandeliers. The hotel wasn’t deluxe, just entertainingly garish. The next morning a lovely man with a Cesar Romero mustache and braces brought me breakfast. On that little trellis of reality I decided to train a story about youth. When I was young, I occasionally checked into hotels in order to be alone away from the shadow of myself and my own furniture. Also when I was young I listened to a lot of call-in radio shows in the early hours of the morning, which is when I wrote. As I started the story I thought about things I’d felt passionately about in my twenties, things I’d never written about and couldn’t, with any clarity or purpose, write about now. All those experiences feel like foreign coins: undeniably worth something, but how do I spend them? These days different things make me furious or sorrowful, different things are dear to me. I’m not better now than I was then, I want to make clear, not as a writer or a person: only different. Anyhow, I wrote much of what I thought of as “the hotel story” but couldn’t get it right and put it aside, and then in September 2019 my friend Michael Ray at Zoetrope asked me if I had a spare something for the magazine. It was my birthday. I’d had some champagne for breakfast, which seemed right for this story, and I finished it in a few hours. Pulled it together, I guess I mean: the pieces were there but out of order and confused, or maybe in order and not confused enough. It’s an addlepated story; I needed to be addlepated to finish it.

  SCOTT NADELSON is the author of a novel, Between You and Me; a memoi
r, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress; and five story collections, most recently The Fourth Corner of the World, named a Jewish Fiction Award Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and One of Us, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. A recipient of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and an Oregon Book Award, he teaches at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

  ■ This story started with procrastination. For several years I’d been working on a series of essays on writing craft, and in particular what writers can learn from visual artists. I had a vague idea for a piece about form and tension in the work of Louise Nevelson, thinking her blend of abstraction and intense sensory experience might challenge my usual instinct to avoid abstraction in narrative. Mostly, though, I just wanted to write about Nevelson, who has been one of my favorite artists for a long time. Whenever I find myself in front of one of her sculptures or assemblages, I lose interest in just about all the surrounding work in the museum or gallery. Her black boxes stuffed with painted wooden spools and disks and cones get under my skin in a way almost nothing else can. What little I knew of her biography also appealed to me: a Russian Jew who emigrated around the same time as my grandfather, a sexually liberated woman forging an independent path in a repressive culture, an obsessive and driven creator who learned to trust her instincts despite many years of struggle and neglect by the male-dominated art world.

  As often happens when I set myself a specific task, I immediately invented excuses to delay. I decided that before I could write the essay I had to read everything Nevelson had said about her work. I spent the next few weeks delving into interviews, a pair of biographies, and her oral history, Dawns + Dusks, which her assistant recorded and transcribed in the mid-1970s. In the last were a couple of the most intriguing and baffling paragraphs I’ve ever encountered. Nevelson describes, very briefly, and with hardly any specifics, her encounter with the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline on a ship to Paris in 1933 and their subsequent correspondence and near-affair. When they met, Céline had just published Journey to the End of the Night and was already a literary sensation. Despite his blatant anti-Semitism, he clearly fascinated Nevelson, who was an unknown then, recently divorced and trying to discover her voice and her medium.