The Best American Short Stories 2013
In her introduction, editor Pitlor notes that, in the past, a period of distillation needed to pass before one could write about trauma. In today’s digital age, however, with the speed that our society shares news such as the Sandy Hook shooting last December, “while we are grieving, we are now writing.” Although none of the stories in this collection respond directly to current events, each story inhabits its own unique tragedy. These tragedies are those of everyday life, sometimes subtle and often humorous, and range from the acute loneliness of nineteenth-century New England farm life, to the doomed love between a teenage boy and a middle-aged woman, to divorce, to a strange neighbor arriving at a front door—naked—in the night. The setting of modern-day, nondescript America appears in these 20 stories to the point of feeling repetitive, but as a whole this collection is wildly divergent and entertaining, and each story is cultivated with a keen eye for voice and character. --Emily Roth