What are your favorite recently published short stories?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 'The American Embassy' (2003), is the only story in the book I've read before. I'm mildly surprised that she's in the book, not because I don't know she writes a lot about the US (I do), just because I would expect her to appear in an anthology of best Nigerian or African stories. Perhaps she has dual nationality. The story is set in a queue for the American Embassy in Lagos. A woman is trying to obtain an asylum visa for the US after her journalist husband fled the country and her son was shot by government thugs. This background is gradually filled in, while she talks to a stranger - whose role otherwise is oddly unspecified; he doesn't become more significant. At the end she refuses to say more about the murder of her child, to get the visa, and walks away from the Embassy.

Rereading the story didn't make me like it more. I find that this author's stories can have a dull tone. The older I get, the less patience I have with certain gestures that might once have impressed me more, like: the woman continually comparing her son's blood to palm oil because it's the same colour. Surely she would mainly just think of her son's blood as what it is. Another such line: the attackers 'smelled of alcohol and pepper soup' and as a result 'she knew that she would never eat pepper soup again'. Why not add that she would never drink alcohol again, while you're about it? It feels like a gimmick, this method of using a detail with faux resonance.

Aleksandar Hemon, 'The Conductor' (2005), once again takes the book beyond the US. I notice that the stories set outside the US contain much more extreme violence than those within the US, as civil wars and so on take place in other countries but not recently in the US. Hemon's narrator is a Bosnian writer, whose subject here is mainly an older poet, seen as a Bosnian laureate, whom he met in Bosnia, who then wrote poems through the 1990s war, and whom he then meets again in the US. The tone of the story is mostly quite unpleasant.

One aspect that I particularly don't like, which you can quite often find in fiction, is a disdainful attitude to women who have been someone's sexual partner. This also goes along with a very casual attitude to sex itself. The kind of phrasing I mean would be eg: 'I spent a while getting laid, with girls I don't remember'. This story has a few instances of that kind of distanced, contemptuous reference. I find it, I suppose, misogynistic, as well as totally false. Why do writers write as though people have a casual relation to sex, as something you can obtain like turning on a tap, when in real life everyone knows it's nothing like that, and it's always a drama, a privilege, a thrill - or maybe a trauma - but in any case, never simply something to dismiss in this way?

One thing about this story does quite impress me. The famous poet writes lots of poems about the war, which are translated into English. Hemon could just tell us that this is the case. But instead he goes to the trouble actually to write out fragments of this poetry in English. He makes up pieces of acclaimed poetry, and he pulls it off quite wel. In fragments and phrases, this invented poetry does carry conviction and seem quite like the translated work of an acclaimed national poet.

Karen Russell, 'St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves' (2007) is quite a high-concept story. It posits a world in which werewolves exist, living in forests and shunned both by wolves and by people. Conveniently, 'their condition skips a generation', so they have produced a generation of human children who are not werewolves but have been raised in the forest in a feral condition, acting like wolves. These children are given by their werewolf parents to homes to civilise them: one for each sex, and the narrative is from a girl at the girls' school. The stages of the adjustment or civilising process are announced in headings 'from the Jesuit handbook on lycanthropic culture shock'. The school is run by nuns, who exclaim in Spanish. This aspect is rather a red herring; there isn't much religious or Hispanic content to the story.

The oldest girl, renamed Jeanette, is the most civilised and humanised. The youngest, renamed Mirabelle, wants to remain living like a wolf. (Note that the wolf behaviour is in a sense imaginary, an imposition on human bodies - they have to push their ears back manually to make them act like a listening wolf's ears.) The narrator is in between. She thinks she is adapting to human ways quite well until a dance event where she wants to howl at the moon again. The story ends with her making a polite visit to her old wolf family.

The high-concept nature of this reminds me slightly of - an unrelated story I admit - Wells Tower's story 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned', which was cited in the last post before I revived this thread. It's a story that feels like a set piece or calling card. Or maybe, in fact, it's typical of the author and she has done more in this vein. The broad theme is the discomfort of adaptation, of taking another identity. You could read it as an allegory of, say, social class: the person in a different class milieu wanting to revert to their old behaviour the way the wolf girl does. But I'm not much into allegory and maybe it's simpler to take the theme straighter and say: it's about the animal character of human beings, the awkward drives of the body which are repressed or reshaped by civilisation.

Claire Vaye Watkins, 'The Last Thing We Need' (2010) is entirely narrated in the form of six letters from one Thomas Grey, living in Nevada, to one Duane Moser, in the same state. So it's an epistolary story. Each section is framed by addresses, then each letter is all in italics. Grey writes to Moser stating that he found his address on a load of prescription medication bottles that he found strewn on a desert road along with other junk at a scene that suggested that a car accident had taken place. Moser remains entirely absent. He never replies. He may be dead. All we get is Grey's letters to him, which become increasingly personal. Grey confides his life to the absent stranger. He confides one particularly salient fact: that when working at a garage, he was once held up at gunpoint by a young fellow driving a certain car. He shot the criminal dead. Pictures of the car were found among Moser's effects in the desert. Grey takes his daughter Layla out to the ghost town where he found Moser's debris. He fears that he has lost her, then finds her again, behind a building. They survive. But Grey's narrative talks of that car driving past. Perhaps this is imagination.

This story is enigmatic. It finds a concept and works hard to see where it can go. Unlike almost every other story in this book, it experiments with form, in some sense. I don't say that epistolary form is new. But using it in this particular way at least shows some imagination and readiness to try for a different effect. The use of a genre (letters) to convey a narrative that grows larger than the genre should allow, is a little like PALE FIRE, for instance.

Ken Liu, 'The Paper Menagerie' (2011), is narrated by one Jack, the son of a white US father and a Chinese bride he acquired in Hong Kong. The mother speaks little English. She has the gift of not only making origami animals, but also breathing into them so that they come to life. We are in Pinocchio-type territory, or maybe TOY STORY. The boy delights in the animals, till a classmate scorns them, and he turns against his mother and the Chinese aspect of himself. He demands that she speak English, which she can hardly do. The mother dies at age 40 or so, when Jack is a young adult. Back home he finds that one of the discarded paper animals, a tiger, comes back to life, and inside it is a message written by the mother in Chinese. He takes it to a Chinese woman to read. We read it in English. In it the mother tells of her hard life and how much it meant to her that Jack liked the origami animals, a connexion back to their heritage. The boy's rejection of Chinese ways and the mother thus appears all the more cruel.

There is a fantastic element to this story - magic origami - which takes it out of the ordinary. But as the end of that summary may suggest, it becomes rather shamelessly sentimental. Its meditations on ethnic identity are not very subtle.

Haven't read his own fiction, mostly because selections for the Liu-edited (and mostly translated) Chinese science fiction anthology Broken Stars are often promising, then frustrating (though the title story is an amazing exception). Your take reinforces my impression of his work.
Haven't yet read any Karen Russell from that far back, but greatly enjoy her most recent collections, Vampires In The Lemon Grove and Orange World and Other Stories.

Stephen King, 'The Dune' (2011) is a supernatural story about an aged Florida judge who for many decades has discovered that letters appear on a sand dune on a nearby island, spelling the name of someone who dies shortly afterwards. The judge tells this to a lawyer who is formulating the judge's will. The final twist appears to be that the judge's haste about the will is not because he has seen his own name but, I must assume, because he has seen the younger lawyer's name. This is a high-concept story, plainly written. I respect King for his great invention and productivity but to be honest I am doubtful that this is one of the finest US short stories of the era. It's rather incongruous that King is in the volume when so many other people - whether Gothic, Horror, or just big names - are not.

Julie Otsuka, 'Diem Perdidi' (2011) describes the mother of a protagonist who is addressed in the second person, thus: 'She remembers the day on which you were born'. Almost every sentence runs 'She remembers' or 'She does not remember', or contains a similar statement. The story is about memory and its loss. The title apparently means 'I have lost the day'. It is a fancy way of referring to the mother's inability to remember what day it is, and other things in life.

The theme here - dementia, neurological decline, senility - is a large and poignant one which affects many people, increasingly, in our era of 'demographic ageing'. One reads quite a lot on this theme (eg: Franzen's CORRECTIONS, McEwan's SATURDAY), and will probably continue to do so. It is understandable that writers have engaged with this theme as it is very important and emotionally affecting for real people, and it also prompts literary reflections about the continuity of character, memory, language and so on. I respect Otsuka for taking on this painful theme, but her deeply repetitive approach to it risks being ... well, simply monotonous.

There is progression through the story as the first paragraph commences 'She remembers her name' (and various other things) and in the last paragraph she does not. The story charts the further mental decline of someone who was already in decline at the start. I think, though, that the story also holds a greater intricacy, as numerous facts about the family and the mother's life are scattered through it, and might need to be pieced together on rereading. The mother had a first love called Frank, who married someone else; then she married the narrator's father. Japan is in the background: I think that both the mother and father are of Japanese origin, and so the narrator would be a Japanese American. Reference is discreetly made to the internment of Japanese people in the USA during WWII. But I haven't really pieced together this family history yet; would need one or two more readings.

Ted Chiang, 'The Great Silence' (2015): this is a short story, just 5 pages, in fairly discreet sections, so that it keeps stopping and starting again. It is narrated by a parrot, which in this story is conceived as a very intelligent animal - like a human, or maybe like how people imagine dolphins to be. The story notes that parrots (like people) can enunciate words and learn sounds, and suggests that this is a particularly significant or creative kind of intelligence.

The great conceit of the story is to compare animal intelligence and communication to potential or imagined extra-terrestrial intelligence and communication, and to ask: why are humans anxious to find the latter, when they don't bother with the former, which is right in front of them?

I think this is a good message and concept, though if I stand back and reflect I think: a) most animals are probably not that intelligent - the parrot idea here is a fiction - so we are probably not missing out on highly intelligent beings in our midst; b) science does, in fact, try to understand animals and their communication; so the idea that we are ignoring them is, again, a half-truth. Yet the message still feels poignant. It is in large part about how humans have made animals extinct, and how this creates a 'great silence' (akin to Carson's 'silent spring') which is like the silence of the empty universe (bereft of other intelligent life). All this is really thought-provoking and sobering.

Lauren Groff, 'The Midnight Zone' (2016), impressed me. I don't think I've read this author before but like the others in the volume she seems to have had big recognition, prizes, grants, etc. The story describes a family holiday in a cabin in Florida. The narrator, mother of two children, falls from a stool and bashes her head open. She then has to survive with her two young sons till her husband returns. The sense is that she may die, or be neurologically damaged. I felt great suspense about what would happen to her, real uncertainty, and pathos in the children's sadness in the face of their mother's plight. Overnight she has a strange dream in which her spirit floats out beyond the cabin and around the woods. Has her spirit left her dying body? Has she been transformed into one of the big cats of the forest? That sounds far-fetched but it is suggested by the mysterious, troubling last line, when the husband returns, looking scared, and she says that his fear was 'like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt' (p.448). Clearly this implies animality, maybe feline nature, but I'm not sure how literally to take it. Has the woman been transformed into a big cat? Has she suffered brain damage that has made her feel that way? Or is all this just an unimportant figure of speech?

I'm unsure, but the story holds the attention and makes me worried for this woman and her family, though I've never met them before a few pages ago. It actually impressed me as much as almost any in the collection, apart perhaps from Carver's story which also has a quality of everyday mystery.

Manuel Muñoz, 'Anyone Can Do It' (2019), is the final story in the collection. It is narrated by a woman, Delfina, who has migrated from Texas to California, with her husband and son. She lives in a street (in a suburb?) which seems to be populated by Hispanic families who are worried about their legal status in the US. Husbands go out to work and when they don't come back the women worry that they have been arrested on this basis. Delfina, though, is oddly unconcerned about her husband. She is entirely unsentimental about him, even though there seems little evidence that he has behaved badly.

Delfina is approached by a neighbour, Lis, who wants to go fruit-picking with her, in the Ford Galaxie car that the husband has left behind. Cautious Delfina refuses; goes out with her son to a shop, and the son steals a toy car (a symbolic image you could say). Now Delfina changes her mind and agrees to go fruit-picking. She and Lis do a good morning's work, then Lis drives off and doesn't come back. There is a gut-wrenching sort of feeling when I realise this, that it has been an elaborate scam to steal the car; then when I wonder whether Lis has also stolen Delfina's child. She hasn't, the child is safe back home, so only the car has been lost - a big loss, but life could be worse. This drama of deception, fear, relief, is effective. The foreman of the fruit-pickers also shows some redeeming kindness, driving Delfina home and handing her money in sympathy.

That concludes this book, THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY (2021), 466 pages of fiction. I learned from the book about a lot of writers I didn't know. The book is useful in being so determinedly diverse, and including writers of many backgrounds. Its historical balance is rather skewed in that it only includes 40pp from the 1970s, for instance - so it is not really seeking to represent periods equally.

The choice of writers is also puzzling in a way. Diversity is one criterion, and perhaps a good one. Diversity of form or style, though, is not so evident. A few stories are actually formally different, like Claire Vaye Watkins' epistolary story. Most are written in a plain way. The level of frisson in language that you would get from a Lorrie Moore, for instance, is not here, like it or not. I wonder whether this editor, John Freeman, is in a certain way just quite conservative, in terms of style, though probably not politics.

Again on the choice of writers: Le Guin and King are here, names known round the world. Carver is here, with a story that I found more effective than almost any other. But most other big names are not. Richard Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason, John Updike! ... Jonathan Lethem (who has published 3 volumes of stories), D F Wallace (notable in this form, and distinct, like him or not), Kelly Link ... There are really very few SF or genre tales (no crime), and yet Le Guin is here, and King is horror, and Karen Russell on wolves is writing a kind of magic realism ... The criteria are ultimately a little hard to discern.

Thanks for reviving this thread and posting that rather heroic series of summaries. It seems overall you were perhaps slightly underwhelmed by the book. I guess I generally shy away from contemporary short stories myself, at least the kind that would tend to end up anthologized in a book like this. There is a faint eat-your-peas sense of importance that clings to books of this type. Or in other words, thanks for reading this book so I don't have to!

And yet I wonder if I am starting to react against the genre of short stories, from reading so many of them at once. I suspect that short stories often do these gimmicky things, or are rather sententious, and if you only read one then this doesn't strike you.

i've had the same though every time i read short story collections

I don't want to give the impression that I don't like short stories. Some of my most loved books are short story collections. But I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I read a new collection of stories that really blew me away. I guess the last time was probably Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson, and that was over 20 years ago. I think maybe has to do with death of the commercial short story. I think the golden age of short stories roughly coincides with the period when writing stories could be a very lucrative career.

I may be wrong but I get the feeling nowadays that stories are mostly written by members of the literary crowd to impress other members of the literary crowd.

pinefox, I'm loving these summaries & reactions. I often don't love the format either, but I'll recommend Kate Folk's debut collection 'Out There' from last year. I think of her as similar to Ted Chiang in that each story has a clear concept based on some sort of surreal or sci-fi element, but as a means to explore human relationships (where it seems Chiang is more literally interested in AI/technology/aliens in a philosophical sense).

Now that I think of it, the last new story collection that I loved was probably Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You.

o.nate, I have read that collection a few times and know it well. I'm a bit surprised that July doesn't feature in this Penguin book.

I'm most glad that you and poster Jordan appreciated my posts about the collection. re Jordan's post, I do note that there seems to be a strand of short story which is high-concept (like Chiang and seemingly Folk), against a strand that is the opposite, more humanist slice of life if you like (Carver presumably fits here - unless we think Carver has high concepts of his own).

Hilary Mantel read her story "The School of English" on the LRB podcast in 2015. It's a beautifully written story about a horrible situation.

xp I enjoyed your posts too, thanks. As for Carver, I'd like to re-read some of his Lish-edited stories vs. their unedited originals (some of which appear in posthumous collections, or so I'm told).

That would be a good idea, Dow. Carver now seems to me well worth going back to.

I am pretty sure I read that Mantel story - it was about migrant workers living in a house in London? Afraid I don't recall more.

I did too, pinefox. Now I wanna buy this anthology.

George Saunders' 'Sticks' (1994) is a one-page sketch about a father who hangs things on a pole outside his house. I hope this isn't the best Saunders can do.

Saunders is a great writer, Lincoln in the Bardo an outstanding work and recent A Swim in a Pond in the Rain an interesting short story masterclass

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline also a very good read