The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  • This story may not be a love song, but it is a love letter of sorts to the city of Chicago, where I lived from 1992 to 2003. It’s where I met my wife, where my oldest daughter was born, and where I started figuring out how to drag stories out of the margins of my notebooks and into the world. This one in particular lurked on my hard drive for years. In one draft, Kat and her brother were the central characters; their back-and-forth arguments filled fourteen pages. In another version, Kat and Milo were a couple (their arguments filled only eight pages). The story wasn’t going anywhere. Then, late in 2011, I was invited to give a reading at Y Bar in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I was asked to talk about writing, and rather than lecturing a bar full of friends and strangers on the finer points of writerly craft, I decided to read a busted story and talk about why it wasn’t working. With the reading approaching, I gutted and stitched up the draft du jour (then titled “Badges, Posters, Stickers & T-Shirts”) and gave it its first public airing. The draft was a mess, but I left that night knowing that the story had a chance. The breakthrough came when, in a mad rush, I wrote the scene where the narrator finds Kat sick in the bathroom. I finally knew what she was willing to do—and what I had to do—to make this story work. I had plenty more to figure out, but that scene gave me what I needed: a point of view. For the final sprint to the finish line, I give credit to Jon Parrish Peede at VQR, who asked all the right questions and pushed me to find the ending that had long eluded me.

  MOLLY McNETT lives on a farm in Oregon, Illinois, with her husband and children. Her book One Dog Happy won the 2008 John Simmons Award for short fiction from the University of Iowa Press, and her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, New England Review, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Fifth Wednesday, and many other journals. Thanks to the composer Robinson McClellan and the rogue pastor Mike Shea for their help on this story.

  • I was writing a contemporary story in which a high school choir director falls in love with his student’s beautiful voice, but I was a little anxious that it might seem like an episode of Glee. One day I found a textbook on singing, with a brief history of vocal instruction that mentioned Jerome of Moravia and his theory of la pulchra nota, or teaching from the perfect note. Why not set the story in a time when this theory might be applied? In my research I came across a diary of a man who lost his whole family within a month, and his trust in divine providence at each death was deeply touching to me. I wanted the voice teacher to have that kind of faith, though I can’t claim to share it or even fully understand it.

  BENJAMIN NUGENT is the author of Good Kids, a novel, and American Nerd, a cultural history. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. An assistant professor at Southern New Hampshire University, he teaches creative writing at the undergraduate level and in the low-residency MFA program. He divides his time between Manchester, New Hampshire, and Brooklyn, New York.

  • Last year, one of my best creative writing students, Megan Kidder, a well-mannered girl from rural Maine with dyed black hair, a silver nose ring, and a studded belt, dropped by my office. “I wrote a poem about how this one guy prematurely ejaculated,” she said, “and he told his frat brothers about the poem and now they call me God. They’re like, ‘Hey, God.’” A few days later, I was pacing, whispering things, and the first sentence of “God” presented itself. It took the perspective of one of the boys. I didn’t think about how that perspective might open or foreclose storytelling possibilities. I just liked the way it fell into iambic pentameter: “We called her God because she wrote a poem,” and so on.

  I can write lyrically only by accident. Whenever I think “I’m going to sit down and write some poetic lines about my characters now,” the result is hideous. That’s why I like to write about frat boys. I never expect their lives to lend themselves to lyricism.

  In its plot, “God” is a bit like The Sword in the Stone, which was my favorite movie when I was seven. It’s Disney’s adaptation of T. H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, itself an adaptation of Le Morte d’Arthur. At the time I didn’t think of my debt to Malory but rather to Megan Kidder. It was as if she had stepped from a mist-crowned lake and handed me a sword.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author most recently of the novel Carthage and the story collections High-Crime Area and Lovely, Dark & Deep. A longtime faculty member at Princeton, she has been visiting professor at the University of California–Berkeley, at which time the story in this volume, “Mastiff,” was written, as well as visiting professor at NYU in 2014. In 2011, she was awarded the President’s Medal in the Humanities and, in 2013, the Lifetime Achievement Award of PEN Center USA.

  • “Mastiff” grew out of a protracted and arduous hike undertaken by my husband and me in Wild Cat Canyon near Berkeley, California, in March 2013. The relationship between the (initially unnamed) man and woman hikers is not unlike, but not fully identical with, the relationship between the actual hikers, on that actual hike. The scientist who is also a photographer—this is a type with whom I am intimately acquainted, though the individual in “Mastiff” is not in fact—not actually—my husband, a neuroscientist-photographer with hiking skills and a strong sense of what should, and should not, be done on the trail. And the giant, threatening dog that becomes the very emblem of death, against which some sort of human bond must be the protection, as thin woolen gloves are some sort of protection, however inadequate, against the freezing cold—this terrifying creature too sprang from that actual hike on Wild Cat Canyon Trail. So vivid was the experience, and so intense the emotions (felt by the writer/hiker), it was not difficult to find a language in which to “tell the story”—though it should be reiterated that “Mastiff” is fiction, whatever its wellsprings in actual life.

  STEPHEN O’CONNOR is the author of two collections of short fiction, Here Comes Another Lesson and Rescue, and two works of nonfiction, Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, a memoir, and Orphan Trains, a biography/history. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, One Story, Missouri Review, Poetry, Electric Literature, Agni, Threepenny Review, The Quarterly, and Partisan Review, among many other places. His story “Ziggurat” was read by Tim Curry on Selected Shorts in October 2011 and June 2013. His essays and journalism have been published in the New York Times, DoubleTake, The Nation, Agni, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, New Labor Forum, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence. For additional information, please visit www.stephenoconnor.net.

  • In all likelihood “Next to Nothing” would never have been written if it weren’t for Hurricane Irene. I spend weekends and vacations just under three hours northwest of New York City, in an area particularly hard hit by the storm. Our house was spared, fortunately, but on either side of the shoulder of land on which it is built, massively engorged streams of red water roared through culverts like spumes from gigantic fire hydrants. At the height of the storm, the entire valley we overlook became a red sea, with huge waves and frothing pink “whitecaps.” And I really did stock up in advance of Irene at a supermarket, from the parking lot of which one can look out across a valley big enough to hold an entire county—and, in fact, parts of two or three others. But the real inspiration for the story came from an image that just popped into my head of two sisters with black pageboys and eyes of such a pale blue that they were almost the color we sometimes imagine the moon to be. The image wasn’t entirely static. I saw the sisters from the shoulders up, rocking slightly, as if they were walking—or, more likely, lumbering. I also understood, maybe as a function of their freakishly pale eyes, that this pair would be entirely lacking in what is sometimes called “fellow feeling.” They would be extremely intelligent and absolutely rational, but have no emotional attachment to any human being—not to their parents, their children, or each other, and not really even to themselves. I had probably gotten about a page and a half into my first draft when it occurred to me that there was a parallel be
tween the sisters and nature—which is also consummately rational and absolutely indifferent to human concerns. And thus it was that I decided that my protagonists should confront Hurricane Irene.

  I am an atheist and the child of atheists. For as long as I have been able to think in such terms, I have always tried to anchor my beliefs in reason and fact. Starting sometime in adolescence, however, it became clear to me that certain things I want desperately to believe simply cannot be justified by rational interpretations of fact. Is romantic love real, for example, or only a sentimental delusion? Does it make any sense at all to say that human life is sacred? As a result of this realization, I became aware of the paradox that, atheist though I may be, I too must live by faith—not in spiritual terms, but in the sense that in order to be a happy and decent human being, I must cherish “beliefs” that can never be verified. Much of my writing over the years has explored the absurd and possibly delusory nature of many of our most essential values. And when I decided to have the Soros sisters confront a hurricane that shared a name with one of them, I knew that I would be able to explore the significance of our absurd beliefs through negative means—that is, through a pair of protagonists in whom they are entirely lacking. Beyond that, I had no clear idea of what course the story would take, and I intentionally tried to keep myself off balance by making each new segment of the story go off in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. While I knew for a long while that the Soros sisters would end up in floodwaters, I had no idea what would happen at the climax until I was actually writing it. And I still have no idea what happens at the very end of the story—or at least what would have happened in the two or three unwritten sentences that might have followed my final line.

  KAREN RUSSELL, a native of Miami, is the author of two short story collections, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year selection, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

  • Sometimes I think it can be perversely liberating to commit to a premise that seems too goofy to work, or basically foredoomed from the outset. I remember looking up at a certain point while drafting “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound” and blinking into the light of a hard truth: OK, I thought, I am writing Flaubert fan fiction, about a heartbroken dog. But I don’t think I could have told a story about the vertigo of falling out of love, that terrible inertia, or the gravity that first love can continue to exert on a life, except obliquely, from Djali’s low-to-the-ground animal vantage point. In Madame Bovary, the newlywed Emma receives a greyhound puppy as a gift from her husband, Dr. Charles. I loved the deep green haunted quality of the pair’s twilight walks in Tostes, this dog and her mistress, and the way the animal serves as a screen onto which Emma projects every dream and ambivalence. She rehearses her hopes and her fears, using the animal as a sounding board. You sort of feel for the little puppy. As I tried to write the greyhound as a character, I returned to chapters 7–9 and began at the moment of Madame B’s hilarious exhalation, “Mon Dieu, why did I ever get married?” In that scene, her “vagrant” thoughts stray here and there, as if connected by some tether to the dog’s manic pursuit of yellow butterflies; at sunset, she is overcome by formless dread, which she transmits to the dog. It was great fun to try to thread some of Flaubert’s language into this story. Several chapters later, Emma sets out for Yonville and the affair that will end in her suicide; the carriage pauses, and the little dog runs off into the woods, escaping the pages of this novel, never to return.

  This struck me as a wildly surprising event: we expect infidelity from one another, but a dog’s love we assume to be unconditional and eternal. A space opened up in the treeline of the original story, one that I was happy to enter: what on earth happened to this greyhound who abandoned her owner?

  The greyhound’s flight also gave me a physical alphabet to explore the weightlessness, pain, exhilaration, and terror that can follow the dissolution of a bond. And to represent Djali’s escape from the shelter of one relationship, and into an unfamiliar landscape, as a kind of survival story.

  A huge thank-you to Michael Ray of Zoetrope, a brilliant editor with an uncanny sympathy for every kind of story and protagonist—child and adult, animal and monster.

  LAURA VAN DEN BERG is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Award, and The Isle of Youth, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, Find Me, is forthcoming in early 2015. She currently lives in the Boston area and is a 2014–2015 Faculty Fellow in Fiction at Colby College.

  • I have long been fascinated with Antarctica—the isolation, the extremity of weather and landscape, even the cadence of the word itself, Ant-arc-ti-ca—and thus had been trying to write a story set in Antarctica for years. But my drafts, written always from the perspective of a research scientist living in Antarctica, kept withering on the page.

  In 2012, on the news I learned about an explosion at the Comandante Ferraz research base in Admiralty Bay. Two men were killed. The story stayed with me. A few weeks later, a line got stuck in my head: “There was nothing to identify in Antarctica because there was nothing left.” This line soon became the first line of a new story and eventually two interlocking narratives emerged: a present thread set in Antarctica, where the narrator has come to investigate the mysterious death of her scientist brother, who perished in an explosion, and a past thread set in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  In hindsight, I can see why those earlier Antarctica stories kept failing. Not only am I not an expert on Antarctica, I am also not a scientist (and by “not a scientist” I mean barely able to name an element on the periodic table). The gap in knowledge was too great; I had been coming up against the limits of what I could convincingly imagine.

  In “Antarctica,” the narrator is a stranger in a strange land, an outsider—outsider I knew; outsider I understood. And while I have never been to Antarctica, I know Cambridge intimately, and in the end it was the collision between the radically familiar and the radically foreign that helped this story take shape.

  Other Distinguished Stories of 2013

  ACIMAN, ANDRÉ

  Abingdon Square. Granta, no. 122

  ADRIAN, CHRIS

  The Black Book of Conscience. Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 17, no. 2

  ADRIAN, KIM

  Toast. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 52, no. 1

  ALCOTT, KATHLEEN

  Saturation. Coffin Factory, no. 5

  ALEXIE, SHERMAN

  Happy Trails. The New Yorker, June 10 & 17

  ALTSCHUL, ANDREW FOSTER

  Embarazada. Ploughshares, vol. 39, no. 4

  ARVIN, NICK

  City of Mary. Missouri Review, vol. 36, no. 3

  BANKS, RUSSELL

  Blue. Yale Review, vol. 101, no. 4

  BAXTER, CHARLES

  Chastity. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 52, no. 2

  Loyalty. Harpers, May 2013

  BEATTIE, ANN

  Company. Little Star, no. 4

  BECK, RANDI

  By Morning, New Mercies. Ploughshares, vol. 39, no. 4

  BENEDICT, DIANNE

  Radio. Red Rock Review, no. 32

  BERGMAN, MEGAN MAYHEW

  Saving Butterfly McQueen. Ecotone, no. 15

  BOYLE, T. C.

  Slate Mountain. Kenyon Review, vol. 35, no. 4

  BRADFORD, ARTHUR

  Turtleface. Tin House, vol. 15, no. 1

  BRAUNSTEIN, SARAH

  Marjorie Lemke. The New Yorker, April 1

  BROOKS, KIM

  A Man Escaped. Glimmer Train, no. 87

  BROWN, KAREN

  The Authoress. Kenyon Review, vol. 35, no. 4

&
nbsp; BUSIS, DAVID

  The Balcony. Meridian, no. 31

  BYNUM, SARAH SHUN-LIEN

  Tell Me My Name. Ploughshares, vol. 39, nos. 2 & 3

  CANTY, KEVIN

  Mayfly. The New Yorker, January 28

  COOK, DIANE

  The Not-Needed Forest. Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 17, no. 3

  COTUNGO, KATIE

  The Shallow End. Iowa Review, vol. 43, no. 3

  CUNNINGHAM, G. C.

  Pandemic. CutBank, no. 78

  DANIELS, J. D.

  Empathy. The Paris Review, no. 26

  EGGERS, DAVE

  The Man at the River. Granta, no. 124

  EVERETT, PERCIVAL

  Stonefly. Denver Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1

  FERRIS, JOSHUA

  The Fragments. The New Yorker, April 29

  FREEMAN, CASTLE, Jr.

  Protection. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 30, nos. 3 & 4

  FRIED, BARBARA

  The Half-Life of Nat Glickstein. Subtropics, no. 15

  FRIEDMAN, STEPHANIE

  Exposure. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 52, no. 1

  GALCHEN, RIVKA

  The Lost Order. The New Yorker, January 7

  GAY, ROXANE

  The Year I Learned Everything. Prairie Schooner, vol. 87, no. 1

  GILBERT, DAVID

  From a Farther Room. The New Yorker, July 22

  GLASS, JULIA

  Chairs in the Rafters. DailyLit

  GROFF, LAUREN

  Salvador. Tin House, vol. 15, no. 1

  HAIGH, JENNIFER

  What Remains. Five Points, vol. 15, nos. 1 & 2

  HAMMETT, DASHIELL

  An Inch and a Half of Glory. The New Yorker, June 10 & 17