The Best American Short Stories 1999 (Paperback)

~ Katrina Kenison (Editor), (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A great story gets its hooks into you right from the start; you know you're in the hands of a good writer when the very first sentence transports you wholly into another world. "Mother preferred Zulu servants." "It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring." "Who would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn in its fury against the fools of Chelm?"

The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. "I'm not a bad guy," pleads the narrator of "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Díaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'") "Real Estate," by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating "Ha! Ha! Ha!" for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: "The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog."

Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," a kind of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, "The Hermit's Story"; and Tim Gautreax's "The Piano Tuner," about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--"help us live interesting lives." --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

Despite increasing competition, this annual collection remains the place to find the most compelling short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. Guest editor Tan comments that many of her 21 choices carry "an exotic flavor.... Either the narrators were ethnic or the settings outside America." Especially noteworthy are several stories with South Asian locations or characters. In Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" an Indian tour guide finds himself at first puzzled by an Indian-American family, and later drawn to its frustrated mother and wife. James Spencer's "The Robbers of Karnataka" follows Americans who visit South India seeking an enlightened swami, and encounter armed bandits instead. Other strong entries come from such stellar names as Alice Munro ("Save the Reaper"), Rick Bass ("The Hermit's Story") and Lorrie Moore ("Real Estate"). But much exciting work here emanates from young writers. The evocative "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," by Junot D!az, follows a troubled New York City Latino couple to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where "the entire history of late-20th-century automobiles swarm[s] across every flat stretch of ground, a cosmology of battered cars, battered motorcycles, battered trucks, and battered buses... " Nathan Englander combines Yiddish folktale and Nazi-era horror in "The Tumblers," as a group of Hasids performs a grotesque acrobatic act in the heart of Berlin. Hester Kaplan's "Live Life King-Sized" also merges comedy with mortality: the owner of a Caribbean resort must accommodate a guest who asks that he be allowed to die on the island. The selection draws on 17 journals, from the New Yorker to the Clackamas Literary Review; and many of the stories have published in such collections of the authors' work as For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Birds of America and Welding with Children. Such a high caliber of literary excellence speaks well for the state of short fiction. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 410 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company; First Thus edition (October 29, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039592684X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395926840
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #319,022 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amy's touch..., May 6, 2000

By	Dianne Foster "Di" (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

I am a big fan of the "Best American Short Stories" series, an annual collection compiled and published by the Houghton Mifflin Company because I can't get around to reading all those great stories in all those great magazines flooding the market. I've been behind for so long, I was glad when I recently discovered a collection entitled "Best American Short Stories of the Century" edited by John Updike -- a sort of best of the best.

Some years, I have found the annual anthology more appealing, and some years less so. "The Best American Short Stories, 1999" edited by Amy Tan is very entertaining and more memorable than the collections of the past few years. My acid test is this -- can I remember today the gist of a story I read last month? In other words, did it leave a lasting impression? Tan's selections are holding up pretty well. I won't soon forget 'The Hermit's Story', the first entry in her book. I discovered something very remarkable when I read it, but I can't share it because I don't want to ruin the story for you.

These anthologies reflect the taste of the guest editor, as well as the skill of the chosen writers, but why not? Katrina Kenison, the Series Editor, says there's a surfeit of great material, so why shouldn't the guest editor reflect her outlook with her selection.

I think Tan's stories show she is very interested in the 'minority' viewpoint. You might imagine this occurs because Amy Tan is a Chinese descent American, and maybe it does. However, when I use the term minority I mean interestingly idiosyncratic.

Odd and unusual people populate these stories, and odd things happen to them. Of course, if they didn't have unusual experiences we might not find the energy to finish the page. But oddity alone is not enought to sustain the reader. One has to experience a connection with the character. I came to care what happened to most of these oddballs.

Visualize Pam Houston's character, a young woman who says, " When I was four years old and with my parents in Palm Beach, Florida, I pulled a seven-hundred-pound cement urn off its pedestal and onto my legs crushing both femurs." Or, consider this excerpt from Melissa Hardy's tale, "'Once,' Mrs Flowers told George, 'she ate a whole pile of socks I was fixing to darn. Another time she ate a Bible'." I feel frustration, sorrow, and/or amusement when I read these words. The stories grip, they entertain, they amuse. The are some of America's best short stories.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A diverse collection of voices and stories, September 7, 2000

By A Customer

Amy Tan has done a good job selecting 1999's batch of stories for "Best American Short Stories"; I've read better volumes, but I've also read worse. My favorite story was Tim Gautreaux's "The Piano Tuner," a hilarious, unnerving tale about the advantages and disadvanages of "fine-tuning" another person's character through the use of drugs or other modern methods. The next-best story, in my opinion, was Chitra Divakaruni's delightful and wistful "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," another story about trying to change one's character in order to fit in with difficult surroundings, and the limits on one's ability to do so. Finally, my third-favorite selection was Rick Bass's "The Hermit's Story," a tale of rugged individualism and survival in a winter setting that ends with a wonderful image involving fire and a frozen lake, an image I won't spoil for you here.

This volume is certainly the most diverse edition of the series so far in terms of its authors' racial and cultural backgrounds--at least a third of the stories are by non-white authors or have non-white main characters. As Amy Tan notes, however, what matters more than racial or cultural diversity is diversity of voice and experience. I found more in common, for example, between "The Piano Tuner" and "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," in both stories' focus on the theme of changing one's character and learning to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings, than I did between "The Piano Tuner" and, say, Annie Proulx's more impressionistic "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" (another story about rural Americans); or between "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter" and Jhumpa Lahiri's ominous "The Interpreter of Maladies" (another story about Indian families). In any event, this year's edition provides plenty of diversity of both background and voice, and is a solid addition to the "Best American Short Stories" series.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Understated and dream-like, December 4, 1999

By	J. S. Sevakis (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have to admit, I really really loved this book. I don't get the time to read that often, and the short stories in here are exactly the kind that I like to lose myself in. Sure, some are a little bit slow-moving, but it's not a tedious slow, it's a Zen-slow. My favorites include Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter and The Piano Tuner. A great find, highly reccomended.