2.5 stars
I really only got this for the short story contained in this anthology called "men," by Lydia Davis. So, I didn't read all of the stories.

Thanks go to reviewers:

Luke Reynolds
For his talented ratings of the stories
and
Ilana Diamont
For her pertinent review

Both saving me a waste of my time. Short story collections can be so hit or miss.

"Shhh," by NoViolet Buyawayo, 3 stars
The protagonist's father is dying from AIDS. Mother of Bones ( her grandma ), consults Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro, who says to avenge the spirit and heal father, they need to find two fat white virgin goats to be brought up the mountain for sacrifice and that father has to be bathed in the goats' blood. In addition, Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro says he will need 500 U.S. dollars as payment, and if there are no U.S. dollars, euros will do.

"Special Economics," by Maureen McHugh, 4 stars
" 'a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,' JieLing said. It had been her father's favorite quote from chairman mao.
'... It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act by which one class overthrows another.' "

"Another Manhattan," by Donald Antrim, 2 stars
The title refers to another drink manhattan, and also another night in Manhattan.
A couple, Jim and Kate, have a disaster of a marriage. They have a couple of friends, a married couple, Elliot and Susan, and they're all having affairs with each other's spouses. Ugh.

"Pee on Water," by Rachel B. Glaser, 3 stars
First there was a beautiful planet, and then humans crawled out of the water.
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Excellent. ( )

"Paranoia," by Said Sayrafiezadeh (2011): 9
- This dreamy story, caught between a sort of waking dream world, a nostalgia for the present, in which a white man (half-aware, half-unaware, unanalyzing receptacle of subaltern experience) travels through a mirage of underclass life, underclass experience of a nameless overclass machinizing above them, and which they are not even set against but only able to react in response to. Very good and the cleanness, the forward-flowing nimbleness of this prose, such a gift after the stilted, faux-readability of much other fare.

"Slatland," by Rebecca Lee (1993): 9.5
- The funny thing is, this story, this carefully controlled outburst of fluid emotion -- in which a girl sees the same therapist twice, once at 11 when she's sad and once at 31 when she's sad -- could have just as easily been included in any number of the so-called SFF anthologies I'm concurrently reading. The relevant turns are clear--the girl's ability to “rise above” her problems and survey the world around her from a literal height in order to gain perspective and move on from her depression. Yet, everything else -- the pinpoint deployment of my so-called “literary faux-prose naïveté”, the wry turns, and the counter-intuitive character expressions -- just so good, so beyond what those stories normally do, even when they're actively trying for precisely this effect. Example: when the therapist first says “girlie-whirlie” and the next line is “Despite this, my father allowed me to see him.” Otherwise, the completely unanticipated and unprepared divulsion of the fathers affair.

"The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp, and Carr," by Jesse Ball (2008): 9.25
- There's a certain type of LitFic prose trick, as popular among the MFA short story crowd as it is unremarked upon -- a certain type of twee naivete, an affected autism in the impulse to hyper-describe the easily describable in such a way that, through simply language and simple observation, we get a little blob of unformed wisdom. My miles vary in relation to this kind of language, although here Ball does it about as good as you can, I'd say. I'm thinking particularly of the comedic dreamscene in which he's on the verge of confronting his eventual murderer but preoccupied with the safety of his jacket, only to reassure himself that surely 'coatmen must have an ethical code to not let anything bad happen to coats'. He mixes, unlike most of these, that kind of conscious digressiveness (the description of the elephant in the circus) with uncanny characterizations and dialogue (something that often gets under my skin, but works here ~ as in the discussion with the girl about the swan, in which she's over-bright and wisdom-from-on-high-giving, but effectively so, in a Moral Of The Story way ~ another, better example: the very funny opening lines, in which a girl at a bar reacts to a man walking up to her by crying), and, most impressively, a type of accumulated narrative momentum often absent (in this story of four men, consecutively killed during duels by the husband of a woman they accidentally caused to miscarry).

"Some Other, Better Otto," by Deborah Eisenberg (2003): 8.5
- Interesting in context of sff reservoir I've been wading in, as this has basically the narrative structure of many more “literary” contemporary speculative offerings, namely a straightforward domestic story overlaid with a patina of scientification (in this case, some deep thinking about Quantum Theory and the cosmos that our protagonist used to both reframe and detach from the more mundane [esp. in this light] aspects of their life). This mode is definitely the Light form of this method, as the Hard form uses even the light patina to causal effect in the story arc, rather than as mere symbolic gloss or ruminative whetstone, as it is here.

Overall an excellent anthology of contemporary American stories from the last ten years or so. What impressed me most, other than the near-uniform excellence of the individual stories, was the coherence of the anthology, the way the stories speak to one another while also being very different formally and stylistically. One thing Ben Marcus is interested in as editor is a certain stylistic richness and density, and every story has a unique voice. I love the realistic character studies like Yiyun Li's A Man Like Him sitting side by side with fabulist and science fiction stories like Maureen McHugh's Special Economics and Kelly Link's The Valley of the Girls. There's the classical beauty of Anthony Doerr's The Deep and the hard-bitten Southern grotesque of Donald Ray Pollock's Fish Sticks. There's the cerebral, neurotic interiority of Deborah Eisenberg's Some Other, Better Otto and the spare language of a child's perspective in NoViolet Bulawayo's Shhhh. The collection favors long stories, with quite a few in the 30-40 page range, but there are also short, formally playful stories like Lydia Davis's Men, Robert Coover's Going for a Beer, Kyle Coma-Thompson's The Lucky Body, Mathias Svalina's Play, and Rachel Glaser's Pee on Water.

I had only read five of the stories in the anthology previously, so most of the work was unknown to me, and 14 of the 32 stories were by writers I had never read before, so I've enjoyed getting to know their work and am inspired to read more. My favorite story in the anthology by a writer whose work I already know well is Denis Johnson's long, wonderfully meandering story The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. My favorite by a writer I had never read before is either Claire Vaye Watkins's The Diggings, Charles Yu's Standard Loneliness Package, or Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's Paranoia. I started to do a list of favorites but the list got too long. I'm excited to teach this anthology in an undergrad fiction workshop because every one of these stories has something to teach. The problem is deciding which stories to put on the syllabus.


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