100 Years of the Best American Short Stories was published in 2015 and was edited by Lorrie Moore (Editor) and Heidi Pitlor (Series Editor).
Last week I wrote a post on the first short story in this book, "The Gay Old Dog" by Edna Ferber. This week I decided to post about the book, listing all the short stories in the book. It will be a useful list for me to refer back to. This book has been on my Kindle since August 2021, so it is time for me to read more of these stories.
There is an introduction for the whole book, written by Lorrie Moore, and an introduction for the section about each decade, written by Heidi Pitlor. The years covered are 1915 - 2015.
Towards the end of the introduction to the book, Lorrie Moore discusses the limitations in selecting short stories for an anthology with this scope. John Updike and Katrina Kenison published The Best American Short Stories of the Century in 2000, and Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor decided to have no overlaps between the two books. (Both were published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.) All the stories were selected from the Best American Short Stories series published annually.
So, here is a list of all the stories in the book:
1915-1920
- The Gay Old Dog / Edna Ferber
1920-1930
- Brothers / Sherwood Anderson
- My Old Man / Ernest Hemingway
- Haircut / Ring Lardner
1930-1940
- Babylon Revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Cracked Looking-Glass / Katherine Anne Porter
- That Will Be Fine / William Faulkner
1940-1950
- Those Are as Brothers / Nancy Hale
- The Whole World Knows / Eudora Welty
- The Enormous Radio / John Cheever
1950-1960
- I Stand Here Ironing / Tillie Olsen
- Sonny's Blues / James Baldwin
- The Conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth
1960-1970
- Everything That Rises Must Converge / Flannery O'Connor
- Pigeon Feathers / John Updike
- Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? / Raymond Carver
- By the River / Joyce Carol Oates
1970-1980
- The School / Donald Barthelme
- The Conventional Wisdom / Stanley Elkin
1980-1990
- Friends / Grace Paley
- Harmony of the World / Charles Baxter
- Lawns / Mona Simpson
- Communist / Richard Ford
- Helping / Robert Stone
- Displacement / David Wong Louie
1990-2000
- Friend of My Youth / Alice Munro
- The Girl on the Plane / Mary Gaitskill
- Xuela / Jamaica Kincaid
- If You Sing Like That for Me / Akhil Sharma
- Fiesta, 1980 / Junot Díaz
2000-2010
- The Third and Final Continent / Jhumpa Lahiri
- Brownies / ZZ Packer
- What You Pawn I Will Redeem / Sherman Alexie
- Old Boys, Old Girls / Edward P. Jones
- Refresh, Refresh / Benjamin Percy
- Awaiting Orders / Tobias Wolff
2010-2015
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank / Nathan Englander
- Diem Perdidi / Julie Otsuka
- The Semplica-Girl Diaries / George Saunders
- At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners / Lauren Groff
Some of these authors I am familiar with, some not. Other than the first story in the book, I haven't read any of the stories.
Many reviews of the anthology note that the story by Nathan Englander is very good. I find it interesting that there are only two stories from the decade 1970-1980 and five stories from the following decade.
I would love to hear if anyone else has had experience with these stories or authors.
24 comments:
I love a good short story and this post will be a great reference guide for me! I did read Updike's Pigeon Feathers!!
The trauma of an adolescent crisis of faith is brilliantly described in this story.
I laughed out loud…
during the allusions to Updike’s mother Linda,
to Updike’s his blustry but ineffectual father and
dazed….Granmom with
My favorite quote:
“….her usual expression of bewilderment.
Her irises were pale discs of crazed crystal.”
Have not heard of Nancy Hale. All of the rest I have heard of or read. I am curious about her now.
I've read a number of the writers in this anthology. John Updike used to be considered a Major Writer...now on the way to being forgotten. The news about Alice Munro might have gotten her banned from this volume if it had been revealed sooner.
I've read nearly all these stories... up until 1990. Afterwards very few. That's only three decades with which to catch up.
This is really comprehensive, Tracy! And there's such a variety of authors here, too. I've read at least something from about half of the authors, but I would like to try more, and this looks like a good place to look.
Thanks for sharing all this; I was one of those curious about the collection.
The more modern they become, the fewer authors I recognize.
Market forces and new technologies have pushed the short story into the backwater, Kelly. It's not surprising that today's great short story writers and their works are little known.
Nancy, I will definitely read "Pigeon Feathers" soon. I don't think I have ever read anything by Updike. I enjoyed your latest post, about Walz.
I like the way Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor have set this book up,. Short stories from every decade 1915-2015 and an intro describing what was going on In each decade. And many of the authors I have heard about but never got around to reading and now I plan to.
Patti, I have not heard of Nancy Hale either. It does look like she published a good number of stories in the New Yorker. Tillie Olsen is not familiar to me also; they were born about the same time but Olsen lived longer. This book has a short intro for each author, so that will be helpful.
It will be interesting to see how Alice Munro will be treated in anthologies in the future, George.
Frank, that is amazing. I would like to get in the habit of reading more short stories of every genre. One thing that seems to be lacking in this one is more stories from other genres (mystery, science fiction).
Margot, I have read one short story from 5 or 6 of these authors (in other anthologies or collections). I look forward to sampling more of these stories.
Kelly, I am now curious to see what which stories and authors were covered in the similar anthology edited by John Updike. That one is not so easily available though, and not available as a Kindle.
Kathy, this is one I wish I had in paper copy, although it is probably huge and I don't need more of those around the house. I like to sample authors via short stories, but often I find that the short stories by an author are not at all like his or her novels.
Jerry, you would think in this day of short attention span that short stories would be more popular.
Short stories are popular, but most readers of fiction who are not very frequent readers prefer novels, particularly long novels, which may well allow them to only have to do so much set-dressing and mental investiture for a more lasting experience--the attention-span question works against short fiction that way. But, short stories have picked up some new readers on line, as well...even as the fiction magazines are having hard times, whether because of the contractions of newsstands, or the falling levels of support for little magazines as universities feel financial crunches, and online magazines have to compete fiercely for eyeballs.
It's rather a pity that no one has attempted a Century of O. Henry Awards stories, as arguably unfair as the culling might be. Volumes go back to 1919...
This hateful computer...I must stop using it, as it will irretrievably erase text unpredictably at certain keystrokes. But O. HENRY and BASS have tended to focus on historical fiction and primarily on contemporary mimetic fiction...to some extent due to snobbery, and to some extent due to other annuals focusing on crime fiction from early on in the last century, with the most durable one being edited for a couple of decades by David C. Cooke, and he turned it over to Anthony Boucher, upon whose death THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE's Allen Hubin ran it for several years, and then Edward D. Hoch for another couple of decades. SF and fantasy and horror annuals have had long runs, as well, particularly beginning in the '50s. Erotic fiction BOTYs had a big influx in the 1990s. Western fiction has mostly depended on Western Writers of America anthologies and some related lines...
And the BASS Century volume isn't That huge a product in paper form!
Todd, There sure are a lot of short stories published. That is true about having to reset for each new piece of fiction you read, short or long.
It upsets me that print magazines and even online magazines have a hard time surviving financially. Not to speak of newspapers. We subscribe to more newspapers (online and paper) and even some magazines than we can keep up with, just because we want to be supportive.
And I agree, a century of O. Henry Awards stories would be a good project.
Todd, if I see this anthology at the book sale in September, I will get a copy. Last year the book sale had a huge number of very appealing short story books and they are hard to resist.
I'm glad you've listed all the story titles. I've read several of these authors's novels but not their stories, so it interests me. I noticed that this book is on sale as an ebook on Amazon for like $1.99 so I just got a copy. Now I'm a bit curious of the stories in the John Updike and Katrina Kenison book. But that one is not on sale unfortunately.
Susan, glad to hear that you got the ebook edition of this too. I find that ebooks are the easiest way to read short stories, but I don't like that I cannot tell how long the stories are.
I would like to have a copy of the anthology by Updike and Kenison too, and I am going to try the September book sale first.
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