Scan barcode
A review by maedo
The Best American Short Stories 2018 by Heidi Pitlor, Roxane Gay
3.0
When I saw that Roxane Gay was the editor for 2018, this became a must buy. I love short stories and trust her taste implicitly when it comes to deciding which books I'd like to read during the regular year. But I was pretty underwhelmed with this collection as representative of the best of 2018, if I'm being honest. I'm not sure I considered the fact that Gay's interest in pop culture/cultural criticism would result in a book that feels very "of the now" - by which I mean that in 20 years, stories about Twitter and the consequences of current social media gone viral are going to feel dated, and direct or indirect references to the election of Donald Trump will lose their potency. For this reason also, I was both intrigued and made apprehensive by Gay's introduction stating that all 20 of these stories were a form of creative political expression.
When it comes down to it, my feeling about this selection of stories is a matter of taste. I loved exactly three of the stories ("The Art of Losing" by Yoon Choi, "What Got Into Us" by Jacob Guajardo, and "The Brothers Brujo" by Matthew Lyons) because they dealt with the stated political concepts in a more universal, subtler way, I guess, than others and were also exceptionally constructed and well-written. "A Family" by Jamel Brinkley is also very good. I can see why most of the other stories were included, but I was also left wondering about the other 100 that were not selected. If the list at the end of the book is the entire selection pool, apparently those stories included works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lauren Groff, and T.C. Boyle, among others - and you know damn well those folks can write a story.
But this is Gay's curation, and I'm not surprised by it knowing what I know of her. Her desire for more diversity of perspectives in this series is an emphatic yes. I hope that trend is set for 2019 and beyond.
When it comes down to it, my feeling about this selection of stories is a matter of taste. I loved exactly three of the stories ("The Art of Losing" by Yoon Choi, "What Got Into Us" by Jacob Guajardo, and "The Brothers Brujo" by Matthew Lyons) because they dealt with the stated political concepts in a more universal, subtler way, I guess, than others and were also exceptionally constructed and well-written. "A Family" by Jamel Brinkley is also very good. I can see why most of the other stories were included, but I was also left wondering about the other 100 that were not selected. If the list at the end of the book is the entire selection pool, apparently those stories included works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lauren Groff, and T.C. Boyle, among others - and you know damn well those folks can write a story.
But this is Gay's curation, and I'm not surprised by it knowing what I know of her. Her desire for more diversity of perspectives in this series is an emphatic yes. I hope that trend is set for 2019 and beyond.