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"Ceiling" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. First published in
Granta
, no. 111.
Copyright © 2010 by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Reprinted by permission of The
Wylie Agency, LLC.

"Housewifely Arts" by Megan Mayhew Bergman. First published in
One Story
, no.
142, November 2010. To be published in
Birds of a Lesser Paradise
, March 2012,
Scribner. Copyright © 2011 by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Reprinted by permission
of the author.

"A Bridge Under Water" by Tom Bissell. First published in
Agni
, no. 71. Copy-
right © 2010 by Tom Bissell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Out of Body" by Jennifer Egan. First published in
Tin House
, vol. 11, no. 3. From
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan, copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Egan.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

"Free Fruit for Young Widows" by Nathan Englander. First published in
The New
Yorker
, May 17, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Nathan Englander. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Nathan Englander.

"La Vita Nuova" by Allegra Goodman. First published in
The New Yorker
, May 3,
2010. Copyright © 2010 by Allegra Goodman. Reprinted by permission of The
Irene Skolnick Agency.

"Gurov in Manhattan" by Ehud Havazelet. First published in
TriQuarterly
, no.
137, January-December 2009. Copyright © 2010 by Ehud Havazelet. Reprinted by
permission of the author.

"The Sleep" by Caitlin Horrocks. First published in
The Atlantic Fiction for Kindle
,
July 1, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Caitlin Horrocks. Reprinted by permission of
Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. on behalf of Caitlin Horrocks.

"Soldier of Fortune" by Bret Anthony Johnston. First published in
Glimmer Train
,
no. 77, Winter 2011. Copyright © 2010 by Bret Anthony Johnston. Reprinted by
permission of the author.

"Foster" by Claire Keegan. First published in
The New Yorker
, February 15 and 22,
2010. Copyright © 2010 by Claire Keegan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Dungeon Master" by Sam Lipsyte. First published in
The New Yorker
, Octo-
ber 4, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Sam Lipsyte. Reprinted by permission of Sterling
Lord Literistic, Inc. on behalf of Sam Lipsyte.

"Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart" by Rebecca Makkai. First published in
Tin House
,
vol. 12, no. 2. Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Makkai. Reprinted by permission of
Rebecca Makkai.

"Property" by Elizabeth McCracken. First published in
Granta
, no. 111. Copy-
right © 2010 by Elizabeth McCracken. Reprinted by permission of Dunow, Carlson
& Lerner Literary Agency.

"Phantoms" by Steven Millhauser. First published in
McSweeney's
, no. 35. Copy-
right © 2010 by Steven Millhauser. Reprinted by permission of International Cre-
ative Management on behalf of Steven Millhauser.

"Dog Bites" by Ricardo Nuila. First published in
McSweeney's
, no. 36. Copyright ©
2011 by Ricardo Nuila. Reprinted by permission of Ricardo Nuila.

"ID" by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in
The New Yorker
, March 29, 2010.
Copyright © 2010 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of John
Hawkins & Assoc., Inc.

"To the Measures Fall" by Richard Powers. First published in
The New Yorker
, Oc-
tober 18, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Richard Powers. Reprinted by permission of
Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.

"The Call of Blood" by Jess Row. First published in
Harvard Review
, no. 38. Copy-
right © 2010 by Jess Row. Reprinted by permission of Jess Row.

"Escape from Spiderhead" by George Saunders. First published in
The New Yorker
,
December 20 and 27, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by George Saunders. Reprinted by
permission of the author.

Foreword

A
FEW YEARS AGO
, as documented in a book titled
The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen
, Kevin O'Keefe, the author, set out to find the most "perfectly average" person in the nation. This person turned out to be Bob Burns. He was fifty-four years old. He was married, wore glasses. He worked forty hours a week as a maintenance supervisor at Windham Technical High School in Connecticut. This five-foot-eight, 190-pound man drank coffee each morning, read the newspaper each day, walked his dog each evening, and attended church most Sundays.

If I were to attempt to describe a perfectly average American short story, it might sound like this: disaffected child protagonist (I'll call him Wally), in the face of parents' recent divorce, finds solace as well as self-awareness in nonconformist flute teacher (I'll call her Ms. Note). The voice in the story would be quirky but not overly oddball, and the story might be told in the present tense, using a first-person point of view. The setting would be Wally's house and Ms. Note's living room—and maybe this living room would double as a dining room and bedroom, and maybe Ms. Note would have recently lost her job as a chef, and maybe Wally's father had several food allergies, which had always secretly irked Wally's mother. The ending would suggest resolution but hint at its opposite. I don't mean this description to sound belittling or quite as reductive as it might. I just mean to demonstrate some of the most common elements that I come across in the many short stories I read each year.

In my five years on this job, I have been lucky to work alongside guest editors with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and tastes. Still, nearly all of them have been surprised at the enormous number of stories that share at least some facets of Wally's. Most taken aback, I would guess, have been the guest editors whose first home was not the United States. When I began working with the wonderful Geraldine Brooks, she promptly took note of the large number of naturalist stories set in the present time. I felt a bit like I had led her into a sprawling subdivision full of identical houses. "Welcome to American short fiction," I might have said with a slight grimace. "Please don't judge us." Although her task was of course
solely
to judge us.

I admit that I feel protective of all this domestic, realist fiction. The majority of my own life is spent tending to small children and folding laundry and emptying the dishwasher, that blessed dishwasher that seems to fill thrice daily as if only to spite me. I have grown accustomed to wandering down the streets of the abovementioned subdivision and knocking on the door of a putty-colored house and finding young Wally sprawled across his microfiber sectional texting a friend rather than practicing flute. And nothing is more welcome to me than a whopper sentence—maybe funny or deadpan, maybe horrifically dark—embedded in the first paragraph of such a story.
You know where you are—but hold on
, the good story promises.
I'll yank that plush Pottery Barn rug right out from under your feet.

Young short story writers often start with familiar subject matter and manageable scope. I don't believe this is problematic. Familiar setting or characters or premise certainly does not necessitate familiar writing. Little makes me more uncomfortable than watching a new writer attempt a triple-triple lutz without sufficient control of language or grasp of form. That reading experience sometimes starts like this: second person (okay, that's fine, sort of) on a prewedding trip to Barcelona; florid or jerky language and vast generalizations about gender (now "I" secretly prefer the leggy barista in a café with luminous cleavage to my willowy and controlling grad student fiancée); excessive description of the rain in Spain that overtly reflects "my" inner state (ugh); sudden switch to first or third person (uh-oh); cut to barista naked on top of "me" (and I'm out).

To my mind, at least in terms of content, you've got an advantage if you choose less familiar settings or characters or premises. In some ways, it might be easier to write of a homophobic soldier in Afghanistan the day after Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed than to write Wally's story. The news is in the content itself. Welcome your reader to a prefab with central air, granite countertops, and walk-in closets and watch this reader slowly back away from the page. Your work is cut out for you. Of course, challenges do arise by setting a story in a war zone. Be careful with your form and language, which should ideally be indivisible from the subject matter. As always, try to avoid stereotypes or characters who exist only to dramatize your sociopolitical agenda. The homophobic soldier? Maybe she is a cabinetmaker from Vermont. Her effeminate battalion leader—he might have been raised in rural Texas by a gun salesman. Okay, I'm laying it on thick here, but I hope you see what I'm getting at. Dramatic content, diverse setting, and innovative form do not automatically entail good writing.

To be absolutely clear: I do not mean to say that I'm hungry to read thousands more stories about Wally or his warring parents or their neighborhood—or that I prefer this content, really, to any other. In fact I would love to read more stories about war (so terribly widespread these days) and the wide world outside the United States and our impact on the environment. I deeply respect writers who explore new territory and/or take risks with structure or form (see Jennifer Egan, Caitlin Horrocks, Steven Millhauser in the following pages, for starters). But to me, the quality of writing always takes precedence over the author's choice of content or form. I look for immediacy, freshness of language, and, perhaps more than anything, ease of language (see Bret Anthony Johnston, Rebecca Makkai, Ricardo Nuila—really all of the writers whose stories appear between these covers). Jonathan Franzen offers this wise bit of advice to writers: "The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator." I seek a certain intimacy when I read, a sense that the writer is someone knowable to me, someone I can trust—not a professor, not an acrobat. Certainly not a figure skater twirling like a tornado at the center of a cold, dark rink.

Ms. Brooks was a superb guest editor, eager to include different genres and confident in her excellent taste. As she writes in her introduction, plot has clearly become distasteful to many American short story writers. Interestingly, this series was in part developed to showcase stories that shunned a ubiquitous sort of plot that had "poisoned" much of the writing at the time, nearly one hundred years ago. But I fear that a new normal has evolved in its place, one conspicuously void of momentum and uninterested in maintaining the reader's attention. Happily, each story in this year's edition creates and sustains its own momentum, whether through premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence. Each writer demonstrates an astonishing understanding of their characters and the worlds in which they live, wherever these worlds may be.

BOOK: The Best American Short Stories® 2011

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