The Best American Short Stories 2021: Ward, Jesmyn, Pitlor, Heidi: 9781328485397: Amazon.com: Books
Dr.C.J.Singh.Wallia
2 votes for this review as helpful.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reviewed in the United States on 13 October 2021
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2021
Selected by JESMYN WARD with HEIDI PITLOR
Reviewed by C.J.Singh.Wallia
*** HEIDI PITLOR is the co-editor, since 2007, of The Best
American Short Stories (BASS) published annually. She is also the
co-editor with LORRIE MOORE of “100 Years of the Best
American Short Stories.” (See my detailed amazon-review of this 723-page
book with Heidi Pitlor’s engaging introductions, instructive and
witty, for each decade. In my Creative Writing workshops, I
assign the big BASS book for self-learning and the current BASS for
detailed discussions.)
*** Heidi Pitlor on her three-page Foreword in BASS 2021
writes: “2020 was more beast than year. …
To be honest reading large amounts of short fiction during a pandemic period
proved challenging for me…. For a story to resonate with me, it had to feel
urgent during a time when even going to the post office held real danger.
*
(Earlier this year, returning from mailing at the local Post Office, I was pushed
into the dangerous car-traffic lane while waiting for the light to turn green. The
culprit, a middle-aged white man, wearing veteran’s clothes, sneered at me,
calling me a Mexican, Iranian. I’m a brown-skinned, naturalized US citizen from
northwest India. The car in the traffic lane luckily swerved away
from me. The moment green light appeared, I ran across the street to my
parked car.)
*
Heidi Pitlor, as in her earlier books, warmly introduces the guest editor.
The 2021 BASS the guest editor is Jesmyn Ward.
*****
JESMYN WARD begins her eight-page Introduction: “The last year bewildered
many of us. The institutions we believed would protect us faltered, one after
another. Casual cruelty, callousness, and gross ignorance became barely
remarkable. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the COVID pandemic,
so many of them brown and black and poor. We who were left were unmoored
by this storm: our world shaken, seared by wind and rain, tossed by grief in a
sea of loss. This year set the ships of our lives adrift, and the pandemic isolated
us from one another, so that we spun and listed alone….That which sustained
us, the rafts we depended on to keep us from sinking into the watery depths of
our loss was narrative.”
All eight pages of Jesmyn Ward’s Introduction to the book present her elegant
writing. Particularly impressive is Ward’s homage to her grandmother’s oral
ability to narrate stories in characters’ voices. This reminds me of my mother
reading to me when I was a child in a variety of voices from the great classics of
India, “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana.”
*
My reading The Best American Short Stories for many years has been more
instructive and far less expensive than the workshops for my MFA degree.
Moreover , The Contributors’ notes in BASS books can be highly instructive for
any reader aspiring to become a published writer of short stories in
magazines.
*
Jesmyn Ward’s BASS 2021 tops my list.
The short stories that impressed me the most include:
1. ‘Love Letter” by George Saunders
2. “Switzerland” by Nicole Krauss
3. “The Last Days of Rodney” by Tracey Rose Peyton
4. “You Are My Dear Friend” by Madhuri Vijay
5. “The Miracle Girl” by Rita Chang-Eppig
Five shining stars for Jesmyn Ward’s The Best Amreican Short Stories 2021
2 votes for this review as helpful.
