STEVEN MILLHAUSER is the author of twelve works of fiction, most recently We Others: New and Selected Stories (2011). His stories have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, and other publications. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Connecticut, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
▪ For a long while I wanted to write a story about a phantom woman. It never came to fruition, for reasons I can only guess at. One day, unexpectedly, a different kind of phantom story appeared to me and dared me to write it. The story "Phantoms" is the result of that dare.
RICARDO NUILA is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, where he works as a primary-care doctor, a hospitalist, and an educator. His first published story appeared in the Indiana Review and was listed as "notable" in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010.
▪ After this story was published, some colleagues, friends, my dad, asked me, "The main character's name is Ricky and he's a doctor: is this autobiographical?" The most autobiographical aspect of this story is that I concussed myself while playing Wiffle ball. I had come off a difficult call where I'd spent the night dealing with a septic patient. I got home and drove immediately to my friend's bachelor party and joined in a game of Wiffle ball. I played first base. Someone hit what amounted to a bunt, the pitcher fielded it, tossed it my way, and I caught it, only my head was in the path of the runner. I didn't lose consciousness.
I played one inning disoriented before subbing myself out. My friend came to check on me and I told him we needed to rule out a cerebral hemorrhage. I started to describe the anatomy: Monro-Kellie doctrine, subdural versus epidural hematoma, middle meningeal artery, etc. I had my friend examine my eyes for a blown pupil. This fazed him enough to drive me to a hospital, where a good neurological exam and an unnecessary CAT scan were performed, showing all was well. As I waited in the ER for discharge, a naked lady with scratches on her back came in. She was obviously drunk; it looked like she'd been jumping into a lake and had fallen on the rocks. The triage nurse asked her what happened and she said, "Dog bites," which I doubted very much.
JOYCE CAROL OATES, 2010 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the author most recently of A Widow's Story and Give Me Your Heart. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the 2010 Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement of the National Book Critics Circle. Since 1978 she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a member of the faculty of Princeton University.
▪ In February 2008 a call came for me late at night: my husband, Raymond Smith, was critically ill and I must come to the hospital at once. But when I arrived, my husband had died just minutes before. I was allowed to stay with him for a while ... But next morning when friends took me to the funeral home to which his body had been delivered, and the funeral director said that the body had to be "identified," I was suddenly not able to move—I could not bring myself to see my dead husband a second time. There was a kind of collapse in my brain—when I realized what I had done, or had failed to do, we were already leaving the funeral home and it was too late. (My friends had identified my husband in my place.) After that I was haunted by the specter of my husband "unidentified"—"unacknowledged."
Some months later, "ID" was written in a burst of emotion—in its original form it is much longer, and we know much more, perhaps more than we need to know, about the intimacy and the anxiety between the mother and the daughter. The story is one in which a crucial ID is not made—and so the daughter's ID (her identity) will forever be askew. There has been a series of unsolved murders of solitary women in Atlantic City, New Jersey—the ideal setting for such tragedy.
RICHARD POWERS is the author of ten novels. His most recent, Generosity, is a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
▪ I wrote "To the Measures Fall" as my contribution for a course I taught at Stanford in early 2010. I asked a small group of spectacular students to write a work that in some way blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. They all put themselves on the line with their creations, so I figured I should as well.
JESS ROW is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, in which "The Call of Blood" appears. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, and many other journals and has been selected for two previous volumes of The Best American Short Stories (in 2001 and 2003). He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and two Pushcart Prizes, and in 2007 he was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and Threepenny Review. He teaches at the College of New Jersey and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His website is jessrow.com.
▪ In his novel G., John Berger writes, "One minute of life is passing by. Paint it as it is." I don't think I've ever written a story as much in that spirit—wanting to capture the multilayered quality, the simultaneity, of everyday experience—as "The Call of Blood." In a sense, you could say it's a story about how New Yorkers returned to daily life after September 11—to the ordinary enervating flux and unhappiness of getting through the day, as a kind of escape from the cataclysmic grief that followed the event itself.
I take it for granted that for most New Yorkers, and indeed for many human beings on the planet today, at least some of our daily unhappiness arises from living in a world of bizarre, uncomfortable juxtapositions—as Hyunjee puts it, "Spring rolls and matzoh balls. Filipinos doing your nails and Koreans doing your laundry and Guatemalans bringing your Chinese food and Hasids handing you pamphlets every time you come out of the subway." People who are multiracial by birth, like Kevin, live with these juxtapositions in the most intense, intimate way, of course, but so do those of us who are part of multiracial, multiethnic families. And so do many others, simply by virtue of being observant and alive. The master narratives of late capitalist culture—that in a global economy a rising tide lifts all boats, or that fundamentalism thrives only in closed societies—haven't fared terribly well in the early twenty-first century, yet no other narratives have replaced them. We're told that diversity is good and exclusion is bad, but we know (whether we want to admit it or not) that those notions are really just a smokescreen for a socioeconomic order that reinforces and exploits ethnic tensions all the way up and down the ladder. It's a kind of dissonance that at times verges on collective schizophrenia.
In her book The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng writes that the ideal of ethnic diversity—the metaphor of the salad bowl, of having "a little bit of everything"—is a kind of "pathological euphoria." Hyunjee's attitude could be called the hangover that sets in after pathological euphoria has ceased. Her exhaustion and disgust are misplaced, but very real. And so, to me, is her courage (and Kevin's courage) in taking up a love affair that violates the social order of their world. "What would it mean to reside within inassimilable difference and incommensurability," Cheng asks, "to experience one's ontology as constantly at odds with the available cultural dressing?" Superficially we might say this experience of being "at odds" applies only to members of minority groups, but in the twenty-first century, who is not, to some context, a member of a minority? Who, in the twenty-first century, has not experienced some sense of dispossession, homelessness, alienation, self-estrangement? That's the common bond that unites Kevin and Hyunjee, I think, and in a different world—a better world—could unite all the rest of us.
GEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of three short story collections: Civil-WarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. A 2006 MacArthur Fellow, he teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
▪ I don't remember much about the origins of "Escape from Spiderhead" except writing the first half-page or so after a long day of working on something else. I was always interested in the idea that who we are seems to have an awful lot to do with just simple chemistry, much as w
e like to think otherwise. So a flu or, per Dickens, "a bit of undigested beef" changes the world, as will a piece of good news or an hour of prayer.
MARK SLOUKA'S books, which have been translated into eighteen languages, include Lost Lake (stories), the novels God's Fool and The Visible World, and two works of nonfiction, War of the Worlds, a cultural critique of technological society, and, most recently, Essays from the Nick of Time. His stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Agni, and The Paris Review, among other publications, as well as in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. A contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, he lives with his family in Brewster, New York.
▪ To write "The Hare's Mask" I had to warm the actual event, knead and stretch it until it became malleable to the imagination. The basic material is historical fact: my father's family sheltered a Jewish refugee in a rabbit hutch during the war; as a boy my father had to kill rabbits for dinner. After that, the picture begins to blur and shape itself to other needs. I'm the trout fisherman, not my father; though there's a picture of my father's family on the mantelpiece, his parents and sister survived the war by some years; I never had a sister or a rabbit, while my son, now grown, had both. Who knows where these things begin, really? I suppose, looking at the picture on the mantel, recalling the old stories, listening to our daughter's rabbit thumping in the dark, I sensed a story about history's losses, time's compensations, and a child's ability to misread the world. To get at it, I had to mix three generations. It was easy enough; in my heart, they were already blurred.
Other Distinguished Stories of 2010
ADRIAN, CHRIS
The Warm Fuzzies. The New Yorker, September 27.
AHUJA, AKSHAY
The Gates. Crab Orchard Review, no. 77.
ALARCON, DANIEL
Second Lives. The New Yorker, August 16 & 23.
ALLIO, KIRSTIN
Green. New England Review, vol. 31, no. 3.
ANTOPOL, MOLLY
The Quietest Man. One Story, no. 132.
BAHR, DAVID
Can You Believe My Luck? Prairie Schooner, vol. 83, no. 4.
BARTON, MARLIN
Midnight Shift. Louisiana Literature, vol. 26, no. 2.
BATKIE, SARA
Cleavage. Gulf Coast, vol. 23, issue 1.
BAXTER, CHARLES
Mr. Scary. Ploughshares, vol. 36, nos. 2 & 3.
The Winner. Tin House, vol. 12, no. 1.
BEATTIE, ANN
Playing to the Bear. Atlantic Fiction for Kindle.
BELL, MADISON SMARTT
Prey. Atlantic Fiction for Kindle.
BEZMOZGIS, DAVID
The Train of Their Departure. The New Yorker, August 9.
BOGGS, BELLE
Imperial Chrysanthemum. The Paris Review, no. 192.
BOYLE, T. C.
The Silence. The Atlantic, August.
BROOKS, KIM
A Difficult Daughter. Glimmer Train, issue 75.
BROWN, CARRIE
Bomb. Glimmer Train, issue 77.
BYNUM, SARAH SHUN-LIEN
The Erkling. The New Yorker, July 5.
CAMERON, PETER
Hearsay. The Yale Review, vol. 98, no. 2.
CANTY, KEVIN
Spring Recital. Northwest Review, vol. 48, no. 1.
CHAON, DAN
To Psychic Underworld. Tin House, vol. 12, no. 2.
CHASE, KATIE
The Sea That Leads to All Seas. Prairie Schooner, vol. 84, no. 4.
COOPER, RAND RICHARDS
Labyrinth. Commonweal, May 21.
COZZA, MARTIN
Pennsylvania Polka. Colorado Review, vol. 37, no. 2.
DELILLO, DON
Hammer and Sickle. Harper's Magazine, December.
DÍAZ, JUNOT
The Pura Principle. The New Yorker, March 22.
DOCTOROW, E. L.
Edgemont Drive. The New Yorker, April 26.
DOWNS, MICHAEL
History Class. The Kenyon Review, vol. 33, no. 1.
EUGENIDES, JEFFREY
Extreme Solitude. The New Yorker, June 7.
FERRIS, JOSHUA
The Pilot. The New Yorker, June 14 & 21.
FLANAGAN, ERIN
Dog People. Colorado Review, vol. 37, no. 1.
FOER, JONATHAN SAFRAN
Here We Aren't, So Quickly. The New Yorker, June 14 & 21.
FOUNTAIN, BEN
Things You Do with Your Feet. The Iowa Review, vol. 40, no. 1.
FRUCHT, ABBY
Tamarinds. New Letters, vol. 77, no. 1.
GILB, DAGOBERTO
Uncle Rock. The New Yorker, May 10.
GILLISON, SAMANTHA
The Fall of the Bevelacquas of Boerum Hill. Epiphany, Spring/Summer 2010.
GOLDBERG, MYLA
That'll Be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents Please. Harper's Magazine, March.
GORDON, MARY
Lydia's Violin. Fiction, no. 56.
GORDON, PETER
Swaying Buildings. The Antioch Review, vol. 68, no. 2.
GOUGH, THOMAS
The Evening's Peace. New England Review, vol. 30, no. 4.
GREENFELD, KARL TARO
Mickey Mouse. Santa Monica Review, vol. 22, no. 2.
HAIGH, JENNIFER
Beast and Bird. Atlantic Fiction for Kindle.
HARVOR, ELISABETH
After We Had Been Married for Seven Years. JoylandMagazine.com.
HEMPEL, AMY
Greed. Ploughshares, vol. 36, no. 1.
HEULER, KAREN
The Great Spin. Confrontation, no. 107.
HILL, INGRID
The Kiss of Sitting Bull. Image, no. 67.
HOLLADAY, CARY
Two Worlds. The Southern Review, vol. 46, no. 3.
HOOD, MARY
Witnessing. The Georgia Review, vol. 64, no. 2.
HORROCKS, CAITLIN
The Lion Gate. West Branch, no. 66.
HWANG, FRANCES
Blue Roses. The New Yorker, November 1.
JODZIO, JOHN
The Wedding Party. Tampa Review, no. 40.
KOHLER, SHEILA
Musical Chairs. Boulevard, vol. 25, nos. 2 & 3.
KRUSE, MEGAN
Dollywood. Witness, vol. 23.
LEEBRON, FRED G.
Out Cold. Tin House, vol. 11, no. 4.
LENNON, J. ROBERT
Hibachi. Electric Literature, no. 5.
LI, YIYUN
The Science of Flight. The New Yorker, August 30.
LOORY, BEN
The TV. The New Yorker, April 12.
LORDAN, BETH
A Useful Story. New England Review, vol. 31, no. 1.
MASON, ZACHARY
The Duel. Tin House, vol. 12, no. 2.
MCGARRY, JEAN
A Full House. Boulevard, vol. 26, nos. 1 & 2.
MEANS, DAVID
The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934. The New Yorker, October 25.
The Junction. Ecotone, Spring 2010.
MENGESTU, DINAW
An Honest Exit. The New Yorker, July.
MILLET, LYDIA
Snow White, Rose Red. Tin House, vol. 11, no. 4.
MILLHAUSER, STEVEN
The White Glove. Tin House, vol. 11, no. 4.
MUNRO, ALICE
Corrie. The New Yorker, October 11.
NADLER, STUART
Visiting. The Atlantic, August.
NULL, MATTHEW NEILL
Something You Can't Live Without. Oxford American, issue 69.
OBREHT, TEA
Blue Water Djinn. The New Yorker, August 2.
OFFILL, JENNY
The Tunnel. Electric Literature, issue 5.
OFFUTT, CHRIS
The Blue Zoo. Granta 110.
PACKER, Z. Z.
Dayward. The New Yorker, June 14 & 21.
PATTERSON, MOLLY
Moving Fronts. Salamander, vol. 16, no. 1.
PEARLMAN, EDITH
Big Sister. Massac
husetts Review, vol. 51, no. 2.
PERCY, BENJAMIN
The Mud Man. The Southern Review, vol. 46, no. 1.
RASH, RON
The Woman at the Pond. The Southern Review, vol. 46, no. 4.
RAY, WHITNEY
Red Bird. The Iowa Review, vol. 40, no. 1.
ROBINSON, ROXANA
This Is America. Atlantic Fiction for Kindle.
RUSSELL, KAREN
The Dredgeman's Revelation. The New Yorker, July 26.
SANDOR, MARJORIE
Wolf. Agni, no. 71.
SAYRAFIEZADEH, SAID
Appetite. The New Yorker, March 1.
SCHATZ, KATE
Folsom, Survivor. JoylandMagazine.com.
SCHUTZ, GREG
Joyriders. Ploughshares, vol. 36, nos. 2 & 3.
SHEEHAN, MICHAEL
Jean Takes a Moment to Respond. Conjunctions, no. 54.
SHEPARD, JIM
Poland Is Watching. Atlantic Fiction for Kindle.
The Track of the Assassins. Zoetrope, vol. 14, no. 2.
SHIPSTEAD, MAGGIE
The Mariposa. JoylandMagazine.com.
Via Serenidad. Glimmer Train, issue 74.
SILVER, MARISA
The Leap. Ecotone, Spring 2010.
SIRISENA, HASANTHIKA
Third-Country National. Glimmer Train, issue 77.
SMITH, R. T.
The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Page 41