Anthony’s Reviews > The Best American Short Stories 1998 > Status Update

Read the final story, “Would You Know It Wasn’t Love” by Hester Kaplan, which was decidedly middling.

Read the short, very thin, sort of funny “Wayne in Love” by Padgett Powell

Read “United Front” by Antonya Nelson, which tried just a bit too hard to be both clever and emotionally grounded, although its central idea was an interesting one.

Read the delicately rendered, subtly complex “Tea at the House” by Meg Wolitzer. She’s a writer whose work is widely acclaimed, but this was my first encounter with her. It won’t be my last.

Read “People Like That Are the Only People Here” by the magnificent Lorrie Moore. It resonated quite powerfully for me, as the father of a 5-month-old son. I’m not quite sure how she manages her wonderful alchemy of blending dark humor with real heartbreak, but this is a shining example of its powerful effect.

Read “Penance” by Matthew Crain, which is the most powerfully affecting story I’ve read so far in this collection.

Read John Updike’s “My Father on the Verge,” a sketchy, competent, but somewhat chilly portrait of a son’s anxiety over his father’s potential fall from grace.

Read the perceptive, wistfully funny “Mr. Sweetly Indecent” by Bliss Broyard.

Read “Morphine” by Doran Larson, which was ambitious in its attempt to bring to life the morphine-drenched inner life of a woman who’s dying; but it was ultimately a bit too poetic and abstract to move me.

Read “The Half-Skinned Steer” by Annie Proulx. It was my first encounter with her work. This is an extremely poetic, impressionistic, vigorously written — but somewhat obtuse — portrait of an octogenarian coming home after decades of being away.