New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus review – a landmark anthology

Pre-9/11 US literature reflected a national self-image that was fundamentally benign. That era is over, judging from this collection

Two radical projects of reappraisal emerge as you make your way through the nearly 800 pages of Ben Marcus’s anthology of New American Stories. One has to do with what it means to be American; the other, at the risk of sounding grandiose (though a little grandiosity seems justified for once), with what it means to be human. I’m not sure how intentional they are: Marcus’s ambitions appear, rightly, more about providing intense literary experiences than making large editorial statements. He calls the book “not a museum piece” but (and note the careful wording) “a sampler of behaviours and feelings we can very nearly have only through reading”.

In a sense it is just that – a sampling of the last 10 years’ worth of books, magazines and small press publications, featuring most of the current eminences of the American short story, from Lydia Davis to George Saunders, along with emerging stars such as Rivka Galchen and Wells Tower, as well as a healthy number of relative unknowns. But necessarily provisional as it is, and clearly favouring a certain aesthetic, it accumulates an unexpectedly powerful coherence as it goes along, achieving the sense – rare in this kind of anthology – of amounting to more than the sum of its parts. It’s a book to wrestle with as well as enjoy; one that forces you to assess and reassess your own sense of what makes a story any good – even of what makes a story a story. It is, indeed, far too quirkily alive to be a “museum piece”, but it feels to me like some kind of landmark all the same.

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