PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

June 15, 2017
Worthy showcase of winning short fiction by recipients of a newly established PEN prize.The Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize honors work by emerging writers published in North America, and the range of publications represented here is refreshingly broad: it includes not just the usual suspects (Boston Review, Southwest Review), but also journals that are themselves emerging into broader view (Epiphany, Hyphen). The judges' choices are uniformly solid; the stories are widely situated but with some points in common. Many feature family members in dramatic situations. In Ruth Serven's very short story "A Message," a mysterious father is revealed to have households scattered across the Balkans: "You say that someday you'll find each of your siblings. Your father will buy a house and you'll all live together. Like Full House." The pop-culture references aren't confined to 1980s nostalgia; in Emily Chammah's lovely "Tell Me, Please," two Jordanian sisters reveal only so much of themselves on their Facebook pages, disguising the fact that they're "from the Beni Hasan tribe, that we live in Mafrag, that we attend Al al-Bayt University." When their father discovers that one of the girls is reading Animal Farm, in which, as one of the sisters puts it, pigs take over a farm, he moans, "My God, what is happening in my home?" Here a Russian emigree of indeterminate age sees a golden hawk that, she is impatiently told, does not exist; there a Korean couple drink like fish, "as if we girls are invisible," as one daughter puts it, just one moment of the familial minefield the children have to traverse. Perhaps the best single moment, from a story by writer Grace Oluseyi, involves two Nigerians, tentatively dating, who bond over sushi, the woman saying to the man, "I was thinking about my grandmother, back home. And how she would be horrified that we would pay to eat raw fish." A welcome addition to the run of established short story annuals, promising good work to come.

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