Best Debut Short Stories 2020

July 1, 2020
The annual PEN award volume delivers another slate of outstanding stories from emerging writers of short fiction. It being a fraught year already, it makes sense that many of the stories gathered here feature characters who fret about money and bleak futures. Sometimes these worries are nested, one unfolding from another. In Ani Cooney's "Evangelina Concepcion," for instance, the first glimpse we have of the teenage narrator comes as she gathers up her mother's things for a yard sale. She is without visible emotion, following her mother's mandate: "You will be like steel. You can cry the first few days, but...I expect you to get up and help your father." Her mother has died in an automobile accident. The family needs money, but there's more: The accident was the fault of a drunk man driving a BMW, and therefore presumably wealthy, and the news account of the accident highlighted a pedestrian who was also killed, a young woman named Ashley who adored Paris. That the paper didn't mention the name of the unfortunate Evangelina Concepcion and her love for Los Angeles speaks volumes about the casual cruelties of class and race, cruelties that Cooney deftly brings to the fore. In Willa C. Richards' meaningfully titled "Failure To Thrive," a graduate student with a newborn infant confronts a miserable existence that binds mental illness, near servitude to one's thesis adviser, and being "so poor we had begun to eat only the casseroles Alice's mother sent over in weekly batches." In another standout story, by Kristen Sahaana Surya, a Tamil-speaking woman is "sold to a man twelve years her senior...with the promise of cash and a cow." His abuse yields unexpected revenge of a fiscal nature. Where there are marriages, as in Matthew Jeffrey Vegari's densely layered "Don't Go To Strangers," evoking a blend of the best of Cheever and Carver, they are miserable--not just because of money, but always with the lack of it in play. An anthology full of promise for more and better (and, with luck, happier) stories to come.

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