But even decades later, after learning the full scope of his fascist sympathies and collaboration—he wrote propaganda pamphlets and articles calling for the expulsion of all French Jews at the same time he was sending Nevelson flirtatious letters and suggesting they marry—she spoke of him with as much yearning as disdain. There was such conflicted emotion in her words and yet so little detail of her actual interaction with this figure who both repelled and attracted her that even before realizing I’d abandoned the essay, I found myself trying to imagine these moments and contemplate her competing desires. By then I was hooked and spent the next few months writing “Liberté.”
LEIGH NEWMAN’S memoir about growing up in Alaska, Still Points North, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, Tin House, Electric Literature, and McSweeney’s, among other magazines. She is the recipient of the 2020 Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura,” and she is the cofounder of Black Balloon/Catapult Publishing, where she now serves as an editor for Catapult.
■ “Howl Palace” began with a real dog. After I had gone to college my dad picked up a black Lab with champion papers named Chelsea. He had gotten her for free from the PennySaver. Soon we all found out why. Chelsea weighed in at about one hundred pounds and did not give a crap if you pet her, fed her, loved her, screamed at her, ignored her, or chucked a sponge at her. Whatever you offered, whatever you ordered, her response was the same cold, brown, unblinking stare. After which she went on charging into table legs and walls, flattening my brothers into weepy human pancakes, head-butting the sliding glass doors in effort to attack the ducks outside on the lake. It was a little horrifying inside the house, especially at dinnertime. I can only imagine the duck-hunting fiascos. I tried to write about her for years, with little success, but I kept putting her into the wrong situations. Only when I started thinking about the women in Alaska I knew who had married and divorced multiple times (not an uncommon situation, considering the skewed ratio of males to females in Alaska), women I cared about and loved, did I find a way to talk about her. Initially I had put her in the center of the now-defunct stories. As the prime mover. But once she was off to the side, raising havoc—and renamed Pinkie—I could explore the characters I was most interested in getting to know.
JANE PEK was born and grew up in Singapore and now lives in New York. Her stories have appeared in Brooklyn Review and Witness. She received a BA in history from Yale University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She works as a mergers and acquisitions attorney and enjoys cycling around the city in search of superlative almond croissants.
■ When I first started writing this story, in response to a piece of surprising real-life news, it was about a group of close friends who are flummoxed when one of their number gets married to a woman he has apparently just met and breaks the news on Facebook. I knew from the start that the wife would be a fox spirit, and specifically the nine-tailed fox spirit who is blamed in Chinese mythology for the downfall of the Shang Dynasty (rather unfairly, I always thought), but for a long time the story wasn’t about her. I wrote a few iterations and then set it aside. A while later I revisited the story as part of a larger project to rewrite various Chinese myths about women—in those women’s voices, and on their terms, combining the magical world that they inhabited with the historical world that we do—and that is what became “The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains.”
ALEJANDRO PUYANA is a Venezuelan writer living in Austin. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Tin House, The Idaho Review, Huizache, Pigeon Pages, and others. His short story “The Hands of Dirty Children” was awarded the Halifax Ranch Prize by American Short Fiction and ZZ Packer. He’s currently working on a novel set in Venezuela. Alejandro is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.
■ I’m writing these words as we all deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, which makes me think about my own relationship with words and isolation. I moved to Austin from Venezuela in 2006; I was not a writer then, had just received a degree in sociology. I deeply wanted to do something creative, fueled by my love of books, comics, movies, and fantasy. Those pursuits seemed frivolous, especially when I turned my gaze to what was happening in Venezuela: polarization, totalitarianism, fear-mongering, social upheaval. I got obsessed with reading Venezuelan news; every morning meant looking for connection to what I left through newspapers, broadcasts, email chains. How many people marched? What did Chavez say now? Who got robbed last night? Then my brother got kidnapped for the second time.
I wrote about it, mostly as an outlet for the anger and the frustration of the event itself, but I didn’t expect to bridge the gap between Austin and Caracas in the way it did, to bring me closer—to my family, to my country, to my understanding of what it meant to be lonely. From then on writing began as a way to deal with my isolation from the country I loved and my family, who still lived the Venezuelan crisis in the flesh.
I would go to Caracas to visit every year. Every time I went, something had changed—not only politically, which I was accustomed to, but physically. On one occasion the country was dealing with a trash crisis. Some public parks, which I remembered as manicured, bursting with tropical flowers, palm trees and mango trees, were now makeshift landfills. On its own that struck me, but what was shocking was the buzzing of activity they generated. Animals and people, mostly groups of children and the elderly, walked through the trash and rummaged through it in search of food. That image stayed with me for at least a year. I couldn’t shake it.
This story came from those things I couldn’t get out of my head and I couldn’t understand. I wrote the first draft in a couple of sittings, which is extremely fast for me. The voice came first, never changed or faltered, and then I just followed it. It took me to two places that I loved as a kid: the Children’s Museum and Plaza los Museos—but from a perspective I had never had. For me those are places of happiness; for the kids in the story those are places of longing. They are excluded from the joy other children take for granted (and that I took for granted). But what surprised me most about the story was that joy could still be found for them, that there were still moments of tenderness and loyalty and levity. If a child is still a child, even in the midst of despair and injustice, maybe my country can still be the country I love, even when it’s broken. I’m still trying to figure out if that’s the case.
ANNA REESER’S short fiction is published in The Masters Review Volume VII, Fourteen Hills, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. Her artwork has been featured on the cover of CutBank and in other journals. Originally from Ojai, California, she now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
■ When I wrote “Octopus VII,” I was interested in artists moving from an academic world into an economic world, balancing creative practices with jobs and relationships. I was curious about the mix of feelings that can arise when an artist’s vocation begins to replace his art practice, and the moment when he experiences creative block in his original medium.
The giant metal octopus grew out of this idea—an unwieldy reminder of past potential that feels difficult to match. As a sculpture, it felt endearing and bizarre. Why an octopus? It seemed like a piece that looked physically impressive but that the artist hadn’t fully rationalized conceptually. In imagining who might make that sculpture, Tyler’s voice emerged.
WILLIAM PEI SHIH is the son of immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. His stories have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, the Des Moines Register, Reed, Carve, The Masters Review, Hyphen, The Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in New York City. More information can be found at williampeishih.com.
■ For me, one of the emotional engines that came about as I was writing this story is the idea of goodness—the human endeavor of choosing not only between go
od and evil, but the everyday and less-acknowledged choices between two disparate goods, and how choosing one good over another is often done, whether inadvertently or not, at a disservice and even the annihilation of the other. In the end I wondered at what point such choices enter the territories of wrongdoing.
I was also thinking about all the many kinds of unrequited love and lonelinesses, and how an essential part of being human is that longing to connect meaningfully in some way with someone else—to relate—and how oftentimes people might need a little more time to explain themselves. I was thinking about how commonalities seem to help. Likenesses and likemindedness also do much of that necessary work. Phenotype is another factor that comes into play. At the same time, shared experiences assume and imagine perhaps too much. Falsifications take hold; pluralities become grossly ignored. In short, one runs the risk of giving people who are seemingly like oneself too much of the benefit of the doubt. And then there is always the expanding and accelerating universe of the unknown, which one might confuse with disappointment. Despite the fact that we are always more than the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell each other, so much of what’s unrequited and unreciprocated gets wasted away into the undiscovered and the could-have-been. I suppose with this story I wanted to highlight the powers of inclusion and diversity and openness, and the dangers of what might manifest otherwise in closures—that there is so much more to life than simply coexistence.
My gratitude to Heidi Pitlor and Curtis Sittenfeld. I would also like to thank my brilliant and wonderful editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, Allison Wright. And Ethan Canin, who saw the story’s potential, and whose workshop at Iowa was where it first saw the light of day.
KEVIN WILSON is the author of two story collections and three novels, most recently Nothing to See Here. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, and teaches at the University of the South.
■ One year in high school there was this boy. And he wore Cannibal Corpse T-shirts. And one of my friends and I were in an art class with him. And he poked us with X-Acto knives and burned us with glue guns while we made a Parthenon out of cardboard. He’d hit me. And he said pretty bad things to us. I never once tried to protect myself or tell anyone or ask for help or stand up to him. It didn’t even really occur to me, even though I was fifteen years old. I think that my complete passivity was repulsive to him, to the point that I angered him, my existence. Now, I don’t even think that boy would remember me. And I don’t think he’d consider anything he did to even be bad.
But the ending of the fictional story is not my story, thank God, so there’s this point where Jamie, who is me, becomes not me. He becomes what I guess he always was, just a character. And I have a family and my life is good. But I don’t think Jamie’s life is good. I wanted to steer him toward a different life, but I guess I failed. And I feel those echoes, where our stories separate. It’s a strange sensation.
TIPHANIE YANIQUE is the author of the poetry collection Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014. Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Book Award in environmental literature and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. Her writing has won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction, the thirteenth annual Boston Review short story contest, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright scholarship, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for, and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, the Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction, and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is an associate professor at Emory University.
■ Fly is one of the main characters of a novel in stories/linked story collection that I have been revising for about nine years. I tend to write multiple projects at once, so nine years isn’t that long for my process—but it is, well, a long time. During that time Fly was a saint, then an awful piece of shit. “The Special World,” in particular, came out of me needing to find his more complex humanity. In “The Special World” we find him as a young adult. It does seem to me that this is when men are made to believe that vulnerability either has its merits or is bullshit. If they can’t handle these almost adult vulnerabilities with bravery, then out goes vulnerability. Before this story’s end, Fly loved his religious faith, his family, a girl, his solitude, his own body. But then all these loves get tampered with.
The collection that this story is a part of is, as a whole, an exercise in fiction forms. I took a class once in fiction forms in college, and it was pretty bad. Though I did learn about the nature of racism and sexism in classroom power dynamics, I didn’t learn a thing about form in fiction. I’ve always felt that was something lacking in my education as a prose writer. So in this collection I wanted to teach myself something about form—about what form can do for a story, how it can make something possible and something else impossible. Another way to say this is that I wanted to think about form in the way I had been taught to think about form as a poet. As a writer from a colonialized place, I was also weary of form as yet another way to impose colonial ideals of beauty on the colonized, but I did love me a sestina. So I knew that preexisting forms had their value. The most ubiquitous fiction form is probably the Hero’s Journey, first made famous by Joseph Campbell. Interestingly, Campbell always claimed that this form was not a colonizing one because it already existed in most cultures. He was just giving it a name and articulating the detailed parts of the form. So I decided to see what the form made possible for a story, and what it could do for me as a writer . . . and maybe what it might articulate for me as a reader and thinker, and even as an agent myself in the world.
Other Distinguished Stories of 2019
Abu-Baker, Reem
Tiny Kind Universes. Denver Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 1.
Adelmann, Maria
Middleman. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 35, nos. 3 & 4.
Allen, Brittany K.
Castaways. McSweeney’s, no. 57.
Anders, Charlie Jane
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nasty Things. ZYZZYVA, no. 117.
Awake, Mikael
The Good Plan. McSweeney’s, no. 58.
Barton, Tyler
Kanorado. The Cincinnati Review, vol. 16, no. 2.
Once Nothing, Twice Shatter. The Iowa Review, vol. 49, no. 2.
Bertino, Marie-Helene
Can Only Houses Be Haunted? Tin House, no. 80.
Braunstein, Sarah
The Modern Era. Playboy, Winter 2019.
Caritj, Anna
White Angora. The Sewanee Review, vol. 127, no. 3.
Chen, Te-Ping
Lulu. The New Yorker, April 8.
Choi, Yoon
The End of Life. Narrative.
Clare, Olivia
Women and Men Made of Them. The Paris Review, no. 230.
Cline, Emma
Son of Friedman. The New Yorker, July 1.
What Can You Do with a General? The New Yorker, February 4.
Cohen, Miriam
The Teenagers. Third Coast, no. 47.
Cole, Lee
Bail. Cimarron Review, nos. 206, 207, and 208.
Conklin, Lydia
Island of Beginnings. ZYZZYVA, no. 117.
Cuti, Vanessa
We Manage. Cimarron Review, nos. 206, 207, and 208.
Deagler, Micheal
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All Addicts. McSweeney’s, no. 56.
Delgado, Yohanca
The Niece. Story, no. 4.
Doerr, Anthony
The Master’s Castle. Tin House, no. 80.
Erdrich, Louise
The Stone. The New Yorker, September 9.
Evenson, Brian
Curator. Conjunctions, no. 73.
Fanning, Amy
Readying the Colors. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 35, nos. 3 and 4.
Fountain, Ben
Social Blunders That Lead to Violence in the Modern World. Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 23, no. 3.
Garcia, Gabriela
Mrs. Sorry. ZYZZYVA, no. 116.
Garza, Kimberly
The Queens of Santo Nino. Copper Nickel, no. 29.
Goldstein, Zoe
Undrowning. Thoughtprints, vol. 48.
Greenfeld, Karl Taro
The Best American Short Stories 2020 Page 45