Introduction

It starts, sometimes, with an ending. The portal leading to a lifetime of slavish short story love can come in the final passage of a piece of fiction, which might contain some kind of full-body startle or revelatory shock. Teachers know this—after all, students return year after year, too big for the classroom and bringing tales of How I’ve Grown as a Reader, Thanks to You—and so when we’re young and our brains are still forming and cooling, we may be given an Amway hard-sell of de Maupassant and O. Henry by a well-meaning teacher.

Or at least that used to happen. Do teachers still teach those stories, or is everything different now? Friends with school-age kids tell me they lament the fact that the Common Core has moved the curriculum away from the supposedly soft shoals of fiction and instead into the harder and more overtly preparatory realm of nonfiction, a place where facts line up like sharp stones, and truth rules. (Unless, of course, you’re a fiction writer, in which case you might feel that nonfiction practitioners have no corner on truth, and you are willing to go toe to toe on this particular point.)

Maybe in assigning surprise-ending stories again and again, our teachers did us the favor of digging new neural pathways in our brains, and somehow actually created in us an unconscious, communal thirst for a big finish. I am certain that my earliest dips into reading short fiction included the de rigueur electric jolt that closed the thing; and so, after a while, armed with my new-smelling reader, which was published by a company such as Ginn (I am drawing that name up from my brainpan, though I haven’t thought of it in several decades), and called, perhaps, Paths of Imagination, Third Edition (okay, I made that one up, but maybe it exists), I came to deliberately trawl for the big moment at the end of a story, and to expect that it would definitely be there. My classmates and I were positive that such an ending was inevitably waiting for us, and we were monomaniacal about finding it, as if we were nonviolent little versions of the killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, who were convinced that the Clutter family definitely had a safe in their Kansas home. A big ending began to seem to me like a requirement—the single element that could somehow make any story memorable. I had a jones for it; I wanted it every time. To me it was distinctive, necessary, a singular taste to be craved and hunted down: a literary kind of umami.

But of course if everything is surprising, then nothing is. Because we had all been raised on the power of surprise, the short stories that my class wrote for the creative writing unit, which has by now maybe been expunged from the curriculum like asbestos from an old school building, sometimes attempted a cheap and lazy mimicry of the kinds of fiction we’d already read. I recall more than one kid standing up and reading his or her own short story aloud; it was invariably full of action and suspense and a touch of Borges-like surrealism, and finally there came the last line, the kicker: “Then I woke up, and it was all a dream!”

Oh ho, a dream, you say? Teachers were tolerant of dreams, but we other students could be sour, exacting critics. Those clever endings taught us not only what to want and expect, but also what not to want: an unearned surprise for a surprise’s sake.

While “The Gift of the Magi” is perhaps the standard-bearer of surprise-ending fiction, not to mention the winner of the M. Night Shyamalan Prize for Unexpected Closure, it was a somewhat lesser-known O. Henry story, “The Last Leaf,” that first obsessed me. The plot concerns two girls who are roommates in Greenwich Village. It’s wintertime, and one of them becomes gravely ill with what’s referred to as “Mr. Pneumonia.” Day after day, as she gets no better, she becomes preoccupied with the vine growing on a wall across the way, visible from her window. As the weather grows worse, she insists to her roommate that her fate is coupled with that of the leaves on the vine. When the last leaf falls, she knows she will die.

One night a tremendous storm hits, and by morning there’s no way that the last leaf could have hung on. Raise the shade! the ill girl demands of her roommate, who is terrified to do so, knowing that the vision of the naked vine will cause her friend to lose the will to live. But when the shade is raised, a single leaf still clings to that vine, and the ill girl finally feels encouraged. Soon, her fever breaks and she begins to get better. But what she doesn’t know is that the old artist who lives across the way, and who knew of the girl’s obsession, went out at night in the snowstorm to paint the leaf on the wall, and in doing so, he himself got sick (also with pneumonia), and died.

Oh god, I loved this story, with its focus on magical thinking and death. To me, the notion that death was under our personal jurisdiction was a big draw—this idea that if only you had the right attitude, you could control death as if it were a thermostat in a hotel room. The story is really a sentimental sketch, and here is a bit of dialogue, spoken by the artist when he hears of the ill girl’s conviction: “Vass! . . . Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing.”

If you stay with “The Last Leaf” all the way through, you wind up at the ending, which you just know William Sydney Porter had worked out before or at least at the same time that he came up with the rest of it. For without the ending, the story rests on shaky legs, and the whole thing could easily blow away like an eponymous leaf in even the lightest of storms.

Later on in my reading life, though I had been fed on thriller endings, I started to want more than that when I read. But the idea of the “surprise” wasn’t abandoned entirely; instead, it was given a shine and polish and a more mature translation. It’s possible to see that a whole story—not just the ending—might itself take on what had been considered the function of an ending. I once heard someone paraphrase a writer (Donald Justice, she thinks, but I can’t seem to find the quote), who said that in all good stories, someone needs to turn a corner, or a hair. No longer on the lookout for the socko shift, the reader surrenders, and it’s then that surprises can flourish. By which I mean that you might not necessarily gasp; but without a doubt you will find yourself in a place you didn’t know about before. A place where you didn’t expect to be.

We live in a moment when change is continually demanded and fetishized. “Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous” is its own category among the New York Times bestseller lists, the first two entries suggesting a hunger for finding a way to be different from the way you are right now, while the third, “Miscellaneous,” suggesting . . . I’m not sure what. I once asked a therapist friend if any of her patients ever actually “changed.” I said to her, essentially, “Come on, you can tell me, I won’t tell anyone,” thinking that maybe she would lean over and confide in me that no, no one ever really changed. That “change” was a grail too far. Maybe modification was a better word. Maybe subtle shift nailed it more accurately. Maybe learning experience was the closest way to describe what actually transpired in therapy. But instead she was mildly offended by this question, and she said to me, “Of course they do.”

So okay, maybe they do, in therapy and in life. In short stories, I don’t think characters or their situation or their surroundings change as frequently as they turn.

The stories in this year’s edition of Best American Short Stories live, and breathe, and again and again in them there is some kind of turn. After I came up with my final list and discussed it with the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, I thought about what it meant that these were the particular stories I had chosen. I considered what I was trying to say, in choosing them. Why they spoke to me as they had. I remembered once reading a book about someone with autism who had a tremendous facility for numbers. Patterns would jump out at her from a page filled with numbers. She was unable to describe how or why she saw them, but she did.

I, too, can’t say exactly what made these stories “jump out” at me either, except to note that among the large number of superb entries I had the pleasure to read—and the quality of the stories given to me was consistently high—the ones I chose all feel like surprises in one way or another, and the surprises seem right. I think it’s true that stories that are surprising in an overarching way are also often surprising on a granular, language level. The macro-surprise and the micro-surprise work together to form something that is original and exciting and exists outside the world of the ordinary.

That’s true of Leopoldine Core’s “Hog for Sorrow,” included this year, in which a man who has hired a prostitute is described as “a little desperate. Like someone on Judge Judy, fighting for old furniture.” I laughed when I read that, and part of me wanted to be an English teacher at that moment, so I could write in the margin, “How true!” (Not that Leopoldine Core, with her spare, lucid prose about desperation and love, needs an English teacher at this point.) T. C. Boyle, whom I have read and admired for years, offers in the first sentence of “Are We Not Men?” a jarring and almost physical surprise-pull into a world that is his own: “The dog was the color of a maraschino cherry, and what it had in its jaws I couldn’t quite make out at first, not until it parked itself under the hydrangeas and began throttling the thing.” Chad Anderson uses the second person in a strong and sure way in “Maidencane,” and if the voice makes for clear, rhythmic reading, time suddenly intrudes: “Two decades drop away. The past and the present spring together like a clap.” Sonya Larson’s first-person narrative is vivid with wit; humor works organically in this examination of race, coupledom, compatibility: “I met Gabe Dove when I was sad and attracting men who liked me sad.” Noy Holland’s short story “Tally,” weighing in at a far lower word count than anything else in this volume, is bold as well as economical: “The man, the men—the sober man, the dead man—had a sister, inscrutable as a turtle.” Jai Chakrabarti’s “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness” gives us a drama about the delicate interlace of the exigencies of desire and family: “Nikhil convinced himself that Sharma had opened his heart to the idea of fathering, but the exuberance of this conclusion led to certain practical questions.” A very different fatherhood milieu exists in Fiona Maazel’s “Let’s Go to the Videotape,” in which supposedly private experiences are fiercely plumbed: “Who doesn’t film his kid experiencing a threshold moment?” Maazel asks. Jim Shepard’s “Telemachus” situates its characters in the close quarters of a short story and the equally close quarters of a British submarine during World War II, where, during a storm, “we alternated at the watch, poking our faces and flooded binoculars into the wind’s teeth . . .” Eric Puchner writes of adolescence and the residue of a boy’s parents’ broken marriage. The boy observes his father’s girlfriend, who had “done up her shirt wrong, and I could see her belly button, deep as a bullet wound, peeking between buttons.”

Each story is a discrete surprise, the whole of them a collage of distinctness and distinction. This is true, too, of the stories honored in the back of the book, including ones by (to name just a handful of authors) Smith Henderson, Shruti Swamy, Lydia Conklin, Rebecca Makkai, Wells Tower, Caitlin Horrocks, Lee Conell, Manuel Muñoz, Corinna Vallianatos, Michelle Herman, John Fulton, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Helen Schulman, Jennifer Haigh, Joan Frank, Bret Anthony Johnston, and David Bergen. It goes without saying that choosing twenty for a collection such as this one is always going to be difficult, and is a kind of skill that you figure out how to do on the job. This year, though, it was perhaps difficult in a different way; and here is the moment in this essay in which I want to talk about a very different kind of surprise, in order to give some context for how I approached the reading of these stories. As it happened, I was sent the first batch of them right before the 2016 presidential election. Like everyone I knew, I felt hope and excitement mixed up with unrelenting ambient worry and dread. I would watch the news at night and then shut it off after a while and return to the task of reading for Best American Short Stories.

Then, after the longest vamp ever, November 8 arrived, bringing with it its own surprise ending, and one that seemed, to so many people, wrong on a few different levels. Wrong, by my view, as in outrageous, wrong as in puzzling, wrong as in unearned. As of this writing, all those feelings remain in place. Here’s a difference between life and art: the first might or might not contain a surprise or turn that feels wrong, while the second should contain one that feels somehow right, even if in being “right” it reveals injustice or tragedy or the unexplainable. And after the surprise has been revealed, it might well have an afterlife—which, if it’s a wrong life-surprise we’re talking about, can feel deadening, and create the sensation of time standing still. People want to know: Will it always be this way? Will the molasses of time ever thin out and flow? Will we ever have reason to feel hopeful?

At some point during election night, when I was the only one still awake in my household, I felt I really shouldn’t sleep. It was as if I had to keep vigil. I was waiting for the results to become official; waiting to find out what was what, for sure, and then start to face it in a way that would no longer be theoretical. Waiting for the last leaf to drop off the vine. Pacing around the apartment, I wandered up to the big pile of short stories I’d been sent. At 2 a.m. I found myself trying to read them, but it was tough. Almost immediately I put them aside, realizing that this was not the time for this. But when would that time be? Each one had been written with care and command; and I wondered how reading fiction after this election was going to remain an imperative act; and I wondered what, too, would happen to its sister act, writing fiction.

To say, merely, “We need art now more than ever before,” in answer to the questions that surround us, is sort of an unsatisfying response, and a little sanctimonious, and maybe not entirely true. Okay, we do need art more than ever before, but we still want it to perform the same magic that it once performed, when in fact we are living in a different moment. What is art going to give us now? Will the leaf clinging to the vine be proven to be not art but purely artifice, a false comfort that can’t actually save anyone’s life and in fact is pretty much good for nothing?

As the stories piled up in drifts around me in the weeks after the election, I found some answers, because among the stories, when I dug in fully, were stellar moments of profound change and beauty and weirdness and singularity. And while the election had made me feel that there was nothing on earth powerful enough to drown out this particular bad surprise, that turned out not to be true. Life kept getting lived, though with different emotions attached now. I returned to the well of stories again and again, finding myself drawn there not for distraction, not for, “Take me away from 2016,” but for many reasons, none of them easy to describe. If you know exactly what you are going to get from the experience of reading a story, you probably wouldn’t go looking for it; you need, in order to be an open reader of fiction, to be willing. To cast a vote for what you love and then wait for the outcome. You need to have faith in the reading experience of the past to allow you to read now, in the present, and to keep reading into the future, regardless of what dark shape it takes. And once you start reading, you may well find that you are launched out of despair. The launching isn’t necessarily from a cannon; it might be from a slower kind of transport. Slow and deliberate, with the particular tang and feel of the writer whose work in particular launched you.

Joseph Conrad wrote about how art, when it succeeds, can offer “that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” This year was a strange year to be reading so much fiction in the midst of what I think of as a bad surprise. But the glimpse of truth, as ever, is on display if you make the effort to look for it. So I raised the shade.

Meg Wolitzer