'Best American' collections speak volumes
What better way to sample and celebrate some of the year's most interesting writing than through the short, tasty bites offered in the annual "Best American" collections. USA TODAY dips into four diverse volumes.
The Best American Short Stories 2016
Junot Diaz, editor
Mariner, 288 pp.
***½ out of four stars
Leave it to Junot Diaz to a) get us excited all over again about short stories via his gonzo introduction and b) vividly expand the horizons of what we think of as an “American” story. This terrific and surprising collection of tales by a diverse group of writers lives up to Diaz’s “rah-rah” (his term) rallying cry for the form. Some stories take place far from our shores (Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ghana). Others are set in this country, in the troubled present or rough-hewn past. Count on them to transport you. Personal favorites: John Edgar Wideman’s “Williamsburg Bridge.” (Will his writer-narrator leap off it?) Louise Erdrich’s "The Flower," a semi-mystical/magical tale about a white boy who saves an Ojibwe girl from a brute trader in the 1800s. Ben Marcus’ chilling "Cold Little Bird," about a father enraged by his intellectual son, who at age 10 suddenly refuses his parents’ affection. (This one is a “wow.”) And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "Apollo," a regretful story of an upper-class Nigerian boy who betrays the older, teenage house boy he loves.
- Jocelyn McClurg
The Best American Comics 2016
Roz Chast, editor
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp.
*** stars
Female artists and slice-of-life tales make up the best of the Best comics of the year on Roz Chast’s watch, so sorry Batman and Superman. A collection that usually leans toward the avant-garde does so in an interesting way: Drew Friedman’s “R. Crumb and Me” is an autobiographical piece featuring the comics icon and a mix of photorealistic art and inspired cartooning. Works by Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh come to life to give a heartbroken woman a pep talk in Liana Finck’s “All the Paintings Here Agree.” There’s quite a bit of entertaining and emotional heft in some of the excerpts, including a 4-year-old girl dealing with hearing loss in a landscape where everyone is drawn as a rabbit (Cece Bell’s "El Deafo") and an old woman literally swimming with the fishes (Anne Emond's "The Swim"). But there’s some time for fun, too, such as Kate Beaton’s “Broadside Ballads,” using bygone images from the Bodleian Library as inspiration for uproarious historical comedy.
- Brian Truitt
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016
Rachel Kushner, editor
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 432 pp.
**** stars
Sometimes we forget that remarkable literature is not only a cultural luxury, but a means of expanding our empathy in a world of moral complexity. A group of Bay Area high school students would like to remind us. They met on Monday nights to read, discuss and ultimately select the excellent works of fiction and non-fiction that appear here. What they have given us is a gift. Texts were chosen to embody "what it means to be alive in 2016." The anthology begins with a story of a grieving man charged with the absurd task of turning war-torn Chechnya into the "Dubai of the Caucasus" (Anthony Marra's The Grozny Tourist Bureau) and ends with a modern history of Black Lives Matter (Robert Lucas and John Clegg's Brown vs. Ferguson). Highlights include an intimate conversation on democracy, fear and faith with our current president (Marilynne Robinson's An Interview With President Obama); a stunning piece of journalism from The New York Times on what happens when we die alone (N.R. Kleinfield's The Lonely Death Of George Bell); and a haunting look at family dynamics in a graphic short story about a stuttering girl who dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian (Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying). One wonders how the world might be different if works in Best American Nonrequired Reading were indeed required.
- Alia E. Dastagir
The Best American Travel Writing 2016
Bill Bryson, editor
Mariner, 277 pp.
***½ stars
Legendary travel writer Bill Bryson makes his return as guest editor of this year’s compilation, 16 years after editing the very first edition of the series. Bryson acknowledges that travel isn’t what it used to be. There are so many tourists in the world today, and so many destinations are unpleasantly crowded. Think of the Mona Lisa room at the Louvre in Paris or the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. For that reason, some of his choices for travel pieces don’t take place in the most popular destinations in the world. In one story, Dave Eggers explores Hollister, Calif., and how the town has not benefited from being the namesake for the American clothing brand owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. Meanwhile, Paul Theroux visits Monroeville, Ala., the town where Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up as childhood friends. Bryson concludes that “you don’t have to seek out exotic locales or go to terribly great lengths to have memorable and touristically solitary experiences.” He also laments that there is a widespread belief that travel writing is “something of a doomed art.” But the stories Bryson has chosen prove that there are still writers traveling and producing beautiful stories, such as a pregnant Freda Moon’s essay on making the same journey to Panama that her mother had made while pregnant with her. Other writers are producing fascinating reported pieces, like Sara Corbett’s exploration on whether AirBnB can thrive in Japan. If Bryson proves anything, it’s that travel writing is not yet doomed.
- Nancy Trejos