Edited by John Kulka and Natalie Danford

“Is the short story dead?” wonders Mary Gaitskill in her introduction to Best New American Voices 2009.Short answer: No. As long as there are fiction-writing workshops, there will be short stories. Each of the fourteen stories in the volume Gaitskill helped assemble was once fodder for discussion around a seminar table. Only the best new voices know for sure the conditions under which their work was composed, but the the Iowa Writers’ Workshop student who narrates Nam Le’s contribution, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”, provides an insight into that rarefied world: “It was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much.”Le’s narrator, also named Nam Le, casts about desperately for inspiration. “I tried everything—writing in longhand, writing in my bed, in my bathtub.” Eventually, he buys an electric typewriter at an antique store.”There’s a lot of polished writing around,” a literary agent tells him. “You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out?” Her colleague answers, “Your background and life experience.”

There’s a lot of mining of background and life experience in Best New American Voices. The hometowns of many of the authors curiously mirror the settings of their stories. Nebraska, northern Russia, Lake Geneva, Wyoming, Mali, Iowa City and Puerto Rico are all vividly and grimly described. To be fair, the fictional Nam Le is the only participant in a writing workshop; the authors are careful to place made-up people in the middle of their carefully reconstructed settings. We have rock-climbers, carnies, teachers, a veteran of the Iraq war and a lot of teenagers.Somehow, though, despite all this variety in character and setting, the fourteen stories here feel oddly, numbly familiar. Perhaps it is because, whenever it is geographically possible, the season is winter. (Otherwise, there is dust and thunderstorms.) Perhaps it is because most of the characters are vaguely depressed and none have the wherewithal to tell a joke. Of the fourteen stories here, only one, Jacob Rubin’s “Little Stones, Little Pistols, Little Clash”, makes any attempt at humor.

Of course it is no sin to write serious fiction. But nobody who contributed to this collection seems to be having much fun. Too many of the stories here have the feeling of exercises: 2,500-word laboratories designed to test dialogue, metaphor, description and other fictional techniques. Some are successful, particularly Nam’s “Love and Honor”, Anastasia Kolendo’s “Wintering”, and Will Boast’s “Weather Enough”—in which our fair city of Chicago makes a cameo appearance. Suzanne Rivecca’s “Look Ma, I’m Breathing” and Kevin A. González’s “Statehood” are also stand-outs.

It’s likely you will have the opportunity to encounter most of these authors again; nine of the fourteen are currently at work on novels and the rest are assembling their short story collections. (Le is ahead of the curve: his book of stories, The Boat, came out earlier this year.) Maybe by then these best new voices will have become comfortable with their craft and have a little more time to play.

Reviewed by Aimee Levitt

Best New American Voices 2009 edited by John Kulka & Natalie Danford
Harvest Books, 2008.
Paper, 368 pgs, $14.00
ISBN-10 : 015603431X