Moreover, since many of her stories are told in present tense, her characters seldom engage in meditation or attempt a search for meaning, and there is little cause for her narrators to indulge in exposition or exploration. Beattie's characters seldom experience the kind of epiphany of awareness we have been accustomed to in twentieth century short fiction from James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson up through Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud. Beattie's people seldom know what makes them do the things they do and have no real sense of purpose or destiny thus instead of engaging in deliberate action, they more often seem acted upon. Seen as the spokesperson for her generation, Beattie has been alternately praised for her satiric view of that era's passivity and criticized for presenting sophisticated New Yorker magazine characters unable to understand themselves or others. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.Īnn Beattie ranks second only to Raymond Carver as being responsible for the renaissance of the American short story in the 1970s and 80s. Every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. Trevor’s stories are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the European Union, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor-secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is an anthology of stories from Trevor’s most recent collections. It’s only when she seems to be seduced by the public demand for the novelistic that she breaks faith with the great masters who have preceded her. She succeeds much more often than she fails because she brilliantly exploits what the form does best. Eisenberg is indeed a master of the short story. The best stories f Deborah Eisenberg, who has been called a master of the form, reflect her continuing conscientious effort to provide a structure and a syntax for feelings unspeakable until just the right rhythm makes what was loose and lying around inside clench and cluster into a meaningful pattern. Good stories, like good poems, don’t pontificate. The kind of complexity that fascinates masters of the short story is not captured by using more and more words but by using just the right ones. The short story’s lack of room to ruminate about so-called “big” socio-political issues is one reason the form is not popular with so-called “serious” critics who prefer genres that generalize. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Of all those listed above, here are the ones that I have read, with a brief comment on each: The New York Times’ 100 Notable books included ten short story collections: Mishra chose: David Means's The Spot Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Pankij Mishra, who asked: “Is short fiction with its necessarily fragmentary form and brisk epiphanies, better placed than the panoramic novel to capture the weird disjointedness and partial visions of modern life?” adding he was more captivated this year by short stories than long novels. Roddy Doyle picked Amy Bloom's collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out Byatt picked Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl The Guardian asked individual reviewers to list their favorites:Ī.
They listed Patricia Engel’s Vida as one of their “best debut collections.” National Public Radio listed Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li & The Collected Stories Of Deborah Eisenberg. Slate listed only The New Yorker Stories by Ann BeattieĪtlantic chose Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg & What Becomes by A. The New Yorker listed only Barry Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy.
Los Angeles Times’ David Ulin listed only The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.
Publishers Weekly listed only one: Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates.
The San Francisco Chronicle listed only one: Selected Stories by William Trevor. The Village Voice listed no short story collections in their fiction list. The Washington Post listed only “Best Novels” in their fiction category, as if short stories did not exist. I have have looked over the “Best Books of 2010” lists of the major newspapers, networks, and magazines and list below the short story collections chosen for those lists, along with my own comments on those I have read.
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