The Best American Short Stories 2015
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0547939418
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Boyle’s choices of stories reflect a vibrant range of characters, from a numb wife who feels alive only in the presence of violence to a new widower coming to terms with his sudden freedom, from a missing child to a champion speedboat racer. These stories will grab hold and surprise, which according to Boyle is “what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year’s selections.”
Mulling over the question of character likability, series editor Heidi Pitlor asks, “Did I like these characters? I very much liked reading their stories, as did T. C. Boyle.” Here are characters who “are living, breathing people who screw up terribly and want and need and think uneasy thoughts.”
T. C. BOYLE, guest editor, has published fifteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his novel World’s End and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing. His most recent book is the novel The Harder They Come.
HEIDI PITLOR, series editor, is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.
explaining left in me. My legs will not hold me up. “I’m going to bed.” I go into the bedroom, take off my clothes, step around the piss on the rug, and climb beneath the covers. Then I hear a scratching at the door, which opens, and small footsteps. Cordelia climbs the little carpeted steps at the end of the bed, which James bought when she couldn’t jump up anymore—there is still tenderness in him—and I feel the small body curl beside me. We sleep. James calls the vet, and we take the dog
and his wife. The young woman in the corner was traveling with her mother and older brother. And the tall man was with his son, or so Kavitha presumed, though they looked nothing alike. The boy was not more than eight or nine years old but, of all of them, he seemed to remain the calmest, even more so than his father. He serenely took two thin pebbles, a curled length of twine, and a chit of paper, maybe a photograph, from his pockets and put them in his shoe. They heard a clamor farther down
lorry, a burly Sikh who spoke very little, except to say, I’m going to Attari, no further, ignored Kavitha. But we have to get the police, she said, the authorities, the military, I don’t know. That train is under siege, she cried. My husband is on it, his father. People are hurt. The cabin of the lorry was dark. She turned from the driver to the boy. He was staring out of the window. He wasn’t my father, the boy said, falling silent again. Kavitha looked at him, as if for the first time. What’s
he smiled at anyone who met his eyes. And to those who then returned his smile with their own, he would speak: “Excuse me, ma’am,” or “Sir, just a moment,” and he would fake-limp with all his dignity—they could see this now, the ones who looked—and he would reach out a hand. Those who took it—very few, very few, God save us all—would find he had pressed into their palm a hundred-dollar bill. And was already walking away. Another story: Sometime in your teens, in high school, around the time your
person reeling from some kind of intoxicant. In Tucson, where I lived for many years, you’ll often see someone marching down the road or standing at a bus stop with this very odd, twitchy behavior. Of course, meth is everywhere in Arizona. The neighborhood in which I lived slid quickly from working class to something a little more provisional. Coming from a working-class family, I find myself drawn to these sorts of characters: characters who appear to have less armor and artifice. Somehow their