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About the Author No BioLORRIE MOORE is the author of the story collections Bark,Birds of America,Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run
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the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. Product Description The Best American Short Stories anthology offers up an annual bumper crop of the best short fiction. This year's stories come handpicked by a beloved master of the form, Lorrie Moore. Ranging from the outrageously funny to the surprisingly moving, here is a sampling of the year's best on audio. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionOver the years I have listened to fellow teachers and writers pronounce on literary fiction — its predators, prey, habits, and habitats — and as I’ve gotten older I have stopped taking notes and attempted instead not to fidget rudely in my seat. For some reason it seems that everything I hear now sounds increasingly untrue. Or at least no more true than its exact opposite. It seems that no matter what one says about reading and writing, or about short stories and novels, a hundred exceptions support the opposite case. Short stories are for busy people or short attention spans: Well, then why can a reader duck in and out of a novel for ten-minute intervals but not do so successfully with a short story? People don’t read anymore: Then why are books being published — and sold — at a record number? There is no literary community: What are all these writing programs and reading series and book-groups-in-the-middle- of-nowhere? Perhaps all these assertions occur because, too often, and more and more, writers are asked to speak publicly of their art (oh, dear) or their approach to their craft (that alarmingly nautical phrase), and what has resulted may be simply the desperate, improvised creative-writing yack of good people uncomfortably far from their desks.Nonetheless, opportunities such as this introduction encourage implausible pronouncements and sweeping generalizations, and though I am not easily encouraged, I am surely immune from nothing — a lesson learned from literature.There is no thoroughly convincing theory of the short story — it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both. There is the defining length (an unedifying fifty-page range), there is the short story’s lonely voice from a submerged population (Frank O’Connor’s famous hypothesis), and there are various “slice of life” ideas and notions of literary apprenticeship (stories are what writers do on their way to a novel).All of these convey what happens sometimes — what happens a lot — but in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier.Let me throw some into the pot. Many that I’ve heard — and used myself — are fashioned as metaphors comparing shorter and longer narratives, attempting to define the one through its relationship to the other. A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. A short story is a weekend guest; a novel is a long-term boarder. A story is a brick; a novel is a brick wall. And my favorite, the asymmetrical a short story is a flower; a novel is a job.From its own tradition, the novel arrives to reader and writer alike, baggy, ad hoc, bitter with ambition, already half ruined. The short story arrives, modest, prim, and purposeful, aiming for perfection, though the lengthier it is, the more novel-like, the more it puts all that at risk, acquiring instead, in a compelling trade, the greater, sustained attention of the reader, upon whom a more lasting impression will be made, if all goes well. (This year’s anthology, I
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