The Best American Short Stories 1991 [Paperback]

Alice Adams (Editor), Katrina Kenison (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The first sentence of the first story in this collection--"We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights"--lures the reader with its promise of a strange and unfamiliar world. The selection, by Rick Bass, does not disappoint, taking us on a tour of "backwoods nightspots" where an aspiring fighter trains for a career in the big city. Story after story--there are 20 in all--matches Bass's opening gambit, with a dazzling mix of telling details and poignant character portraits. There are Charles D'Ambrosio Jr.'s 13-year-old protagonist who must escort his mother's drunken friend to her home; the woman in Siri Hustvedt's tale who enters a hospital because of a months-old migraine and whose neighbor, an old woman, one day climbs in bed with her and begins kissing her passionately; the sullen teenager, created by David Jauss, whose father is fired for embezzling, then hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Ashamed, the son blurts out to a friend that his father died of a brain tumor; years later, a father himself, the son reflects, "I had always loved my father, though behind his back, without letting him know it. And in a way, behind my back, too." Adams wrote Second Chances.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Like others in the series, this volume is doubly delightful, thanks to extended "Contributors' Notes" that include commentary from each author in addition to the usual (and often numbingly similar) biographical data. In her note, Kate Braverman opines that writing is like hunting--most days you come back with nothing more than cold toes and an aching heart, and then every once in a while you bag something sizable. All the stories collected here seem big: big in scope, big in achievement. A character in Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water" thinks about levels of maleness--friendly maleness, sexual maleness, violent maleness, and so on--and, in one way or another, each of these 20 stories plumbs the various levels of ordinary people's attitudes and experiences. Truly a bravura performance, this is for most libraries.
- David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; First Edition edition (November 11, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395544092
• ISBN-13: 978-0395544099
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,369,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elizabeth Graver is at work on a project titled Plants and Their Children, a novel set in a summer community on Buzzard's Bay from 1942 to 1999. She is the author of three novels: Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001); The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001), and Best American Essays (1998). Her story "The Mourning Door" was awarded the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares Magazine. The mother of two daughters, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Boston College.
For more information, visit http://Elizabethgraver.com/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Grab Bag of Great Stories!, February 3, 2010

By 

Anita Kelley "voracia" (Albuquerque, NM) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Short Stories 1991 (Paperback)

You may wonder why I am reviewing, in 2009, a book compiling these editors' choices for the best short stories published in 1991. The short answer is that I am very, very far behind. The long answer is that I used to read this series a lot, in high school and college (both of which were post-1991) but I stopped that habit, which I now find unfortunate. I've decided to continue reading as many short stories as I can, to improve my own writing of them, and because collections of short stories make good reading for me. I can bring the book with me wherever I go, whether to dentist appointments or on road trips, and read one story at a time. It's much easier to pick up where I left off than it is with a novel!

In the Forward to this book, Series Editor Katrina Kenison makes the following observation, which is in line with why I decided to start re-reading short story collections: "Alice Adams reveals in her introduction that reading a good story often provokes her to go and write one of her own. Perhaps we should all give thanks, then, for the inspiration writers draw from each other - one good story begets another."

There are many, many good stories in this book, some of which I found inspirational for my own writing and some in which I simply lost myself. My top three favorite reads, which I hope to go back to again and again, were the following:

1. Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.'s "The Point." In this story a man reminisces about helping his mom's friends home after parties thrown by his mother at their house. He has memories of very interesting characters, most of them sad alcoholics, yet he seems to have turned out just fine.

2. Charles Baxter's "The Disappeared." In this story a Swedish businessman visits Detroit and meets a religious-crazed American girl who temporarily steals his heart. The main character in the story, however, is truly the city of Detroit. It's amazing how Baxter captures the pulse of a dying city, and makes dreadfully accurate predictions regarding its fate.

3. Elizabeth Graver's "The Body Shop." In this story a man looks back on his adolescent years of helping his creative and entrepreneurial mother run her mannequin design business. It is touching and very realistic.

I also enjoyed Amy Bloom's "Love is Not a Pie," Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water," David Jauss' "Glossolalia," Francine Prose's "Dog Stories," and Leonard Michaels' "Viva La Tropicana," a very entertaining and far-fetched yet somehow believable story about a young man who gets caught up with the escapades of his uncle, a former Cuban revolutionist-turned-gangster.

There are stories by some other usual "giants" in this collection - Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, John Updike - but I didn't enjoy them as much as the others I've mentioned. I haven't read much from Munro but I usually like reading Oates and Updike. Both of their pieces in this collection, however, seemed wordy and cumbersome to me, and I couldn't pay much attention. Munro's story was the most interesting to me, and I also like parts of Updike's piece, and feel that perhaps if I read it when I had more time and patience, I would like it more. Perhaps it had something to do with it being the last story in the book!

At the end of it all, I'm glad I picked up this "old" book and I plan to read many more short story collections in the coming months. I love the variety as well as the convenience. It is so easy to escape into a short story, come back out of it, and then get lost in the next one!

To read more book reviews and other posts of interest to readers and writers, please visit my blog, Voracia: Goddess of Words.