Every December, Houghton Mifflin's Best American series comes through with its fix for finicky readers, distilling the finest of all the past year's literary endeavors into anthologies packaged by genre and strung together with keen introductions often as striking as the content itself. Since 1915, the series has covered short stories, essays, travel, sports, spiritual, mystery and science writing; in 2002, it expanded to include Best American Nonrequired Reading in response to modern proliferations of new, nontraditional methods and media, and Best American Comics makes a similarly essential debut this year. The Spec takes a look at the best (and worst) of the Best. -Gizem Orbey
The Best American Short Stories 2006
"The short story is in need of a scandal," writes Ann Patchett, the guest editor of Best American Short Stories 2006. "It needs to be a little less demure." She's right, although if she intended this collection to be that scandal, she failed profoundly. The 20 stories in here are, with few exceptions, exceptionally cultivated, well-mannered, literary, and culled from places you would expect-a handful from the New Yorker, many from respected fiction journals. Seasoned veterans like Alice Munro and Edith Pearlman make appearances, and the contributions from new authors are often the most elegant of all. "Once the Shore," Paul Yoon's first published story, is about the hidden pain and disappointment of a middle-aged American woman and a young Korean waiter. In the story, fishermen killed in a boating accident "s[i]nk into a dark depth, their limbs positioned, without effort, in the most graceful forms known to any dancer." Beautiful writing, but 'scandalous"-and "exciting," for that matter-are not the first words that come to mind.
Still, most of this anthology is first-rate stuff that captivates through sheer strength of story and detail, including Maxine Swann's "Secret," an affecting look at the terror and awkwardness of adolescence in a rural town, and Thomas McGuane's "Cowboy." One of the shortest stories in the collection, "Cowboy" nevertheless spans decades on a small ranch. And there are admittedly a couple of pieces with experimental flair, including Ann Beattie's 50-page finale, "Mr. Nobody at All," a series of funeral speeches by a dead artist's self-interested coterie. It is at times bloated and showy, but after the stories that precede, its bombast is a breath of fresh air. Avid readers will find plenty to love in the latest Best American Short Stories, but it will be an austere, demure kind of love.
----Paul Barndt
The Best American Comics 2006
Comics are the latest-and very welcome-addition to the Best American series. From fantasies to hard-hitting political nonfiction, from satire to realism, Best American Comics 2006 includes the work of veterans of the comic movement-such as Kim Deitch, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, and Robert Crumb-alongside some particularly interesting contributions from a few of this past year's newcomers.
As explained in the introduction, the editors' first ambition was to open readers to the breadth of subject matter that comics can deal with effectively; the second ambition-to refute comics' reputation as a deviant and childish medium-has been attempted many times before, as any seasoned comic-enthusiast knows. Thus the stories in the included strips are often very political in nature, disdainful of war, the death penalty, corporate culture, or labor rights. They can otherwise be described as melancholic, poignant broodings on human nature, and it is the general atmosphere that emanates from these strips that actually creates the book's appeal. In the words of Robert Crumb, initiator of the underground comic movement, its authors are "throwback melancholy nineteenth century romanticists"-the touching, heartfelt tragicomic strips they produce are the highlight here.
If you haven't yet discovered graphic novels, this collection provides a pretty decent, interesting, but somewhat gloom-heavy introduction. If you want a spectacular one instead, you might be better off opting for McSweeney's Quarterly #13, which is possibly the most beautiful book you'll ever find.
The Best American Essays 2006
The selection of Lauren Slater as an editor does not bode well for The Best American Essays of 2006. In 2004, Slater became infamous for her truth-stretching yet rather boring book of essays about famous psychological experiments-and she spends much of her introduction attempting to defend it. Like Slater, some essayists just try too hard-and a few of them seem to have crept in among this year's Best. An essay about the Kinsey Institute throws out dozens of naughty sound bites without ever making a point, while the author of the next piece describes a life as pathetic as A Million Little Pieces author James Frey's. Still, most of the selected essays are both interesting and grounded in reality. Readers can relate to simple, universal topics like the death of a child's goldfish, being left-handed, and dealing with the "n-word." Susan Orlean, writer for the New Yorker and editor of last year's Best Essays, provides one of the best pieces in profiling a family desperate to find a lost dog. She follows them to doggy detectives and through countless hours of fliering, questioning, searching, and hoping. When the owners finally reunite with their dog, the strange but true ending to the story proves more compelling than exaggeration.
The Best American Travel Writing 2006
Good travel writing, Tim Cahill tells us in his introduction to this year's Best American Travel Writing 2006, is simply good writing. So it is that the essays and articles he has chosen for this collection are warm, solid, and often quite funny pieces of writing that are, for the most part, concerned only incidentally with places and the quest to reach them. Were there a Best American Food Writing (and indeed, there should be), Gary Shteyngart's celebration of the gamy gastronomic delights of nouveau riche St. Petersburg would be a nice fit, as would Chitrita Banerji's reflection on her parents' marriage through their love of Bengali food. And were there a Best American Sex Writing (and indeed, it's only a matter of time), Sean Flynn's enthralling article on Costa Rican sex tourism would surely be included, though Rolf Potts' disappointing account of a Tantric sex seminar probably would not be. Among essays such as these are many pieces on using transportation, such as David Sedaris' typically amusing tale of spitting a throat lozenge into the lap of a harridan seat-mate on a flight, as well as many pieces on specific destinations ranging in exoticism from bourgeois Zurich to Ian Frazier's hometown in Ohio. As is typical of the Best American series, many of the pieces are wonderful, while some of them are so-so, but everyone should find something of interest in this year's motley mix.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 marks a meta-rebellion: in his fifth year as editor of the anthology, Dave Eggers pushes the boundaries that he himself established. Rather than a simple collection of the best overlooked essays and short stories of the year-though those are also represented, and the selection is brilliant-it seems the editors of BANR decided this year to include everything that seemed funny or important and involved the English language. A partial list of new genres explored includes the "Best American Ringing Defeat of Religion Masquerading as Science" (a selection from the court proceedings concerning intelligent design in Dover, Del.) and "Best American Things to Know about Hoboes" (from John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise), along with bits and pieces of everything from the Iraqi constitution to the screenplay of Miranda July's quirky indie film Me and You and Everyone We Know. The only downside to the inclusion of new media is that the book's target demographic may already be familiar with the material: they will have watched the excerpted episode of The Daily Show, read the issues of The Onion from whence the year's most quotable fake headlines arose, and forwarded all the included Chuck Norris Facts to their friends (months ago). Still, there's something delicious about the sense of recognition the reader might feel, especially since irreverent material is included along with more traditional narratives (in Part II of the anthology), from literary heavyweights like Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and David Foster Wallace.
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