The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction

Contents

Preface
Joyce Carol Oates

The Toughest Indian in the World
Sherman Alexie

Lobster Night
Russell Banks

The Hermit's Story
Rick Bass

1-900
Richard Bausch

Poor Devil
Charles Baxter

Lavande
Ann Beattie

Off
Aimee Bender

Mercy
Pinckney Benedict

The Love of My Life
T.C. Boyle

The Identity Club
Richard Burgin

Son of the Wolfman
Michael Chabon

Night Women
Edwidge Danticat

Television
Lydia Davis

Aurora
Junot Díaz

A House on the Plains
E.L. Doctorow

Death of the Right Fielder
Stuart Dybek

The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor
Deborah Eisenberg

Disaster Stamps of Pluto
Louise Erdrich

Reunion
Richard Ford

Rêve Haitien
Ben Fountain

The Girl on the Plane
Mary Gaitskill

The Paperhanger
William Gay

City Visit
Adam Haslett

To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O'Hare
Amy Hempel

Emergency
Denis Johnson

Double Exposure
Greg Johnson

Old Boys, Old Girls
Edward P. Jones

Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine
Matthew Klam

Baboons
Sheila Kohler

Once in a Lifetime
Jhumpa Lahiri

Some Terpsichore
Elizabeth McCracken

Cowboy
Thomas McGuane

Sault Ste. Marie
David Means

Ranch Girl
Maile Meloy

The New Automaton Theater
Steven Millhauser

Paper Losses
Lorrie Moore

Stitches
Antonya Nelson

Landfill
Joyce Carol Oates

On the Rainy River
Tim O'Brien

The Escort
Chuck Palahniuk

People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water
Annie Proulx

The Red Bow
George Saunders

Leslie and Sam
Douglas Unger

The Brown Chest
John Updike

Incarnations of Burned Children
David Foster Wallace

Cinnamon Skin
Edmund White

Who Invented the Jump Shot
John Edgar Wideman

Bullet in the Brain
Tobias Wolff

Preface

"Art, a master once observed, is never theoretical"—So the unnamed narrator of Steven Millhauser's elegantly composed allegory of the artist's relationship to his art "The New Automaton Theater" tells us. It's a compelling irony of Millhauser's provocative story that it presents a theory of art—of mimesis—through its very specificity, and suggests the impossibility of explaining, paraphrasing, analyzing, and even comprehending art in terms other than itself: "Nothing short of attendance at the Neues Zaubertheater can convey the startling, disturbing quality of the new automatons."

So too with the forty-eight stories of this collection, of which nearly all were written and published in the twenty-first century and reflect something of the dazzling variety of the contemporary scene: styles, tones, subjects, settings, points of view (including, in our highly politicized era, differing and subtly contentious political perspectives). Of the forms of literature none is more supple, more flexible and open to aesthetic variation than the short story; its very brevity is an inspiration to the writer to experiment in ways that would be impractical—if not fatal—in the longer novel form. No literary form is more ideally suited to the challenge of storytelling through unique and idiosyncratic voices, in which "character" is revealed in the telling, swiftly and dramatically:

Earlier today, me and Cut drove down to South River and bought some more smoke. The regular pickup, enough to last us through the rest of the month. The Peruvian dude who hooks us up gave us a sampler of his superweed (Jewel luv it, he said) and on the way home, past the Hydrox factory, we could have sworn we smelled cookies baking right in the back seat.

—Junot Díaz, "Aurora"

I cringe from the heat of the night on my face. I feel as bare as open flesh. Tonight I am much older than the twenty-five years that I have lived. The night is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend upon it.

—Edwidge Danticat, "Night Women"

Next night, walking out where it happened, I found her little red bow. I brought it in, threw it down on the table, said: My God my God. Take a good look at it and also I'm looking at it, said Uncle Matt. And we won't ever forget it, am I right?

—George Saunders, "The Red Bow"

My first day as an escort, my first "date" had only one leg. He'd gone to a gay bathhouse, to get warm, he told me. Maybe for sex. And he'd fallen asleep in the steam room, too close to the heating element. He'd been unconscious for hours, until someone found him. Until the meat of his left thigh was completely and thoroughly cooked.

—Chuck Palahniuk, "Escort"

Such abrupt and edgy story openings are characteristic of our era, in which the tradition of the finely crafted short story in the mode of Henry James, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, and others has been complemented by a vernacular urgency that would seem to spring from nonliterary sources like the stage monologue or performance art. Certainly the more traditional story continues to be written, and very beautifully written, by contemporary writers as varied as John Updike, Russell Banks, Rick Bass, E. L. Doctorow, Thomas McGuane, and Deborah Eisenberg, among others in this volume; and there are ingeniously conceived stories in which a distinctly moral perspective prevails beneath virtuosity of form, as in Richard Bausch's "1-900" (a transcript of a lonely man's protracted phone call with a female sex-worker), Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" (the final, accelerating minutes of a man's life), and David Foster Wallace's "Incarnations of Burned Children" (a parents' nightmare, in miniature).

Ours is not a time of self-conscious literary experimentation, like the 1960s and 1970s, yet unsettling short fiction continues to be written, adhering more to recognizable forms such as romantic comedy (Aimee Bender's "Off"), stand-up comedy (Lydia Davis's "Television"), and the crime-mystery story (Louise Erdrich's "Disaster Stamps of Pluto" and David Means's "Sault Ste. Marie") than to elaborately extended novel-length fictions. The reader is likely to be provocatively disoriented by the matter-of-fact distortions of the real in such fabulist tales as Stuart Dybek's "Death of the Right Fielder," Richard Burgin's "The Identity Club," and Elizabeth McCracken's "Some Terpsichore," yet the ethical concerns of these stories are as crucial as those of more explicit "realistic" stories like those by Doug Unger, Pinckney Benedict, Michael Chabon, Sheila Kohler, and Ben Fountain. The perimeters of the real are not ostensibly challenged by such stories as Greg Johnson's "Double Exposure" and Richard Ford's "Reunion," but it is helpful to know who "Sylvia Plath" is to fully appreciate Johnson's story, as it is helpful to know John Cheever's short story "Reunion," with its similar setting in Grand Central Station, New York City, to fully appreciate Ford's artful variant. And there is the riddlesome mystery-crime-fable "The Paperhanger," by William Gay, a unique prose fiction that eludes all definition.

Through most of the twentieth century, the sexual frankness of such stories as Edmund White's "Cinnamon Skin." Mary Gatskill's "The Girl on the Plane," Antonya Nelsoll's "Stitches,"Adam Haslett's "City Visit," Annie Proulx's "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," and others in this collection would have distracted readers from the serious ethical questions the stories raise, as the ethnicity of Sherman Alexie's "The Toughest Indian in the World," Jhumpa Lahiri's "Once in a Lifetime," John Edgar Wideman's "Who Invented the Jump Shot," and Edward P. Jones's "Old Boys, Old Girls" would have marginalized these stories among many "mainstream" Caucasian-American readers. Now it might be argued that it is the socially "marginalized"—our evermore literate and self-expressive ethnic minorities—that can lay claim to seeing contemporary American society most vividly.

In recent decades memoir and memoirist fiction—that is, fiction that simulates memoir as a literary strategy—have more or less replaced formal literary experimentation. Readers distrustful of "difficult" fiction are rarely rebuffed by the conversational, confessional mode that makes of the explicit a virtue and resists oversubtlety; reading, the reader becomes an immediate confidante, an intimate friend. In stories as diverse as Lorrie Moore's "Paper Losses," Ann Beattie's "Lavande," Amy Hempel's "To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O'Hare," Denis Johnson's "Emergency," Maile Meloy's "Ranch Girl," and Tim O'Brien's "On the Rainy River," as well as those by Edmund White and Junot Díaz, it is likely to be the forthright memoirist tone that rivets the reader, while in stories of hyper-domestic-realism like Matthew Klam's "Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine" and Charles Baxter's "Poor Devil," it is likely to be the accumulation of prosaic detail, the poetic appropriation of the not-very-poetic, that most powerfully convinces. All of these are fictions of brilliant specificity, the very antithesis of "theory."

It was both a challenge and a pleasure to assemble, with the highly capable assistance of Christopher Beha, the stories in this volume. What Christopher and I most regret is having to leave out so many excellent stories—enough stories for another volume, or nearly! Several much-admired stories could not be included because of their length while in other cases we could not secure permission for reprinting. All forms of art are generated by the wish to make of the perishable something imperishable and of the merely finite and local something that might be called "universal"—a quixotic goal perhaps, but an admirable one. So too the anthologist hopes to bring together in a reasonably permanent structure the very best and most representative work of his or her era, as in The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.

—JOYCE CAROL OATES, February 2008