The first time I started reading New American Stories, which I'm pretty sure was more than a year ago, I got about halfway through before being distracted by one thing and another; when I came back to it I decided to start again from the beginning. Which means I've been reading this tome, on and off, for quite some while now, and also that I've read quite a lot of its stories more than once.
Actually, there's a sense in which that was always going to be true, regardless, because what's become clear while reading it is how much of a node the anthology is, planted indeed at the intersection of a lot of what's going on with American short stories today, as well as my own tastes. After all, I picked it up because, amongst its 32 entries, it includes stories by my two reigning favourite short story writers, Rebecca Lee ("Slatland", which isn't one of my favourites of hers but is possibly the most impressively weird thing in the remarkable Bobcat) and Rivka Galchen ("The Lost Order", which is one of my favourites, and maybe the most perfect story in the all round confounding American Innovations).
And, while working through it, I separately came across a couple of others which stunned me when I read them online, before later discovering them also tucked away in the back half of NAS: Rachel B Glaser's hypnotically brilliant and staggeringly unusual "Pee On Water" and Deb Olin Unferth's "Wait Till You See Me Dance", which works the short story magic of seeming to spin off-centre while pulsing forward the whole way through, and ending with an emotional burst that carries its own hard, unforgiving truth inside it.
Plus there was George Saunders's "Home", which I didn't think I liked that much the first time I read it, found had worked its way, from that odd opening line onwards ("Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window."), inside me by my second pass, and then totally bowled me over through repeated reads in Tenth of December.
I was already familiar with many of the other authors, to greater and lesser extents, in some cases from the way, way back (Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo), and in others more recently: Joy Williams, whose "The Country" in NAS is as powerfully metaphysical as any contemporary short story could be, Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories I've been discovering with huge enjoyment over the last few months, represented by the not-a-word-wasted "Men", Kelly Link, Donald Antrim.
Of course there were new discoveries, too; interestingly, the three that stand out are all laced with a dark, squalling humour: Sam Lipsyte's "This Appointment Occurs in the Past", Rebecca Curtis's "The Toast" and Charles Yu's "Standard Loneliness Package", which made me laugh out loud not once but twice on public transport with descriptions that are packed with an existential depth charge of emotion:
Actually, there's a sense in which that was always going to be true, regardless, because what's become clear while reading it is how much of a node the anthology is, planted indeed at the intersection of a lot of what's going on with American short stories today, as well as my own tastes. After all, I picked it up because, amongst its 32 entries, it includes stories by my two reigning favourite short story writers, Rebecca Lee ("Slatland", which isn't one of my favourites of hers but is possibly the most impressively weird thing in the remarkable Bobcat) and Rivka Galchen ("The Lost Order", which is one of my favourites, and maybe the most perfect story in the all round confounding American Innovations).
And, while working through it, I separately came across a couple of others which stunned me when I read them online, before later discovering them also tucked away in the back half of NAS: Rachel B Glaser's hypnotically brilliant and staggeringly unusual "Pee On Water" and Deb Olin Unferth's "Wait Till You See Me Dance", which works the short story magic of seeming to spin off-centre while pulsing forward the whole way through, and ending with an emotional burst that carries its own hard, unforgiving truth inside it.
Plus there was George Saunders's "Home", which I didn't think I liked that much the first time I read it, found had worked its way, from that odd opening line onwards ("Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window."), inside me by my second pass, and then totally bowled me over through repeated reads in Tenth of December.
I was already familiar with many of the other authors, to greater and lesser extents, in some cases from the way, way back (Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo), and in others more recently: Joy Williams, whose "The Country" in NAS is as powerfully metaphysical as any contemporary short story could be, Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories I've been discovering with huge enjoyment over the last few months, represented by the not-a-word-wasted "Men", Kelly Link, Donald Antrim.
Of course there were new discoveries, too; interestingly, the three that stand out are all laced with a dark, squalling humour: Sam Lipsyte's "This Appointment Occurs in the Past", Rebecca Curtis's "The Toast" and Charles Yu's "Standard Loneliness Package", which made me laugh out loud not once but twice on public transport with descriptions that are packed with an existential depth charge of emotion:
I am feeling that feeling. The one that these people get a lot, near the end of a funeral service. These sad and pretty people. It's a big feeling. Different operators have different ways to describe it. For me, it feels something like a huge boot. Huge, like it fills up the whole sky, the whole galaxy, all of space. Some kind of infinite foot. And it's stepping on me. The infinite foot is stepping on my chest.
The funeral ends, and the foot is still on me, and it is hard to breathe. People are getting into black town cars. I also appear to have a town car. I get in. The foot, the foot. So heavy. Here we go, yes, this is familiar, the foot, yes, the foot. It doesn't hurt, exactly. It's not what I would call comfortable, but it's not pain, either. More like pressure. Deepak, who used to be in the next cubicle, once told me that this feeling I call the infinite foot - to him it felt more like a knee - is actually the American experience of the Christian God.It's only now, typing that out, that I've made the obvious connection to Orwell's vision of the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever. It doesn't matter. Maybe it makes it better.
