Best Debut Short Stories 2020
Remarks from the Judges
“The short fiction I love best knows how to declare with beauty, ‘I prefer not to.’ It takes the page as a space to refuse what tends to be, unzipping barriers. This collection gathers stories from voices throwing rice at the moment the essential and the original meet.”
—TRACY O’NEILL, 2020 judge and author of Quotients and The Hopeful
“I love the stories we picked for this collection. I love their passion, invention, and wildness. I love that these are the artists’ first published stories. Your first published story never quite gives up its place in the mind. It was the first one chosen—hooray! And yet there is always the nagging doubt (‘Is it actually good?’) and here we are, celebrating, saying, ‘Yes, yes, it is good, so so good!’”
—DEB OLIN UNFERTH, 2020 judge and author of Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance
“The stories and writers here represent a wide range of voices at the levels of ethnicity, gender, and style. Many carry a very quiet confidence that is refreshing in our harried world, and I feel certain that we will see these authors’ names in print again soon.”
—NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES, 2020 judge and author of Heads of the Colored People
“I was really inspired by what I saw here—not just the beautiful weirdness of the writers and their work, but the fact that the stories were published. It made me feel so hopeful.”
—CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, 2019 judge and author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties
“I was so blown away by the pieces we chose for this collection—there was a wonderful array of different styles and approaches in the submissions we received, but each of the stories we ended up choosing had something startlingly alive and bracingly imaginative within it. You can tell that these are writers working with total dedication to gift these fictive worlds to their readers, to make these surprising, vivid scenarios real. I am so wildly enthusiastic about what these writers are going to do next—and in reading this anthology, you get to say you’ve followed their entire career, from the very first short story on! You can’t beat that.”
—ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN, 2018 judge and author of Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“When I sit down with a short story, I’m hoping to be surprised, or unnerved, or waylaid. I want to feel that something is at stake: in the language and structure, in the emotional lives of the characters, in the consequences of their actions. The best stories are almost otherworldly in their dimensions, as if I have opened a small suitcase left on my front door, only to find three geese, a small child, a jewel thief, and her mother emerging. The stories here delighted and surprised and moved me—I’m so very, very glad that I got to read them and that now you do too.”
—KELLY LINK, 2017 judge, 2018 MacArthur Fellow, and author of Get in Trouble
“There were very well written stories that didn’t end up on the final list, edged out by the magnitude of feeling and creativity contained in the final twelve. I was particularly struck by the authors’ ability to hit it out of the park, first time up. When I read I’m always (like it or not) guessing what’s going to happen at the end of the line, the scene, on the plot level. The stories we chose were those that forced me, a relentless overthinker, to stop thinking.
“Amy Hempel’s first short story was ‘In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.’ That story is great, and contains many of the elements she’s famous for, but it is not like most of her stories. It’s way longer, for one, and more traditional. As if she was only able to peel her inhibitions as she wrote more and more. I’m excited for these authors to participate in that same kind of peeling that helps voice grow more substantial, and I hope this honor gives them the confidence to get weirder and weirder, stronger and stronger.”
—MARIE-HELENE BERTINO, 2017 judge and author of Parakeet and 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas
“A lot of people talk about how so many short stories are becoming too workshopped, too MFA, too a certain kind of story. And I can say, after reading all the entries here, they are wrong. There are so many stories being told that are extraordinary and unexpected. I fretted over picking only twelve. But the stories that won were all stories that astounded us all.”
—NINA McCONIGLEY, 2017 judge and author of Cowboys and East Indians
Praise for PEN America
Best Debut Short Stories 2019
“These stories all share a sense of necessity and urgency . . . What consistently runs through all 12 entries in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 is the promise of clear new voices, powerful testimonies, and unique perspectives to assure us that even in our current dark times there will always be the short narrative to take us back into the light.”
—CHRISTOPHER JOHN STEPHENS, PopMatters
“Prominent issues of social justice and cultural strife are woven thematically throughout 12 stories. Stories of prison reform, the immigrant experience, and the aftermath of sexual assault make the book a vivid time capsule that will guide readers back into the ethos of 2019 for generations to come . . . Each story displays a mastery of the form, sure to inspire readers to seek out further writing from these adept authors and publications.”
—Booklist
Praise for PEN America
Best Debut Short Stories 2018
“The PEN America contest for outstanding debut fiction returns with a second annual anthology of remarkable prose. This year’s submissions were judged by an all-star trio of fiction writers: Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Alexandra Kleeman. Once again, the gathered contest winners are uniquely gifted writers whose stories represent literature’s bright tomorrow. The pieces showcase a wide breadth of human experiences, representing numerous racial, ethnic, and cultural identities . . . Sharp, engrossing, and sure to leave readers excited about the future of the craft.”
—Booklist
“These dozen stories tend to the dark side, with rare moments of humor in a moody fictive landscape; they’re thus just right for their time . . . A pleasure for fans of short fiction and a promise of good things to come from this year’s roster of prizewinners.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for PEN America
Best Debut Short Stories 2017
“Urgent fiction, from breakout talents.”
—Booklist
“A great overview of some of the year’s most interesting fiction.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Copyright © 2020 by Catapult
First published in the United States in 2020 by Catapult (catapult.co)
All rights reserved
Please see Permissions on page 233 for individual credits.
ISBN: 978-1-64622-022-9
ISSN: 2691-6533 (print)
ISSN: 2691-655X (online)
Cover design by Strick&Williams
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Yuka Igarashi, series editor
EVANGELINA CONCEPCION
Ani Cooney
from Epiphany
THE OTHER CHILD
David Kelly Lawrence
from The Threepenny Review
SUMMERTIME
Mohit Manohar
from Michigan Quarterly Review
CATS VS. CANCER
Valerie Hegarty
from New England Review
THE WATER TOWER AND THE TURTLE
Kikuko Tsumura
translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton
from Granta
FAILURE TO THRIVE
Willa C. Richards
from The Paris Review
GAURI KALYANAM
; Kristen Sahaana Surya
from The Rumpus
DOG DREAMS
Sena Moon
from Quarterly West
BAT OUTTA HELL
Damitri Martinez
from Foglifter
MADAM’S SISTER
Mbozi Haimbe
from Granta
DON’T GO TO STRANGERS
Matthew Jeffrey Vegari
from ZYZZYVA
THE GOOD, GOOD MEN
Shannon Sanders
from Puerto del Sol
About the Judges
About the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers
List of Participating Publications
Permissions
INTRODUCTION
My work as an editor usually involves choosing—what to publish, how to publish it—but one of the annual joys of putting together this anthology is not choosing. There’s an initial choice, when we (my colleagues and I at Catapult, our collaborators at PEN America) decide which three among our favorite fiction writers we’d like to ask to judge the prize. Pretty much all the hard work after that—the evaluating of submissions, the reaching of consensus—we leave to them. What a pleasure it is to be introduced this year to new writing selected by Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth.
If I see any recurring themes in these pages, they must be accidental—or it probably says more about me than it does about the judges, the original editors of the pieces, or the writers themselves. For what it’s worth, this time around, I kept noticing money.
Like many people in real life, many of the characters in the stories find themselves doing things for money. In “Failure to Thrive” by Willa C. Richards, a couple of archaeologists with a newborn baby get paid to take a trip from Milwaukee to Florida to retrieve human skeletons. In vivid, painful detail, Richards describes a family nearly breaking under the pressure of competing needs: financial, physical, emotional, sexual. Money also drives people to extreme ends in Sena Moon’s beguiling “Dog Dreams.” The characters here are involved in an insurance scheme; as is often the case, their dire material concerns mask even more dire emotional complications.
Sometimes we talk about money when we can’t talk about feelings. In Shannon Sanders’s “The Good, Good Men,” two brothers meet up to confront a new boyfriend who has installed himself at their mother’s house. They’re convinced that the man is a penniless leech and that it’s up to them to save her. Gradually, with masterful nuance, Sanders suggests that the brothers might really be there to save themselves—to protect their own memories of their childhood and their father. “Evangelina Concepcion” by Ani Cooney follows a teenage girl in the aftermath of her mother’s death. She focuses on selling a box of her mother’s clothes, trying to be the practical, unsentimental daughter her mother asked her to be: “You will be like steel. You can cry the first few days, but after the fifth day, I expect you to get up and help your father.” The story is a bracing reminder that grief is something not everyone can afford.
The narrator of “Madam’s Sister” works as a gardener and guard and odd-job man in a wealthy gated home in Zambia. Five miles away from his employer’s place is the crowded township of dusty convenience shops and infested waterways where he lives. Mbozi Haimbe deftly establishes the contrasts of this world, and then inserts a visitor from London, who throws things into even starker relief. Mohit Manohar’s delicately funny and suspenseful “Summertime” is about a visitor to London: a college student from a “newly rich” Mumbai family goes on a date with an Englishman he’s met online. On its surface, their meeting promises intimacy and connection, and their city is full of refinement and luxury: an exhibit at the British Museum, high tea at the Savoy. Yet, from the beginning, there are hints that not everything is as it seems. In “Don’t Go to Strangers” by Matthew Vegari, a couple lingers in another couple’s home in the hours after a dinner party. They’re old friends, and between them Vegari choreographs a virtuosic four-way dance of emotional shifts and unspoken tensions. In subtle ways, money—one man’s work raise and fancy new barbecue grill—also creates rifts within their small social circle.
“Gauri Kalyanam” begins with a daughter being born and then quickly sold into marriage. “She is sold with the promise of cash and a cow,” Kristen Sahaana Surya writes. In precise lyrical strokes, the wife is portrayed escaping her husband and working as a laborer and a housekeeper to provide for herself and her sons. She refuses her fate as “a woman whose existence depends on erasure”; money becomes her ballast, giving her substance and strength. “She sews her savings into the hems of her petticoats, and when they weigh her down, she buys thick gold belts that she fastens across her broad belly. At night her eyes close and grow green: she converts belts to houses, belts to bedrooms, belts to Western toilets and marble verandas . . . Belts trace the shape of her waist and the length of her life, and when she feels them move under her sari she feels a deep-set satisfaction.”
Once I start looking, it’s hard not to see this theme everywhere. In David Kelly Lawrence’s “The Other Child,” an unnamed narrator visits his dying father in the hospital, where he meets an unnamed child he never knew his father had. Soon the two are roaming the parks and streets of an unnamed city, meeting only strangers—but even they, in their eerie, dreamlike world, have to wait for the monthly installment of their father’s inheritance before going to the market to buy fruit. In another disquieting and impressionistic story, “The Water Tower and the Turtle” by Kikuko Tsumura, a man has retired to his hometown in rural Japan because the rent is half of what he was paying in the city. His life, it seems, has also been reduced to a series of circumscribed pleasures: old memories, a bag of homemade pickles, a pack of beer, a new bike that costs just 50,000 yen. There’s a new bike in “Bat Outta Hell” by Damitri Martinez too, but this one is a hardly modest Harley-Davidson driven by the teenage narrator’s uncle. When his mother confronts him about it—“You don’t have any fuckin money! What’d you buy it with?”—the uncle replies, “None ya.” This is a coming-of-age tale slyly turned inside out, where a loud motorcycle can come to represent secrecy and silence.
Valerie Hegarty’s “Cats vs. Cancer” may not mention money directly; its protagonist does buy cat food and shop online for “an aesthetically appropriate cat tower” for the kitten she takes in from the alley outside her Brooklyn art studio. She also undergoes invasive diagnostic tests for breast cancer. The particularities of pet care and medical treatment are “two things you should never talk about to the person sitting next to you at a dinner party” (as the author herself says) and still the story manages to be irresistibly witty and observant and surprising. It occurs to me that money is another supposedly impolite topic of conversation, and that it’s exactly this impoliteness that I keep finding and enjoying in these stories. There is a kind of candor that feels exciting, current. Like so much of the literature I love best, they show me something that’s been there all along, veiled by civility and pretense and timidity and habit. They lay it bare.
I’m writing this five months into 2020, when a global crisis seems to be laying bare the profound ill health of our sociopolitical structures and economies. This might explain why money—its power, its invisibility, its tangibility, its absurdly unequal distribution, the way it forms and deforms all our relationships—has been on my mind. Of course, it’s only one facet of this multifaceted collection; other readers will find other connections and insights, will be moved and consoled and inspired in different ways. I imagine, however, that every last one will be left as grateful as I am to have these twelve writers to keep us company while the world continues to unveil itself to us. A heartfelt thanks to our judges and to the editors of the magazines where these stories first appeared, and to Fernanda Dau Fisher, to Jane Marchant and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf of PEN, and to my colleague Sarah Lyn Rogers, without whom none of these revelations would be possible.
YUKA IGARASHI
Series Editor
/> EDITOR’S NOTE
“Evangelina Concepcion” paints a portrait of teenaged Lila and her small family as they weather the grief-stricken weeks after Lila’s mother (the titular Evangelina Concepcion) is killed in a car accident. Told in second person, from Lila’s point of view, in numbered sections and straightforward, evocative prose, the story is bleak, funny, and deeply moving.
The episodic structure of the piece effectively evokes the nonlinear, elliptical nature of Lila’s grief. She writes her mother’s name inside her clothes. She recalls her mother’s advice: “You will be like steel.” She endures visits from family friends who “praise [her] lack of frailty.” She reads and rereads an online article about the accident—which offers bountiful detail about the accident’s other victim, a white pedestrian, but leaves Evangelina Concepcion nameless. When a former employer of her mother’s calls to express his condolences, she notices “how easy it [is] for him to cry over the phone for someone who cleaned his house.” After this phone call, attempting through increasingly hysterical laughter to explain to her father, brother, and dinner guests why she found the tears of her mother’s employer so funny, what Lila cannot articulate becomes as important as what does appear on the page: the outrageous emotional privilege of a man who cries freely over the death of his housekeeper is juxtaposed with Lila’s own fierce stoicism in contrast so stark it becomes absurd.
That “Evangelina Concepcion” is Ani Sison Cooney’s first publication is a testament to the sharp eye and editorial wisdom of our Fifteenth Anniversary Issue guest editor Alex Gilvarry. I am grateful to Alex for choosing this piece for publication, proud to work for the journal that published it, and thrilled for Ani Sison Cooney. He is truly an emerging writer to watch.
Rachel Lyon, Editor in Chief
Epiphany
EVANGELINA CONCEPCION
Ani Cooney
1.