The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  ■ Over a period of three years, I traveled to Cuba about a dozen times to do research for a novel. During that time, I learned about the Campoamor theater, so abandoned that somehow the entire city had forgotten where it was. A Cuban friend and I searched every map and asked around yet nobody could tell us exactly where it was. After about a week, we mentioned it to another friend’s mother, well into her seventies, who told us to look just behind the Capitolio building, where the Campoamor ruins were hidden in plain sight. I wanted to write a story that reflected the ambiguous loyalties I observed in so many young people in Cuba, the ways that patriotism and survival are often in direct conflict, the negotiation of public and private life, and respective hidden desires. A lot of this story comes from things I saw, people I knew, and gossip I heard. I wrote it to remind myself of that particular time at the end of 2014, when there was a blend of cautious hope and skepticism that change might come to the island after decades of suffocating stillness. I’m Colombian-American, not Cuban, and knew I was approaching this as an outsider, so to displace my sensibility even further, I decided to try it from a male perspective, which was also something new for me.

  Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2010. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

  ■ The first thread of this story came from hearing a sermon on Noah’s Ark. It’s rare for me to be in a church as an adult, and it had been years since I thought about Noah. Even set in a joyful sermon, the story seemed to me profoundly tragic. When I was very small, one of my favorite books to be read at bedtime was an illustrated retelling of the Noah’s Ark story. I do not know whether it was the story itself, or the idea of a boat full of animals, or the theatrics with which my parents would oblige me when I demanded they read, again and again, my favorite page, which read in its entirety “Hmm, said Noah.” How, I wondered, had this story been so comforting to me as a child? How had I missed the weight of all that loss?

  “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” started there for me, with the idea of putting a character in a similar state of discomfort. I meant to write the first few pages and see where they got me, but I was in the middle of a cross-country move and a family emergency and a novel, and the story hovered at idea for months. Eventually I stumbled into a good writing space and had one of those magical writing days when things just work; I drafted the first half of the story and thought I’d finish the rest of the draft over the semester break. The semester break came; I lost the keys to the writing space, and my sense of the story, and some other things that made writing feel like a distant priority. I’d nudge the story every few months, but if it moved at all it moved slowly and aimlessly. Dori became more and more interesting to me, but to what end I couldn’t say. I began to superstitiously believe that the story had vanished with my access to the place where I’d started writing it.

  When the story finally cracked open for me, more than a year after I’d started it, it was because I got that it had never been about a wedding or how anyone felt about the groom. The real loneliness of the story had been underneath the opening bit all along, in what it means to understand that every triumphant story of the things we survive is also the story of the losses haunting it.

  Mary Gordon is the author of eight novels, two collections of novellas, two collections of short stories, two memoirs, two collections of essays, a writer’s interpretation of the Gospels, and a biography of Joan of Arc. She has been awarded the Story Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City. Her latest novel, There Your Heart Lies, was published in May by Pantheon.

  ■ I attended a lecture by my colleague at Barnard on the idea of Ugliness in the Renaissance. I thought: “what a terrible word ugly is.” Soon afterward, I bought something beautiful in a store full of beautiful things, owned by a woman who I could not but think of as “ugly.” The juxtaposition was the source of the story.

  Lauren Groff is the author of four books: The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Prize, and which won the American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Book Award. This is her fifth story in The Best American Short Stories anthology. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two sons.

  ■ This story came from two places. The first was my friend’s sighting of a Florida panther far to the north of where panthers supposedly roam, at his camp way out in the scrub where my husband and all of his friends often take their children camping. The panther haunted me for months, but the story didn’t come together until spring break at the beach last year, when my husband had to go back to work in Gainesville, leaving me stranded without a car and with our two small boys. We weren’t far from humanity: I could hear the neighbors grilling out, and could see the pickups driving up the beach (on a sea turtle nesting habitat! Humans are egregious). But when the boys went to bed, I started spinning out about the worst possible thing that could happen now that I was alone with the boys. I worked myself into sleeplessness, and the first draft came before dawn.

  Amy Hempel’s The Collected Stories won the Ambassador Book Award for Best Fiction of the Year, and was one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year in 2006. She has won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award, and received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the United States Artists, and is a founding board member of the Deja Foundation, a nonprofit rescue organization for dogs (www.dejafoundation.org).

  ■ Being haunted is the way many of my stories begin. And nothing has haunted me more than the object at the center of “The Chicane,” the tape in a vault in another country. I learned about it before I had begun writing. I began the story that is powered by it more than thirty years ago. I have been thinking about it for that long. I knew it needed to be framed, but I had only one incident, not the two required. No story has taken this long for me to write. Because a part of it is true, and because of the person who inspired it, I felt a particular weight of responsibility to get it right.

  Noy Holland’s I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories was published by Counterpoint in January 2017. Her debut novel, Bird (Counterpoint), appeared in 2015, to great critical acclaim. Holland’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, The Believer, Noon, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts. www.noyholland.com

  ■ I wrote all but the first sentence of “Tally” during a residency at the MacDowell Colony last September. I’d been carrying the first sentence, and the notion behind it—that we are sometimes driven into the mouth of what we most fear—since my days tending bar in Montana. Cowboy bar, hoarfrost, not much on the jukebox. I had a bird dog and a tiny cheap apartment.

  Sonya Larson’s fiction and essays have appeared in American Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Poets & Writers, the Writer’s Chronicle, Audible.com, West Branch, Salamander, Red Mountain Review, Del Sol Review, and others. She has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and more. She is studying fiction in the MFA Prog
ram for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and is writing a novel about Chinese immigrants living in the swamps of 1930s Mississippi. Sonya lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works at GrubStreet, an independent creative writing center in Boston.

  ■ A few years ago, I found myself suddenly single, and feeling like a fuckup in most areas of my life.

  I tried to date again. But I started hearing more comments than usual—in bars, in texts, in bed—about my race. “I can’t wait to meet you,” said one guy. “Half-Asians are the holy grail.” Said another, who was white, “I like you, but if we had kids, they’d totally be watered down.” I felt confused and a little enraged, watching people use my race to evaluate our potential.

  I complained to my friends, who laughed and commiserated. “This is why I only date people of color,” a Bengali friend said over breakfast. “So that I don’t have to explain.” “Me too,” another nodded. “But I’d rather not date another Korean. I already bring that to the table.” I blinked into my eggs, feeling weird all over again. Their predilections made sense, but unsettled me too.

  It occurred to me that the dating world may be one of the last remaining realms in which people openly and regularly express racial preference. Sites like OkCupid and Match invite this, and have revealed disturbing trends (most racial groups, as of this writing, pursue white men and Asian women; few pursue Asian men and black women).

  We tend to think of attraction as a deeply personal force—something mysterious, “biological,” and otherwise out of our control. But even this raw sensation can be shaped by external forces we don’t realize. Forces of history, of stereotyping, and even public policy.

  Of course, we don’t exactly contemplate this stuff as we’re sipping beer at a bar and catching someone’s gaze. Does he intrigue me? we ask ourselves. Do I think about her when she’s gone? Following our gut here seems obvious and unavoidable. But what if our gut contains some racial bias?

  So I tried to write a story that houses these ideas, and lets them resonate like a bell tower around a bell. And I tried to embrace my fuckuppery, in both context and form. It may seem like a simple dating story, but for me its consequences are much larger. What’s at stake for Chuntao—and for all of us—is nothing less than who we make available to ourselves to love.

  Fiona Maazel is the author of three novels: Last Last Chance (2008); Woke Up Lonely (2013); and A Little More Human (2017). Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  ■ Parents spend a lot of time talking about the detrimental influence of social media on their kids. But one thing I noticed when I became a parent was how alarmingly addictive and questionably helpful social media became for me. Suddenly I was a part of a community whose only shared interest was parenting, but whose hold on me was powerful. I’d post questions about my daughter’s well-being—she’s snoring, is that okay??—and wait, with a mixture of anxiety and delight, for all the reassurance to pour in. Not just that snoring was okay, but that I was okay. And not just okay, but great. Because one thing social media is skilled at is tearing you down or building you up.

  Even so, I was incredibly uncomfortable with all this. And then uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. Is camaraderie necessarily fake simply because you don’t know the people with whom you’re exchanging intimacies? Does publicizing personal details about your life signal the end of real friendship, this being premised on the idea that friendship is about a communing of private selves? What does this mean for people who routinely share and consume each other’s secrets? And who gets hurt as a result?

  Enter “Let’s Go to the Videotape.” I wanted to find a framework for thinking through how all this stuff might play out in the life of someone who is hobbled by grief and unsure of how to work through it for the benefit of his son. I wanted to develop a good man who’s faced with too many options, who is desperate for help and community, and who basically exploits his son to get it. Though of course he doesn’t know as much. He’s just muddling along as best he can. Just like the rest of us, I figure.

  Kyle McCarthy’s work has appeared in Southwest Review, American Short Fiction, Harvard Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  ■ I work as a private tutor in Manhattan, where the displays of wealth and naked ambition continually astonish me. Once after listening to a particularly outrageous tale, my father jokingly suggested I write a Nanny Diaries for the tutoring world. For a few weeks I played with this idea, imagining a beleaguered narrator beset by coddled children.

  At about the same time I had the great pleasure of reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. One early March evening, walking home from the park, I heard my narrator unspooling a Dyeresque rant, saying things like something was in fact wrong with today’s females. Probably I was sort of twitching and talking to myself, but I didn’t care: I just wanted to follow that voice.

  So I began to imagine the person witnessing all this wealth as a particular someone. I began to see her girlhood, and her relationship to sex, beauty, and ambition, as something odd, as culturally determined as the milieu in which she found herself.

  It’s strange. Like my students, I’m a millennial—though just barely. Sometimes the young women I teach seem like a new species, and sometimes their desire to be perfect, brilliant, and beautiful feels achingly familiar. And sometimes, simply, their inner lives are mysteries. So I suppose “Ancient Rome” came from a place of wondering, too.

  Eric Puchner is the author of the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two collections of stories, Music Through the Floor and Last Day on Earth. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including GQ, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Short Stories 2012. He has received an NEA fellowship, a California Book Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A professor at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.

  ■ Most of my short stories aren’t particularly autobiographical, at least in the conventional sense, but this one is based on something that really happened: my father, chasing some kind of California dream, moved us out to suburban LA when I was twelve and ended up losing all of his money in the savings and loan crisis in the eighties. (More than all of his money, actually—he went $2 million into debt.) Soon afterward, he moved out of the house and got involved with a much younger woman. Among the casualties of his disappearance from our life were his two hunting dogs, whom he left cooped up in a pen in our backyard. My mother, whose only experience with hunting was cleaning and cooking the smelly birds my dad used to bring home, asked him many times to come get the dogs, two German shorthaired pointers she didn’t know how to care for. But he never did. Finally, after months of pleading, she loaded the dogs into her car and took them to the pound to get put down. I only found out about this years afterward, when my mother told me the truth about where the pointers had gone. She said that it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. Later, I began to imagine what it might be like for a boy, one who tragically idolizes his father, to accompany his mother on such a trip. Despite having some obvious similarities, the parents in “Last Day on Earth” aren’t my real parents, and like everything else in the plot—the trip to the beach, the maligned girlfriend, the father’s dumpy apartment—they’re largely made up. For a long time I wrote stories wishing that my mother wouldn’t read them, but this is a story I wish with all my heart she could read. In any case, I wrote it for her.

  Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House Flash Fridays, the New Quarterly, and Malahat Review. Her musical collaborations include an opera libretto for Erato Ensemble, texts for Vanco
uver International Song Institute’s Art Song Lab, and a script for City Opera Vancouver. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers (University of Texas–Austin). “Novostroïka” is part of a linked story collection in progress.

  ■ “Without papers, you’re a bug,” wrote the Soviet poet and lyricist Vasily Lebedev-Kumach in “Bureaucrat’s Song.” The words morphed into an expression still used in the former Eastern Bloc: “Without papers, you’re a turd.” Without an internal passport, propiska (residence permit), and the myriad other documents required of a Soviet citizen, your very personhood was held in question.

  “Novostroïka” came out of a conversation with my parents. They recounted how our panel building in Brovary, Ukraine, hadn’t made it into the city’s registry. None of the municipal services recognized the address. If an entire building is “without papers,” what happens to the people living inside it? If you are repeatedly told that something does not exist, when do you start believing it?

  Jim Shepard has written seven novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and a Story Prize winner, and most recently The World to Come. He’s also won the Library of Congress / Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College.