The Best American Short Stories 1993

 

I rub my dry hands across the thick paper cover of this volume. Its bright yellow cover with orange, blue, and black writing stares back at me, laughing, daring me to ignore it over the next many days, weeks, months, and years that it might take me to finish.

 I give this physical book a voice as my hand passes over it. The callouses on my palms act as phonograph needles scraping against the woven pattern of the cover. The pages blow air back at my face as my thumb runs down the side. I hear its voice. Perhaps it’s the collective voice of the authors, the stories, the characters all begging me to discover them again.

With physical objects like this book, I often wonder about the journey it has been on before it landed in my hands. What shelves did it grace? Where did it travel from? How long did it sit with other books in a box in my basement before being pulled for reading? Giving a bit of life to these books allows the development of a relationship with them. Could that be the reason why I spend so long carrying them around?

Over the last sixteen years of this project, various volumes of this collection have moved with me from home to work, room to room in a house, state to state, sheltered from the elements and exposed, and have been a burden physically and psychologically as they have accompanied me through some of the most important years of my life. Am I heaping too much weight on these books? Perhaps. However, their influence on me and the lessons they impart have been something that I value and cherish, and I will endeavor to continue to write about their influence.

BASS 1993

As Katrina Kenison writes in the Forward of this volume, as the BASS Series Editor, the stories for this collection’s anthology were originally published between January 1992 and January 1993. As I do when reading these books, I’ll often try to remember that year, psychically place myself back in that year, and approach the story with that mind. My present mind will creep into thoughts about the story, which is part of this exercise’s magic.

Louise Erdrich is the editor of this volume, and we’ve encountered her twice before. Her story “Scales” was selected for inclusion in the 1983 BASS collection, and her story “Snares” appeared in the 1988 volume.

We’ll get a chance to hear her voice again in the 2003, 2015, and 2016 BASS collections.

I’d like to highlight a point that Erdrich makes in her introduction.

“Usually these collections are structured alphabetically, according to author. I wanted to play with the order so that I could set off the strengths of each piece. The collection begins with the most evocative first paragraph which I think belongs to John Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite,” an unostentatious, painful, faultless story about a crack in the ice, a marriage, and a man’s entry into the uneven reality of old age. I’m also pleased that Mr. Updike should for once appear first since he is usually last by alphabet in this collection.”

At this moment of writing, I can’t recall any guest editor placing the stories in anything but alphabetical by the author's last name since John Gardener’s selections for the 1982 BASS.

I should note here that that collection was one of, if not my favorite, BASS.

 

Additionally, John Updike is a favorite of mine, and to have him kick off the volume, I feel, sets me up for success… perhaps Erdrich gives us a little treat by providing some rhythm to this collection – in what would usually just be a composition decided by our alphabet.

Erdrich does mention the “New Yorker” story “issues” with these collections, and I suppose at this point in my introduction, I should note that there are eight stories from The New Yorker, and coming in second would be two stories from Harper’s.

I can’t say that discovering where the story was originally published has had any sort of impact on my feelings about the story – but I will say that the availability of The New Yorker as a publication that prints great short fiction has kept the fire of interest in this art alive for me. I felt I should mention this as I have commented on it before, and Erdrich took the time to mention it.

So…I suppose we should start the clock!

Stop the Clock

On February 20, 2020, I typed “Start the clock” when I introduced BASS 1992.

I also wrote this line: “I've written several times about the various stages of my life, and here we are at another. It'll be very interesting to see what develops”.

Here we are

4 years, 11 months, 4 days

Or

1800 days later, and I can finally close the cover on this volume, Finally.

There is simply too much to write about concerning developments in our lives over the past 1800 days, so I’ll just have to revisit this post someday and reflect on our lives from 2020 until 2025. I will say, though, that the highs (good things) vastly outweighed the lows (bad things) over the five years, and I consider us very fortunate in that sense.

Can’t say that I gave the volume a fair shake. I could have easily finished the volume in 20 days if I read and written about a story every day until completion. One month if I took the weekends off.  

No, I had to take 1800 days.

Running into some old friends – JCO, DFW, and Tobias Wolff was great. 

I’ll remember where I was in July 2024 when I read DFW. Where I was in January 2023 when I read JCO, the one story I read in 2022, Community Life by Lorrie Moore, Emergency by Denis Johnson in January 2021, and Days of Heaven by Rick Bass in June 2020 – when the world was very interesting.

So, onward with life and reading. 1993 awaits us. 

Firelight – Tobias Wolff

 

I haven’t started recommending authors yet to my oldest son, and I believe that I could be coming in late on this move…can’t recall if my father recommended books/authors to me when I was my son’s age, but I feel that if I’m going to start attempting to lay down some examples for him, now would be a great time. We are working at nurturing a book-reading habit in them, but now perhaps would be a good time to stoke his interest in reading by offering suggestions of writers that I think he might enjoy.

As I’ve written over the years, this series has opened my eyes, heart, and mind to authors I am sure I would have never come across on my own. Of course, I will offer my copies up to the boys to read in a couple of years, but now, perhaps I’ll just stick with authors that I think they might find enjoyable.

Tobias Wolff is, without question, a writer that I’d recommend to my sons. I’ve had the chance to comment on his stories a number of times on this platform, and I always find comfort in turning the page and seeing that his story is next up.

A 2004 interview with him in the Paris Review, which I wrote about here back in 2011, gave meaning to this BASS project, and I’ve returned to his thoughts about reading and writing over the years.

Looking over my spreadsheet, I see we won’t encounter Wolff again until the 1997 BASS. He’ll surface again in 2006 and then again in 2008. Given my reading habits, I’m not necessarily pleased with the space between his stories – but that’s on me.

A part of Wolff’s short stories that I always look forward to usually lands in the last few paragraphs of the last page, and in this story, “Firelight,” Wolff delivers again.

“I watch the fire, watch the changing light on the faces of my family. I try to feel at home. And I do, mostly. It is a sweet time. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.”

I enjoyed this story as it provided me with an interesting look at a young man’s relationship with his mother. It allowed me to step into a fictional character and gain a different perspective on a mother/son relationship.

And that, right there, is why reading fiction and short stories is so important.

In his contributor’s notes at the back of this issue, Wolff states, “The origins of my stories are always hard for me to pin down because the act of writing them inevitably tangles history and imagination in a way impossible for me to untangle later on.”

With that statement, we can see that a bit of fact might always seep into fiction – perhaps just enough at the right time to give us (perceive) that perspective we would not be afforded if we did not read the story…and become that boy.