2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Book Review: New Stories from the South (2006 -- The Year's Best), April 16, 2007
This review is from: New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2006 (Paperback)
Book Review: New Stories from the South (2006 -- The Year's Best)
In the introduction to this collection of short stories, novelist Allan Gurganus (The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, Homeboy-On the Flood, and The Practical Heart) makes clear his admiration for the young writers, and for the region of the country that produced them, in spite of the disrespect often shown the region and anything it produces.
"The South has for many years been whispered about as the backwoods Sibling of America's regions," he writes, "That's gratitude for you!"
But Gurganus has a secret, or at least a belief that he doesn't think is willingly shared by the rest of the country. "We know things," he says. "We have seen so much. But somehow, in the age of factoids and e-mail, we, overlooked, remain in possession of a choir of cross-racial voices all dedicated to eloquent Telling at full blast."
Just reading Gurganus' introduction is a moving experience, a prideful one for a southerner like this reviewer. And there is the promise in Gurganus' prose that what will follow is indeed some of the year's best short story writing from the South. He definitely delivers. But, bear with me for a bit more of Gurganus:
`Stories only happen to people who can tell them,' one Confederate widow confided.
'Since Appomattox, a trillion other Southern pages have been committed --- also much revised, even perfected. And since that April, our region's prose has sung most everything except surrender.
'True, we lost once, big time.
'But our concession prize? The stories.
'Having got those in the settlement, we really are funnier and darker and shrewder --- bigger --- than the ones who still believe that they, at least, are smarter. We have been blessed with a language all our own; it encompasses those jazz-rich minority languages that make our region major. Race woes and that old rugged cross called Religion have left us as ornery as eloquent. We've been given bumper crops of younger hearts, just wising up, just coming into their new, truer versions of the ancient tale.
We have outlived the forgetters, my talkative brothers and sisters.
At last, we win and win and win. We have finally become what time will tell.'
And what a fine benediction Allan Gurganus gives this collection of short stories called, appropriately, New Stories from the South (2006 - The Year's Best). Gurganus served as the editor of the collection along with series editor Kathy Pories. The publication is the latest in a long line of distinguished books from the tiny, prolific and first-class Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Started on a shoe string and run determinedly with books and their lovers as the central focus, Algonquin has thrived, and thrived handsomely with a library of award-worthy books, a stable of highly talented writers, and the commitment, energy and resolve not to follow blindly the rather self-defeating and cynical approach being pioneered by their wealthier brothers and sisters in New York. With this release, Algonquin can again boast, as Gurganus says, "we win and win and win," with one major caveat, which I will get to shortly.
The New Stories From the South series was begun by Shannon Ravenel some twenty years ago. Ravenel somehow found the best of Southern writers and presented their works each year. Now, with guest editors like Gurganus, the series is so popular and well regarded that Ravenel (and Algonquin) must be fairly bursting with regional pride.
And the collection is a good one. Fresh, daring, bursting with an energy unlikely to be found in the literature of other regions of the country to the same degree that it seems to rise from Southern soil, the stories all seem to tell about new facets of life in the southern United States in voices that bolster Gurganus' claim to, and pride in, the "bumper crops of younger hearts, just wising up, just coming into their new, truer versions of the ancient tale." These stories are the serious short story lovers' short stories, in the best tradition of the more famous and skilled short story writers like O'Henry, Edgar Allan Poe or Richard Wright.
If there is any really serious flaw to the collection, it is rooted in the ancient and abiding ghost of Southern life, the cavalier dismissal or lack of notice for one of the regions most important story sources: its black citizens. There are tales here that talk about slavery or allude to its destructiveness, that talk about kindly and well intentioned black people who, contrary to an earlier period, are at least accorded an appropriate dignity in the hands of the writers.
But here is the caveat I mentioned earlier: The flaw in this collection is that Gurganus couldn't seem to find ANY black voices to tell their story in their own words, not through the filters of what white people might construct of black vocabulary, intonations and meanings. Allan Gurganus chose the stories on the quality of the stories themselves and without regard to the writer, according to Algonquin.
In 21st century America, it is nonetheless a real shock and a shame that in a collection of twenty stories, it appears that not one is from the pen of a black American writer. And while the ancient tale of the South is marvelous and always in need of being told, some of us have tired of hearing about it only through white people who sometimes can't seem to catch the real meanings that may emit from a culture they once reviled, brutalized, oppressed and finally dismissed. One can only hope that having become "what time will tell," as Gurganus puts it, doesn't mean that our world will begin to look like "Day of Absence" with a corresponding poverty --- of spirit, of humanity, of artistry - that necessarily follows in its wake, regardless of which ethnic group is "absent.".
The collection would have been incomparable had there been at least a nod to some of those "jazz-rich minority languages that make our region major." But hope springs eternal: Algonquin has announced that the 2007 collection will be edited by newly celebrated black author, Edward P. Jones, including --- presumably --- a more diverse collection of writers.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Something To Crow About, October 10, 2006
This review is from: New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2006 (Paperback)
In the beautiful cover artwork of NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH: THE YEAR'S BEST, 2006, Chanticleer is perched on a writing pen. He obviously has something to crow about as this is as fine a collection of stories as you will find anywhere. I was reminded again and again as I read each of them of why we read in the first place. These 20 stories entertain us, they tease us with language used in new ways, they often bridge the gap that separates us all, they give us new insights, they suprise us. One of the writers, William Harrison, says that "stories can sneak up on the reader." Wendell Berry's "Mike" fits that description, one of the two stories included about dogs. If you are not careful, the last sentence will make your eyes burn in spite of yourself.
These 20 stories are as different in subject matter-- building a house, handling snakes, attending a high school ball game, to name three-- as their writers; but they are often similar in their themes. Many of them are about serial failures in relationships but the characters do not lose hope of starting over. Of course they are often not far away from both race and religion.
My favorite story changes on any given day. Today it's Geoff Wyss' "Kids Make Their Own Houses" with the poignant but realistic definition of love after 40: "We were both over forty, and it was time to choose someone to cling to through the hunchback years, the drug-cocktail and tomato-garden years."
Allan Gurganus selected these 20 stories for this anthology. He also wrote a sometimes long-winded but nonetheless brilliant introduction-- after all he is the author of the huge novel, THE OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL-- reminding us of what Flannery O'Connor said about why Southern writers feature freaks so often in their writing, because we can still recognize them. Mr. Gurganus takes it one step further and says these freaks are often at family reunions. He also points out that the best writers of the 20th Century are from the South: besides Ms. O'Connor, he names Tennessee Williams, James Agee, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, "just for starters."
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