A review by biolexicon
The Best American Short Stories 2005 by Katrina Kenison, Michael Chabon

3.0

So I've now read a bunch of these short story collections. And, after a while, all the stories begin to feel the same. I know that there's supposed to be no unifying aesthetic for our literary time, that we've now become a multitude of voices from different walks of life and that this excludes any consensus. But the stories all follow the same narrative arc. They're like a section taken from a novel. Drop the reader in, spend a long time piecing the character's emotional life and personality together, build up to a scene (often an event of daily life, like a dinner) that has far reaching emotional significance and cut it off, leaving the reader feeling the desired feeling and leaving the actual ending of the events ambiguous. I don't have any problem with that style, it just seems to be the only style featured. I thought reading a bunch of these with different editors would feature vastly different collections but that doesn't seem to be true. They all read the same after a while.