Herodotus: The Histories (IBR2026) – More fun than you might think

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds – some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians – not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.

Book 1.1, Proem – The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories; Robert B Strassler, Editor

I thought this would be a struggle. It was, in places – but it was also a delight.

As I described my path to this point back when I posted about reading Hesiod, I won’t repeat myself except to say that a certain understanding of Greek history – and drama, and mythology – seems helpful when reading Plato and Aristotle.

Herodotus is considered the first Western historian, though his idea of history falls a bit outside of the much narrower contemporary boundaries we might recognize. He wandered around, interviewing people, asking questions – inquiring. In fact, the Greek word historia means inquiry. Some places read like a travelogue: the geography of an area, the local customs. He indicates skepticism, though not as often as the contemporary reader might think he should. He often includes two or three different versions of events: “The Athenians say this, but the Ionians say that.” As the above proem indicates, he tries to be balanced in his reportage, giving credit where credit is due, since his purpose is not to glorify Greece, but to understand how wars come about. And he loves digressions, even multiple nested digressions, to provide past context for the present. As a result, it’s both a fun read and a confusing one. And, at times, surprising – I had no idea Herodotus was the source of some pretty famous quotes.

There’s a lot of help along the way for the intimidated. I chose the Landmark Edition, and was quite pleased with it. Each paragraph includes a brief marginal summary; footnotes are plentiful; and most important to me, maps specific to the exact passages appear every three or four pages. All this means much less flipping around and losing my place, or, worse, skipping over what isn’t clear and missing a lot of the points. The introduction is helpful, and includes a dated summary of each book. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation, but it reads quite well. Maybe a little too well? Compare the opening Proem quoted above to the Oxford World edition published about the same time:

“Here are presented the results of the inquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.”

Robin Wakefield, Translator: Herodotus: The Histories (Oxford World’s Classics)

I’d say the Landmark version lacks a certain poetry. But as a first-time reader, I’ll trade poetry for clarity, especially once we move beyond Grand Statements of Purpose to who did what.

I found numerous Youtube videos that also helped, some to a greater degree than others; links below. I can’t verify the accuracy of these, but I didn’t find anything that was completely out of line with the text. And, again, as a first-time reader, I needed all the help I could get.

Some things to keep in mind:

  • The division into nine books was made after Herodotus’ death, but it remains a convenient way to organize one’s reading.
  • If it seems strange that Persians and Egyptians refer to Zeus and Apollo, that’s a bit of a trick: Herodotus ‘translated’ the local god into the closest Greek god.
  • There was no Greece in ancient times; there were a lot of cities loosely bound by language and customs common to the Hellenic people, who battled each other as often as they battled barbarians.
  • And, oh, barbarian simply meant non-Greek (see how easy it is to slip and start talking about Greece? It still means Hellene) and didn’t have the negative sense we associate with it today.
  • I always found it confusing that the Ionian cities on the western shore of Asia Minor – that is, modern Turkey, which was the Persian empire – were Hellenic. It’s helpful to think of the sea as the scope of Greek culture, rather than a landmass. They colonized that distant shore, as well as parts of the Black Sea, in antiquity, and their connection to what we think of as mainland Greece, particularly Athens, becomes evident as we read.

Book 1 tells of the rise of the Persian empire. The narrative starts a couple hundred years before, however, with a fun story about the Lydian king  who wants to show off his beautiful wife to his bodyguard, and ends up getting killed for it. This puts into motion a curse that will come to pass in four generations. Then there’s the king who has a dream his daughter is pissing on his city, so decides his baby grandson is a threat. The best part is where he hands the baby to his top general with orders to kill it. The general takes the baby to a farmer and tells him to kill it, because shit rolls downhill. The farmer ain’t gonna do no such thing,  and in ten years, the king recognizes his grandson and… well, you won’t believe how he punishes the general who didn’t kill it. And that is part of how Cyrus the Great became King of Persia. Didn’t I tell you this was fun?

By the way, those of us who spent way too much time in Sunday School know that Cyrus the Great was famous for releasing the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity. Herodotus doesn’t mention that at all.

Book 1 also contains the famous (to some) saying, “Count no man happy before he is dead.” This is attributed to Solon, in a conversation with King Croesus of Lydia. The fabulously wealthy  King asks the wise lawgiver, “Who is the happiest man”? Solon starts listing nobodies, and dead nobodies at that. He finally explains that life is fickle, so you need to see how it ends before you start toting up happiness. First of all, scholars doubt this meeting ever happened.  Second, the famous quote is a pithy summary of what the text actually says:

And so, Croesus, human life is pure chance. You seem to be very wealthy, and you rule over many people, but I cannot tell you yet the answer you asked for until I learn how you have ended your life. You see, the man who is very wealthy is no more happy and prosperous than the man who has only enough to live from day to day, unless good fortune stays with him and he retains his fair and noble possessions right up until he departs this life happily. For many wealthy people are unhappy, while many others who have more modest resources are fortunate. The man who has great wealth but is unhappy outdoes the fortunate man in only two ways, while the fortunate man out does him in many ways. The former is more capable of gratifying his passions and of sustaining himself in adversity; But the fortunate man, although he does not have the same ability to sustain himself in adversity or passion, avoids these anyway by virtue of his good fortune. Moreover, he has no injury, no sickness, no painful experiences; what he does have is good children and good looks. Now, if, in addition to all these things, he ends his life well, too, then this is the man you are looking for; he alone deserves to be called happy and prosperous. But before he dies, refrain from calling him this – one should rather call him lucky.

Book 1:33 – The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories; Robert B Strassler, Editor

That’s why pithy summaries survive. They’re a lot easier to remember than speeches.

Book 2 is all about Egypt. Scholars think this wasn’t meant to be part of the Historia, but it got included anyway. It’s full of interesting stories about Egypt, most of which are, well, let’s say fanciful. My personal favorite is about the pharaoh Psammetichus , who wanted to know if Egyptian was truly the oldest language. He had a baby raised without ever hearing human speech, and waited to record the child’s first word. Alas, it was the Phrygian word for bread, so Egypt lost bragging rights. ‘Fanciful’ is perhaps too generous to describe this, but it is fun reading. It’s rather a famous story in linguistic circles; it was nice to read it in its original habitat.

Book 3 starts out with Cyrus’ son Cambyses, now king of Persia, conquering Egypt. He then leads three disastrous campaigns, goes a little bonkers, and dies. There’s a battle for the throne, with Darius eventually winning. There’s a bit about India, where scary gold-digging giant ants chase away men who come to collect the gold; this is also related to language, as it looks like the term translated as ant is actually the word for a type of marmot. A lot goes on, from sending spies to Greece to a dustup about Samos. Finally, Darius puts down a Babylonian revolt with the help of a friend who cuts off his nose to infiltrate the rebelling city as a deserter. That’s devotion.

Book 4 is all about the Scythians. Darius really, really wanted to conquer them, but he couldn’t figure out how since they were nomads and had no city to take. There’s a crucial showdown  at a bridge that introduces Histiaeus and Miltiades, who become key players in events to come.

Book 5 gives us the Ionian Revolt, which is how the Greco-Persian wars got started in the first place. The Ionians, who are, remember, Hellenes (that is, Greeks), on the western coast of the Persian empire, decide to declare their independence. They’re helped along by Histiaeus, who’s a clever little schemer and champion ass-kisser. He sends a message to his nephew Aristagoras in a rather ingenious way: Histiaeus tattooes it on the scalp of a slave, then, when the hair grows in, sends the slave to Aristagoras with only the message, Shave my head. The Ionian revolt gets Athens involved, which annoys Darius no end. He gets that the Ionians might revolt, and he can deal with them, but who are these Athenians? He has a servant tell him at every meal, “Remember the Athenians” and makes it his mission in life to conquer them. But first he has to deal with these Ionians, which gets very messy and involves not just the entire coastline but pretty much every island in the Aegean sea.

Book 6 starts with shutting down the Ionian Revolt (and with Histiaeus finally running into people who are tired of him getting away with all he’s gotten away with), and ends with the battle of Marathon, the first major battle of the Greco-Persian wars and a resounding victory for Greece. Herodotus specifically mentions Aeschylus’ brother as one of the casualties: “Kynegeiros, [aka Cynaegirus] son of Euphorion, fell, for while seizing the sternpost of a ship, his hand was chopped off by an axe.” I’ve found sources that claim Aeschylus fought at Marathon, and/or that he fought at Salamis. His play The Persians takes place in Susa after Salamis, and shows Xerxes’ mother, a chorus of elders, and Xerxes himself, mourning their defeat. I’ll deal more with this in a later post about reading Greek tragedies.

Oh, and the guy running from Marathon back to Athens to give them the good news of victory, the reason we run marathons today? That isn’t in Herodotus. He has a guy running to Sparta to ask for military help, but Sparta is busy with a religious festival, an excuse they’ve used before (and will again). Miltiades features prominently at the end of this book, but I’m a bit confused since it seems there are two Miltiades, and this one might be the son of the other one. I need to get this straightened out on second read.

Book 7 sees a regime change in Persia: Darius dies, and Xerxes takes over after some debate about succession. Xerxes needs some convincing to continue the assault on Athens, and besides, he has a revolt in Egypt to take care of, but he eventually puts together the biggest army the world has ever known and heads for Hellas. There’s a fun bit about him getting angry when a storm disturbs his pontoon bridge at the Hellespont, and he has the water flogged and shamed. But then he takes on Macedonia and Thrace, and eventually gets to Thermopylae where Leonidas and his 300 are defeated. And yes, though the film has been widely panned by scholars and history enthusiasts, they did get something sort of right:

Though the Lacedaemonians and the Thespians alike proved themselves to be brave in this battle, it is said that the Spartan Dienekes proved himself to be the most valiant man of all. It is reported that before the Hellenes engaged the Medes in battle, one of the Trachinians said that there were so many barbarians that whenever they shot their arrows, the sun was blocked by their number. Dienekes was not alarmed to hear this but rather, in total disregard for the vast numbers of Medes, said that what his Trachinian friend had reported was in fact good news, since it meant that while the Medes were blocking the sun, they would fight them in the shade. This saying and others like it have been left as memorials of Dienekes and the Lacedaemonians.

Book 7:226 – The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories; Robert B Strassler, Editor

We also meet Themistocles, who out-Odysseuses Odysseus: half-hero, half-conman. But here, he has a very good idea to build ships, which will save Athens’ butt down the line. And, by extension, saves Europe and changes the course of history, so say the scholars, and who am I to argue.

Book 8 gives us the Battle of Salamis, which boils down to a bunch of ships ramming each other. Scholars consider this to be the decisive battle of the Greco-Persian wars, though there are battles, particularly Platea, which Herodotus describes in detail, yet to come. It’s cool that  a female admiral impresses Xerxes with her battle tactics, which may or may not have been a mistake on her part. There’s also a surprise:

As Xerxes was doing all this, he also sent a courier to Persia to report his present misfortune. There is nothing that travels faster, and yet is mortal, than these couriers: the Persians invented this system, which works as follows. It is said that there are as many horses and men posted at intervals as there are days required for the entire journey, so that one horse and one man are assigned to each day. And neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swiftly as possible.

Book 8:98 – The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories; Robert B Strassler, Editor

That last sentence (emphasis added) might sound a little familiar. The Post Office has no official motto, but a version of that sentiment is engraved on a New York City post office.

Book 9 covers the battle of Platea, which apparently Herodotus viewed as more significant than Salamis, since it’s the last real battle on Hellene land and sent the Persians home. There are some other events, but Herodotus ends with a flashback to Cyrus, who once proclaimed, “Soft places tend to produce soft men; for the same land cannot yield both wonderful crops and men who are noble and courageous in war.” And on that note, Herodotus ends his Inquiry.

I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this. Pleasure aside, it also helped me iron out a lot of vague concepts and random ideas that have confused me for decades. The time invested – including the considerable time spent creating flash cards in Cerego so I stand a chance of retaining some of this – was very much worth it.

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  • The Youtube channel titled “Generic History Videos” was a treasure for me, though I have no idea who this guy is – I can’t find his name anywhere – or if he has any actual credentials. Alas, he’s only gone up to the middle of Book 7 so far, but I’m patient. Books 1-4; Books 5, 6, and part of 7
  • I don’t know who the “Rambling Raconteur” is either – he lists himself as a high school math teacher named Jack – but he’s worth listening to as well. The information is less comprehensive, but I like to use multiple sources whenever possible.
  • The US Post Office, which claims no official motto, gives full credit to Herodotus.

In-Between Reading 2026: Shaking Things Up a Little (IBR2026)

Posted by Karen Carlson on

Happy New Year! This is the time of year I usually start reading Pushcart. I have the 2026 volume on my Next Read Table (the TBR shelf got overloaded so I had to expand) but I’m going to do things a little differently this year.

I mentioned in my BASS 2025 wrap-up post that I felt silly about reading the same three books (four, sort of) over the last three months. It’s unusual that I would be reading other books along with BASS, so it’s not surprising I got bogged down. But it’s left me a little frustrated, feeling the need to finish the books I started before moving on to Pushcart. So I’m kicking off the year with In-Between Reading: The Big Books Phase. Because these aren’t week-long reads. They’re more like month-long reads.

My first goal is to finish Herodotus. I’m close – halfway through the ninth and final book – so that feels like the place to start.

Next, I want to read Sinykin/Winant’s Close Reading For the Twenty-First Century. I’ve been carrying this as my transit book, which means short, distracted reading sessions, not the way to read this book. And yet it’s been exciting and inspirational to read. I even made some clumsy applications of some of the basic ideas in my BASS read. But I want to sit down with it, and with some of the essays and books and articles it refers to. Just from my casual first pass, it seems worth spending time with.

I think I’ll then turn to Helen DeWitt’s latest novel, Your Name Here. I’ve been hearing it’s a complicated read, so it’s not going to be a six-day book.

I also have Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid on the agenda, inspired by Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations and helped along by discovering a lecture series on MIT’s open courseware platform.

I haven’t forgotten about ancient Greece; Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War is waiting for me. I debated scheduling this right after Herodotus, but I think I want some distance between them, since they have very different styles. Herodotus is what I imagine being on the bus with the Merry Pranksters might have been like; Thucydides is more like sitting in on Professor Kingsfield’s Contract Law class. I’ll probably follow this up with a tour of the major plays, or I may throw them in when I finish Herodotus.

Then there’s Richard Cohen’s Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, which sent me down this ancient Greek rabbit hole in the first place. I’ve put this on hold; just the first chapter has given me a year’s worth of reading, since it doesn’t seem all that useful to just read ten pages about various historians and call it a day. It’s because it’s such an interesting book that I want to pause for now. Maybe I’ll do the chapter on Rome next year. And chapter three the next year, assuming there is a next year.

This means my blogging pace is going to slow down. Some of these are Big Books – 600 to 800 pages – and some contain multitudes. It’s going to take me a while, say, a month at least, for each work. There are reasons for that. It isn’t the reading; it’s the understanding. It’s the retention. For some, it might be creating flash cards in Cerego. Or finding and reading the books and articles mentioned in a book. Or going through a series of lectures on the material. Or something else besides just reading the book.

I hope to get to Pushcart by late summer, so I’ll be free for BASS by October, assuming it’s published then. All of this is subject to change. But I find it helpful to have a plan, however tenuous, and to commit to it publicly, however unread by eyes other than my own.

Hey, why am I still blathering, I’ve got reading to do.

BASS 2025 Wrap-up: Finding the Funny, and Much More

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Book Art by Su Blackwell (detail)
During my first year as series editor of The Best American Short Stories, every day has felt like library book sale day…. Even if they have led me to ignore my family on occasion, the stories have been excellent company; when I have felt despair about the direction of our country, the fiction I read this year helped me make more sense of the world than real life was able to provide.

Nicole Lamy: Foreword, Best American Short Stories 2025

I decided to try some new approaches to this year’s BASS. One was keeping a list of things to put into this wrap-up post. In past years, it’s almost as though I  was surprised to run out of stories, and tried to think of something to say in summary besides a list of my favorites. We’ll get to that – and have a little fun with it – but first, let’s go through the list.

I enjoyed listening to the Writer’s Bone podcast episode 731 in which Daniel Ford talks to both Nicole Lamy and Celest Ng about BASS 2025. They discuss the short story as a literary form, describe the selection process, and provide several tidbits about the stories included in the volume – and about the general themes and issues reflected in the hundreds of pieces they read.

I always have trouble getting into the swing of things, and struggle with the first story or two. Part of that is switching from reading and writing about books, to focusing on stories; it requires a change of mind-set. This year, I thought a different approach might help. I strained out all my digressions, my personal connections to the story, and anything that seemed ‘un-serious’. I don’t know what I was trying to prove, but the result was horrible. I wasn’t happy with the posts – even, maybe especially, after I added back what I’d pulled out as a clumsy afterword – but worse, it screwed with my head to the point where I was paralyzed and didn’t even want to read the third story. It was an experiment worth trying, even though it failed. So I went back to my old slapdash, throw in everything but the kitchen sink approach, and felt a lot better. I’m not getting graded on this, I’m not getting paid, so I have to be having fun. Besides, over the past several years, I’ve started to think of this blog as a sort of fragmented autobiography. Inclusion of my reactions, based on my experience, is part of that, and it bothered me to think it was something to be discarded.

I also tend to gravitate towards stories that are in conversation with big topics, whether that means our current moment or broad-reaching and eternal themes…. In my read, the very best stories engage with more than just the purely personal, and this is what turns a good story into a great story.

Celeste Ng: Introduction, Best American Short Stories 2025

By coincidence, on the same day BASS was released, Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant’s book Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century also came out. The introduction describing the process was a revelation and an inspiration: scene setting, noticing, local, regional, and global application. I have more work to do on that book and on the processes they show, but there were moments when I used my nascent understanding of noticing and widening applications of themes from local to global in my posts. I’ll be including Close Reading… in my In-Between Reading 2026.

When Celeste mentioned humor in her Introduction, I was a little concerned. I feel like I haven’t understood humor since the Seinfeld years. I didn’t always see the funny, but I often did, and this year’s volume seemed to have a lot more humor than in the recent past. Or maybe my willingness to see catastrophe through a more ironic viewpoint is improving.

A literary magazine stood out to me: The Drift, founded in 2020. One of my favorite stories from last year, Steven Duong’s “Dorchester”, was the first time I’d seen The Drift in these, or any, pages. This year, three of their stories were selected, including two of my favorites. I’m grateful the magazine allows three free story views a year, which has worked perfectly for me – so perfectly, I decided to stop taking advantage of their generosity and subscribe. It’s been years since I’ve read a literary magazine regularly; this seems like a good place to start.

Since my blogging buddy Jake Weber didn’t start this year’s volume with me due to other things going on in his life (how inconsiderate life can be – he’s getting started now, so here’s hoping), I relied heavily on my reading buddy Andrew, who came through heroically. About halfway through the volume, he, traditionally a BASS skeptic (that ‘Best’ thing raises a lot of resistance for many of us), commented: “Three stories i really like? Not sure that’s ever happened before.” He added a fourth later on. Congratulations, Celeste and Nicole, you’ve cleared the Andrew bar. And which stories passed the test? You’ll just have to go through the comments to find out.

As for my own favorites: I originally had two stories picked –

– but as time goes on, other stories have blossomed in my memory and proved themselves on re-reading:  

I’ve been apologizing regularly to Don Curran, keeper of my favorite “What Are You Reading This Weekend?” thread on Bluesky, for reading the same three books for the last three months. But I’ve noticed this year more than ever that three days is not enough time for a short story to sink in. Connections occur to me after I click on ‘Schedule,’ and while some stories fade, others follow me. So it’s quite possible other stories will keep tugging at my sleeve, asking for more attention, and will end up on my favorites list.

Some stories stood out for specific, often less-than-literary, reasons. Thus, may I present The Sloopies, my answer to all those year-end lists pouring at us. I did this back in 2016, but for some reason never repeated it until now. Maybe there weren’t enough quirky categories. Maybe I wasn’t able to see them.

The 2025 Sloopie Awards:

  • Story with a character who should be put in a cell with Hannibal Lecter: “The Masterclass” by William Pei Shih.
  • Story I really wanted to hate, but ended up loving: “What About This?” by Justin Taylor.
  • Story I don’t understand but loved anyway: “Third Room” by Julian Robles.
  • Story that taught me a new word I can’t believe was ever coined: “Drapetomania” by William Lohier
  • Story with the funniest single line I’ve read all year: “Abject Naturalism” by Sarah Braunstein
  • Story that made me want to go to Costco:   “Take Me To Kirkland” by Sarah Anderson
  • Story with the best never-saw-that-coming ending: “Time of the Preacher” by Bret Anthony Johnston
But stories build our empathy by asking us to imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s position, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings…. At the end, though – assuming the stories done its job – this made- up story will have allowed you to access an emotional truth. Facts may tap politely at the prefrontal cortex, appealing to your rational brain, but fiction snakes its way into your limbic system and nests deep in your emotions. By skirting all the rational barriers we hunker behind, sometimes fiction can reach us in a more visceral way. And in doing so, short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values – then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.

Celeste Ng: Introduction, Best American Short Stories 2025

Maybe it’s reading that will save us all. See you next year.

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BASS 2025: Jessica Treadway, “An Early Departure” from Five Points #23.2

Posted by Karen Carlson on
When I start writing a story, I usually know what it’s about but not what will happen in it. I begin with a relationship, situation, or memory that holds emotional resonance for me, because as a fiction writer, that’s my most natural and valuable resource…. I have always cherished being an aunt, and I know better than to think it’s like being a mother, but it was easy to imagine my way into the heart of a woman who makes that mistake because she needs to.

Jessica Treadway: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

I’ve often thought about the complicated relationship between writer and reader. If a reader isn’t familiar with the slang a writer uses – or the allusions, or the mythologies embedded in a story, or the norms of certain situations and the consequences for their violation – a story can’t work. The writer can put clues into the story so the reader can infer from context.  But to a large extent, the writer assumes the reader either shares a set of experiences, or is willing to find out about them. Of course, the more one reads, the more one understands what one hasn’t experienced first-hand. And though reading is usually considered a solitary experience, shared reading, whether in a class, a book group, or reading online commentary, is another way to make up for whatever deficiencies one may have.

Here we have another story about motherhood. As I mentioned in the prior post, I was serially ‘mothered’ by, first, a mother, then a grandmother, an aunt, a half-sister, and a stepmother, and I have never been a mother. Was there some ineffable quality present only in the first mother, and, since my memory of that time is hazy, do I have any idea of what motherhood is?  How can I read a story that hinges on whether or not a woman is a mother when I don’t really know what it would mean if she were? Is there one thing that distinguishes a mother from a different caretaker?

I have a lot of questions. But let’s focus on the questions the story raises for me.

One year, my sister booked a hotel with a rooftop pool, and how much fun was that! Watching my niece and nephew laugh and splash under the stars. Another year we arranged the trip around my fortieth birthday, and they sang to me over a red velvet cake from Magnolia Bakery. I got the impression that they all made a special effort to give me a nice time, knowing how I might feel turning forty with no children of my own. Nobody said this out loud, but they were right that I felt a certain way, and the celebration helped in the moment even though it made me sadder when I was alone on the train back to Boston the next day.
Back then I liked to read quotes from successful women about not having children. Like Jennifer Aniston, who said, “You may not have a child come out of your vagina, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t mothering.” I’m mothering, I told myself, whenever I spent time with my sister’s kids. So they didn’t come out of my vagina. Is that such a big deal?

The overarching question: Is there a difference between a mother and an aunt who has been present in the child’s life over a long period? The story answers firmly: Yes. But is Kim’s experience the only experience of secondary motherhood? And just what was the relationship between Kim and Tanya: was it daily contact, good times and bad, comforting in sorrow and celebrating in joy, giving hard advice when needed, or was it outings and visits? The story isn’t clear.

The plot involves Tanya asking Kim to help her brother Henry, who has been caught hacking grades at his college. We aren’t given the details, but apparently Kim has some kind of position that gives her the ability and the aura of authority to intervene on Henry’s behalf.   

Slowly, I repeated Tanya’s words aloud: gotten himself involved. “You make it sound as if he couldn’t help it. As if he had no choice.” I noticed that my hand was trembling as I reached for my water glass. Tanya saw it, too. “And I wouldn’t call that ‘getting in trouble’ – I’d call it committing a crime.”
She sucked her breath in, barely audibly, and sat back in her chair. “I didn’t expect you to be so harsh,” she said. “This is Henry we’re talking about.”
“I know.” it chilled me to see the look of distrust in her eyes. “You think I’m not upset?”

As I read it, Kim sees Tanya as being manipulative in her request: asking for a visit instead of a phone call, wearing a necklace that was a special gift, turning sobs on and off as needed, minimizing the seriousness of Henry’s actions. She turns it up to 11 when she calls Kim her second mother.

Kim knows better.

Ah, those magic words: “a second mother.” they are meant to be a compliment – one of the highest – but the person they are addressed to, the person so named, understands all too well how far the second mother falls short of the first.

Kim tries to point out the ethical issues: Henry needs to face the consequences of his actions. Tanya isn’t having it.

I wonder if Kim has ever had a discussion like this with Tanya before. If not, this would be a tough place to start. But on the train to meet Tanya, Kim anticipates serious issues, from money problems to pregnancy. It seems to me that this isn’t virgin territory for these two. It’s a bit surprising, then, that this seems to be the first time Kim has taken a hard-line stand and Tanya has pushed back.

All that is somewhat secondary, however. The story takes place in two acts, and the second act, with Kim on the train home, has the money shot. The title points us to it, while also bringing to mind the potential early ending to Kim and Tanya’s relationship. Kim had been planning an overnight stay, dinner with Tanya’s friends, relaxed conversation. Instead, she leaves after the lunch. “It became clear,” she narrates, “that she intended for us to part ways.” The narration has zoomed back out; where we had details of exact words and behavior during the lunch, now we have to take Kim’s word for it. Is Kim a reliable narrator?

What does the second act accomplish that the first act didn’t? A child on the train cries, and Kim offers the mother some banal comfort that suggests she, too, is a mother who has dealt with a cranky kid. The child smiles. Kim first reads it as a reaction to the sound of words; then she reconsiders: “He smiled at me not because I’d charmed him, but to let me know he recognized a liar when he saw one.” Wow. Kim doesn’t let herself off the hook any more than she did with Henry. The child’s reaction is unknowable; it’s all interpretation. Which interpretation is correct? Whichever, it’s the moment she again faces her fear, which she has already conveyed

Kim has already acknowledged, in her heart, that being “like a second mother” isn’t the same as being a mother. Why replay that acknowledgment?

I wonder if it’s the automatic nature of her response to the frazzled mother. Even though she’s aware she isn’t a mother, she plays one without even thinking about it. Her first interpretation of what the child is thinking – he likes the sound of a word she said – is from her belief that she is a mother. The second – that he knows she is a liar – comes from her belief (fear?) that she is, in fact, not; that she can fool the child’s mother by saying the right thing, but the toddler knows. Relate this back to Scene One, and Tanya’s manipulation plays differently. She’s played, not on Kim’s motherly love for her, but on the more voluntary nature of their relationship, and Kim’s fear of that tie being broken.

Maybe that’s the essence of motherhood: the tie that is never broken. I’d disagree with that, but from my reading, I’d guess that tie is at least a lot more durable than any other. Those who’ve had consistent mothering – and those who are mothers – can let me know if that’s true.

* * *        

  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work, including the upcoming (April 2026) story collection, I Felt My Life With Both My Hands, that will include this story.

BASS 2025: Sanjana Thakur, “Aishwarya Rai” from Granta, May 28, 2024

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Granta art: Photograph © Keerthana Kunnath
I do think that this story, with all its different mothers, allowed me the space to explore how variable and complex mother-daughter relationships are, and how impacted by cultural and societal standards of womanhood and beauty. What are the expectations mothers and daughters have of each other? What happens when you fall short? Can you find the perfect mother? Does such a thing exist?

Sanjana Thakur: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

There’s a subgenre of story/film I’ll call “It was in my backyard all along.” It’s frequently found in romcoms: the lead longs for the perfect but unattainable partner, but eventually discovers the best friend is the real perfection. It can be in adventure stories, particularly those for children: someone goes searching for a place where they can have fun, and finds out the most fun is to be had, literally, in their own back yard. The Wizard of Oz gives a double dose of this phenomenon: not only does Dorothy Gale discover she’s had the secret to returning home all along and never needed to see the Wizard, but she finds out the people in her life are the ones she wants to be with, not those over the rainbow. Maybe you never figure out what you want until you see what else is out there, and discover it’s lacking.

Avni wants to find a better mother. So she goes to the mother shelter and adopts one.

The first mother Avni brings home is too clean. She wears white at all times, perpetually a mourner, and roams the two-bed flat with a feather duster tied to her slim wrist. ‘Don’t I look just like Aishwarya Rai?’ she asks, and pours bleach into the bathtub and onto her body. Scrub-a-dub-dub. Avni asks her no questions and takes her straight back.

In the middle of this process of adopting and returning mothers, Avni has the opportunity to see the actual Aishwarya Rai through a work assignment. It turns out unattainable beauty is as unattainable as motherly perfection.

It’s the fourth mother who is exactly what Avni needs: not a mother, but a mirror, someone to give it to her straight. Someone to point out she already has the ruby slippers. Cut to heartwarming moment.

As you might be able to tell, I was a little disappointed with this story. Part of that, I’ll admit, is because I don’t understand this idea of motherhood. I’ve never been a mother (cats don’t count, no matter how much you love them). Yes, I had a mother. She died when I was fairly young, after a couple of years of serious illness, so I don’t have any of the warm fuzzy moments mothers are supposed to generate. The mother role was filled by other relatives for a while, until stepmom came along. This worked out fine until it didn’t, and then it really didn’t. Except for one moment, when she came through with a brilliant solution, instead of the “I told you so” she had definitely earned, at a time when it was desperately needed. Maybe that’s the motherhood feeling I should be focusing on.

But some of my disappointment is from the predictable nature of the story. Maybe those who do connect with motherhood will enjoy watching Avni’s interaction with the women she invites into her life. I saw the differences, noticed the progress she was making, but wasn’t particularly engaged. I just don’t think it was my kind of story.

I was also distracted by the idea of the shelter itself.

The shelter houses one hundred and fifty women who used to be or long to be or have no choice but to be Mothers. They live in small double rooms with identical furniture. They cook together in a common kitchen and grow tulsi plants on the windowsill. On Sundays they sit in a long line that winds its way past the rooms and around all the living room furniture. They oil and braid each other’s hair. Avni did high school community service hours here. They seem happy enough to her.

This is where I wanted to know more. The similarity to animal shelters is emphasized by the treatment of the first mother Avni returns (the story is online, link below, find out for yourself). How do these women come here? Were they ignored by their families? Unwanted, abandoned, abused, lost? Without context, this element just hangs there.

Yet it occurs to me that perhaps neglecting this element of the story emphasizes how those mothers in the shelter are in some way neglected by society, seeing as they are there instead of in their own homes. That’s stretching things a bit, but it’s not impossible.

I tried thinking of it as the possible fate of Avni’s mother, if their reconciliation were not to happen, but Avni would have been aware of that from the start. It doesn’t seem to play a part in her decision making. All she sees is her need, not her mother’s. And maybe that’s why I’m balking.

This story was the winner of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, so I must be missing something. Maybe a mother.

* * *           

  • The story can be read online at Granta.

BASS 2025: Justin Taylor, “What About This” from Harvard Review #62

Posted by Karen Carlson on
I wrote the first draft of “What About This” longhand at a coffee shop in Winchester, Tennessee, on December 1, 2022, during the last days of a difficult semester spent far from home. I’d been given a generous teaching fellowship that I worried I had squandered…. By Thanksgiving, I was desperate for something – anything – to show for the university’s investment in me, and my own time. Thus to the coffee shop, where I bought the largest latte they’d sell me and proceeded to pour four months’ worth of writerly anxiety and existential vertigo into a voice suggested by the innocent seminarians-in-training who, in reality, it was my privilege to live among in the little university housing village….

Justin Taylor: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

Anyone who reads here often will know I tend to like stories with biblical or religious echoes. And that I dislike slacker stories. But what do I do when I find both of those elements in one story?

I defected to div school because two good women in Cincinnati had hit their limit: one blocked my number and the other changed our locks. Suffice to say it served me right and my thought at the time was that learning to serve might set me right, and it might have, but I was proving an at-best-indifferent exegete and and frankly frightened of the prospect of shepherding a flock. I came here in a blaze of self-abnegation, but these people were always trying to get me to stand up and declaim.
I got in my car, cranked the radio too loud to hear my thoughts – sick unto death of my own namby heresies and underbreath bitching – and Jimi was hollering Dylan and I decided to drive seven hours south towards the ocean, okay Gulf, to wash and be clean.
Almost got there, too.

From the start, I’m a little off-balance. I understand the urge to get the hell outta town and bask in the opposite when one’s upright life gets to be too much. But how does being rejected by two women propel one into divinity school? Given that most of the story is the tale of (relatively low-level as these things go) debauchery, with occasional mentions of the spiritual path put on hold, I’m assuming there was something like a Call at some point, but we aren’t privy to it. Ok, fine, keep your secrets. Make it harder. See if I care.

I’ll admit, the story started out in the red. I still remember the Justin Taylor story I read over ten years ago, when I was still reading TNY regularly. “It’s fitting that this story is pointless and uninteresting,” I wrote; “it’s about being pointless and uninteresting, as far as I can tell.” That he’s a well-honored writer and director of a pretty chi-chi writing program doesn’t get in the way when I have a bee in my bonnet.

What does get in the way is that the narrator’s voyage isn’t entirely pointless, nor is it entirely uninteresting. In fact, there are some gosh-darn good sentences in here. I’m not always sensitive to things like the rhythms of prose, but I felt it here, more than once. The first paragraph, which I haven’t quoted because it would be too long, should be recorded.  We’ve also got a lot of very subtle scriptural phrases woven in, not so they stand out unless you’re looking for them.

And what about this:

The bar had nothing on tap and a blue neon wall skull paying homage to tequila: no particular brand, just the general proposition. Marty Robbins on the Juke and sitting alone in blonde splendor was a clear-eyed woman with a high-set ponytail plunging down her straight broad back. Medical boot on her left foot, cowboy boot on her right. She had a tightly puckered smile from the tequila she’d just knocked back in a shot glass shaped like a cowboy boot.
So three boots total but none to make a pair.

I really like the boots, in spite of myself.

And I like dragging Naaman into things. 2 Kings 5. Look it up. KJV, please. Another thing I like, a character who sticks to the verily and thee and thou version.

And how can I resist a story that tailors St. Augustine to its needs. It kept me watching Nurse Jackie through however many seasons that was, and if it’s one thing I dislike more than slacker stories, it’s junkie stories, even if the junkies are incredibly sympathetic and often heroic. But here, it’s more of a promise than a request:

Celeste and I spent a week together, torrid, twice involving the cane so smooth and cool and remorseless against my throat that I saw fireworks and when restored to breath took to my knees by the side of the bed to thank God for hiding. For leaving me be.
I will find you again, I prayed, adapting the famous passage in Augustine. I will find you again but not yet – please not just yet.

That really got me.

So I guess I can live with the missing pieces, since the tough-guy rhetoric sings often enough – more would be too much – and I get the idea of knowing it’s not time to go home yet, that maybe if I throw myself to the winds, I’ll get a message that will bring me back. But maybe not. And that’s the tension of the story, left unanswered. Go ahead, keep your secrets.

* * *      

  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about his work.

BASS 2025: William Pei Shih, “The Masterclass” from Los Angeles Review, September 2024

Posted by Karen Carlson on
“The Masterclass” originated as a cut from a novel that I was working on, but over a summer in Paris, evolved into a piece of its own, encapsulating themes of mentorship, the struggles within artistic communities, and the complex interplay between ambition and disillusionment.

William Pei Shih: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

Some of the stories I’ve read so far in this volume have dealt with tragedies, with losses beyond any I’ve survived, and I’ve spent more than a few teary moments over these pages. But none has caused me the degree of hurt that this story inflicted. It’s not just because I recognize the emotional landscape, but because of the fury I feel at the academic malpractice displayed in the story, and at the result: the quenching of an artist’s love for the art, the replacement of creative joy with hopeless apathy.

The story takes place at a prestigious music festival, and is narrated by a young pianist, a recent Conservatory graduate. A Record Producer asks him to have coffee and discuss potential recording projects. This is the kind of meeting a fledgling performer lives for, a way to step into the limelight, to move a career into a higher orbit.

Also at the festival: the pianist’s former Piano Teacher, in fact the head of the Conservatory from which he graduated.

Now we were all at the Music Festival together in New England, and my Piano Teacher, that well-known and widely respected pianist with long fingers that cast even longer shadows — who I had wished in all my time at the Conservatory to notice me in the way that a coach might notice and pass along their expertise to a budding younger athlete — must have seen me and the Record Producer talking together. And from the corner of my eye, I watched as my Piano Teacher made their way over across the verdant lawn (as it was the height of summer) toward us, and come to say hello to me, and I was nothing short of — elated. Up until then, my Piano Teacher’s schedule had been too busy or full to spend any meaningful time with me — at the Festival, and even during our three years at the Conservatory together….
My Piano Teacher then saw that we were going to sit down for coffee, and to my utter delight (and even excitement) — which I had to find the strength in me to suppress — asked if they could join us. It was shortly before the Masterclass that my Piano Teacher was about to give at the Festival, and since we had a few moments to spare, I said, “Of course,” because in truth, in all of my time of studying with my Piano Teacher, for one reason or another, the music of other people (other more important and promising students), kept getting in the way.

Oh, the eagerness of the student, delighted to be finally recognized by his Piano Teacher, the hope that an endorsement might help move the Record Producer from query to contract. We find out a lot more about the many ways the Piano Teacher left the student to his own devices during the Conservatory years: fifteen times, as I count them, fifteen repetitions of educational abandonment, of valuing other students, other projects, more than our pianist. Ouch.

It gets a bit repetitious, to be honest. Oh, different reasons crop up: other students were more promising, more attractive, better connected in terms of future fund-raising. But the pianist chose this particular Conservatory, this particular Piano Teacher, because he favored the same kind of music: Rachmaninoff. Turns out, the pianist has realized in retrospect, that might not have been the wisest choice. After all, how many Rachmaninoff experts can the concert industry support at one time?

This retrospect has resulted from this very meeting at this very Music Festival. There’s a particular exchange where I noted, “Wow” in the margin, an undercutting so diabolical, so obvious, it’s not really believable. But it is believable. I believe this is the Masterclass of the story. I believe the Record Producer has seen this kind of sabotage a hundred times, and knows when to cut his losses. I believe it happens every day, in various performance fields, in elegant Academies, in literary circles. For that matter, in high school group projects, in church bake sale meetings, in family reunions. But as presented in this story, it leads to  a loss of art.

I happen to know a number of professional musicians. None are household names, even to afficionados of their particular niches. They make good livings in schools and choir lofts, in orchestras and local holiday celebrations. Most writers make their living teaching, or in entirely non-literary fields, publishing stories and books that never make Best of the Year lists. Somehow they keep the joy of the art alive; they probably have fantasies of wild success, but they’re also realists. Our pianist is not that lucky. He uses the word ‘bludgeon’ – several times – at one point. His joy didn’t survive that. He no longer plays. And that is what hurts me. The final paragraphs of the story give the pianist the final word, one that will only occur in fantasy, but is nonetheless simultaneously accusation, and self-recognition of semi-voluntary collaboration.   

But wait, there’s more. Shih uses two stylistic devices that, while purposeful, made the story almost unpleasant for me to read. Both are evident in the sole quote I’ve included (the story is available online, link below).

The first is the use of the singular they throughout when referring to both the Piano Teacher and the Record Producer. There’s really no reason why the story requires this; gender is not an issue. I wonder if it’s a way to remove gender from the equation. This didn’t happen because men are like this, or because that’s how women are. But I think it’s more likely to be a tip to the future, to normalizing this usage, so it doesn’t stand out so glaringly, so it isn’t such a problem when a non-binary person asks for the correct pronoun address. If everyone is they, it’s no longer a marker, no longer a problem. I will admit there is some benefit to gendered pronouns in a story crowded with characters, since it may help distinguish one from another. But I suspect there are ways around that. I grew up when Ms. was just emerging on the scene, and it was considered a huge problem, as were women bosses in general. All those problems seem to have worked themselves out. Perhaps the singular they will as well. I rather doubt it, but it’s an interesting way to put it out there.

The stylistic usage more germane to the story is the repetition of the phrase ‘my Piano Teacher.’ I found this annoying as hell. Out of curiosity, I ran the story through a text-to-speech reader, and it was even more annoying. It’s not a flaw, however, nor a mistake. To some degree it’s necessary, since there are no names in the story (the second story like this, what’s going on?). But it’s exaggerated beyond need. As such, it emphasizes how the Piano Teacher lives in the pianist’s head rent-free, even now, long after graduation, long after the end of his music career, when he’s given up piano altogether. It’s not a healthy habitation, but, as the pianist says, “Yes, it was you, it was always, of course, you.”

I have similar voices living rent-free in my head. They, too, are not healthy, yet I can’t seem to oust them; the best I can do is recognize when I’m acting on them, and put a stop to it. I wonder how many negative forces in the world are caused by such arrangements: people still angry, years later, over some failing, some cruelty, acting out against others or against the world at large. And then I wonder how many pianists, writers, artists, inventors, creators of all kinds, let their expressions be censored by the rent-free inhabitants. I wonder if there’s any way to evict them, for the good of us all.

* * *             

  • The story is available online at Los Angeles Review.
  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about his work.

BASS 2025: Julian Robles, “Third Room” from The Drift #12

Posted by Karen Carlson on
The Drift art by Brooke Bourgeois
This story holds and hides a Mexico I fled from, incomplete. Names, titles, birdsong – the word for things: I relinquish these to the man in the third room.

Julian Robles: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

It’s not terribly unusual that I don’t feel like I ‘get’ a story in BASS. It’s more unusual, however, that I feel like I don’t ‘get’ a Contributor Note. But let’s put that aside for the moment.

Fortunately, the story is available online (link below), so readers here are welcome – encouraged – begged? – to let me know what I’m missing. (The Contributor Note is, alas, not available, but we’ve put that aside so stop thinking about it). The availability of the story also allows me to dispense with any summary, beyond “it’s about a strange guest in the third bedroom.” Even that doesn’t sound right. Is it about the guest? About the lawful tenant? What about the landlord? The other visitors? Whose story is it, anyway?  Ah, the question I come back to when I’m lost. But I’m not sure I have an answer here.

In November my landlord and her family left the city to celebrate the abrupt cessation of her husband’s paralysis….
The night before they embarked on their trip, the landlord invited me to dinner. Her family lived in the apartment directly above mine. The husband was Honduran. She was Mexican. Their two-year-old daughter was, I supposed, Honduran-Mexican, or perhaps Mexican-Honduran, or simply Mexican, since Mexico was the country we lived in. She was white, like her parents. We ordered Italian food from the restaurant around the corner. The landlord’s husband now healthy, I judged it appropriate to at last bring to her attention certain features of the apartment in need of repair: low water pressure in the shower, a loose doorknob, flickering lights, and, naturally, the issue in the third bedroom. But out of respect for their solemn dinnertime recollections of the husband’s illness, and after witnessing their elation in describing the morning of his recovery, I again postponed broaching these issues.

I wrote dozens of short paragraphs about all kinds of things I saw in the story – gender, class, economic disparities, race, self-absorption, personal distance, choices of relationships, professional purpose, communicative style, story structure (particularly the landlord’s place as the opening and closing, with an additional appearance in the middle). Maybe I’ll let them stand. Maybe I won’t. Fact is, this is a hypnotic story that seems to go off on tangents, but those tangents seem terribly important somehow. I don’t know how they all add up. But it’s mesmerizing.

Let’s start with the first-person narrator. Nameless, which is ironic since nameless protagonists is one of the recurring complaints in the story. But no one has names, so everyone is identified by their relationship to the narrator: the girlfriend, the writer, the landlord, the landlord’s husband, the man in the third room.

While we’re at it, let’s look at gender identifiers. The landlord is a woman, yet the narrator refers to her as a landlord. This could simply be contemporary convention; the term ‘landlady’ does seem outdated. Or it could be either a subtle remark on gender fluidity, or on class: she is the lord, the owner, and the narrator has a wary  view of landlords.

I spent some time looking at gender identifiers for the narrator, and didn’t find any. My read is male, but there are certain places where the text leans female (kissing the baby, hugging the landlord’s husband, plucking eyebrows). This could be a deliberate, if subtle, presentation of gender fluidity, in which case this is the first time I’ve read a non-binary character who wasn’t specifically presented as such as part of the characterization. But I think it’s just part of the overall vagueness of the story, the hypnotic sense that lets us read what we want to read. For convenience, I will refer to the narrator as ‘he’ since there’s too much going on to worry about the singular they.

Can you see why I say I don’t get this story? I haven’t even gotten into the story yet, and I’m awash in detail. They can’t all matter, can they (like why the title is “Third Room” and not “The Third Room”)?  Yet for all that detail, the story was a very smooth first read. In fact, I didn’t make a single mark on the pages my first time through. That’s very unusual for me. I just kept reading, like I was being lulled to sleep by the rhythmic sound of a railroad car covering a long flat distance.

At the top of the list was the man who had been living in the third bedroom of the apartment since at least September….
My reaction upon spying him through the kitchen window was less fear and more akin to fatigue — yet another chore. I was in the middle of cooking breakfast, and I had an omelet to attend to. Then I had to clean the bathroom. And later that afternoon I had an appointment with the archivists at a rare book library. I’ll deal with him later, I thought. When I came home that evening, he was still in the room, still seated at the desk, and still writing. The only difference in the scene was that the bedroom’s overhead light had been turned on. The third room suffered from poor exposure to natural light; its solitary bulb had likely been emitting that dull, whitish glow since the early afternoon.

I find it curious that the narrator never goes into the room to inquire what the man is doing there. Maybe that’s a good thing, since it seems that those who do go in, never come out. It’s sort of a black hole, that room, since information never escapes.

I went down more than a few rabbit holes.

One of them is the writer. Not the writer in the third room, but the writer with whom the narrator has coffee and then invites to see the writer in the third room.

This writer was fifteen years older than me, spoke little Spanish, and had recently moved to Mexico for reasons that remained unclear. The writer was from New York and had written books about nameless protagonists who abandon their lives and flee to comfortably defamiliarized places. Their sites of refuge weren’t exotic in the traditional sense of the word — they were cities where everyone spoke English and that people from New York recognized at least in name, in the instances where names were provided. The idea was that the characters lost their identities upon entering these uncanny realities, or arrived at them with aspirations of nonexistence — meant to comment, I supposed, on a pervasive homogenization and disintegration of identity in our, the readers’, lives. But the settings of these stories were so plainly removed from the world of economic and political exigencies (and by no coincidence invariably devoid of non-white characters) that they became, paradoxically, comfortable and familiar to New York literary audiences, and thus I often fell asleep reading this writer’s books.
Nonetheless, given his experience in matters of people willfully disappeared, nameless, or otherwise effaced, I thought he might have suggestions for how best to rid myself of the man in the third room.

I’m betting there are those more familiar with the literary world than I am who know who this is. Or who have several candidates for who this might be. I see some overlap between the writer’s novels and this story – nameless protagonist, vague place, uncanny realities – but there are also differences. Could this all be a self-referential story, the story narrating its own involution? Then there was the chapter from Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices about implied authors, but I don’t really have a handle on that so I’m just throwing this out there and maybe some day I’ll come back to it and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was talking about.” But not today.

I’m very interested in that term, “narratological imperatives,” which led me down an even twistier rabbit hole.

The Mexican government was funding my work. The selection committee had called the research “very promising,” and its members expected a stellar mid-year report. That was the condition of my return to the country: a report of merit on peculiar industrial patterns I had identified at the city’s outskirts — what I had argued in my proposal were critical to understanding the country’s “narratological imperatives.” But I was having trouble finding the information I needed. I worried about the months to come. I worried they would make me leave Mexico again.

Narratological imperatives sounds like a term people with MFAs might know. Yet I found very little online. There’s some material on narrative imperatives, but that appears to be something else, what’s necessary to make a story make sense. And, for all the confusion this story generates, it’s very straightforward in a narrative sense. There are no disruptions of time, scene, or person; it’s just the little things that seem odd. And, of course, the man in the third room.

Back to narratological imperatives. Psychoanalysis distinguishes it from free association, which doesn’t seem particularly helpful. The context in the story seems to point to some set of cultural expectations, but I’m not sure what to make of that.

Then I came across references to two other literary works, which apparently play with the idea of the narrator referring to the author, or at least they can be read that way. In the third room we have the unidentified man, who is writing; later, the writer, friend of the narrator, enters the room. And, of course, the narrator. There seem to be a lot of writers, of story tellers. Is the idea of implied author being quietly referenced here? That seems absurd, since a reader would have to be familiar not only with a 17th century French novel but Gunter Grass’ Cat and Mouse, and with papers written about them.

If this sounds a bit fanciful – and I admit, it does – consider another impression the narrator has with the writer in the story as they walk back to his apartment:

The writer spent most of that time outlining the plot of his latest book. He planned to return to New York the following month to attend a conference, or maybe to speak on a panel, or it was possibly the case that he was receiving an award. The details were unclear, because the writer had transitioned so abruptly into descriptions of his winter plans that for several minutes I thought he was describing deeds accomplished by the narrator of his novel. This new novel’s narrator would have a name — the writer’s name — and his deeds would unfold in familiar, fully-realized cities.

That’s pretty serious slippage between author and narrator there. I only wish I had a better grasp on the narratological theory I think I’m glimpsing. Still, it provided me with an interesting few hours in the rabbit hole, and convinced me this story is far more complex than I can untangle.

I take comfort that editor Celeste Ng, in her Introduction, indicated her own puzzlement:  “[It] hooked me with its strangeness but stayed with me because of its haunting (yet comic) depiction of isolation and loneliness. I still can’t say I know what it means, but I can tell you I’m still thinking about it.” Yes, that’s exactly it.

Now about that Contributor Note. I quoted only a small part of it above, the part that made the most sense in terms of how the story came about. But there’s much, much more. It begins:

The apartment where I began and finished this story belonged to a psychologist. She offered me the place on a handshake after a five-minute conversation during which she complimented my aura. This was five months before I saw a different psychoanalyst in Del Valle who described my dreams as “suffused with atavistic fear.” At the start of our first session, the psychoanalyst drew my attention to the sound of a bird nesting beyond the window. He sent me home with a gabapentin prescription and advised me against reading or writing before bed.
I suppose I followed the psychoanalyst’s advice, because I wrote this story over the course of an afternoon in the last sunny month of the year. I composed it at the dining table in an apartment far too large for a life willingly circumscribed to a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bed where I spent hours reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and feeling guilty for not reading enough Latin American literature.

Julian Robles: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

That’s about half of it. There’s more than a hint of an autobiographical approach to the story, given this information, thus reinforcing the idea of author-narrator confusion. And the Contributor Note is as hypnotic as the story.

In spite of the unresolved issues raised by this story – or perhaps because of them? – I want to read more by Robles. He has several other pieces, some of which are online, and I think I might enjoy an afternoon going through them, listening to the rhythm of the rails as the train moves through undiscovered countryside.

* * *        

  • The story is available online at The Drift.
  • In lieu of a website, this brief interview from three years ago provides some insight into Robles’ work.
  • An article referencing narratological imperatives by Françoise Jaouën, “Civility and the Novel: De Pure’s La prétieuse ou le mystère des ruelles,” can be found on Jstor.
  • A second article referencing narratological imperatives by K. F. Hilliard, “Showing, Telling and Believing: Günter Grass’s ‘Katz und Maus’ and Narratology” can also be found on Jstor.

BASS 2025: Nathan Curtis Roberts, “Yellow Tulips” from Harvard Review #61

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Material for a story was all laid out for me, but I started off with some foolish ideas. I felt like such an outsider in suburban Utah, I couldn’t imagine myself in the place where I really did live. So I started writing about someone who fit in …. I struggled for months to get anything worthwhile onto the page, aside from the story’s basic scaffolding. I took a long break from the manuscript, and when I came back to it, the problems seemed obvious. The story wanted to be about a misfit. The narrator needed more of me in him.
…. The process of crafting this story helped me find some beauty and grace in a religion I hadn’t believed in since I was sixteen, one that rejected me before I ever had a chance to reject it.

Nathan Curtis Roberts: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

Welcome to Abe Sorenson’s world in the very Mormon Utah suburb as COVID rolls in. His wife took off for a collective some years ago (“A cooperative lavender farm in Oregon: was anything ever so lesbian in its signifiers?”) so he’s on his own making a home for their 30-ish son, Brigham, whose intellectual impairments often make that a challenge. Roberts shows us Abe’s world with an ironic, if slightly tense, humor rather than bitterness.

It was his mother who chose the name Brigham. I would never have. The person who gives her son such a name is at the far end of a pendulum swing, and it’s inevitable that it will come hurtling back the other way. Some folks, especially in our religion, are given to extremes – extreme belief, extreme disbelief. Wendy tried both several times, and finally settled on disbelief. We were introduced during our senior year of college by the bishop of our singles ward. He could only have been a few years older than us, but back then I regarded him as mature, authoritative, and pleasing to the eye. “You two have the same problem,” he told us. “I believe you might be able to help each other out.”

I’m happy to say this isn’t a hatchet job on the LDS Church. There’s Bill Nilsson, all-around good guy who helps his neighbors, including Abe, and proves that a judgmental mindset and tiny acts of random cruelty aren’t necessary for believers.

Then there’s Meghan Palmer, who proves that, while not necessary, they are certainly possible. Take, for example, her reaction when Abe and Brigham start taking walks that go by her house.

Meghan Palmer called to ask that we no longer use the sidewalk in front of her house during our morning walks. There is a type of audacity only a Mormon lady can muster.
…. “But he’s upsetting people. He wants to hug everyone when we’re supposed to be keeping six foot distance. He’s happy about all of the things that make the rest of us terrified – myself included…. Everything that makes the rest of us nervous gives Brigham the thrills.”

I can understand Brigham’s excitement. All of Christendom looks forward to the end of the world, whichever way they see it happening. Death itself is a glorious freedom from this world of sin; the saved have tickets to the Bosom of Abraham. So why be scared? There are even a few believers who sway political parties to get to the Second Coming sooner. Brigham may not have an impressive IQ, but he gets the subtext just fine. And that makes people uncomfortable. Most of us don’t really want to examine our fundamental beliefs too closely.

The story plays with all these elements, and a few more besides, but it really comes down to the tulips. I have to admit, I’m a little undecided about how to read the tulips. But let’s try.

Apparently, deer love to eat tulips, and pretty much anything else that people plant in their gardens. Except daffodils, which contain a toxin to ward off snackers. This forms the basis of Abe’s view of yellow tulips:

It appeared the deer were also quarantining, because the tulips in our bowery, and on Englewood Drive, were allowed to bloom that year – but only the yellow ones. I’ve long felt resentful of yellow tulips. They are redundant with daffodils, which are more resistant to disease and deer. What tulips are good for is their variety of colors, and for getting eaten up as buds, before they have a chance to present themselves. Meghan Palmer’s house had a whole patch of them, yellow tulips in among the yellow daffodils.

I initially read this as a resentment of conformity – in this case, of color –  and a desire for diversity. But in light of Abe’s recollection, towards the end of the story, of Bill Nilsson’s view of yellow tulips when Abe complains about them, I want to re-think that:

“Don’t you think tulips have a right to exist? A right to try to exist? Even the yellow ones! They might not make it through to blooming, but imagine how much more beautiful the world will be if they do. We owe it to them to let them try. We owe it to ourselves.” He was delivering a homily, that much was obvious. But what mystical old-man wisdom was he trying to impart? That everyone deserves a chance to thrive on their own terms? At the time I assumed he was referring to Brigham. I realized now he was talking about me. Or Wendy. Or both of us – we had the same problem, as the handsome young Bishop said.

Abe follows this up with a mental homily of his own, of a time when the pandemic is in the rearview mirror. It’s lovely, these last sentences; I read them out loud a few times. And I had to reconsider my view of Abe’s disregard for yellow tulips. Maybe he was focusing on their lesser function. If the purpose of tulips is to bring a variety of color into the world, yellow tulips fail, just like certain people could be disparaged for failing to fulfill what some might consider their purpose.  Or maybe he’s absorbed the community attitudes towards heteronormativity and has translated it to a prohibition against monochromatism – until Bill presents a defense that allows an entire rainbow to bloom.

In any case, it’s not only warm and fuzzy, it’s a fun story to read, with lots of little moments I haven’t even mentioned. I wish it were available online, but that’s how it goes sometimes. And, to top things off, I just got my copy of Pushcart 2026, and this is one of two stories from this BASS volume that‘s a double-hitter.

 * * *         

  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about his work.

BASS 2025: Andrew Porter, “Angelo” from Ploughshares #50.1

Posted by Karen Carlson on
At its heart, “Angelo” is a love story, but it’s also about that period in one’s life when so much seems both possible and impossible, when your vision of your own future changes daily.
And because I wrote the opening paragraph of the story first, I knew all along what the future would hold for Angelo and Cole. I knew where they’d end up. I just didn’t know why. So, that’s what the story was about for me: going back to the beginning to discover why.

Andrew Porter: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

Growing up is hard to do. Just google that phrase, you’ll find a bazillion articles on how hard it is, how to survive it, why it’s so hard. And how some people never quite manage it. Growing up’s a bitch, and for some people, it’s extra-hard, through no fault of their own. That’s probably why the Coming-of-Age story is so popular in the literary canon.

Porter starts this particular Coming-Of-Age story in the present, so we get to see the result before the process:

Evenings I meet Angelo in the parking lot behind Whataburger to get high. This has become such a ritual that we don’t even talk about it anymore. We just meet up in the same spot right behind the dumpster, a small patch of creosote bushes that shield us from any onlookers. It used to be that we’d drive over to Angelo’s apartment afterward and watch the news or watch the Spurs, but Angelo is married now—he’s been married almost six months—and so we don’t do that anymore. Instead, we just pass a joint back and forth, sit in his car for about an hour or so, listening to music and occasionally talking, but mostly just sitting there quietly, a ritual we’ve shared since high school, since longer, probably, than either of us can remember.

The age is unclear. Maybe they’re eighteen, maybe they’re twenty-five. It’s clear there’s a bond between Angelo and Cole, a strong one that draws them together for an hour every night. But the scene is devoid of joy, of energy, of life. There’s just this quiet… communion. And, just as Porter had to write the story to figure out how they got there, we have to read the story for the same reason.

The core of their relationship forms during the summer between their junior and senior years in high school, when Angelo rents a small artist’s studio in a little community of artists. Even though they’ve both got heavy things to deal with, it still feels like an idyllic time. Angelo paints, and Cole hangs out. Sometimes they spend the night together. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they don’t. Another artist across the courtyard asks Cole if they’re “going out.” He tells her they’re just friends. She gives him a little smile a lesser author would describe as knowing, but Porter knows we’ll figure that out for ourselves. Maybe that’s a crucial difference between a literary story and pulp fiction: the author gives the reader enough context, and trusts the reader to put it together.

Are they friends or lovers? Even they don’t seem to know. But they don’t seem too concerned about putting a label on their relationship; it is what it is, and that’s good enough.

Still, I knew how it looked to some people and knew what other people were probably thinking and saying. I knew that what Angelo and I were didn’t make a lot of sense, even to us, that we weren’t something that was easily defined or categorized, that we weren’t something that was easily explained or understood.

While Angelo has the talent, Cole has the faith that it’ll take him where he wants to go. RISD, for instance. Angelo isn’t so sure; yeah, he won a contest in San Antonio, but what’s San Antonio. They talk a little about what it will mean to them if it does happen, since Cole isn’t likely to ever get out of San Antonio.

After a while, he put out his cigarette on the ground and then leaned his head on my shoulder, a rare display of public affection. I looked around the rest of the courtyard to see if anyone could see us, but the courtyard was empty now, no one in sight.
“Plus,” he said, “if I left, I’d probably end up missing you too much, you know?” He tapped his leg.
“We could write letters,” I said, “like in the olden times.”
“You mean like the 1980s?”
“No,” I said, “like the 1880s, with a quill and shit.”
“I think you’re thinking of the 1780s,” he said and laughed, shaking his head.
“See,” I said. “That’s why I need you to stick around, to keep me from saying dumb shit like that.”
“Yeah, that’s my point,” he said, shaking his head again. “That’s my point exactly.”

It’s one of those tortured moments of growing up: you’ve got something great going on, but you know it’s going to change. And this kind of change, while a good thing, a very good thing, is going to destroy this magical time.

Turns out, the change comes before RISD becomes anywhere near a reality.

I found the story to have a curious sameness to it. The lack of energy in the first paragraph persists throughout. Even the crisis points seemed muted, resulting in the story having little shape, as Vonnegut called it. I don’t think that’s a flaw; I think it’s the point. Sometimes people get stuck – in a particular time, in a career, in a relationship – and can’t quite let go of what was, with all its beautiful memories and its safe, familiar perimeters, to move on to something better. The last sentence – a sentence that brought me to tears for its beautiful and tragic honesty – gave me this read of the tonal moderation. This is what stuck looks like.

Cole raises a great question: “How does an artist stop being an artist?” This sent me a-pondering if that can even happen. Oh, an artist might stop painting or songwriting or whatever, but does that mean they are no longer an artist? Must one do to be? Might a fallow period be necessary for external reasons, to keep the artist internally safe until recovery? Is this what being stuck looks like for some people?    

I’d like to see how these guys are doing in, say, ten years. They both deserve that kind of hope, at least.

*  *  *       

  • The story can be found online at Jstor (with free and painless registration)
  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about his work.

BASS 2025: Carrie R. Moore, “Till It and Keep It” from Sewanee Review, Spring 2024

Posted by Karen Carlson on
“The Garden of Eden”: British Textile, 16th C
I kept thinking about household structures, how we join our lives to others. As a practicing Christian, I’ve thought of the book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve. Those scriptures serve as the structural backbone of this story: a woman who meets a man, who’s been in the world slightly longer than she has, in an Edenic landscape. And outside of that Eden, the world is full of horrors.
The story gained momentum. Then – the COVID-19 pandemic happened. My writing grappled with my worst fears, exaggerated by hours of doom scrolling….
Still, nine years after its first draft, the core of this story is a relationship between two women.

Carrie R. Moore: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

I always seem to have trouble with cli-fic. In the particular, the scenarios are similar, drawn from scientific predictions of where our collective greed and taste for comfort will lead us: floods, drought, famine, illness, death. Losses of land, extinctions, breakdown of civil and structural systems. In the abstract, I kind of object to it. Is someone really going to adjust their lifestyle, vote for greener policies, view the present signs more seriously because of a story? Isn’t  using the dramatic aspects of climate catastrophe to tailor a scene benefiting from, possibly contributing to, our lack of urgency?

Still, the cli-fic stories I’ve encountered in BASS (and Pushcart) have been about something other than the bleak setting and the longing for what was. Moore’s story is no exception. It’s about a bond that can’t be broken, until it is.

Brie and Harper are trying to get out of Low America – the South – and find their way to Maine, where it might be better. It might not. But the maybe is good enough. They’ve stuck together through all kinds of crap, and now it’s a series of viruses that keeps swapping between them.

They hadn’t counted on running into Eden along the way, right there in Tennessee.

As she drove, Brie said, “Just hang on. We’ll stop soon,” and passed her sister a silver canister of tea leaves to chew. But whatever was ailing Harper hit Brie too. As the hot pressure spread through her skull, she eased off the road, into woods blurry as gray flames. She cussed. Then prayed: Lord, cover us. It was different from her usual prayer: Lord, let us get the chance to taste something green.
Brie repeated her sister’s name. They hadn’t survived so much for her to lose Harper now.
Then she saw the orange and green shapes just outside the window. The orange globes, dimpled and striped pink. The green, a sharp tip. It took her a minute to recognize them, long as it had been since she’d seen such fruit.
“Harper,” she said. “There’s peaches out there.”

There’s a lot going on in this story. People who might help or hurt, one can never be sure these days. Memories of their past, of the people they lost along the way. A general wariness which may or may not be overcome.

But the center is, as Moore’s Contributor Note indicates, about the sisters, about what happens to an unbreakable bond when it turns out that each wants different things, after all.

That night, as they faced each other on the shed mattress, Brie said, “There’s a lot we can learn in a place like this, if we both work.”
Harper curled her fist under her cheek. “We been working and learning for years. At some point, you just have to go.”
Brie rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. There had been cobwebs in the rafters that morning, and now they were gone.
“I don’t think peaches grow in Maine,” Harper said, her voice softer. “But maybe apples? Potatoes? Would that make you happier, staying through the canning?”

Do you give up something real for something that may or may not exist? And what was the goal in the first place?

I do have a quibble with the story. I resent that attachment to a man plays a big part in the decision making process. The cynical side of me reads: “Hey, sis, it’s been nice, but I got a man now, so bye!” I have to wonder: what if the man, if the attraction to him, wasn’t part of the picture? Would that make the decision easier, or harder? I’d rather read about that quandary.


Still, the story ends beautifully, with an overtone of regret and the hope for reconciliation. As someone who’s watched a lot of people walk away far too easily, it’s satisfying to watch one wrestle with doubt in Eden.

This story is the final piece – and the only one set in the future –  in Moore’s debut short story collection about Black life in the South, Make Your Way Home, published this past July.

* * *                  

  • The story is available online at The Sewanee Review.
  • Read a review of the story collection, Make Your Way Home, ending with this story, at The Rumpus.
  • Read an interview with Moore about the story collection at One Story.

BASS 2025: Elizabeth McCracken, “Seven Stories about Tammy” from Zoetrope #28.1

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Lady with a Fan:  Gustav Klimt, 1917
My grandmother was a dogged fabulist when it came to her age, and so were her sisters. Two of the Bernstein sisters – there were six – performed as folk dancers in New York City and in the 50s they kept scrapbooks of clippings with the dates torn off. I’ve always been fascinated by this particular piece of vanity, which has never made sense to me, and have long meant to write about somebody who lies about her age over decades.

Elizabeth McCracken: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

This story sets up a wonderful game of “Whose story is it?” right from the title. Because it’s not really seven stories about Tammy; it’s more like seven stories about how the family Harkins reacts to Tammy, over twenty or thirty years. Not well, I’d say.

Story #1 begins:

“Her name is Tammy,” Morris had announced ahead of time, which is what threw his family off. The imagined Tammy, his first girlfriend, first to be brought home anyhow, was a girl in a bikini he’d met in Tallahassee, a model, he told his fellow Harkins, who filled in the rest. Hair in pigtails, a vacationing Iowan, a girl who’d blow over, a girl you’d be teased over for the rest of your life. When Morris appeared, he was not with a girl but a woman. This Tammy—the actual Tammy—had thick, blond hair she wore in a mid-neck bob whose depth could be measured with a ruler. Hair like the Sphinx. Tan like the Sphinx. A smoker’s voice: ruined? No, sexy and persuasive. Morris was twenty-seven. She wasn’t.
Immediately, the parlor game was how old is she? And Dennis, the father of them all, decided he would win.

It’s a wonderfully fun read, a snarky comedy of manners at the start, with Tammy taking it all like a good sport. The dog sits on her foot. Dad spills red wine on her. She flat-out asks them what they want to know, bringing their scrutiny under scrutiny. No one asks the crucial question, of course. But they make all sorts of suppositions about her from her hair (“The uses of her bob were clear, the way her hair fell and obscured her face, then swung back into place…. she wielded the bob like a lady with a fan in the olden days, folding and unfolding it”) to the “air of money” she projects. Mother, father, sister Victoria and brother Porter, each at opposite ends of adolescence, all create their own stories about Tammy.

There’s a hint of foreshadowing:

She seemed like that sort of woman, efficient and ruthless, with beautiful manners. There was a moment in that first ten minutes when she might have put the lot of them – Morris’s parents, sister, brother, the family beagle Albert – to work. Set them right.
Everything would have been different if they’d been obedient. Tammy might have saved them all, not just Morris, who wouldn’t have drifted away. Porter wouldn’t have drunk so. (Of course he would have, but maybe to more charming effect.) Their parents wouldn’t have argued. Victoria’s life would have changed the most. She was seventeen then, a fool for charismatic women.

The style is a bit chaotic, the omniscient narration zipping from person to person, father Dennis, mother Miriam, siblings Victoria and Porter, zooming in and out, but  barely flickering over Morris and Tammy. They seem remarkably calm and self-possessed as a result, the center of a whirlwind. While Tammy is the focus of attention, Morris, struggling actor, is ignored: “Oh, were you here, Morris? his family thought” when he announces their departure.

Family Dynamics 101. And that’s just the first story about Tammy.

Story #2 takes place a couple of years later at the worst wedding reception ever, its tackiness fully revealed when Dennis puts Elvis’ “In the Ghetto” on the jukebox and Miriam asks the bridal couple to take a drunken teenage Porter home, since “[e]veryone’s already been deflowered, is my guess.” This trip home turns out to generate a plot line that persists through the years. I imagine that Tammy designed the reception – not the wedding, which had taken place at City Hall some time before – the family deserved.

And so it goes on, each story about Tammy really being a story about the family that’s so busy worrying about her age they don’t notice their own deficits.

In the process of telling seven stories about Tammy, McCracken reveals an interesting aspect of storytelling: the story we tell, tells about us, as well. Why did we pick the subject, how do we approach it – with admiration, sympathy, scorn? – and what do we include and leave out? Where do we begin and end the story?

When we tell a story, the story tells on us as well. We see Dennis’ selfishness, Miriam’s snobbery, Porter’s incipient alcoholism, Victoria’s body dysmorphia, and Morris’ invisibility, all thought the lens of the seven stories about Tammy. We see everyone’s age disclosed, save Tammy’s. And we see Albert, the girl beagle with the boy name, the perfect spirit animal for Tammy:

Things happened over the Tammy years. Albert the beagle was middle-aged when Tammy appeared; They loved each other. Albert knew they were both likely to be put in the backyard. The Harkins would say, of either of them, Well of course you’re a member of the family, but it wasn’t true. Neither Albert nor Tammy wanted it to be true.

When I saw the title “Seven Stories about Tammy,” I thought seven people were each going to tell one story. Instead, we see Tammy as the sum of her interactions with the various Harkins, and that telling sentence early on that they might have been better off if they’d directed their attentions differently.

* * *          

  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work.

BASS 2025: Yasmin Adele Majeed, “The Clean-Out” from Narrative, Winter 2025

Posted by Karen Carlson on
In much of my work, I am interested in the debts that immigrant daughters are born into, and their creative attempts to pay them off. These characters are both daughters and mothers, and what they owe each other, and what they believe they are owed, drives the story. I wanted to capture the force and complexity of the women on the Filipino side of my family, and through the lives of these characters, consider the contradictory narratives that can exist within a single family.

Yasmin Adele Majeed: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

One of the hallmarks of the Best American Short Stories anthologies, particularly over the last ten years or so, is that they strive for variety – of theme, of voice, of style, of authorship. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because there’s something in it for everyone, and readers are introduced to writing they might not otherwise have picked up. A curse, because chances are, not all of the stories are going to hit for the average reader.

For example, this story. I seem to have missed it. But I’m going to try, anyway.

I had been dreading my mother’s arrival all week, and now here she was, her own mother in tow….
I watched her circle the car and help her mother, my Lola, out from the passenger seat. Lola looked tired. Four weeks ago, Walter—her late husband, and my mother’s stepfather—had died unexpectedly. Complications from chemo, my mother had told me on the phone.
Lola said something to my mother, who did not reply. “Teo, come help,” she said, sharply. For a moment I imagined myself as a petulant daughter, running away into the forest, where no one could find me. But I had never been that girl, and I felt too old to be any other kind than the one I was.
I stood up. The grass tickled my ankles. “I’m here,” I said. “Right here.”
Their faces turned to me in surprise. Lola’s broke into a smile when she saw me, but my mother’s was troubled. She didn’t expect me from that direction.

I recognize several often-seen elements: a multi-generational family with issues, three degrees of immigration, a gathering of individuals bringing different views to the table, concern, in both the past and the future, about one’s ability to be a mother. Symbols proliferate: the beach house itself, the process of cleaning it out, the bird, the woods. I see two inconsistencies that bother me enough to seem significant: we’re told Tiya Eileen had cleared the house of memorabilia five years before, so why does it need to be cleared again; and in the first paragraph narrator Teo says she’s afraid to walk in the woods alone, but at the end she enters the woods on a mission without hesitation or comment. But nothing really sticks for me.

Maybe it’s because the narrator doesn’t seem very engaged in the family dynamics that so plague her mother and grandmother. She’s more of an observer, a witness, than a participant – and a somewhat unwilling one at that – in their drama.

I realized that I did not know whose fault it was that every conversation we had devolved into the airing of the same wounds: that Lola had left my mother and her siblings with my great-grandfather so that she could marry a stranger, that my mother did not want to leave the Philippines but was forced to when she was sixteen, that when my mother turned eighteen she did not speak to Lola for eight years, until one day she called to say, “I’m pregnant, Mom. I’m having a daughter.”

Because I was struggling, I went to some lengths I haven’t found necessary in prior stories this year. First, because the story is available online, I copied it into a document and had Word read it to me. That sometimes helps when I’m having trouble focusing; hearing the words knocks some sense into me. That didn’t really work this time.

I also paid extra attention to the comments Celeste Ng made in her Introduction: that the story “expertly unravels what goes unsaid across generations – and asks whether withholding stories can sometimes be an act of kindness.” That interested me. It’s not clear that Lola, the narrator’s grandmother, understands why Belen, the mother, so hated Walter, her stepfather, to the point where she wouldn’t attend his funeral. It’s even less clear that Teo understands the reason. We know Belen resents being moved from the Philippines to California as a teenager, but is that enough to cause such a rift? And it leaves open the question of why she didn’t go back when she was old enough to live her own life – or was that the missing eight years? I was very unhappy that my family moved from Connecticut to Florida when I was in grade school; before my nineteenth birthday, I was back in New England, on my own. Granted, it’s not as dramatic a shift as across an ocean, but I still have to wonder what we aren’t seeing, what isn’t being told, and who’s in on it and who isn’t.

This leaving things unsaid also comes at the end of the story, when Teo tells part of the truth, and “[t]he rest, I kept for myself.” This makes it sound like something beautiful happened, and she doesn’t want to share it, but the circumstances indicate it’s more likely she feels her discretion – and, note, we aren’t exactly sure what she tells and what she doesn’t – will be less painful for Lola.

Something I’ve noted in these stories is that the all contain at least a moment of humor. This one is no exception, and, for those of us who watch, or used to watch, the Lifetime network,  here is your pre-Christmas chuckle:

[M]y mother and I watched “Christmas in July” on Lifetime, an endless marathon of movies about white women and, what seemed to me, petty familial problems that always resolved themselves neatly in time to celebrate the holidays together. I knew that these women existed only to placate the rest of us from unhappy families in varying degrees of dysfunction. I knew my mother knew this too. Neither of us acknowledged this—it remained the only TV we watched together.

Yes, those movies are the televised version of Harlequin Romances, all different but all alike. I’m pretty sure Teo watches with a different perspective than her mother Belen. But they both no doubt yearn for the simple solution to come at the end of the show, knowing real life is not written that way.

I’m also grateful to Majeed for giving me a word I’ve been missing: prolepsis. I’ve been calling it a ‘flash forward’ for years, and now I know what I should have been calling it.

* * *             

  • The story is available online at Narrative.
  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work.

BASS 2025: William Lohier, “Drapetomania” from One Story #315

Posted by Karen Carlson on
I learned about the term drapetomania in a class on Morrison, Ellison, and Faulkner. Halfway through the semester we were sent home because of the pandemic. I began the story as part of the final paper for the class, since the term seemed to connect much of the historical violence we were reading about with the horrors of the present. The characters all struggle to negotiate agency within an apocalyptic scenario, and running, in the story, speaks to that negotiation.

William Lohier: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

For me, it was the other way around. I read the powerful story, then was knocked on my ass when I found out the meaning of the title.

But let’s start with the story.

I first heard the running at school. Jackson had been fidgeting all week, though the rest of us pretended not to notice. He raised his hand for the bathroom, leaving us hunched over a midterm exam, and we heard footsteps circling the hall for the rest of the period. No one went to check on him. Even Ms. Price soldiered on, gripping the chalk so hard it snapped in half as she marked the time we had remaining.

All we know from this first paragraph is that we have a young, probably teen-age first-person narrator, and that something happened to Jackson that everyone was anticipating but no one wanted to address. The teacher marking the time they had remaining – sure, that refers to the exam, but it echoes more broadly. Something bad is going on.

Then we learn more.

Maybe we should have acted sooner, understood the danger when the first reports of manic running appeared on our timelines and newsfeeds. At first people thought it was a prank, some viral stunt for media attention. Parents started taking their kids’ phones and petitions were circulated to ban the latest social media. We were two weeks into the semester when the first runners began to collapse. Interludes between classes were hashed out in fierce whispers as we huddled around videos of them, crumpled on the ground, coughing up blood.

And here we think we have the picture of what’s going on: a running mania, dealt with ineffectively as it escalates. Kind of like a zombie apocalypse without zombies. Kind of like Covid, but with only one symptom:  running.

Turns out we don’t know the half of it. And that’s an interesting element in itself. Because how does it change your understanding of the world of the story to find out the people who are running to death are all Black?

Lohier does an excellent job of dropping details like that without dwelling on them. The empty desks in the classroom. Nina, our narrator, imagining the clicking of Kasey’s braids as she runs: “Maybe running brought some relief and she looked up at the sky and felt free.” He uses captivating imagery: the “chatter of feet” as a runner circles her block in the snow, “and the footprints he left behind made me think of the pictures in the news of the blisters, raw and angry, the trailing pale flaps of skin.” Beauty, pain, relief, freedom, anger. And fear. Who’s next?

Enter a reporter named Jai who wants to get up close and personal with Nina. Jai’s presence gives the story a chance to open up a little more than it would if it were just Nina and her family, which is rapidly decreasing.

Jai isn’t really a reporter; she’s just an intern, but the station wanted to put “someone from the community” on the ground. What community that means isn’t clear. Nina views her as Asian; turns out her father is Japanese, her mother Guyanese, and she was “born here” whatever that means, so she’s just going to have to wait and see. Like I said, he drops these details. How Black do you have to be to run? What is Black, anyway?

The bare plot of the story runs through a more or less predictable apocalyptic course, but it’s these little side issues that make it burrow a lot deeper than worrying about a character you like running off into the sunset. Check out the little satiric observations: companies that want to use runners as “unregulatable labor” (sowing seeds, generating electricity, delivering goods). Research funding that dries up when it turns out white people aren’t affected. The slight tick of panicked denial when it turns out they might. And did I mention the imagery?

There’s probably a natural inclination to view this in light of the recent Covid epidemic. Yes, there was, at least early on, a propensity for people of color, the political games piled on fast, and there was the sense of everyone waiting to see if that cough was just dust or the real thing.

But I thought of something else. Maybe not everyone’s memory goes back to the mid-80s, or has read And the Band Played On as many times as I have, but there was this weird disease that only affected gay people. GRID, they called it. Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. People were dying of unusual diseases in New York, San Francisco, LA. Members of the gay community wondered if that bruise was just a bruise, if that cough would go away, or if they’d be dead like that guy they knew. And beyond a few health care and public health workers, nobody really cared. Until Rock Hudson died of AIDS and it became everyone’s nightmare.

I also thought: a Black man running – or a Black woman, for that matter – wouldn’t last long in a lot of US towns. I thought of Ahmaud Arbery, murdered in 2020 because he was running in Georgia and three white men didn’t like that. He wouldn’t stop when they ordered him to, and they liked that even less.

Now let’s take a look at the title, through the lens of Manuel Gonzalez, the One Story editor who interviewed Lohier for this piece:

I’ll admit that before reading William Lohier’s stunning new story, “Drapetomania,” I didn’t know what drapetomania meant or that it meant anything, and certainly didn’t know it was a term invented in 1851 by Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright to describe the “psychological disorder” (ha) that caused enslaved Blacks to run away from the men who claimed to own them.

Manuel Gonzales, Editor’s Note at One Story

I’m still stunned that a (white) doctor in 1851 wrote a paper, published in a medical journal, that claimed a mental illness was the reason Black slaves ran away from their lawful owners. I mean… Really??!? Really. Links below.

But let’s end back on the story, which deals out information at the precise moment it matters most, to get us to think about our own perspectives and those of the world we live in. Lohier is putting together a story collection titled Black Star Line which I’m hoping will include this story, and give me some others of similar impact. I’m looking forward to seeing it soon.

* * *           

  • Read Gonzalez’ full intro and interview with Lohier at One Story.
  • Read the text of Cartwright’s paper on drapetomania at PBS.
  • Read commentary on Cartwright’s article at the Jim Crow Museum website.
  • Read coverage of the trial of the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery at NPR.

BASS 2025: Hannah Kingsley-Ma, “Underwater” from The Drift #13

Posted by Karen Carlson on
I’ve always been interested in where pockets of privacy exist in our closest relationships – and how many different strains of intimacy there are within our wider social constellation. I’m also interested in seeing how these different kinds of intimacy collide. The prime setting for a collision seemed to me to be someone else’s family vacation.

Hannah Kingsley-Ma: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

How fitting that this story focusing on intra- and inter-family relations should come up to bat during Thanksgiving Week, that Family Holiday of Holidays, when everyone has to take sides (which feast to attend), decide to fit in or stand out (What do you mean, you’re a vegetarian / you don’t like football / you voted for WHO??!?), and notice how different ones spouse is when surrounded by, or separated from, the family of origin. There isn’t even the distraction of a swim in a saline pool as there is in the summertime vacation of the story world:

What a pool it was, Sam thought. A special kind of pool. Very cold and salty. There was no chlorine in it, someone informed her. All saline. She took that to mean they were basically bathing, treating their various open wounds. She had been on vacation with her husband’s family for exactly two days.

That’s a kind of eww-ey opening, setting the stage for a little discomfort, a slight sense of disorientation. And for pete’s sake, two days, how many open wounds could there be?

Turns out, only a couple, but they’re big ones for Sam. First, barely two paragraphs in, there’s the dog.

A well-bred dog, genetically modified to have the personality of a teddy bear, pawed at the water hesitantly, struck with the expression of someone who has either witnessed or committed a crime. The previous night this same dog, Dotty, had been seized by an urge to hump one of Sam’s Crocs, still affixed to her foot, and she had stood there frozen until her husband, also named Sam, kindly suggested she kick it to the side. So she had kicked the dog in front of the entire family, and the dog had issued a sharp and plaintive yelp — you betray me? — and Sam had profusely apologized, again and again and again, but no one present could get the sound of hurt out of their mind.
I can’t believe you told me to do that! Sam wailed at her husband later, once they were alone.
I didn’t tell you to do that, said her husband. I meant kick off the shoe. I didn’t know I had to clarify not to kick the dog.
I kicked the dog, Sam said mournfully.
You did, he confirmed.

I’ve mentioned frequently during this read that I’m keeping an eye on my sense of humor, which has seemed muffled of late, but it came back full force with this story. I’m not one to laugh about kicking dogs, but it’s that perfect anecdote of miscommunication and innocent reaction. I’m not sure I’d kick a dog just because my husband said to kick it – in fact, I know I wouldn’t – but Sam is so distressed here, I can’t help but be sympathetic.

This leads, almost lyrically as well as practically, to our second theme. The term “genetically modified” makes it sound like some lab procedure was done on Dotty as a zygote, but it really only means typical dog breeding practices, in use for centuries, to strengthen certain characteristics and temperaments. Still, it resonates a little when we learn that Sam’s husband – also named Sam, wouldn’t you know it – has a twin sister. Now, there’s no more genetic connection between fraternal twins than between any siblings, but it complicates things for wife Sam, because she’s intensely jealous of Lizzie, husband Sam’s twin sister.

Sam kept these thoughts private, ashamed of the underground river of jealousy that every now and then threatened to sweep her away. Seeing her husband and his twin sister interact made Sam feel insane; she wasn’t sure whether she was perverted or they were. Which would be worse: if Sam was imagining a psychosexual dynamic that didn’t actually exist, or if her husband was cultivating an intensely subtle psychosexual dynamic with his sibling that only Sam was smart and incisive enough to pick up on? She feared that the odds were against her being a perceptive genius.

This shifting of loyalties is a real thing that most newlyweds go through, though in the case of the Sams it seems to have lasted for six years. It’s not helped by husband Sam taking Lizzie’s frequent phone calls into another room when wife Sam is there. And it’s not helped at all by wife Sam’s imagining things like: “What had they been doing while they were in there, swapping amniotic fluid in the womb, getting wasted and doing backflips whenever their mother ate maple syrup?”

It doesn’t seem to matter that wife Sam has the same loyalty issues with her family, specifically, her three sisters who don’t get why she’s going on vacation with another family rather than with them. Does jealousy run in families?

And it really doesn’t help that the dog Sam kicked is Lizzie’s.

As the story unfolds, these issues of jealousy and loyalties play out in various ways, from idyllic walks in the Berkshire woods followed by tick-hunting sessions where they “groomed each other like a bunch of chimps” to night terrors (I’ve had them from time to time, and agree they’re probably worse for the sleeping partner than for the terroree) that further reveal connections and jealousies. Then there’s the final scene, which leaves wide open exactly what happened, and how much of an accident it was.

Something I hadn’t realized until I started preparing this post and type the title, “Underwater,” was the predominance of water in the piece. It’s not just the opening scene in the saline pool, it’s the amniotic fluid, the “underground river of jealousy,” Sam’s sisters described as salmon swimming upstream. And the final image, which presses a hard choice on the reader. Good fiction is supposed to make us work.

* * *                

  • The story is available online at The Drift.
  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work.

BASS 2025: Bret Anthony Johnston, “Time of the Preacher” from Virginia Quarterly Review #100.2

Posted by Karen Carlson on
It’s safe to say I was as surprised as anyone by what the characters do and don’t find in that house.

Bret Anthony Johnston: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

This is the fourth Johnston story I’ve encountered. The first, way back in 2011, “Soldier of Fortune,” was the first time I realized I could recognize a story was really good with out feeling personally moved by it. A couple of years later, “Encounters with Unexpected Animals” was one of my favorite stories in that BASS volume. I don’t remember “Dixon,” from 2018, not even after reading my post about it, despite the fact that it seems to have said something to me that I consider extremely important. So I looked forward to this story. What have you got for me now?

Snakes.

Snakes didn’t bother him. He liked catching them and feeling them slip from one hand to the other, as if he were letting out rope. He liked watching them vanish in the brush afterward, liked happening upon the sheaths of their shed skins, feather light and lace soft. Mandy knew he was partial to them, which was undoubtedly why she’d invented the snake tonight. Driving toward the rental, Holland clocked a certain surprise that this was the first time she’d baited him like this, then beneath that, the deeper surprise that she’d stoop to invoking the preacher. Mandy wasn’t a believer, exactly, but she wasn’t a nonbeliever either, so whatever had occasioned the lie had her in a corner.

It isn’t about the snake, of course, though it’s all about the snake. It’s about who we turn to when we’re scared and what that means. It’s about keeping hope alive even when the divorce was three years ago and she’s remarried. And it’s about the pandemic. Apparently enough time has passed, for me, anyway, to make reading about the pandemic possible without groaning.

The story evokes, but doesn’t dwell on, a lot of the moments that weren’t that long ago. “A mobile testing site had taken over the parking lot of a dead mall….On the radio, hotheads debated stimulus checks and mask mandates…. Hotheads saying convention centers might be converted to morgues.” People are building fences in record numbers, giving Holland more business than he can handle. He’s adopted some Brahma chickens he found abandoned by someone who probably didn’t want to bother with them anymore.  And now the preacher renting a cabin from Mandy has disappeared without notice, taking even the cups with him.

Snakes in a story involuntarily evoke temptation, disobedience, a fall from grace. That Mandy’s missing tenant is a preacher, and the very title of the story, adds to that atmosphere. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I don’t see any treachery. I see two people distanced by their own decisions who find comfort in each other when it feels like the world is ending.

“I just keep thinking this is the end of the world. A snake in a house previously occupied by one of God’s servants didn’t exactly help.”
“Maybe the snake was raptured too,” he said.
“Or maybe I’m just mourning not making enough bad decisions when I had the chance.”
…. “It’s like everything was on a solid glacier for our entire lives,” she said as she blotted her eyes with the cuffs of her shirt. “but now it’s breaking apart and we’re on our own little pieces of ice and floating away in different directions. Soon I’ll be gone or everyone else will. I mean, if you can’t count on a preacher to stick it out, who’s left?”
“I am,” he said. “I’m right here.”
“You are,” she said. “And you’re sweet to rush over even if you think I’m lying about the snake.”
“I want you to feel better,” he said.

You have to wonder why these people divorced. But these are extraordinary times, calling for extraordinary kindness.

The title may include a preacher, but it’s from a song by Willie Nelson that tells the story of a man bereft by his  woman running off with another man. Apparently there’s a whole song cycle about it, and it doesn’t end happily. Is this an attempt to rewrite the song, to show violence isn’t the only way to deal with pain?

Thus far, it’d be a funny, sweet story with relatable characters who are easy to care about, with enough tension from the hunt for the snake to keep it moving while Holland and Mandy cover their own emotional trajectories. But then there’s the final paragraph.

I spent part of the summer looking at narrative point of view. This story stays in third person throughout, but up until this final paragraph, it’s locked solidly into Holland’s head. Everything is from his point of view: the snake, the chickens, Mandy, the preacher. And now the narration zooms out just a bit, just enough to view the immediate surroundings, leaving Holland out of it. What’s impressive is not how it made me laugh, but how casually elements were strewn about, while Holland was moving the refrigerator and Mandy was fretting, with no hint as to the eventual destination, the best trick of its kind since Bruce Willis turned out to be dead. I have no idea what it means, but I loved it. Yes, I’m being cryptic. Read the story. You’ll see.

* * *            

  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about his work.
  • Check out Johnston’s forthcoming story collection Encounters with Unexpected Animals which will include “Time of the Preacher.”
  • Willie Nelson’s performance of “Time of the Preacher” is available on Youtube.

BASS 2025: Isabelle Fang, “Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges” from McSweeney’s #75

Posted by Karen Carlson on
In having so many characters to play around with, I started writing toward the unspoken needs and wants we have hidden in all our relationships. I wanted to write about people who, somewhat by accident, end up meaning more to each other than they first bargain for.

Isabelle Fang: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

One of the reasons I find the BASS Contributor Notes so interesting is that they reveal how the stories came to find their final form. So many stories have their origins in bits and pieces, ideas that aren’t quite fleshed out, quick sketches, that come to life when they are combined. Fang tells us that this story started as two separate pieces: a draft about a reality TV show, and a fragment about “[a] man returning all the used panties he’d bought from a woman over years and years” (Oh, that got your attention, didn’t it? That’s ok, come for the panties, stay for the punch). Combining them created this amalgam of humor and longing that looks at just what a relationship is.

So let’s talk about relationships for a minute.

Forget all the psychobabble and podcast talk that claim relationships are about honesty or communication. Relationships are the interpersonal version of Hobbes’ social contract. You get something, you give something. You get a carpool, you stop smoking on the way to work. You get someone to kill spiders, you put your shoe budget towards a down payment on a house. Whatever. Everyone’s bargains are a little different.

But people aren’t machines. Sometimes we don’t tell the whole truth about what we want, or what we’re willing to give. Sometimes, we lie to ourselves. Sometimes, we change our minds; and sometimes that sneaks up on us. This story gives us all three.

Warning: mild SPOILERS. I don’t think it matters that much. While there are several points of narrative suspense – will the daughter come to the dinner? Will the bride show up at the wedding? What’s going to happen at the goodbye meeting? – the story is more about how May understands and reacts to all of it.

I’ve always been a little confused by the distinction between plot-driven and character-driven fiction, but I understood it here: rather than characters being there to execute events, in this case events happen to illuminate the character’s choices and, well, character.

May started selling her used panties by text and mail back when she was in film school. [Digression: perhaps the most useful part of reading short stories has been the window it gives on certain life activities I’d ordinarily not know anything about. I first came across the panty-buying trade a few years ago when I read Emma Cline’s story “Los Angeles”. Hey, guys: WTF is wrong with you? End digression]. Bill has been her favorite customer. But now, Bill has texted her that he’s not going to need her services anymore. He wants to take her to dinner to say goodbye. She’s figuring out whether she wants to do that or not.

Pre-Bill, May had always had the sneaking suspicion she’d be a better person if she journaled. But it was a habit she couldn’t keep without someone on the other end, without stakes. Over the past six years, May’s writing has condensed from full letters to field notes:
Blue, Cotton: Lunch with my mom
Pink, Boy Shorts: Laid in bed, ate a Hot Pocket
Lavender, Seamless: Got new boss coffee (splash of oat, 1/2 Splenda packet)
Black, Lace, G-String: Caught up with ex-boyfriend
…. For a while, May stopped daydreaming about her own life. Instead, she’d picture Bill: clumsy fingers tugging at a Christmas ribbon, ripping into shiny airtight plastic, a man lying in mountains of panties and paper. May never worries about posturing with Bill. He doesn’t care if she lands the best entry-level job or moves the farthest from her hometown. Bill will read about May microwaving old Indian food while wearing a pair of baby-blue panties, and thank her for it. Maybe it’s not a friendship, exactly, but it’s the easiest relationship in May’s life.

Look at the way Fang uses this section of interesting backstory to fill in a lot of less-interesting-but-important backstory: we find out May’s life is pretty boring, hence the daydreams. She’s got career concerns, feeling pressure to compete with fellow students who might be doing better than she is on some metrics. And her romantic life isn’t overflowing. So when we find out May’s doing her first on-site production gig, we know that’s something that matters to her.

The gig is to follow a 53-year-old North Carolina man who’s about to marry his nineteen-year-old mail-order bride from the Philippines. Ok, maybe she isn’t exactly mail-order, but he met her online, paid for her rent and rainbow braces (another thing I’ve now learned about) and now she’s coming here to get married in Hawaii. She’s an Asian replacement bride for the Asian wife who left him years ago. [Seriously, guys, WTF?] The crew is drooling over filming the tawdriness of all this.

They film a tour of John’s home. He talks like it’s MTV Cribs, like they’re in a long-dead, simpler era of reality television. He still keeps a picture of his ex-wife on his night stand, stacked on top of paperwork for Ally’s K-1 visa, brain-dead to the optics. Instinctually, May pulls out her notebook, jots down the header “Beige, Seamless,” and writes, “Toured a strange man’s home.” She remembers that Bill won’t be buying anymore, and feels her face get hot. She scratches it all out and starts taking notes on the day’s schedule.

Fang just sneaks those clues in there: May might consciously think of Bill as a journal, not as a real person, but she’s going to miss that journal. She also thinks a lot about the difference between being nineteen, and being twenty, which is when her mother married. “There can be so much that happens in that year.” Makes me wonder what happened to May back then.

So we have these two relationships, one beginning, one ending, both between strangers, both more business deals than romantic connections. But they’re very different. And that difference becomes more pronounced when John brings out the prenup for Ally to sign. He’s been burned before. “The prenup is a very intimate thing for me.” May has a lot of thoughts about Bill ending their relationship, but the financial loss isn’t among them.

Fang uses this dual story to great effect. The key to the story occurs in two phases, once with John and Ally, once with May and Bill. The shot:

At the airport, Ally doesn’t look real at first; she’s a blur running into John’s arms. But then John grips Ally’s arms and the meat of her bends to John’s hands.

The meat of her? That startled me when I read it. Fang chose to make it startling. The first thing it conveys is embodiment: this is a person, not pixels on a screen or a voice on the phone. That’s emphasized by the entire paragraph, which literally has her becoming real and goes on to describe Ally’s flawed skin and awkward movements. But that could have been accomplished by writing “the skin of her arm”; instead, Fang chose “the meat of her.” That brings to mind the devaluation of women into sexual receptacles and/or decorative objects, emphasized by the homophonic play of “meet market/meat market” as a description of singles bars (do they still call them that, or are they just clubs now?) where the meeting that takes place is more your-place-or-mine than getting-to-know-you. Just ask the crew, who are having a lot of fun chatting up exactly what’s going on here.

That might have remained an interesting insight, but for the reprise at the very end of the story. May has had her farewell dinner with Bill, and he’s presented her with her panties: all laundered, smelling fresh and clean, tied with the ribbon she used to send them, with the notes she’d written with each of them “packed so densely it feels like a stack of business cards.” Her confessor has suddenly become her absolver; all the tawdriness is washed away. It was just a business deal. That night, as May tries to sleep, the last word on the subject is the chaser:

At the bottom of May’s mind, a nineteen-year-old girl. If May got close enough, she could maybe feel the meat on her arms.

The question I have is whether May is thinking of Ally, comparing herself to the bartered bride, or whether she is thinking of herself before that crucial year between nineteen and twenty, when a lot can happen. Maybe both. Maybe there’s the longing for this mail-order relationship to instead be something real, to find herself embodied with someone who will be her journal, her confessor, her absolver, but also her lover and sexual satisfier. Or maybe there’s this residual shame over the seaminess of her transactions with Bill, now that she has the more blatant example of Ally to compare to herself.

In any case, it’s a wonderful use of duality that pays out throughout the piece. Forget communication and honesty: There’s what we bargain for, and what we secretly hope will happen. There’s nineteen, and there’s twenty. There’s the business deal, and there’s the meat on your arms.

This is Fang’s first published story. It’s quite something; it’ll be interesting to see what she comes up with next. And there’s another interesting, if trivial, thing about this story: I believe it’s the first time a BASS story has included emojis.

BASS 2025: Lyn Di Iorio, “Maritza and Carmen” from The Georgia Review, Fall 2024

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Luis Germán Cajiga: “Mujer con Sombrero Negro”
“Maritza and Carmen” is part of Let Me Take Care Of You, a collection I’m writing set in Puerto Rico. At the heart of these stories are kaleidoscopic encounters following Hurricane Maria – moments of connection between people who might otherwise never have met. The storm, followed by institutional collapse, cruel neglect, and the arrival of stateside billionaire profiteers, paradoxically led to a strengthening of bonds and a collective determination to regroup and regrow. This shifting landscape shapes the world of my characters.

Lyn Di Iorio: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

This story poses a fascinating question: What happens if you lose your identity – and then discover you don’t want it back?

Maritza found herself left without memories after being rescued, half-dead, from a river in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. She took the name of one of her rescuers, and now, after a year living with Juancho, owner of a small café, she’s feeling calmer and soothed by growing vegetables and flowers behind their home.

Then Juancho sees her picture in the newspaper.

Not her picture, exactly: the picture of a police officer named Carmen, receiving an award for heroism during Hurricane Irma. Carmen is thirty pounds heavier and has awful orange hair. But it’s her. She’s found herself again.

“So, then I should call you Carmen?”
She looked at the picture of the woman with the unfortunate hair. “I like being Maritza with you. I feel more like Maritza.”
Juancho was relieved, not because she did not remember the other man and did not seem to want to remember him, but because he also felt that the name Maritza suited her better than Carmen. The name Maritza seemed lighter, laid back, vivacious, not to mention sexy. There was something jagged and blunt about the woman in the photo.

And there’s one more thing. The woman in the newspaper photo has a teenage daughter, Taina.

“We should contact your daughter, Taína. She must miss you so much.”
She didn’t answer him. The word “daughter” floored her. Why did she not feel more motherly? She went to the last table. The half-length Cajiga reproduction hanging over it was the Mujer con Sombrero Negro, a portrait of a beautiful woman with clay-brown skin wearing a large-brimmed black hat that was indistinguishable from the color of her hair.…
“When you see her, you will remember her completely,” he said. “Everything will be fine.” He tried to take her in his arms again, but she moved away. “You will remember.”
She said nothing. She was not afraid that she would not remember more details. She was afraid that remembering would not make her feel anything different from what she felt now when she looked at the girl in the newspaper. She felt curiosity and she admired the girl’s beauty. Maritza herself was not beautiful. To go by the pictures in the paper, her former self, Carmen, was close to ugly.

The story deals with Maritza negotiating the chasm between who she was and who she is, with complicated feelings about who she wants to be. There is, of course, a reunion with her daughter; they’d had what seems to be a typical mom-teen relationship, full of conflict and drama, but Taina starts to cry when she relates how alone she has felt, believing her mother to be dead. Maritza cringes with guilt. “The feeling was there, but it was submerged.”

It’s interesting she characterizes it that way. I felt submerged reading the story; I noted at one point I felt like I was reading underwater. I’d thought this was because of the detailed description of Carmen’s trauma in the river, complete with intricate details of living and dead things in there with her. But I think it was more a lack of connection, odd since there is so much going on here. I’ll chalk it up to my failure as a reader to master a style I found … well, thick. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but it’s the word that comes to me. I was curiously unmoved by any of the characters, though I could understand the turmoil they’d been through. Maybe it’s the trauma that blunted their expression of that turmoil. I also noted that images – the painting, the newspaper photographs – and memories were so prominent, more so than present experience. Maybe that added to the distancing.

I was, however, very interested in the story of the story, described in Di Iorio’s Contributor Note. She’d already written Taina’s story as part of the above-mentioned collection: the girl saw her mother swept away by the river surge, leading to the presumption of death. Di Iorio decided to change that presumption: “What if, instead, it was parts of her identity – her roles as mother and policewoman – that died? Where Taina finds a new sense of belonging, Carmen loses hers entirely.” That makes me want to read the initial story; perhaps it will help me enter this one with the emotional connection it deserves.

* * *         

  • This story is available online at The Georgia Review.
  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work, including the collection-in-progress, Let Me Take Care Of You.

BASS 2025: Sophie Madeline Dess, “Unfathomably Deep” from Drift #12

Posted by Karen Carlson on
Medea Sarcophagus, Altes Museum in Berlin
It is a story born of the question: What forces and passions possess us in the wake of grief?

Sophie Madeline Dess: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

I found the magic of this story to be in the reveals. The false leads and tone reversals, the half-hints, the important words that don’t seem that important at the time. It all comes together by the end, still confusing: I had to read the story several times to feel like I knew what was happening in various places, and I think I’ll be milking subtext and metaphor for the next thirty reads at least.

Because of this partly gradual, partly sudden kind of reading experience, I’m hesitant to write much about it. But I have a lot to say, about the story, about Euripides’ Medea, about how the story did what it did. So I’ll put the standard warning – Spoiler Alert! – and strongly advise one read the story (it’s available online, link below) before reading this post.

I was disoriented by the opening sentences, which set me up for violence, perhaps kidnapping, imprisonment, rape, torture, then led to a far more benign explanation.

Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out. One of the men was late. The other two began without him. The room was hot and forbidding. As the men locked me in my stirrups, they told me their names, which now I’ve forgotten, but I do remember that one was blonde, the other blonder. They were medical students. I played their patient. Together they shot me small smiles and then proceeded to probe.
When at last the late doctor arrived, his hair looked extremely black beside the blondes. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “Sorry I’m late. It’s unseasonable outside.” He walked over to the exam table on which I was spread, where the blondes had also just begun apologizing — for Daniel’s being late, and also for the sorry quality of Daniel’s apology. Three young men, wearing white coats, looking deep into my body and expressing solemnities. I looked away. Then back at Daniel. My god, I thought.

All those dangerous words at first: spread me open, hot and forbidding room, locked me in. Even the smiles are shot. Then the mood turns on itself: narrator Izzie explains she is a Gynecological Teaching Assistant, a sort of practice patient so medical students can develop some degree of competence on paid models who are trained to evaluate and coach before being let loose on paying patients who may be in distress.

[Maybe the violence in Izzie leaks out through the language?]

Everyone asks me, Why him? What was it about him? I can’t quite say. The way he said unseasonable. The efficiency of his beauty, its immediate implication of eternity. His eyes! Their slow pulses of anti-death.

We don’t know why him what yet.  Izzie mentions her sister. She mentions Utah. She uses words like violent peace and savage depth. She mentions a therapist, grief, love. We don’t know a lot about exactly what any of this means, which is the alluring force of this story. We have to keep reading to find out.

Now let’s talk about Medea.

I happen to have been obsessed with ancient Greece lately, so this played right into my park. Except, I’ve never read or seen the Euripides play. I found several articles and videos (links below) that helped fill in the gaps in my knowledge. It’s a surprisingly modern tale: Woman helps her husband achieve his goals, gets him out of numerous scrapes with her magical powers (and her penchant to murder anyone who gets in the way without dropping a beat), and bears him a couple of sons (a much riskier business then than now) but when he dumps her for a younger, more well-connected Princess in their home-in-exile, she gets really, really mad. “Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour,“ she says. She murders the new wife, but that isn’t enough. To truly hurt her husband, she murders his children, who happen to be her children, of course. Then she arranges for him to die. And she gets away with all of it.

Scholars are impressed with how ‘complex’ (that’s the exact word they use, over and over) the character of Medea is. On the one hand, she’s a loyal and supportive wife. On the other, she’s a murderer, several times over. She’s sympathetic one minute, a monster the next. The big debate is whether she’s crazed from anger, or perfectly sane, when she murders her own children. She plans and executes the murders perfectly. She gives a speech expressing outrage at how women are treated as objects in society. She indicates she knows what she’s doing, and she knows it’s wrong, which is the legal definition of sanity in the 21st century. But… doesn’t she have to be at least a little crazy? Is she a heroine, or an anti-heroine – or both at the same time?

One thing that leaps out at me as I read this story is the use of the word unseasonable. Dr. Gregory Nagy, Harvard Classicist, teaches a mooc in which he defines the Greek hero has having several characteristics, and unseasonability is one of them: a hero is born out of time, his coming into the world is complicated and difficult. Example: Achilles was in danger of being murdered by his father (paternal infanticide is all over Greek mythology, as is patricide for that matter), so his mother hid him away.

Is any of this relevant to this story? Probably not. Relevance would require that Dess be familiar with Nagy’s construct, which is certainly possible, but the word is used in the story to describe events that surround several different characters. Daniel is connected with words like eternity and anti-death, and he seems to be pretty special, but he doesn’t really function as a hero in the story. Izzie functions as a hero, but she isn’t described as unseasonable, or extraordinary. Medea is considered the heroine of Euripides’ play, but in the story she isn’t described in relevant terms either.

They ask me how a girl like me could do it. They’re skeptical. They say I’m made of myth.

[Maybe, just as Izzie’s violence leaks out in the language of the first sentences, the notion of heroism – or anti-heroism – leaks in via this word, attaching itself to,,, whomever might seem most likely to earn it]

And the word unseasonable, in the final paragraph, reveals a very different, very important function. I find it an interesting use of a somewhat unusual word. I don’t remember having seen the word unseasonable in a story, or a novel for that matter, recently. Then again, my memory isn’t what it used to be.

Back to the story. It turns out Izzie’s sister, two months pregnant, was to play Euripides’ Medea back in Utah, but the director didn’t like her interpretation of the role.

The director, a Utah native, did not like the way my sister played this woman — he didn’t like the breath-holding, the righteousness. “You give her too much,” he warned her. “Remember: this is infanticide. Medea kills her children. This is gruesome.” My sister fought back. I watched as she stood up and got personal, using words like “silly” and “troglodytic.” The next day, the director gave a long lecture to the entire cast about Euripides, about Greek culture and why we should understand Medea’s actions as reckless, immature, melodramatic — actions with brutal, long-lasting consequences, in a series of equally if not increasingly gruesome tales. “Good, well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground,” he said at the end of his speech. He said it especially to my sister.

So Izzie and her sister watch from the audience as the understudy plays a “fretful, self-conscious Medea whose rage no one believed in.” Izzie’s sister believed in Medea’s rage. And now, so does Izzie.

For more, you’ll just have to read the story. To find out where the title comes from. To understand Izzie’s grief and love and violent peace. To see a birth-like death. To see how the pieces fit together. It’s tragic, to be sure. And it’s very, very complex.

* * *          

  • The story is available online at Drift.
  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work.
  • Read an interview with the author about this story and about her recently published novel, What You Make Of Me.
  • Brief (<5 min) video of British classicist Edith Hall discussing the complexity of Medea.
  • Video by Overly Sarcastic Productions (15 min; humorous but detailed) outlining the Medea legend and Euripides’ play.

BASS 2025: Sarah Braunstein, “Abject Naturalism” from TNY 7/29/24

Posted by Karen Carlson on
[F]inding my way to the end of this story was a challenge. At one point Toni says she stopped writing because she never could figure out how to end things. “Abject naturalism” sat in a file for a long time until I could understand what its ending needed to do.

Sarah Braunstein: Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2025

I once took a class with a professor who insisted that every poem Robert Frost wrote, no matter what it was about, was really about writing poetry. Two roads in the wood? Poetry. Woods on a snowy evening? Poetry. Walls, birches, death, gold, choosing a star? All about writing poems. I got the sense, after I’d read this story a couple of times and looked up the title, that this story is all about writing a story.

Vonnegut used to talk about the shapes of stories, and this story has a definite shape. It starts with cautious, almost tedious control, then loosens up and breaks free, until the final paragraph ends with joyous abandon of imagination unfettered by doubt or, for that matter, reality. Isn’t that the process of writing a story?

It isn’t that outlandish an idea, that it’s about writing. The story does feature a writer, after all – or, a former wannabe writer, Toni:

In graduate school, she had written a story loosely based on her parents, in which a couple has to contend with a skunk in the basement—their failure to contain the animal leads them to pitch a tent in the back yard. The same teacher said the story suffered from abject naturalism. The plausible was described plausibly, credible things occurred in credible order. Toni felt this was the worst thing that could be said about a story, the worst way you could live a life.

I poked around to see if abject naturalism was an actual literary term. Turns out, it was a term used by Frank Conroy, director of the Iowa Writers Studio for many years – including the years Braunstein spent there as a student. Various former students around the internet refer to it as too much detail that has no real purpose in the story. On first read, I felt a bit like the first part of the story was just too much, not detail, but unnecessary backstory, too soon. Turns out it all fed into the later part, particularly in the way a serious self-absorbed academic with no desire for children or family gets swapped out for a dyslexic contractor who misses his family, both the one that was and the one that never was.

The story proceeds in ten-year chunks. In grad school, a classmate pursued her, though she never let him catch her. Ten years later, hurting from a crappy job and a failed romance, she let him, now working on a couple of novels and a PhD, catch her. When she told him about her pregnancy, he opted out: “I want my central relationship to be with texts.” That got a chuckle out of me; it sounds exactly like the sort of thing a self-important, emotionally constipated person would say, and I can imagine all sorts of writers – and artists, politicians, public intellectuals – uttering that kind of dismissal.

The business end of the story starts when that pregnancy – or, Amalie, the issue thereof – is ten years old. They’re in a pretty good situation: Toni’s in a much better job, by quirks of fate has a good living situation at a reasonable price, and Amalie is a clever child interested in everything. But she’s still worried that it’s all so fragile. What if the landlord who’s given her a break dies? What if something happens to Amalie? Danger is everywhere. I can sympathize; I recently said that the problem with my life being pretty much the way I want it to be right now is that it could change in a flash. Constantly imagining that danger, the way Toni does, seems to me a form of abject naturalism. Yes, horrible things happen, and reducing the risk is great, but at some point you have to stop worrying about every detail and have a little faith that you can handle the bumps in the road and course correct before you skid off into a ditch.

And as Amalie grows up, she wants more freedom. Her first journey by herself – just a half hour jog around the neighborhood – is anxiety-ridden for Toni, but finally starts the story’s rising action rolling:

Twenty minutes passed. I should not have let her go, she thought. She is too curious. She has no father. No man has imprinted. She’s vulnerable.
But she came back whole. A knock, and when Toni opened the door she found her daughter breathing heavily and standing next to a glossy black telescope on a tripod stand. “A man gave it to me,” she said.
“A man?”
“It needs to be cleaned. We can see Saturn’s rings!”
“Which man?”
“It needs a new—I forget the word.” She wiped her brow. “He told me. He said to look on eBay. He said I could buy the part for cheap.”

My concept of real-life abject realism is, when your kid shows up at the door with a telescope excited about seeing Saturn’s rings, you focus on where it came from to the exclusion of her excitement at the possibilities. Can you tell I’m not a parent? I’m imagining parents reading this story and freaking out at the thought of ‘a man’ giving something to their ten-year-old, thinking I’m crazy that Toni might have any room for anything else.

I read in Braunstein’s Contributor Note that this is more or less something that happened with her own son; she immediately knew the telescope was the prompt for a story. I wonder if that’s the real key to being a writer: to know how to turn something begging to be a story into one.

What does a telescope do? The word literally means far-seeing. Amalie wants to see the rings of Saturn; Toni needs to see beyond her fear, beyond the abject naturalism she’s been living.

Toni finds the telescope man – Marco – and complains that he’s sent her daughter the wrong message: that strangers are friendly and helpful. This is completely opposite to Toni’s view of the world, where every stranger is out to get Amalie. The poor guy tries to bring it down a notch (he was just taking it out to the trash when Amalie skipped by, she asked about it, so he let her take it), but Toni isn’t having it. At least, not then. Later, she realizes she was rude, and goes to apologize. At least, that’s what she says, but we readers know a Meet Cute when we see one, whether it’s on the page or on the screen.

She felt he’d accepted her apology before she’d fully made it. She said it was true, yes, she’d overreacted, she was a single mom—but she wished she’d been allowed to apologize fully.
“Coffee?” He pantomimed a mug in his hand, a swig. She saw an agility in his body, lightness despite his size.
“You want to apologize inside?”
“I’ll be late to work.”
He dropped the mug. “Where’s that?”
“The hospital.”
“Doctor?”
“Administration.”
“Forms,” he said sympathetically. “I don’t envy you.”
“They’re not bad. I used to take people’s blood.”
“You prefer forms to blood?”
“The money’s better.”

Ok, that’s a little Nora Ephron, but it’s fun, and who doesn’t love watching Meg Ryan banter.

Then follows the Slow Thaw – yes, I’ve read Roger Ebert’s reviews way too much, but they’re great – as Toni starts to see into the distance. And by the way, I’ve never heard of, let alone seen, the kind of push-button light switch she mentions, but now I know they do exist. I’m not sure if its function in the story – maybe a counterbalance to seeing into the distance, the ability to see the charm of the past? – but I found it an interesting tidbit.

A story about adults breaking through fear to anticipation and delight might end in a round of drinks, but this is a mother and ten-year-old child, so we’ve got a round of doughnuts instead. And even though Toni knows the short-term is going to be problematic, she can now see the long term, and it gives her joy.

Empty cans skidded across the pavement. A storm was coming, like Amalie had said. They were stuffed to the gills with sugar and caffeine. The school nurse would call in two hours. By that point, Toni would have called in sick herself, would be home napping. But before the nap. Before Amalie throws up in the coatroom. While the sky is so lovely and strange and their glucose levels have not yet plummeted — she feels entitled to everything she wants. Ambition is ascendant. Danger everywhere, but it’s not — look at that — in this story. In this story, no one lays a finger on any child. The wind lifts Amalie’s hair. Toni lets her ride in the front seat. When she starts the car, the radio is already playing the right song, Freddie Mercury announcing a homicide, and they sing together, and it ends just when she pulls up to the school, as if God himself had set the needle down.

This is the second Braunstein story I’ve read; the first was “Marjorie Lemke” from a 2013 TNY. I should admit my fondness for her is probably partly based on her being a neighbor: she lives in Portland, Maine, and I’m always happy to give a shout-out to Maine writers. This story will be included in her new collection, Baby in a Box, due out in June 2026.

* * *          

  • Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work.
  • In his post at Workshop Heretic, Jake Weber connects abject naturalism to horror.
  • Vonnegut’s lecture on story shapes is available on Youtube.
  • Check out Baby in a Box, the forthcoming collection (June 2026) that will include this story.