Short Stories - Our Man in Boston

Genre Genre Genre • Boston After Dark

As long as I am banging the drum for short fiction, let me apprise you of the latest addition to the Akashic Books Noir Series: Boston Noir edited by Boston homeboy Dennis Lehane (The Given Day).

Since the 2004 publication of Brooklyn Noir, that series has added some 30 titles, all of which follow the same template: An editor native to the title city assembles other denizens of that city and each provides a story specific to various neighborhoods of the metropolis in question. Featured in this volume: Stewart O’Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, Dana Cameron, and of course Lehane, whose introduction contains this pearl: “That’s the paradox of the new Boston—what’s lost has, in many cases, been taken; what’s left is what people can’t sell. Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times so the changing times instead roll over them.” —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 17, 2009

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Current Reads • Get Shorties

While preparing my chat with American short fiction samurai Tobias Wolff for publication, I realized that though I greatly appreciate short stories I have not been paying sufficient attention to them in this space. Luckily, I have the 2009 edition of The Best American Short Stories at hand.

As you may know, this series has a long and honorable history dating back to 1915, as well as a permanent editor, Heidi Pitlor, who is joined each year by a guest editor—this year, Alice Sebold. And as is the customary practice, each volume contains about 20 short fictions, culled from a wide-ranging smorgasbord of magazines and finally selected from about a hundred stories by the guest editor. And, as has been the case, there are well-known names from well-known publications and newcomers from not-so-well-known periodicals.

This year, Daniel Alarcón, Annie Proulx, Yiyun Li, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (The New Yorker), Joseph Epstein (Commentary), Richard Powers (Conjunctions), Kevin Moffett, Adam Johnson (Tin House), Ron Rash (The Southern Review), and Jill McCorkle (Narrative Magazine) are joined by Steve De Jarnatt (Santa Monica Review), Alice Fulton (Tin House), Karl Taro Greenfeld (American Short Fiction), Eleanor Henderson (Agni), Greg Hrbek (Black Warrior Review), Victoria Lancelotta (The Gettysburg Review), Rebecca Makkai (New England Review), Alex Rose (Ploughshares), Ethan Rutherford (American Short Fiction), and Namwali Serpell (Callaloo) to round out a cornucopia of short narratives.

Sebold introduces the anthology:

More than mere solace is to be gained by reading good stories—short stories in particular. Stories provide an endless access into another world, brought forth by an infinite number of gifted minds. A story about grief can comfort; a story about arrogance can shock and yet confirm; a story populated largely by landscape, whether lush or industrial, can expand the realm that we as individuals inhabit.

She echoes Pitlor’s conviction that these selections “demonstrate the human ability to endure crises and to regenerate afterward. There is nothing safe about these stories.” —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 12, 2009

» Read excerpts from The Best American Short Stories 2009.

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Serious Fun • In It for the Money?

Saying someone needs no introduction used to have some validity—before life in the post-industrial world went all 365/24/7 on us. Now the exponential explosion of sense-wracking gossip, trivia, ED adverts, and religious poppycock renders that gesture anachronistic. Nonetheless I would love to think that Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five), who died in 2007, needs no introduction—at least to people who find their way to this outlying outpost.

Let me take care of a couple things on my left-wing, arugula-eating agenda by bringing an unintentionally amusing obituary of Vonnegut to your attention. This in the they-would-be-viewed-as-amusing-if-they-weren’t-so toxic category and a case in point of one of Vonnegut’s Swiftian bon mots from Cat’s Cradle:

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Well anyway, a new volume of Vonnegut short stories has been assembled: Look at the Birdie (Delacorte). Anthologized here are 14 previously unpublished stories (festooned with the author’s chirpy line drawings) written just as Vonnegut was liberating himself from the grind of his servitude to General Electric. The stories are nascent exemplars of Vonnegut’s humorous humanism and are well worth any reader’s time. But what I found especially edifying was the facsimile of a letter he wrote to a friend in 1951 on where his writing was going:

…the obvious alternative is, of course, something to please The Atlantic, Harper’s or The New Yorker. To do this would be to turn out something after the fashion of somebody-or-other, and I might be able to do it. I say might. It amounts to signing on with any of a dozen schools born 10, 20, 30 years ago. The kicks are largely on having passed off a creditable counterfeit. And, of course, if you appear in The Atlantic or Harper’s or The New Yorker, by God you must be a writer, because everybody says so. This is poor competition for the fat checks from the slicks. For want of anything more tempting, I’ll stick with money.

And he did. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 4, 2009

» Read an excerpt from Look at the Birdie.

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Edited by Bridget Fitzgerald

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Saturday, November 21, 2009