New Stories from the South 2002: The Year's Best (New Stories from the South)

As Larry Brown explains in this year's preface, This is all that I have, this land called North Mississippi, home of my father, and grand-fathers, and great-grandfathers, and luckily for me, it turns out to be always enough. It's that land and everything around it-the intractable clay soil, the twisting rivers, the air heavy with humidity-that makes the South a character in its own right, and that permeates this year's collection.

The stories in the seventeenth volume of New Stories from the South begin with the land or the water or the weather, but it's their depth and richness that take us somewhere altogether new-the South, seen from a wholly new perspective, as if for the first time. From the mountains of Tennessee to the suburbs of New Orleans to a hollowed-out antebellum house to the center of Texas, this year's New Stories from the South turns out to be always enough.

Nineteen writers make their mark in this year's volume: Dwight Allen, Russell Banks, Brad Barkley, Doris Betts, William Gay, Aaron Gwyn, Ingrid Hill, David Koon, Andrea Lee, Romulus Linney, Corey Mesler, Lucia Nevai, Julie Orringer, Dulane Upshaw Ponder, Bill Roorbach, George Singleton, Kate Small, R. T. Smith, and Max Steele.

Each story is followed by the author's notes about its origin. Readers will also find an updated list of the magazines consulted by Ravenel and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series' inception in 1986.

New Stories from the South is now in its 17th year, and once again editor Shannon Ravenel offers a broad sampling of the region's best work. With an introduction by Larry Brown, the 2002 edition includes 19 stories by authors like Russell Banks, as well as lesser-known talents. Set as far back as the Civil War (Dulane Upshaw Ponder's "The Rat Spoon") and as recently as the present, the 2002 collection places a heavy emphasis, intentional or not, on themes of loss and reconciliation. Some stories have dark and violent outcomes reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates's work, such as William Gay's "Charting the Territories of the Red" and Brad Barkley's "Beneath the Deep Slow Motion." Others tackle spiritual encounters at the end of lives lived with good intentions, like Aaron Gwyn's "Of Falling" and Lucia Nevai's "Faith Healer." Kate Small's "Maximum Sunlight," about a young Vietnamese woman's assimilation into Washington D.C., is a particularly lyrical piece about race in the South, while Andrea Lee's "Anthropology," about two black intellectuals reconciling their heritage, takes a more playful tone. In almost all cases, the stories show men and women struggling to remake themselves in the face of their realities. Similarly, these stories reinvent the Southern short story, one paragraph at a time, much as the South they depict continues its own slow reinvention. --Jane Hodges