New Stories From the South: The Year's Best, 2006

New Stories from the South

by Allan Gurganus (Editor), Kathy Pories (Editor), Tony Earley (Contributor)

We launch into our third decade by welcoming a guest editor—to select and introduce each year’s collection—and who better to inaugurate the change than Allan Gurganus. He has combed through hundreds of short stories written in 2005 to assemble a muscular array of talent, twenty stories ranging from low-down, high-octane farce to dark, erotic suspense.

This year’s volume combines seasoned writers like Tony Earley, Wendell Berry, and George Singleton with gifted newcomers, including Keith Lee Morris, Erin Brooks Worley and J. D. Chapman. Their stories range from a communal love poem for a hunting dog, to a tale of a newly rich retiree trying to micromanage a Hollywood movie and losing his trophy wife to each new young screenwriter, to a harrowing work about a Virginia slave-woman burned alive for witchcraft.

As Gurganus writes in his introduction, “The only region of the U.S. ever to declare war on every other region of the nation won—if not that great gray fib of secession, then most of the recuperating country’s truest stories.”

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Southern

Audible Audio

First published August 18, 2006

About the author

Since 1989, Allan Gurganus’s novels, stories and essays have become a singularly unified and living body of work. Known for dark humor, erotic candor, pictorial clarity and folkloric sweep, his prose is widely translated. Gurganus’s stories, collected as “Piccoli eroi”, were just published to strong Italian reviews. France’s La Monde has called him “a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.”

Fiction by Gurganus has inspired the greatest compliment of all: memorization and re-reading. The number of new critical works, the theatrical and film treatments of his fiction, testify to its durable urgency. Adaptations have won four Emmy. Robert Wilson of The American Scholar has called Gurganus “the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty.” In a culture where `branding’ seems all-important, Gurganus has resisted any franchised repetition. Equally adept at stories and novels or novellas, his tone and sense of form can differ widely. On the page Gurganus continues to startle and grow.

Of his previous work “The Practical Heart”, critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “Masterly and deeply affecting…a testament to Mr. Gurganus’s ability to inhabit his characters’ inner lives and map their emotional histories.” The Atlantic called the same work, “An entertaining, disturbing and inspiring book—a dazzling maturation.” Of “Local Souls”, Wells Tower wrote: “It leaves the reader surfeited with gifts. This is a book to be read for the minutely tuned music of Gurganus’s language, its lithe and wicked wit, its luminosity of vision—shining all the brighter for the heat of its compassion. No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other. These are tales to make us whole.”

Gurganus’s first published story “Minor Heroism” appeared in theNew Yorker when he was twenty six. In 1974, this tale offered the first gay character that magazine had ever presented. In 1989, after seven years’ composition, Gurganus presented the novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). This first book spent eight months on theNew York Times bestseller list; it became the subject of a New Yorkercartoon and remains a clue on “Jeopardy” (Names for $400). The novel has been translated into twelve languages and has sold over two million copies. The CBS adaptation of the work, starring Donald Sutherland and Diane Lane and won and a “Best Supporting Actress” Emmy for Cecily Tyson as the freed slave, Castalia.

Along with Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus’s works include White People, (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist) as well as the novel Plays Well With Others. His last book was The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award). Gurganus’s short fiction appears in the New Yorker, Harper’sand other magazines. A recent essay was seen in The New York Review of Books. His stories have been honored by the O’Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Gurganus was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. His novella Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale, from White People, has become part of the Harvard Business School’s Ethics curriculum. The work is discussed at length in Questions of Character (Harvard Business School Press) by Joseph L. Badaracco.

Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1947 to a teacher and businessman, Gurganus first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings and drawings are represented in private and public collections. Gurganus has illustrated three limited editions of his fiction. During a three-year stint onboard the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War, he turned to writing. Gurganus subsequently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he’d gone to work with Grace Paley. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Mr. Gur

Reviews

[📚Linda Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with most anthologies, the stories were uneven: some were to my taste, some were just not good, and some ended abruptly with no resolution. A couple had very witty parts like the one about recovering soldiers and the one about elderly people having an affair. The one set in 18th century America on the other hand was very serious and even difficult reading.

[LibbyZally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful quick read, at least for me. I honestly loved every single story.

[Wendell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m generally leery about these “best of” collections—the quality of the work is almost always spotty, and one frequently gets the sense that it wasn’t so much the “best of” as “the best way” – to pay back friends, to promote students, to curry favor. The fact that such series not infrequently choose guest editors like Beck or the mega-novelist/screenwriter of the moment, rather than people whom we might reasonably expect to possess a certain amount of judgment with regard to contemporary writing, doesn’t add to their credibility. Allan Gurganis, however, is an exemplary writer and a trustworthy editor, and he’s brought together much more good work than not in this anthology. But as always, the quality is variable: There are still too many Iowa workshop “epiphany” stories here and, in a few others, the authors are struggling much too hard to show how Southern they are, inserting as many items as possible from the “Approved Tropes of Southern Fiction List”; at times, that is, the corn pone and huntin’ dawgs get a little thick. Still, there’s a great deal to like and respect in these stories, and Gurganis has interesting and provocative things to say about his selections in his opening essay. The question of how “genre writing” defines itself and is defined is always intriguing—when Gurganis speaks of southerners’ almost genetically inherited “sense of loss” or the way that southern writers are “connoisseurs of disaster,” it’s interesting to speculate whether that’s really what makes southern writing southern or whether writing that satisfies those broad categories (to name only two) tends to satisfy a set of predetermined expectations and is thus chosen as emblematic of the category. In other words, a tautology. There are surely southern writers who are writing in entirely different traditions, and there are surely non-southern (geographically) writers who write passionately and effectively about loss and disaster (I think of Keith Banner, for example, whose writing is arguable very “southern,” though his roots are in Indiana and Ohio). Nonetheless, with the exception of perhaps the southwest (on a more minor scale), I can’t think of another regional literature that has produced more fine American writing, and Gurganis has done an excellent job in bringing together this more-than-respectable sampler.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audio book back and forth to several out-of-town meetings lately. There were a few stories I did not really care for, but, for the most part, this is a really solid collection. There were a few that made me laugh, a couple that brought tears to my eyes and many that made me see the South clear as a bell. The narrators (a different one for each story) sounded authentic as well. It was nice that a story set in Georgia had someone reading with a Georgia accent, while an Alabama story had someone with an Alabama accent. I liked it well enough that when I pull out of the drive today, I will be starting New Stories from the South, 2005.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I asked for short story collections last Christmas as I anticipated having little reading time -- and a short attention span -- with a baby due in January. This collection has been a welcome change of pace from my reading about infant development and breastfeeding. The editing author's dicussion of what are authentic Southern stories is terrific. And there is a varied collection of voices telling the stories. There have been a few I wished were full novels, but all (save one) have been satisfying as short stories -- real treats.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been an avid reader of Southern fiction for a while and short stories are one of my favorite mediums. These collections tend to showcase new and old authors, but always new stories. The cultural evolution and stagnation of the South is quite evident based on my readings of this series over the past 15 years. The tidy quality of the short story appeals to my ADD and desire to always read before sleep. Plus...I read them over and over.

[Sarah Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short stories was alright. I wasn't terribly impressed by any of them. I did like how the author gave a short description of the origin or impulse behind each story, because that's something I'm always curious about.

[Judi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. This collection was OK. I enjoyed "Tastes Just Like Chicken" the most. For me, it came around full circle. Short stories are very hard to write. Most in this collection pumped up fast and had it goin', but then just abruptly stopped. Left me scratchin' my head.

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series never disappoints.

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why is it I find short stories simply end, instead of having a satisfying conclusion?