Freeman, a 46 year old graduate of Swarthmore, has made his name as a poet, an editor, a publisher, and a literary critic.  Serving as the president of the National Book Critics Circle, the editor of Granta, and now an executive editor at Knopf, he is in a singular position to survey American literature.  The result of his casting his eye on short stories by American authors from the 1970’s to the present time is a superb volume which made for wonderful reading.

From the famous to those unknown to me and with stories that varied from Jamaica Kincaid’s two pager, ‘Girl’, about a young girl’s indoctrination to womanhood to Andrew Holleran’s thirty page ‘The Penthouse’ about a homosexual designer’s crowd in his New York City penthouse, these stories are universally engaging and either unsettling or thoroughly enjoyable or often both.  In each of the 37 stories, well known writers in the genre such as Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Dennis Johnson, and George Saunders as well as names not familiar to me such as Dorothy Allison, Percival Everett, and Charles Johnson create vital worlds, interesting characters, and complex plots.   Reading the stories written over a period of 50 years also provided a panoramic view of the changing environment that is America as formerly marginalized writers address topics such as queerness, Blackness, the plight of Native Americans, America’s wars, and other social topics through the magic of fiction.

Interestingly, none of my big four made the cut.  While I agree that Mailer didn’t belong, it’s surprising to me that Roth, Bellow, and Updike don’t make an appearance though all three were writing short stories into the ’70’s and ’80’s.  Changing tastes, for sure.

Despite those omissions, I highly recommend this book.  The beauty of a short story anthology is that you can dip into it any time and in 5-30 minutes have a meaningful literary experience, travel to far parts of the world, enter the mind and body of someone completely different than you, and marvel at a writer’s ability to accomplish all of that with a simple piece of paper and a pencil.  Fine job, John Freeman!