New Stories from the South: The Year's Best

Every year, I purchase New Stories from the South, but I always buy last year's, in paperback, then I might take another few months to read it. So I've just finished the 2000 issue and will start on 2001 one of these days (I have it in my pile of books somewhere). I never regret having purchased or read these anthologies. They always include good writers, both new and familiar, and the stories are an interesting combination of themes, locales and styles. The South is a part, sometimes subtle, but always there, and the characters are seldom sterotypical, their stories never trite. Pick up any of these issues. The stories are timeless.

One wonders a bit at the subtitle: The Year's Best, 2000, and then one remembers this collection, the latest in a long line of such anthologies stretching back to the 1980's, was edited by Algonquin Books' Shannon Ravenel, and she knows more about these things probably than anybody else.Nevertheless, I would call this a mixed bag of Southern storytelling. Allan Gurganus's "He's at the Office" has a clever premise, one familiar to anyone from a close-knit, aging family, and once again showcases Gurganus's sharp eye for detail and razzmatazz prose style, but the ending is silly and the story collapses because of it. R.H.W. Dillard's "Forgetting the End of the World" seems much ado about nothing and strains for a significance it most certainly does not achieve. These are two of the weaker links in the chain. Among the stronger ones are "Mr. Puniverse", a marvelous comedy of unrequited passion, Romulus Linney's "The Widow", which has the rhythm and cadence of a good Appalachian folk ballad, Melanie Sumner's "Good Hearted Woman", the book's longest piece and most obvious crowd pleaser, about a young woman's confrontations with work, love, and family, and Margie Rabb's "How to Tell a Story," my own favorite of the bunch, and an incisive, very moving, and all-too-true look at the dog eat dog world of university creative writing programs and one young writer's determination to tell stories despite what happens to her and the stories she tells. This is an attractively designed paperback. Each story ends with an author biography, with the writer revealing why he/she wrote that particular story.