Read and Appreciated in 2004
A Year’s Best List
Short stories
Alice Munro published a new collection of stories this year, but I haven’t gotten a copy yet. Instead, I reread some of The Love of a Good Woman, a collection of perfect stories.
First there was Chekhov, then there was Munro. I’m tempted not to bother with anything else!
But I did read and enjoy much else. I finally got around to reading most of Harry Mathews’s collected stories, The Human Country, a few of which were so surprising as to be delightful, because they did things with words that might not seem altogether possible. The most impressive feat of writing I came across this year is Mathews’s story “The Dialect of the Tribe”, which moves a linguistic shaggy-dog story toward a 47-word palindrome. Why he would bother, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly an impressive feat.
The best anthology I read was undoubtably The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories edited by Ben Marcus. It is both enlightening and entertaining, a model of ecumenical taste, a definition-defying mad dash at the heart of what fiction is and can be.
As for work published in 2004 itself, there’s quite a variety. Good short stories appeared everywhere this year, though often not in the familiar places. The small presses produced some lovely work, and if you’re not reading such magazines as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Alchemy and Flytrap and Say… and Electric Velocipede, then you’re missing some weird and wonderful writing. (Some dreck, too, but you get more predictable dreck from the well-known SF and fantasy markets, of which only Fantasy & Science Fiction was reliably good this year.)
The best short fiction I saw from the small presses came in the form of two chapbooks from Small Beer Press. Richard Butner’s Horses Blow Up Dog City and Theodora Goss’s The Rose in Twelve Petals have, it seems to me, the highest percentage of excellent work in them of any of the collections published this year.
Which is not to say it was a bad year for collections—it’s easy for chapbooks to maintain a high percentage of good work, since they contain a small number of pieces. Among full-length collections this year, two up-to-now career retrospectives showcased some particularly fine writing: Jeff VanderMeer’s Secret Life and John Crowley’s Novelties & Souvenirs.
The online magazines seem to get better each year. SciFiction published Christopher Rowe’s “The Voluntary State”, a story that truly justifies the adjective “breathtaking”. Strange Horizons published “Tetrarchs” by Alan DeNiro and “Women are Ugly” by Eliot Fintushel, two of my favorite stories of the year. Ideomancer had the good sense to make M. Rickert a featured writer for a couple of months (the best Rickert story of the year, and one of the best by anyone this year, was “Cold Fires” in F&SF, a story that requires an active and attentive audience, but repays that audience well for their work). Lenox Avenue published Tim Pratt’s “Life in Stone”. Failbetter.com, Pindeldyboz, and Identity Theory published reams of interesting work.
(If duct-taped to a chair and threatened with tickling by featherduster, I would say that my favorite story of 2004 was “Revenge of the Calico Cat” by Stepan Chapman in the anthology Leviathan 4: Cities. But there’s nobody around with duct-tape or a featherduster, so I don’t feel obliged to choose. Because “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link, in Conjunctions 43: Beyond Arcadia, was just as good. And “Delhi” by Vandana Singh in So Long Been Dreaming. And “Three Days in a Border Town” by Jeff VanderMeer in Polyphony 4. And everything else I’ve mentioned so far. No, to choose is impossible.)
