New Stories from the South 2010

June 14, 2010
The 25 stories in this 25th annual anthology lean more toward "menace" than outright attack, and though it's true that some of the stories lack a certain bite, this year's outing is a solid addition to a worthy institution. In "Housewarming," Kevin Wilson charts a father's pain as he removes a drowned deer from his son's pond and tries to flush from the young man's life an abiding anger that swamps them both. In Rick Bass's "Fish Story" a man remembers the night he kept a massive catfish watered; the croaking thing refused to die, even as it was flayed. Toddlers, reptiles, parents, and predators alike stalk one another, but it's not animals who lurk in one of the best stories—Tim Gautreaux's "Idols"—it's the ghost of Flannery O'Connor. As Gautreaux says in the author's comments, he wanted to find out if two of her "famous characters could be ‘continued,' so to speak." They can if they're carried by Gautreaux, whose story reaffirms William Faulkner's assertion, and the series's preoccupation: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

June 15, 2010

The annual anthology celebrates a quarter-century with a stellar selection.

Though the criteria for inclusion mystifies, the results should satisfy any reader with an affinity for short fiction. Some of the better stories, including the closing "Retreat" by Wells Tower, don't take place in the South, while the style and subject of others don't reflect any sort of regionalism. Even editor Hempel has no discernible ties to the South, though she has distinguished herself as a master of the story form. However they're otherwise categorized, masterful stories abound here, many of them spare, first-person narratives capable of delivering a jolt to the reader's nervous system. The 25 stories range from the hard-boiled "Drive" by Aaron Gwyn, in which a dangerous desperation reignites a faltering romance, to the complications of morality, establishment of value and the ravages of time in "Fish Story" by Rick Bass. Following each story is an explanation by the author of the piece's genesis and development (which, in the case of Padgett Powell, is both longer and more compelling than his one-paragraph "Cry for Help from France"). Among the better-established Southern authors, there is characteristically compelling work—from Tim Gautreaux, Dorothy Allison and Ron Rash, though the delight of the anthology lies in the discoveries it affords (like Megan Mayhew Bergman's elliptically terse "The Cow That Milked Herself"; Ann Pancake's soul-shattering "Arsonists"; and Laura Lee Smith's Swamp Gothic "This Trembling Earth").

These stories are less reflective of the state of Southern fiction than the state of the contemporary short story. "Though one's sense of geography is keen," writes Hempel, "it's hard to feel that there is much that separates us after reading the stories collected here."

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