The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. "I'm not a bad guy," pleads the narrator of "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Diaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'") "Real Estate," by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating "Ha! Ha! Ha!" for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: "The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog."

Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," a kind of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, "The Hermit's Story"; and Tim Gautreax's "The Piano Tuner," about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--"help us live interesting lives." --Chloe Byrne

Product Description
"What I look for most in a story," writes Amy Tan in her introduction to this year's volume of The Best American Short Stories, "what I crave, what I found in these twenty-one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell." Tan found herself drawn to wonderfully original stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. In this vibrant collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in new works by writers such as Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, and Pam Houston. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," by Junot Diaz, features a young man trying to stave off heartbreak in a sacred cave in Santo Domingo. In "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," by Chitra Divakaruni, a mother moves from India to California to be closer to her son, only to sacrifice something crucial along the way. In Melissa Hardy's haunting story "The Uncharted Heart," a geologist unearths a shocking secret in the wilds of northern Ontario. "Maybe I'm still that kid who wants to see things I've never seen before," writes Tan. "I like being startled by images I never could have conjured up myself." With twenty-one tales, each a fabulously rich journey into a different world, The Best American Short Stories 1999 is sure to surprise and delight.

The Best American Short Stories has always been a reliable and constant supplier of great contemporary work and uniquely distinctive tales. Stories that are far from typical but pleasantly uncanny and sometimes pleasingly bizarre. Stories that do not have a simple introduction, climax, and then resolution but stories that create their own course. Stories that you find yourself still thinking about days later in the shower, still trying to understand what exactly you comprehended. Yet instead what I found was a pretty traditional and conventional assortment of stories. I am not saying that these stories are particularly bad stories because they are not, it is just the straightforward fact that they are not as daring or come near to being as refreshing as their predecessors. I found many of her selections boringly light even when dealing with subject matters that are all but light. They tell their story and that is all. Everything felt so laid out and revealed that there was no room for analyzing or dissecting. Many of the stories were exactly as what appeared and nothing else, nothing left underneath to discover. They reminded me of the stories the entire class would read as one in the eighth grade and everyone would reach the same obvious conclusion of what the moral and purpose of the story was as the teacher nods her head to provide assurance.

There is still a couple of decent stories in this entire book (such as Pam Huston's The Best Girlfriend You Never Had) that renders the two stars given but in no way is that an endorsement to spend your money on two short stories. Instead, I recommend you simply visit you nearest bookstore, lean against a bookshelf and spend 15 minutes reading those two stories. Once you are done, place that book back on the self because that is where it belongs. I never thought I would be saying that about a book from this series but hopefully this is the first and last time I will have to. And hopefully this is just the black sheep in this family of over-achievers.

P.S.
In the end, I simply realized that perhaps a great novel writer should stick to novels and not picking short stories.


Did I miss something?   February 19, 2001
 1 out of 3 found this review helpful

I am a big fan of the Best American Short Stories series, but this one was a huge diappointment. I like stories that have some meat; they should resonate with depth a long time after being read. This collection offers few such stories. Then again, I wasn't expecting much more from Amy Tan. Try '98 or '00 instead.


A fine collection   October 20, 2000
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I found this to be an excellent, thoughtfully assembled collection of stories. I must especially disagree with the reviewer who felt that having a b writer like Pam Houston in a collection with Rick Bass ammounts to a literary injustice. Quite to the contrary, Houston's story is the best in the book and bears re-reading. (And, if you've checked out John Updike's Best Short Stories of the Century, you'll note that her story was one of the few tales from the nineties to be included.) This is a slow, collection, certainly, which may turn off some readers. But I've thoroughly enjoyed it.


A diverse collection of voices and stories   September 8, 2000
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Amy Tan has done a good job selecting 1999's batch of stories for "Best American Short Stories"; I've read better volumes, but I've also read worse. My favorite story was Tim Gautreaux's "The Piano Tuner," a hilarious, unnerving tale about the advantages and disadvanages of "fine-tuning" another person's character through the use of drugs or other modern methods. The next-best story, in my opinion, was Chitra Divakaruni's delightful and wistful "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," another story about trying to change one's character in order to fit in with difficult surroundings, and the limits on one's ability to do so. Finally, my third-favorite selection was Rick Bass's "The Hermit's Story," a tale of rugged individualism and survival in a winter setting that ends with a wonderful image involving fire and a frozen lake, an image I won't spoil for you here.

This volume is certainly the most diverse edition of the series so far in terms of its authors' racial and cultural backgrounds--at least a third of the stories are by non-white authors or have non-white main characters. As Amy Tan notes, however, what matters more than racial or cultural diversity is diversity of voice and experience. I found more in common, for example, between "The Piano Tuner" and "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," in both stories' focus on the theme of changing one's character and learning to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings, than I did between "The Piano Tuner" and, say, Annie Proulx's more impressionistic "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" (another story about rural Americans); or between "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter" and Jhumpa Lahiri's ominous "The Interpreter of Maladies" (another story about Indian families). In any event, this year's edition provides plenty of diversity of both background and voice, and is a solid addition to the "Best American Short Stories" series.