Vheissu

This year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories is off to a dour start. The series editor’s Foreword tells us that, “[a]t this time, all sorts of publishing seem destined to disappear, or at least exit from this challenging time enormously scathed. I have talked with editors who claim that literature is dead” (p. ix). Then we get this edition’s editor, Alice Sebold, elaborating further in her Introduction: “We are living, as I write this, in the worst economic conditions almost any of us can remember. In the world of publishing, good people have lost their jobs, and more job losses are on the horizon. Whole divisions of venerable publishing houses are falling away. Historic names are disappearing overnight, there one day and gone the next. The individuals who have survived so far are not quite sure why, and spend hours every day doing a job—editing quality fiction—that the powers that be are beginning to deem no longer necessary” (p. xv). In such a milieu, she goes on to say,...