Short Month, Short Stories

Read along with me!

Our shortest month seems to call for something special. A couple of years ago I attempted a version of this project, but I think this one will work better. Every Wednesday in February, I’ll be writing about short stories. I’ve written before about the curious question of why we don’t all read more short fiction. Short stories pack a punch. They have to, with only a dozen or so pages to work with. Many of us lament that we don’t have the time to read as much as we’d like, so you’d think short stories would be the perfect solution. But they remain an underappreciated art form. So, in February, we’ll give them some love.

I thought at first that for this project, I might just pull stories at random from the stack of literary journals beside my lounge chair. (I got a lounge for Christmas, and I love it! Scroll down for photo.) But then I thought it would be more fun if you had an opportunity to read along. So, Thursday on my lunch break, I bundled up (long down coat, scarf, hat, gloves) and trudged up the sidewalk patched with icy snow to downtown New Haven’s Atticus Bookstore Cafe. (If you follow the link, you’ll see how heavily they’re leaning into the cafe part—one strategy for the survival of a small, independent bookstore in these times.) I’m sure the food smelled good, but I breathed in the delicious smell of new books near the cash register, then picked my way past small tables of New Haveners enjoying hot drinks, soup, bread, and comfort food for lunch and tried not to disturb anyone as I searched the shelves and—eureka!—found what I was looking for: the 2024 edition of The Best American Short Stories, this one guest edited by Lauren Groff.

I’ll be reading four stories in February from Best American. I haven’t yet decided which, but upon perusing the table of contents and series editor Heidi Pitlor’s foreword and reading a couple of the contributors’ notes in the back, I decided on one bit of structure, which is to read two stories by writers I’m already familiar with and two by writers I haven’t read before. If you want to play along, I’ll let you know one week in advance what I’ve chosen to read for the following week, but it would also be fun if you read something different from the collection and commented back to us!

The first name that jumped out at me from the table of contents was Laurie Colwin. Didn’t she die in the ’90s? I thought. She did—but “Evensong” is a previously unpublished story of hers that appeared in The New Yorker sometime between January 2023 and January 2024. All of the stories in this Best American were published in that time period—after which series editor Pitlor passed her top 120 picks (she reads about 3,500 stories a year!) on to guest editor Groff, who chose 20 from that batch to be published in the collection in the fall of 2024. Anyway: It seems that Laurie Colwin’s story was brought to The New Yorker by her child, RF Jurjevics, who recalls seeing the typescript for the story on their mother’s desk at the age of six or seven and then drawing a “book jacket” for it. I first heard of Colwin through the editors of the wonderful, now defunct literary magazine Glimmertrain, who gushed about her in a column and sent me out to find her most famous novel, Happy All the Time. I liked it a lot—not enough to gush, maybe, but only because I think there was probably a generational pull for them that was missing for me, since Colwin was part of my mother’s generation.

Colwin’s “Evensong” will be my first Short Month, Short Stories read, and I’ll post about it a week from Wednesday, on February 5th. That gives you a little bit of time to catch up and secure a copy of Best American for yourself if you’d like. Now, allow me to climb up on my soapbox for a moment. Imagine it creaking in the cold. I won’t be up here long.

If you plan to join in, please do your very best to purchase a copy from your local independent bookseller, or online from Bookshop, which supports independent booksellers, or borrow it from your local library. New Haven’s Atticus used to be a two-floor bookstore with a little cafe. Now it is a bustling cafe with half a floor of books. We still have Barnes & Noble (yes, I buy books there, too), but Borders is long gone. The best independent bookstore for me is a 30-minute drive, though there’s also a terrific little neighborhood bookstore across town called Possible Futures that describes itself as “a cross between a community reading room and an independent bookstore.” (New Haveners, check it out!) We also have a couple of great used bookstores downtown, plus one in my town that’s about to make a move to another space that I hope will work out for it.

If we care about the survival of bookstores like these, where we can walk around and smell and touch and open and read a few pages of the books, then we have to send our money to them, even when it’s less convenient. You know the company I’m referring to—the one that used books as its loss leader back in the ’90s in order to create a massive online marketplace. I buy books there as well, but only under very particular circumstances. I bought two books there for Christmas, but first, I searched Barnes & Noble and the indies. I couldn’t find what I wanted, which was quite obscure. Often, that leads me to buying a used copy from one of the reputable online sellers like Thrift Books. (While writing this column, I just learned that another online used bookstore I’ve purchased from in the past is also quietly owned by the massive online retailer, so [sigh] that’s the end of that.) But I wanted these Christmas gifts to be new. For me, that’s the only circumstance that justifies a purchase from you-know-who: unused copies of obscure books I literally can’t find anywhere else. Creeeeeeak. Off soapbox.

I’ll end with a quote that I like from Best American editor Pitlor’s foreword to the 2024 edition:

Reading is quieting the mind and making room for another voice. Reading is listening. It is a form of witness.

Friends, I hope you’ll join me in February for Short Month, Short Reads! Maybe among us, we can at least float a comment on every one of the 20 stories in The Best American Short Stories 2024.