New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2000 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156512295X ISBN 13: 9781565122956

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of outstanding short stories by masterful voices in Southern literature features twenty works by both established authors and new writers, including A. Manette Ansay, Clyde Edgerton, Robert Olen Butler, Allan Gurganus, Chris Offutt, Melanie Summer, and many others. Original.

About this title

About the Authors

Ellen Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest settlements in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Her fiction has won many prizes, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She lives now in Jackson, Mississippi.

Shannon Ravenel has edited New Stories from the South since 1986. Formerly editorial director of Algonquin Books, she now directs her Algonquin imprint, Shannon Ravenel Books. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

From the Back Cover

New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2000 tours the contemporary South better than any freight train, jet plane, or VW Bug. As Ellen Douglas muses in her preface to this year's collection, each story here helps us "feel and understand the significance of the buzzing blooming dying chaos of our experience."

-An adulterous couple, whose love is like a hard drug, drives to Nashville to face worse news than they could have foreseen.

-A box of kittens, discarded on the highway, becomes the bargaining chip in an unraveling marriage.

-A young man habitually waves back to a chronic "waver" on hi commute to work, even as he's perplexed by what the waving might mean.

Now in its fifteenth year, New Stories from the South is the most enduring, most read regional collection, or as Kirkus Reviews said, "one of the best story anthologies around."

Reviews

As quoted by Ellen Douglas in her preface to the 15th anthology in this consistently strong series, a neighbor of Flannery O'Connor once said, "Them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do." The 20 short narratives collected here are best enjoyed in the same spirit, as mesmerizing snippets from lonely, often strange, people's lives. "He's at the Office," by Allan Gurganus, is the best of an impressive bunch. In Gurganus's intense, tightly composed tale, narrator R. Richard Markham Jr. discovers that Dick Sr.'s workaholism covers up a more serious sickness and ingeniously preserves what's left of his ailing father's selective memory. Memory is also the theme of R.H.W. Dillard's "Forgetting the End of the World," which is postscripted with a wink from the author: "I do not remember having written this story." Cathy Day's imaginative contribution, "The Circus House," is set at the turn of the 20th century in Peru, Ind., where "Mrs. Colonel" Ford is the genteel, self-described "First Lady" of the Great Porter Circus & Sideshow Menagerie. Her husband manages their marriage with the same practiced logic he brings to his traveling enterprise, leading Mrs. Colonel Ford to swallow her pride and chase after a younger man. "Sheep," the story of a death row inmate told from the inmate's own perspective, is Thomas H. McNeely's accomplished debut. Another young writer, Christopher Miner, introduces a self-righteous home wrecker in "Rhonda and Her Children," a wicked satire. Both Mary Helen Stefaniak ("A Note to Biographers Regarding Famous Author Flannery O'Connor") and Margo Rabb ("How to Tell a Story") use real-life experiencesAStefaniak's mother and aunts went to school with O'Connor, and Rabb's parents were killed in a plane crashAas their respective foundations for witty and tender stories. Polished works by Tony Earley, Tim Gautreaux, A. Manette Ansay, Robert Olen Butler, Clyde Edgerton, Melanie Sumner and Wendy Brenner round out this diverse and compelling collection. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This noteworthy annual anthology of short fiction is drawn from a wide range of magazines, such as the New Yorker , Glimmer Train, and Shenandoah, and contributions from newer as well as established authors. Its South is diverse and complicated. The opening story explicitly confronts the prominence of a southern literary figure, Flannery O'Connor, to whom the narrator's family was incidentally connected. "Sheep" is a daring story whose point of view raises complicated questions about the alleged serialkilling protagonist's rural Texas life and the sheriff's troubling insistence that he "get right" with God. "How to Tell a Story," set in an MFA program at "Southwestern University," has a protagonist for whom life is so "absurdly sickening that I have to rearrange it, alter it, turn it into fiction." In "Heavy Metal," a Waco, Texas, girl questions the Bible her father relentlessly quotes to damn others in the "corrupt End Times" of the Branch Davidians, and she leaves home identifying with her "own personal Jesus," whose nail wounds suggest an intimacy with others she experiences through her body piercings. James O'Laughlin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface: Like a Vase or a Dance or a Painting

by Ellen Douglas

Susanne Langer, the twentieth-century philosopher who seems to me to have written most cogently on the subject of art, at the beginning of her great book Feeling and Form defined art as "the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling." Not mirrors to the world, not instruction, not entertainment, not even beauty, but the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. Langer says that the human animal is preeminently a symbol-making creature. We make forms that help us to feel and understand the significance of the buzzing blooming dying chaos of our experience. A story, like a vase or a dance or a painting, is such an art form. It presents to the human mind and senses an "as if" world, a symbol, new with every writer, that makes the reader say, "Yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it quite that way before, but that's how things are."

Flannery O'Connor wrote that "a story involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality." "I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me," she wrote, "and when she returned them, she said, 'Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.'"

And John Berger, the British critic, poet, and storyteller writes, "often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten." And, "art runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot."

But don't the first and third of these writers disagree with each other? Isn't Berger saying with the words "judged the judges" that storytelling is didactic, moralistic, and isn't Langer saying that it is not? Why do I feel so strongly that they both speak the truth? Flannery O'Connor's neighbor, I think, answers me. Them stories just gone and shown me how some folks would do. The storyteller presents an imagined world, cruel or benevolent, joyous or tragic, but stripped of all irrelevancies and the reader responds with, Yes! That's how things are. The reader's life may indeed be changed, not because the writer has lectured him, but because of the power and truth of the story. If the reader judges the judges or pleads revenge to the innocent, it's because she has been moved by the story, the symbol.

We know of no people, no community of humans from as far back as we can go, who did not make stories. Stories with heroes and villains, stories with characters confronting fate, stories that transformed experience into symbols that gave meaning to human lives, that made the listeners, the readers weep or laugh aloud-- and indeed act, as perhaps no moralist might have made them act.

One of the mysteries of the human world is that there have always been communities of artists in every medium, periods when individuals in a particular corner of the world produced the flowering of a particular art. That's been true of storytellers in the South, and off and on we speculate--perhaps spend too much time speculating--about the whys and wherefores of that flowering.

A major role of the South in our history has been to be the anvil on which the nation's metal is beaten into its still evolving shape. Sometimes we've been leaders, sometimes villains, sometimes victims or scapegoats. Whether we're black or white, the fire has been turned up under our lives (and perhaps consequently under our stories) again and again. We have known honor and betrayal, slavery and freedom, brutal poverty and obscene wealth, religious fanaticism and racism, the intimacy and support of still-functioning communities and the loneliness of the outsider. And our artists have been among those who have wielded the hammer, shaped the metal of our destiny. They have striven to make sense of what life's brutalities cannot, have voiced our region's tragedies and dilemmas, have forced the nation to turn and look at these and to see that they are not simply the South's tragedies and dilemmas, but the nation's and indeed the world's.

All of our artists have had a share in this shaping, but particularly music makers and writers.

One sees immediately that blues and jazz and rock, and even rap and hip-hop, clearly run like rumors and legends and make sense of what life's brutalities cannot make sense of. But our stories function in this way, too. One thinks immediately of Faulkner's "Dry September," and Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From." And then a spate of titles and writers comes to mind--from Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable to Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston to Peter Taylor and Ernest Gaines and Richard Bausch and Anne Tyler.

At this point I seem to hear the voice of another writer who generalizes, as did the three I have quoted, and who, like them, speaks especially to the South. The Irish writer Frank O'Connor, who is one of my favorite storytellers, wrote in THE LONLEY VOICE, "always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society." And, "there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often ?nd in the novel--an intense awareness of human loneliness." He goes on to trace the essential loneliness of the short story character from Gogol through Chekhov to Joyce and Katherine Anne Porter.

Story after story in this year's New Stories From The South illustrates the writer's abiding concern with making an artwork expressive of human feeling, stripped of the extraneous, the irrelevant. Again and again a story runs like a rumor and a legend, making sense of what life's brutalities cannot. And I ?nd in these writers a deep and sympathetic perception of the tragedy of human loneliness.

Finally, as Flannery O'Connor's neighbor said, "Them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do."

Use of this excerpt from New Stories From The South: The Year's Best, 2000 may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:

Copyright (c) 2000 by Ellen Douglas. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156512295X
• ISBN 13: 9781565122956
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Ravenel Shannon