James McDonald Reviews The Best American Short Stories 2023

Last year the literary critic James McDonald asked "Where is Our Zola?"

A partial answer to his question would seem to be "Not in The Best American Short Stories 2023" to go by his review of that collection last week, the subtitle of which is "A Step Backward," referring to the movement of the included stories and authors away from meaningfully dealing with the world in which we live.

McDonald also leaves no room for doubt about the reason for the unhappy situation--namely that longtime editor Heidi Pitlor, more or less in line with the tendency of the "scene" to which she belongs, "speaks for an affluent segment of the population . . . academia . . . the publishing business," such that while she has "a good ear for sentences" (the Cult of the Sentence strikes again!) her "social outlook ventures no further than upper middle class preoccupations such as identity politics," with all the blinkers implied about her and her colleagues' perspective. (In pointing this out McDonald incisively points to Pitlor's remark about how in the pandemic "we were all working . . . at home"--the reality for editors and suchlike, but not for working-class folks, and a good many non-working-class people besides.)

Particularly worth noting is McDonald's challenge to the claim of the anthology that it presents "the best" stories of the year. As McDonald notes, what we have here are a mere twenty stories, three-quarters of them taken from a mere half dozen publications, and a fifth from just one. (Four stories from The New Yorker. Ugh.) A case of looking for one's keys under a streetlight, the extreme elitism of the presumption (that what is "best" is to be found in this tiny and extremely exclusive slice of even what the literary magazines have carried), is "hard to maintain," even before one takes into account the intellectual limitations of those making the selection --a thought I have had myself back when I was reviewing "best of year" anthologies with some regularity. Back then, because I had already come to understand how unbelievably closed the magazines and publishing generally are to the vast majority of would-be authors, and still had illusions that the web would provide the excluded some chance to be heard (long since crushed), I picked up such volumes hoping to see that by way of some obscure online outlet some gem came to the notice of the world and was recognized by inclusion there (or at least, that we had something from an author truly from outside the "club"). I was disappointed every time--and dare say that nothing has changed since. I dare say, too, that just as this seems to me one of the factors that has left science fiction increasingly stagnant, so has it been unhelpful from the standpoint of the long overdue regeneration of a contemporary literature.