"New American stories" by Ben Marcus (ed) (Granta, 2015)

In the introduction Marcus writes -

• I also made a classic mistake. I confused the description of feeling with the creation of them. I wanted to cause feeling in others, but all I did was assert, somewhat grandiosely, that I had feelings myself (xviii)
• If writers can't genuinely make it new, they probably can't convincingly make it old, either (xx)

The stories were less than 10 years old at the time of printing, chosen with variety as well as quality in mind. 4 from the New Yorker, 2 from Harper's. 700+ pages. Doerr, Saunders, Lydia Davis, Zadie Smith, DeLillo, etc.

• "Paranoia" (Said Sayrafiezadeh) - Roberto arrived in the States when he was 13. His parents left him there when he was 17. Now 24, he lives above (and works for) a cobbler. When he breaks his nose, Dean (it's his 1st person PoV) visits him in hospital. On the way, Dean meets some guys (now fat) that he used to play football with. War is in the air. When Roberto's released, the bill is $3k. Dean lends Roberto $200. He goes to the July 4th parade and sees that a guy who was with his friends is now a soldier. When he goes round to Roberto's place he finds that Roberto's been taken away. Illegal immigrant? Trouble with a loan?
• "Slatland" (Rebecca Lee) - In 1967 the narrator, Margit, was a sad 11 year old girl. Her lecturer father took her to his colleague, Prof Pine, who told her to rise above her problems – she rightly thought her father was having an affair. In 1987 she's engaged with Balescu, a Romanian who escaped Ceausescu. He thinks that in America “People discuss their feelings as if they were great works of art or literature that need to be analyzed and examined and passed on and on”. When she’s driving him she falls asleep and he’s hurt in an accident which she rises above, looking down on him, hurting him the way Ceausescu would have hurt him. She thinks that “the signs indicating that a man is in love with another woman are often similar to the signs of an immigrant in a new country, his heart torn in two.” She thinks she’s getting letters from his wife, so she intercepts the letters (like Ceausescu would). She goes to Prof Pine to get the letters translated. Balescu has a wife and 2 kids. She decides to give him the letters
• "The early deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp and Carr" (Jesse Ball) - A judge claims that 4 young men, mucking about, caused his wife's miscarriage and challenges them one by one to a duel. He kills 2 of them. The 3rd kills the second at the last moment, then gets killed. We're privy to the youths' thoughts on the eve of their deaths. Next day the 4th youth is visited by the judge's wife, who has sex with him and tells him there was no miscarriage. The wife is the second for the duel. The 4th youth dies.
  I don't get it.
• "Some other, better Otto" (Deborah Eisenberg) - Mid-life crisis. Lawyer Otto, 50+, is in a long relationbship with musician William. He avoids family gatherings if he can. His sister Sharon is brilliant and mentally troubled. His sister's step-daughter at 9 is showing similar traits. A lesbian couple have just adopted a baby from China. Otto wonders whether he's good enough for William, and wonders about multi-verses.
  No
• "The Deep" (Anthony Doerr) - Tom's born in 1914 with a hole-in-the-heart problem. He's not expected to live to 18. He faints. He calms himself by thinking of blue. His single mother runs a boarding house for salt miners. A classmate, Ruby, befriends him. She likes oceans. She gives him tadpoles. She improvises diving equipment with a garden hose, getting him to pump while she walks into the lake weighed down by stones. When 15 they clumsily kiss once. In the Depression his mother leaves him. The bank repossesses the house. He finds a job in the city - a porter in a maternity ward. Ruby comes in. They've not seen each other for years. They agree to meet in an acquarium. They wish each other luck. Maybe the baby's eyes will turn blue. In the final sentence we're told he has a day to live.
• "A man like him" (Yiyun Li) - 66 year old ex Art teacher Fen in Beijing looks after his mother. She's rather confused. He notes down her phrases as if they were wise aphorism. He spends 3 hours/day in a cybercafe, Mrs Luo covering for him. He reads about a daughter who attacks an unfaithful father. Fen was adopted. He was doing well at art college until his prof father had to become a toilet cleaner. When he was 24, a teacher, he was accused of being over-interested in a 10 y.o. girl. He attacks the daughter online. He arranges a meeting with the father, who first thinks Fen is gay. Fen has found someone as passive and fatalistic has he is. He quotes his mother. I like how our view of Fen changes, and I kuke his use of his mother's quotes.
• "Home" (George Saunders) - A war-veteran returns to see his (ill?) mother and remarried ex-wife. Lots of quirky dialog and "don't tell her I told you" discussion.
• "Shhhh" (NoViolet Bulawayo) - The boy narrator's father has returned from South Africa at last, dying (of AIDS we later discover). Mother tells the boy to keep his father's return a secret. He can't play with his friends. He prays, and wonders above heaven.
  No
• "Special economics" (Maureen McHugh) - Set in China after bird-flu has kill a quarter of a million people. There are plague markets where secondhand wares are sold. Jeiling starts working in a factory making bio-batteries, paying the company more for food and accomodation than she earns. She sneaks out on Sundays with a friend, and busk. A man breaks into their room claiming to be a government inspector. He says that the local police are too corrupt to deal with their slavery, but stories in US media will work. They don't trust him. They take his money and use it to buy themselves out of the company, helping others too.
• "This appointment occurs in the past" (Sam Lipsyte) - The main character leaves the bed of his ex mother-in-law and later drives in a car (a parting gift from her) to a student friend, Davis, who he hadn't seen for year. There's a flashback to the witty student banter they had with Brianna and Debbie. They meet in a diner - "I suppose you could call it a retro diner, but what diner isn't? They're all designed to make you think fried food won't kill you because it's the 1950s".Davis (accidentally?) shhots him. He marries Debbie, who becomes a prof. Or maybe at the end he suicides?
• "Men" (Lydia Davis) - 7 lines.
• "Another Manhattan" (Donald Antrim) - 2 couples have been secretly swopping. Jim has been hopitalised a few times recently after suicide attempts. He's just spent hundreds of dollars on flowers for his wife, putting them in debt.
  Far too long for me - I lost interest.
• "Meet the president!" (Zadie Smith) - SF, set in East Anglia. Lowestoft has a population of 850 - the only people left are those who can't leave. Bill Peek, 14, is augmented. He talks with a local. I think he's playing an immersive computer game to break into the president's office while guiding the local to her sister's wake.
• "The largesse of the sea maiden" (Denis Johnson) - Episodic, some parts working for me, most including a moment of inappropriate/unexpected behaviour. I'm puzzled by the ending.
• "The country" (Joy Williams) - A father living with parents goes to a sort of church-based group therapy session. She wanted to put a Tagore quote on a billboard. His wife's left him. His 9 y.o. son is being home-taught. A woman from the church group visits. I don't get it.
• "A happy rural seat of various view: Lucinda's garden" (Christine Schutt) - Recently Nick and Pie visit Gordon - a friend, artist and womaniser. He touches Pie. Pie eventually leaves Nick. I don't get it.
• "Hammer and sickle" (Don DeLillo) - The Narrator is in a low-security prison. His ex-wife informs him that their 2 daughters (10 and 12) are on a kid's channel - reading out (and riffing off) financial snippets like playground chants. He thinks she wrote the script. The common room fills to watch their performances. He wonders what the inmates are deprived of - "touch screens ... the gentle bell reminders of an appointment ... the prospect of failed signals ... We were always on, wanted to be on, needed to be on, but that was history now." I like it.
• "Play" (Mathias Svalina) - The rules for some childhood games. I like most of them.
• "Madmen" (Lucy Corin) - The main character has her first period so she has to go to a place to pick her madman (or women). The people are labelled "Contemporary Bipolar", etc. She choses which to take home. Her mother might have been a madman. I like it.
• "The arms and legs of the lake" (Mary Gaitskill) - On a train, an Iraqi vet and a female pacificist (and others) talk. It gets awkward.
• "Raw water" (Wells Tower) - Cora (43, an artist who visits failed environmental projects) and huband Rodney go to stay in a rented house for a few weeks by an artificial sea-water lake with desalination equipment. The change (or the water) does their sex life good. He falls for a young girl. Interesting.
• "Pee on water" (Rachel B Glaser) - Summarising evolution in few pages. "This is the nice time of early men and monkeys, before cigarette butts cozied fat into the grass. No plastics, no prayers ... The first restaurant opens ... A pencil with an eraser attached ... The seventeen-year-old girl looks into the toilet at the shape of the shit that sits there, complete as one thing, a size similar to her boyfriend's penis. Not right, but close maybe, and she puts her hand above the water, widening her fingers to remember the length."
• "Love is a thing on sale for more money than there exists" (Tao Lin) - Garret and Kristy are NY students who've lived togerther for 1.5 years. Fears about terrorists abound. Garret sees her with a man - a terrorist? They separate. No.
• "The toast" (Rebecca Curtis) - Sonya (40) has an older sister Leala who has 2 daughters (6 and 8). She's invited Sonya to a wedding event. Sonya was a CW tutor. She's a food faddist. She thinks her sister's partner is boring. She's going to write the toast. She relates then rejects some family stories full of sibling rivalry and a friend of their mother who was often mentioned though rarely seen. When Leala read Sonya's book of short stories she wondered why all the big sisters were so nasty.
• "Going for a beer" (Robert Coover) - The narrator's confused about whether he's in the past, present or future.
• "Standard loneliness package" (Charles Yu) - The narrator works in a call centre for emotional engineering, experiencing moments of others' lives for a set rate. He tried to befriend the woman who works in the next cubicle but it doesn't last. He experiences the funeral of the woman's father.
• "Wait till you see me dance" (Deb Olin Unferth) - The narrator teaches English to non-English students. She can also tell when people will die. She falls in love with a useless student who's 11 years younger than she is. He's a brilliant pianist. The school administrator invites her to a Native American dance event. Neither of then are native american. She offers the administrator $1000 if she can mark her class's exams. The administrator refuses. She abandons the administrator in the desert, knowing she's soon to die anyway, then returns to collect her. She still refuses. The narrator's contract isn't going to be renewed anyway - poor performance.
• "The lucky body" (Kyle Coma-Thompson) - A murder and subsequent destruction of the body. 4 pages. I don't get it.
• "The lost order" (Rivka Galchen) - A lawyer has retired without telling her husand. She'd receiving phone orders for food. She becomes ambiguous about gender roles.
• "Fish Sticks" (Donald Ray Pollock) - Del's in a late-night laundromat on the eve of cousin Randy's funeral. Randy had been a sucessful body-builder. When they were kids they ran off to Florida and Del got money for them by selling sex. The wierd girlfriend who Del's been trying to dump comes in and offers sex, telling him to pretend he's paying for it.
• "Valley of the girls" (Kelly Link) - In the near future some kids emulate Egyptian rites, having pyramids and burial chambres built, worrying about grave robbers. In the text, names are in boxes, like cartouches. Someone suicides, someone is locked in a tomb with them.
• "The diggings" (Claire Vaye Watkins) - In 1847 2 brother become gold-diggers. One has visions of the future. They get ripped off, meet an interesting pair of Chinese men.