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Monday, February 12, 2018

A fine piece of fiction concludes 100 Years of Best American Short Stories - but is it a story?

The final selection in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners (2014), by Lauren Groff, and it's an excellent story in many ways though I have one objection, which I'll get to, but first: Yes, this story, like few others, tells the life story of a young man in a short space. It feels neither rushed nor truncated, it's unusual and vivid in its setting, and gives a good sense of the man's personality as it evolves through various crises and in the shadow of two odd, powerful parents. The protagonist is raised in Florida swampland, where his father, a herpetologist, captures snakes for study and for sale. His father is abusive and self-centered; the mother abandons the family when the boy is young, and he suffers  through a painful adolescence. Shortly after he's reunited w/ his mother in his college years, she dies (cancer?) and later his father dies, despite his boasting of immunity, from a snakebite. The young man marries well, and sells off various pieces of his inherited property to the university of Florida, eventually becoming wealthy from the sales and from shrewd investments (he seems like a complete social misfit, but evidently he's quite capable). Some kind of illness of trauma causes him to lost all sense of hearing, leaving him isolated and depressed - and we build toward a scary ending, which I will not divulge. Nice work in a short story, but - is it a short story? Many readers will recognize that Groff went on to include this piece - verbatim perhaps, I'm not sure - in her well-received novel Fates and Furies, where it serves as the lengthy back story to one of the characters. Well, perhaps she composed this initially as a story and then saw broader possibilities and expanded it into a novel; that does happen. But I have a sense that, certainly by the time the story was published, let alone re-published in the 100 Years anthology, that she and the editors knew this was an excerpt from a longer work. As a piece in a magazine, I don't care whether it was actually a story or an excerpt; however, in an anthology that unabashedly boasts that it represents a selection of the best American short stories, couldn't, shouldn't the eds (Lorrie Moore, Heidi Pitlor) have been more vigilant and actually select pieces that represent short stories, not merely short fiction?

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