European v American short fiction - some thoughts

Poking around in the Alexsandar Hemon collection Best European Fiction 2011, and am struck by a few things: first, almost none of the authors in the collection are familiar (to me) -in fact only one I'm sure I've read before is Hilary Mantel, and her short story, about a girl dying of anorexia, is about as different from her well-known novel, Wolf Hall, as you can imagine: short, contemporary, harrowing. I haven't systematically read through it, but have read some of the stories Hemon singles out in his introduction, and am struck by the differences between this collection and the annual collections of the best American stories or Prize Stories (O.Henry Awards): the European stories are more literary, at least in the sense of pushing the edges of literary form and technique, unusual narratives, a focus on the grotesque and the surreal (Ugliest Woman in the World - about a circus sideshow love affair/marriage; another story entirely about a man in his apartment while a woman he's about to have an affair with freshens up in the bathroom, but then she vanishes - huh?) - compare these with American collections in which the spirits of realism still rules; yes, many of the characters are outsiders and loners, but the stories tend to be told in much more conventional ways - there's much less experimentation with form and point of view. On the basis about just a few stories, it's ridiculous to generalize - the collection may have more to do with Hemon's taste than with an overall cultural trend - but I wonder what it says about the marketplace for literary ideas, in this profit- and celebrity-driven culture compared with the rest of the world.