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melanie_reads's review
2.0
Underwhelming. The only thing I'll remember about this collection is that it appears writers are starting to use varied perspectives even in short stories. There's one about music that I enjoyed, but otherwise, forgettable.
escapegrace's review
3.0
Alice Sebold was this year's editor, and she chose some memorable selections, especially "Hurricanes Anonymous," which I can't get out of my head. Unfortunately, the pace of the collection staggers somewhat dramatically toward the end. I've never seen this happen before in a BASS collection, and I don't think Pitlor, Sebold, or the last 3-4 writers alphabetically are singularly responsible, but it was not a strong finish.
melissafirman's review
4.0
I especially like short stories for the opportunity to discover new (to me) authors, to sample a bit of their work, and this collection was no exception. While I didn’t like all 20 stories in The Best American Short Stories 2009, I liked many more than I disliked. For the purposes of this review, I’ll highlight nine of my favorites and several authors well worth watching.
Steve De Jarnatt’s “Rubiaux Rising,” about a drug-addicted veteran trapped in an attic during Hurricane Katrina, remains my favorite of this collection.
“In the attic Rubiaux watches light pour in – dancing dust around, slow and celestial like the Milky Way. His ears improve with a crack-jaw yawn. What’s that high-pitched rushing? Those low knocking sounds like bowling heard outside the alley. And that slow, mean rumble. What is coming this way?
A shock wave hits the house like a dozen Peterbilts crashing one after another into the frame. Beams groan, the whole foundation nearly quaking off its shoulder, nails and screws strain to hold their grip, eeking like mice as wood and metal mad grapple to hold their forced embrace.
A new light shines at the far window, painting the ceiling with golden ripples. Reflection. Water. Water is coming. Water is here.”
Hurricane Katrina also makes an appearance, along with Hurricane Rita 26 days later, in Adam Johnson’s tension-filled and sad story, “Hurricanes Anonymous,” which I also liked. (In the Contributors’ Notes, which I often enjoy just as much as the stories for the insights they provide, Johnson is an eerie Nostradamus. He says, “I lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana for three years …. A mixture of lush wetlands and petrochemical plants, the area was both a rare ecological treasure and an apocalypse in progress.”)
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynam was just named one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 writers, and her story “Yurt,” focusing on the dynamics and inner-lives of a group of middle school teachers (you’ll never think of your 6th grade teacher the same way again) was one of my favorites in this collection. It had me from the first sentence.
“A year ago, Ms. Duffy, the fifth-grade English and history teacher, had come very close to losing it, what with her homeroom being right next to the construction site for the new computer lab, and her attempts to excise the Aztecs from the curriculum being thwarted, and her ill-advised affair with Mr. Polidori coming to an end.”
Joseph Epstein’s story “Beyond the Pale” brings the reader into the lives of two writers, Arnold Berman and Zalman Belzner, and how their encounter leads to a complicated (and dark) triangulation with Mr. Belzner’s wife, Gerda. The details that Epstein gives us in bringing Gerda’s character to life are sharp and vivid, making her seem as real to the reader as if she jumped out from the page.
“A Shadow Table” is part of author Alice Fulton’s much-acclaimed debut novel, The Nightingales of Troy, which chronicles a family over the span of a century. It is ten linked stories, but “A Shadow Table,” about a family’s memorial to their daughter, more than ably stands on its own as it tells the story of a couple, their respective families’ losses and those among them.
Eleanor Henderson is an author I will be looking for more of, as I loved her story “The Farms.” Set in the early 1990s in a hardscrabble Florida apartment complex, the young narrator struggles to befriend others with similar heartache while encountering the reality of the stigma surrounding her brother’s death from AIDS, due to a blood transfusion.
“I was the only one who wanted to talk about Andrew. Krista, our old neighbors, my teachers, even my parents – everyone tripped past his name, hopped over it in coded silence. Listening to the sternness in Donatella’s voice, I wondered now if our new neighbors might be doing the same thing, if we were what they were talking about on their balconies in voices too low for me to hear, and if that was why they refused to meet my eyes before ducking into their cars.”
Perhaps it is because this one hits home for me, but “The Farms” is a powerful story and one of the very best in this collection.
“Sagittarius” will resonate with – and leave breathless – any parent who has known what it means to have a child who is different. In Greg Hrbek’s story, two parents struggle with the physical and emotional reality of having a young child who is, inexplicably, half human and half horse. From the doctors’ recommendations that will change the essence of who the child is to the impact that caring for their son has on their other child, Greg Hrbek takes the reader on enough of a roller-coaster ride to fill a novel.
Victoria Lancelotta is an author who is somewhat familiar to me (I bought her short story collection Here in the World: Thirteen Stories from … someplace, maybe a used bookstore or a yard sale.) Since it’s still on my TBR bookshelves, I hadn’t read any of her work until “The Anniversary Trip,” a story about Monica and Martin, visiting Paris with Martin’s mother following the death of his father. The anniversary becomes one filled with the realization of loss, which becomes all too apparent in the course of the trip.
I read Jill McCorkle’s The Cheer Leader a million years ago (it was published in 1984 and I remember checking it out at the library where I worked after school). While I don’t remember much about the book, I do remember that I really liked McCorkle’s writing. So when I saw that this collection had a Jill McCorkle story, I was thrilled to rediscover her writing. “Magic Words,” a contemporary story about a woman having an affair with a younger coworker and the intersection of lives young and old on her way to meet him, didn’t disappoint.
Loss, sadness, and uncertainty are predominant themes in this often dark collection of stories. I’m not sure if that is coincidental – a reflection of recent years and the economic gloom and doom environment – or whether this reflects the perspective and preferences of the collection’s Guest Editor Alice Sebold (no stranger to dark themes in literature herself!) As I said, not all the stories in The Best American Short Stories 2009 are winners, and they’re not always uplifting, but these nine selections are among the most finely crafted pieces of writing very much worth reading.
Steve De Jarnatt’s “Rubiaux Rising,” about a drug-addicted veteran trapped in an attic during Hurricane Katrina, remains my favorite of this collection.
“In the attic Rubiaux watches light pour in – dancing dust around, slow and celestial like the Milky Way. His ears improve with a crack-jaw yawn. What’s that high-pitched rushing? Those low knocking sounds like bowling heard outside the alley. And that slow, mean rumble. What is coming this way?
A shock wave hits the house like a dozen Peterbilts crashing one after another into the frame. Beams groan, the whole foundation nearly quaking off its shoulder, nails and screws strain to hold their grip, eeking like mice as wood and metal mad grapple to hold their forced embrace.
A new light shines at the far window, painting the ceiling with golden ripples. Reflection. Water. Water is coming. Water is here.”
Hurricane Katrina also makes an appearance, along with Hurricane Rita 26 days later, in Adam Johnson’s tension-filled and sad story, “Hurricanes Anonymous,” which I also liked. (In the Contributors’ Notes, which I often enjoy just as much as the stories for the insights they provide, Johnson is an eerie Nostradamus. He says, “I lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana for three years …. A mixture of lush wetlands and petrochemical plants, the area was both a rare ecological treasure and an apocalypse in progress.”)
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynam was just named one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 writers, and her story “Yurt,” focusing on the dynamics and inner-lives of a group of middle school teachers (you’ll never think of your 6th grade teacher the same way again) was one of my favorites in this collection. It had me from the first sentence.
“A year ago, Ms. Duffy, the fifth-grade English and history teacher, had come very close to losing it, what with her homeroom being right next to the construction site for the new computer lab, and her attempts to excise the Aztecs from the curriculum being thwarted, and her ill-advised affair with Mr. Polidori coming to an end.”
Joseph Epstein’s story “Beyond the Pale” brings the reader into the lives of two writers, Arnold Berman and Zalman Belzner, and how their encounter leads to a complicated (and dark) triangulation with Mr. Belzner’s wife, Gerda. The details that Epstein gives us in bringing Gerda’s character to life are sharp and vivid, making her seem as real to the reader as if she jumped out from the page.
“A Shadow Table” is part of author Alice Fulton’s much-acclaimed debut novel, The Nightingales of Troy, which chronicles a family over the span of a century. It is ten linked stories, but “A Shadow Table,” about a family’s memorial to their daughter, more than ably stands on its own as it tells the story of a couple, their respective families’ losses and those among them.
Eleanor Henderson is an author I will be looking for more of, as I loved her story “The Farms.” Set in the early 1990s in a hardscrabble Florida apartment complex, the young narrator struggles to befriend others with similar heartache while encountering the reality of the stigma surrounding her brother’s death from AIDS, due to a blood transfusion.
“I was the only one who wanted to talk about Andrew. Krista, our old neighbors, my teachers, even my parents – everyone tripped past his name, hopped over it in coded silence. Listening to the sternness in Donatella’s voice, I wondered now if our new neighbors might be doing the same thing, if we were what they were talking about on their balconies in voices too low for me to hear, and if that was why they refused to meet my eyes before ducking into their cars.”
Perhaps it is because this one hits home for me, but “The Farms” is a powerful story and one of the very best in this collection.
“Sagittarius” will resonate with – and leave breathless – any parent who has known what it means to have a child who is different. In Greg Hrbek’s story, two parents struggle with the physical and emotional reality of having a young child who is, inexplicably, half human and half horse. From the doctors’ recommendations that will change the essence of who the child is to the impact that caring for their son has on their other child, Greg Hrbek takes the reader on enough of a roller-coaster ride to fill a novel.
Victoria Lancelotta is an author who is somewhat familiar to me (I bought her short story collection Here in the World: Thirteen Stories from … someplace, maybe a used bookstore or a yard sale.) Since it’s still on my TBR bookshelves, I hadn’t read any of her work until “The Anniversary Trip,” a story about Monica and Martin, visiting Paris with Martin’s mother following the death of his father. The anniversary becomes one filled with the realization of loss, which becomes all too apparent in the course of the trip.
I read Jill McCorkle’s The Cheer Leader a million years ago (it was published in 1984 and I remember checking it out at the library where I worked after school). While I don’t remember much about the book, I do remember that I really liked McCorkle’s writing. So when I saw that this collection had a Jill McCorkle story, I was thrilled to rediscover her writing. “Magic Words,” a contemporary story about a woman having an affair with a younger coworker and the intersection of lives young and old on her way to meet him, didn’t disappoint.
Loss, sadness, and uncertainty are predominant themes in this often dark collection of stories. I’m not sure if that is coincidental – a reflection of recent years and the economic gloom and doom environment – or whether this reflects the perspective and preferences of the collection’s Guest Editor Alice Sebold (no stranger to dark themes in literature herself!) As I said, not all the stories in The Best American Short Stories 2009 are winners, and they’re not always uplifting, but these nine selections are among the most finely crafted pieces of writing very much worth reading.
alundeberg's review
3.0
This was an impulse buy (what? me have an impulse buy at a bookstore?! Never!) in order to find some short stories for my class. I've read six of the stories so far, and I'm not THAT impressed. Maybe I need someone to explain to me why they are the "Best". I will keep reading....
grumples's review
3.0
Probably the worst collection of stories since I started reading them back in the 1990's. Alice Sebold seems like a kind lady with bad taste (as was "The Lovely Bones"). The last story in the anthology was the best, and I would have liked to read more like that.
josephfinn's review
3.0
Not my favorite of the collections, but there's fine work here from Joseph Epstein and Yiyun Li especially.
kawai's review
3.0
It feels a bit more rangy than some of the previous collections, and many of the stories were more memorable, which isn't always the case with these anthologies, at least for me. But you're always going to get a mixed bag with the 'Best American', so a reader's mileage will vary. Every year some subset of famously anthologized authors are included in this collection, and more often than not I'm left scratching my head at the reasons behind their selection; the 2009 edition seemed more free of that, at least for me as a reader.
Thus I found it better than many other years of this series, although I'm not sure I'd mark it among the best (just for comparison purposes for people familiar with this series, the 2007 edition remains one of my favorite).
Thus I found it better than many other years of this series, although I'm not sure I'd mark it among the best (just for comparison purposes for people familiar with this series, the 2007 edition remains one of my favorite).
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