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The Best American Short Stories 1996: Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines (Best American Short Stories)
The Best American Short Stories 1996 Selected from US and Canadian Magazines - Best American Short Stories Author:John Edgar Wideman While some installments of this annual anthology could more accurately be titled "The Best Short Stories published in The New Yorker," many of this year's selection are culled from more obscure literary magazines, with a number of new voices standing alongside series regulars such as Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Adams. Among the more established ... more »writers, a standout is Jamaica Kincaid's "In Roseau," a tale of a girl who gets involved in an erotic triangle with a married couple. Two writers who have won critical acclaim without yet reaching a wide audience they deserve weight in with impressive pieces: Stuart Dybek offers a surreal yet oddly coherent story of love, loss, and Chinese food in "Paper Lantern"; Melanie Rae Thon's "Xmas, Jamaica Plain" demonstrates her considerable gift for capturing a character's voice. Few of the new writers that Wideman includes hold their own against their better-known counterparts; an exception is Junot Diaz, whose "Yisrael" is a fierce and unblinking story of a disfigured boy who wears a mask and the other children determined to see beneath it. But other newer writers, such as Jason Brown and William Lychack, seem in their different ways to be prime examples of the sort of middle-of-the-road fiction produced by M.F.A. programs: dutifully well-crafted stories whose content is derivative and uninspired. Overall, this is an engaging collection, though one that provides scant evidence for te existence of a new generation of talented short story writers.« less