What are your favorite recently published short stories?

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