The Best

AMERICAN
SHORT
STORIES ®

2010
Selected from
U.S. and Canadian Magazines
by Ri ch ar d R u s s o
with He i d i P i t l o r

With an Introduction by Richard Russo

hou gh ton mif flin h a rc o u rt

bos ton • n ew york 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Hough­ton Mif­flin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Richard Russo
The Best American Series and The Best American Short Stories are registered trade-
marks of Hough­ton Mif­flin Harcourt Publishing Company.
a ll rights re se rve d
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any infor-
mation storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copy-
right owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law.
With the exception of non­­profit transcription in Braille, Hough­ton Mif­flin Har-
court is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selec-
tions reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission
must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as iden­ti­fied herein. Ad-
dress requests for permission to make copies of Hough­ton Mif­flin Harcourt mate-
rial to Permissions, Hough­ton Mif­flin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Av-
enue South, New York 10003.
issn 0067-6233
isbn 978-0-547-05528-2
isbn 978-0-547-05532-9 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
doc  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

“Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched” by Steve Almond. First published in Tin
House, vol. 10, no. 4. From the forthcoming God Bless America by Steve Almond, to
be published in 2011, copyright © by Steve Almond. Used by permission of Look-
out Books.
“Into Silence” by Marlin Barton. First published in Sewanee Review, July-Septem-
ber 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Marlin Barton. Reprinted by permission of Marlin
Barton.
“The Cousins” by Charles Baxter. First published in Tin House, Issue 40. From
the forthcoming Gryphon by Charles Baxter, to be published 2011, copyright © 2011
by Charles Baxter. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc.
“Safari” by Jennifer Egan. First published in The New Yorker, January 11, 2010.
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.
“Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go” by Danielle Evans. First
published in A Public Space, no. 9. From Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by
­Danielle Evans. Copyright © 2009 by Danielle Evans. Used by permission of River-
head Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
“The Valetudinarian” by Joshua Ferris. First published in The New Yorker, August
3, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Joshua Ferris. Reprinted by permission of The New
Yorker.
 “Delicate Edible Birds” from Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. First published
in Glimmer Train, no. 70. Copyright © 2009 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Voice, an imprint of Hyperion. All rights reserved.
“Least Resistance” by Wayne Harrison. First published in The Atlantic, Fiction
2009. Copyright ©  2009 by Wayne Harrison. Reprinted by permission of Wayne
Harrison.
“Oh, Death” by James Lasdun. First published in The Paris Review, Spring 2009,
under the title “The Hollow.” From It’s Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun. Copy-
right © 2009 by James Lasdun. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Gir-
oux, LLC.
“Painted Ocean, Painted Ship” by Rebecca Makkai. First published in Plough-
shares, Winter 2009/2010. Copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Makkai. Reprinted by per-
mission of Rebecca Makkai.
“My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer” by
Brendan Mathews. First published in The Cincinnati Review, vol. 6, no. 1. Copyright
© 2009 by Brendan Mathews. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“PS” by Jill McCorkle. First published in The Atlantic, Fiction 2009. From Going
Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle. Copyright © 2009 by Jill McCorkle. Reprinted by per-
mission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
“Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events” by Kevin Moffett. First published in
McSweeney’s, no. 30. Copyright © 2009 by Kevin Moffett. Reprinted by permission of
the author.
“The Laugh” by Téa Obreht. First published in The Atlantic, Fiction 2009. Copy-
right © 2009 by Téa Obreht. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic on
behalf of Téa Obreht.
“All Boy” by Lori Ostlund. First published in the New En­gland Review, vol. 30, no.
3. From The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund. Copyright © 2009 by Lori Ostlund.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Georgia Press.
“The Ascent” from Burning Bright by Ron Rash. First published in Tin House, no.
39. Copyright © 2010 by Ron Rash. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Pub-
lishers.
“The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach” by Karen Russell. First published
in Tin House, no. 41. Copyright © 2009 by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission
of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.
“The Netherlands Lives with Water” by Jim Shepard. First published in Mc-
Sweeney’s, no. 32. From the forthcoming You Think That’s Bad by Jim Shepard, to be
published 2011, copyright © 2011 by Jim Shepard. Used by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
“The Cowboy Tango” by Maggie Shipstead. First published in Virginia Quarterly
Review, Fall 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Maggie Shipstead. Reprinted by permission
of Maggie Shipstead.
“Raw Water” by Wells Tower. First published in McSweeney’s, no. 32. Copyright
© 2009 by Wells Tower. Reprinted by permission of Wells Tower.
 Introduction

In the late 1980s, when I was a young assistant professor at

Southern Illinois University, Isaac Bashevis Singer visited campus.
The Eng­lish department had a small budget for visiting writers, but
only the Honors College had funds suf­fi­cient to entice someone of
Singer’s stature to a place like Carbondale, Illinois, which meant
that we had to share him with the entire university. Mr. Singer was
elderly and quite frail, his vision and hearing not what they once
were, though his physical diminishments belied a still razor-sharp
intelligence and wit. He traveled with his wife, and they were atten-
tively cared for by the university, but for a man in his nineties he
was worked pretty hard. In the afternoon, both undergraduate and
grad students, as well as faculty from a va­ri­ety of university disci-
plines, convened in a large room with an oblong table, at the head
of which Mr. Singer had been ensconced. The students were
awarded seats at the table, whereas their professors, chafing visibly
at the arrangement, were consigned to an outer ring of folding
chairs and reminded that the purpose of the session was to allow
students to enter a dialogue with the great man, that their questions
got priority. Seated at the very farthest remove from her husband
was Mrs. Singer.
The first student question was obviously a plant. “Mr. Singer?”
said one of the undergraduates. The old man had trouble locating
the voice, lost as it was in the ambient noise of the room — people
settling into their chairs, whispering in nervous anticipation — but
fi­nally saw the raised hand. “Mr. Singer? Could you tell us, please,
What is the purpose of literature?”
 xiv Introduction
Mr. Singer smiled broadly at the question, as if this were the first
time he had ever heard it and was delighted to know the answer.
“The purpose of literature,” he said clearly, meeting the student’s
eye, “is to entertain and to instruct.”
He let his voice fall. Next question.
The undergraduate students looked at the graduate students,
who looked at the outer ring of faculty. Clearly, eve­r y­one expected
more. The question, after all, was the sort likely to generate whole
classes of heated, unresolved debate, but here was a Nobel Prize
winner who seemed to think that ten words suf­ficed to put the mat-
ter to rest.
“But Mr. Singer,” the student persisted. “­Shouldn’t literature
also —”
Singer held up his hand. “To entertain . . . ,” he repeated, paus-
ing to allow his wisdom on the subject to sink in, “. . . and to in-
struct.”
Though he ­couldn’t have been clearer or more adamant, the
question proved resilient. Over the next hour several other at-
tempts were made by faculty and students to get their distinguished
visitor to elaborate on the other possible uses (po­lit­i­cal? cultural?)
of literature, but each time he demurred. Near the end of the ses-
sion, an aggrieved voice rang out, “But in your own stories, ­don’t
you always . . .” At the sound of this new voice, Mr. Singer’s head,
which had begun to droop, snapped up, his eyes darting around
the room, anxious to locate the source of this new ob­jec­tion. “You?”
he said, squinting at his wife who sat in the farthest reaches of his
milky vision. “You! I ­don’t have enough problems?”
To entertain and to instruct. Interestingly, he never reversed the
order. Literature, he seemed to suggest, ­couldn’t possibly instruct
without first entertaining; nor did he fail to pause dramatically be-
tween “entertain” and “instruct,” as if he feared his listeners were
more likely to forget the first purpose than the second. Who could
blame him? I might have been a young, wet-behind-the-ears junior
professor, but counting grad school, I’d been in the lit biz for a
good dec­ade and had witnessed firsthand the propensity of my lit
colleagues to mine both poetry and prose fiction for its sparkling
nuggets of meaning (instruction) while allowing its many delights
to run off like so much slurry. The very word “entertain” connotes
to such folk a lack of seriousness, as if the ability to engage and de-
Introduction xv
light readers amounted to a mere parlor trick. The desire to please,
some would maintain, is akin to pandering. The writer’s real job is
not to court the affection of readers but to force them to confront
hard truths. Back in grad school I’d flirted with such ideas myself,
but lately I’d come to suspect that the desire to show people a good
time is a generous impulse rooted in humility. The artist acknowl-
edges both the existence and importance of others. He ­comes to
us bearing a gift he hopes will please us. He starts out making the
thing for himself, perhaps, but at some point he realizes he wants
to share it, which is why he spends long hours reshaping the thing,
lovingly honing its details in the hopes it will please us, that it will
be a gift worth the giving and receiving.
But of course it’s unfair to blame Eng­lish teachers. Too often
writers themselves, like composers terrified of being dismissed as
“melody makers,” give the impression that “instruction” is the big
game worth stalking. Graham Greene, for instance, drew a distinc-
tion between his “serious novels” and “entertainments” like The
Third Man, leaving readers to wonder if he was blind to what a fine
piece of writing the latter is. Though I’m sure Mr. Singer would
have allowed that not eve­r y­one who uses the word “entertaining”
means the same thing by it, he appeared to want no part of such
snobbery. His point seemed to be that while we might not all agree
on what we find “entertaining,” we’re unlikely to confuse it with
what’s commonly meant by “instructive.” One is a horse and the
other’s a cart, and in his opinion one belonged in front, the other
behind. I left that afternoon session grinning from ear to ear, con-
vinced I’d found an ally, even if he was just visiting.
That night Singer read to a packed auditorium. Given the paces
he’d already been put through, I expected him to be exhausted,
but instead he seemed invigorated. Either he’d had a nap or been
fed a good meal (I can’t imagine where, in Carbondale), or he was
just pleased that with the afternoon’s rough interrogation behind
him, his only remaining task was to disappear into one of his magi-
cal tales. Most nonwriters ­don’t understand how wonderful it is for
an author to lose himself (to lose, literally, his self) in a story he’s
written, or how similar the experience of doing so is to that of a
nonwriter who loses himself in a stranger’s story: for a time, you,
your life, your troubles . . . none of it matters. Granted, writers do
feed off receptive audiences, and there’s always an element of per-
 xvi Introduction
formance, but it’s the disappearance, especially after a long day of
smiling and hand-shaking and answering questions, that the writer
craves. Dickens is said to have read himself to death in huge audi-
toriums, losing himself night after night to Bill Sykes’s murder of
Nancy in Oliver Twist. The best art has always had the power to se-
duce its creator.
Whoever worked the sound system the night of Mr. Singer’s
reading was given a delicate task. The faculty member whose job it
was to introduce Mr. Singer was young and robust of voice, whereas
the writer himself needed a sig­nifi­cant boost from the microphone.
His hellos were barely audible, but as he thanked the audience for
coming to hear him read, the unseen sound engineer in the rear
of the auditorium gradually brought up the volume until the small
man before the microphone could be heard throughout the cav-
ernous space. Here, like a new plot point introduced into a narra-
tive already under way, the law of unintended consequences kicked
in. Because the whole podium was now alive, the mic amplifying
not just the speaker’s voice but ­every other sound. When the toe of
his shoe encountered the base of the lectern, a deep explosion re-
sulted, the reverberations of which he had to patiently wait out be-
fore continuing, though he seemed innocent of his own causal re-
lationship to the disturbance. My wife and I were seated near the
front of the auditorium, and when Singer set down the thick sheaf
of pages on the podium with another resounding boom, we re-
garded each other with chagrin. Did he mean to read them all?
Was it his intention in this manner to exact literary revenge for the
afternoon’s What-is-the-purpose-of-literature discussion?
He began to read, and after about twenty seconds — far too soon,
it seemed — he fin­ished and turned the first page, and I realized
that, yes, of course, he meant to read them all, but there were only
three or four sentences on each; the font had been magnified to
accommodate the reader’s failing vision. Before he could move on
to page two, though, page one had to be dispensed with. Appar-
ently the manuscript had been fastened with a large staple, not pa-
per-clipped, and the sheaf was too thick for each page to be easily
folded underneath the ones still to be read, so Mr. Singer decided,
reasonably enough, simply to detach the fin­ished page, which
came free, reluctantly, with a loud pop. But now the poor man had
another problem. The lectern was narrow, and there was nowhere
Introduction xvii
to put the detached page. He thought about this for a second and
arrived at a workable solution, simply letting go of it. No doubt he
expected the page to drop straight down and come to rest at his
feet on the elevated stage. Instead it caught an air current and
swooped out into the audience, where those seated in the front
rows rose in a wave to field it. There was a ripple of nervous laugh-
ter which, blessedly, Mr. Singer appeared not to hear. He was fin­
ished with the second page now, and after a brief struggle and with
a sound not unlike a cork being extracted from a champagne bot-
tle, it too came free of its staple and wafted out into the audience. I
leaned over to Barbara, my wife, and whispered, “Dear God.” There
had to be at least fifty pages in the sheaf. This was going to happen
fifty more times? I ­wasn’t sure I could bear it. Mr. Singer himself,
though, had the determined look of a man who’d endured worse,
and so I resumed my prayer, silently now. “Dear God, let this grand
old man make it through his story. Give him his well-earned tri-
umph. Do not make a mockery of him.”
Does God listen to the prayers of agnostic young novelists of-
fered on behalf of elderly Nobel laureates? You tell me. After about
twenty grueling pages, half of which ended up in the audience, Mr.
Singer, fin­ishing another page, gave his now customary page tug,
but this time, despite his efforts, there was no pop. The page re-
mained stubbornly affixed. He tugged again . . . still nothing (Dear
God dear God dear God). On the third try — a mighty yank this
time — there was a detonation, and out into the audience fluttered
not one page but two, each describing its own terrible arc. The
page he needed to continue his story had broken containment,
sailed out into the audience without his permission. All, I con-
cluded, my heart sinking, was lost.
But I was wrong. Only momentarily flustered, the old man
reached into his suit jacket and took out another manuscript. “This
sometimes happens,” he admitted ruefully. And not just to him, he
seemed to imply, but rather to all who soldier on in the face of
life’s myriad dif­fi­culties, expected (the frailty that ­comes with age)
and unexpected (You! I ­don’t have enough problems?). Undaunted, he
began to read a whole new story, a backup, the thing he’d learned
long ago that it’s better to have and not need than to need and not
have. He’d come to entertain us, to give us the best he had to offer,
and he meant to do just that. Did he need the money at this point?
 xviii Introduction
I believe and devoutly hope not. The impression he gave was of a
man deeply grateful at such an advanced age to have so many de-
voted readers in a place he’d never been to before, people whose
lives he’d touched by put­ting pen to paper. He’d never met them
and ­wouldn’t meet them tonight. There were too many of them
and there was just one of him, and when he was fin­ished reading
this new story, he’d be whisked away, empty of energy and even his
magical words. But right now he enjoyed being among us strang-
ers, giving us the gift of his voice. He read the second story in its
entirety, calmly and without a glitch, as if his ninety-some years had
taught him that he was unlikely to be thwarted twice in the same
evening. He’d done all a man could reasonably do to anticipate
and stave off dis­as­ter. It would have to be enough. Bathed in sweat
and admiration, I felt — what’s the word? — instructed. Note to
self: this is how it’s done.
To entertain and to instruct.
I’ll leave the de­fin­ing of these two crucial terms to others and
say only that I was wonderfully entertained and instructed by the
twenty riveting stories in this year’s Best American. It’s a showcase of
twenty writers’ often breathtaking talents, but there’s no showing
off, and the stories themselves — rich and varied — are blessedly
free of the narcissism of the age. I’m pleased to report that there
are no triumphs of style over substance, and the language, while
often beautiful and sometimes absolutely electric, is always in the
ser­vice of narrative. The writers may have begun by writing for
themselves, as the late J. D. Salinger famously claimed to do, but in
the end they turned outward, offering us the gift of what they’d
crafted with such care, hoping we’d be pleased. And you will be.
Narrowing the roughly two hundred and fifty stories I read to the
final twenty felt like some sort of literary waterboarding. At the
back of this book is a list of another hundred or so stories culled by
Heidi Pitlor from the thousands she read this year in magazines
large and small, and I strongly encourage you to search these out
and read them, even though I know you’ll prefer some of them to
the ones I chose and, along with their authors, hold my taste
against me, but there you are and here am I. In one of my own
most favorite stories in the anthology, one character, a father who’s
taken up story writing late in life, remarks that stories are like
dreams. His son, also a writer, disagrees. Stories, he claims, are like
Introduction xix
jars full of bees. You unscrew the lid and out come the bees. Maybe
in the end that’s all guest editors do: we choose the stories that
contain the most bees, the tales that sting us good, leaving us sur-
prised and sore at first, then free to worry at our leisure the tender,
inflamed spot, our attention focused, ourselves wide awake and
alive.
Rich ard Rus s o