The Best American Short Stories 2015 Read Online Free

exactly, constitutes “short.” Poe’s criterion, which gives us a little more meat on the bones, is that a story, in contrast to a novel, should be of a length to be read in one sitting, an hour’s entertainment, without the interruption that the novel almost invariably must give way to: “In the brief tale . . . the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention . . . During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.”
    There’s an undeniable logic to that—and a mighty power too. What writer wouldn’t want the reader’s soul held captive for any space of time? But Poe, for all his perspicacity, couldn’t have foreseen how shrunken and desiccated that hour has become in the age of the 24/7 news cycle and the smartphone. We can only hope to reconstitute it. Ultimately, though, beyond definitions or limits, I put my trust in the writer and the writer’s intention. If the writer tells me that this is a short story and if it’s longer than a sentence and shorter than, say,
The Brothers Karamazov
, then I’m on for the ride. I have never had the experience of expanding a short story to the dimensions of a novel or shrinking a novel to the confines of a short story. I sit down, quite consciously, to write a story or to write a novel and allow the material to shape itself. “The more you write,” as Flannery O’Connor pointed out, “the more you will realize that the form is organic, that it is something that grows out of the material, that the form of each story is unique.”
    Certainly the most formally unique piece included here is Denis Johnson’s “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” a story about stories, about how we’re composed of them and how they comprise our personal mythologies. Johnson builds a portrait of his distressed narrator through the stories he tells and absorbs. At one point, the narrator picks up the phone to hear one of his ex-wives, through a very poor connection, telling him that she’s dying and wants to rid herself of any lingering bitterness she still has for him. He summons up his sins, murmurs apologies, but at some point realizes that he may in fact be talking not to his first wife, Ginny, but to his second, Jenny, and yet, in a high comic moment of collateral acceptance, realizes that the stories are one and the same and that the sins are too. In a similar way, Sarah Kokernot’s “M & L” switches point of view midway through the story to provide two versions of events, both in the present and the past, which makes the final shimmering image all the more powerful and powerfully sensual. And Justin Bigos’s “Fingerprints” employs a fractured assemblage of scenes to deepen the emotional charge of the unease the protagonist feels over the stealthy presence of his estranged father, who haunts the crucial moments of his life.
    There are others I’d like to flag for you too, but since this is merely the preliminary to the main event, I’ll be brief. Kevin Canty’s “Happy Endings” gives us McHenry, a man widowed, retired, freed from convention, who is only now coming to terms with that freedom in a way that makes luminous what goes on in the back room of a massage parlor, while Laura Lee Smith’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” plays the same theme to a different melody, pushing her middle-aged protagonist out onto the wild edge of things just to see if he’ll give in or not. Smith plays for humor and poignancy both, as does Louise Erdrich in “The Big Cat.” Edrich’s story came to me as a breath of fresh air, the rare comic piece that seems content to keep it light while at the same time opening a window on the experience of love and containment. In contrast, Thomas McGuane’s “Motherlode” presents us with a grimmer sort of comedy and a cast of country folk as resolutely