A Cure for "Best of" Hell: The Best of Short Things
by Zack Graham
It’s that time of year again. The late capitalist clusterfuck some call the holiday season. Or, as literary folks know it, “Best Of” Hell.
I’m not going to make my case for the best books of 2019 because I already have in the columns I wrote for this magazine this year (Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Brian Evenson’s Song for the Unraveling of the World, and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School were high on my list). I also don’t want to add to the existential panic induced by yet another “best books of 2019” list; I'm starting to suspect these lists exist only to lengthen the list of books you want to read, ensuring it won’t get shorter as long as you live.
Instead I’m going to tell you about the best “short things” I read this year. Some were poems. Some were stories. Some were published this year. Some were published years ago. But I read them this year, and, for one reason or another, they stayed with me. What’s more, you can read all of them all over the course of a few hours.
I list them below in no particular order. That is my gift to you. Happy holidays!
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“The Quartering Act” by Dolan Morgan (a short story published by Cosmonauts Avenue in 2019)
Morgan channels the best of Ballard and DeLillo when he’s in top form, and his long short story “The Quartering Act” is about as good as he’s ever been. A suburban high school student tells us about The Quartering Act, which mandates every family take in a convicted felon to combat prison overpopulation. One day the teen finds his family’s prisoner-in-residence punching… himself. Sort of. Things only get weirder from there.
The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (a collection of poems re-released by New Directions in 2018)
Reading Pizarnik’s poems feels like staring at the sun. Her voice descends from heaven, her writing is powered by the divine, and her mind is at once a scalpel and a wrecking ball.
“Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” by Zadie Smith (an essay published by the New York Review of Books in 2019); “Like This or Die” by Christian Lorentzen (an essay published by Harper’s in 2019)
We were fortunate to receive two brilliant “state of” essays this year, one about fiction from one of the world’s best fiction writers, and the other about criticism from one of the world’s best critics. The pieces make a perfect pair.
“Boy” by Fatimah Asghar (a poem published by Women’s Studies Quarterly in 2019 that also appeared in Asghar’s debut collection If They Come for Us, published in 2018 by One World / Random House)
I won’t spoil the surprise. This poem devastates and shines in equal measure.
“Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” by Ocean Vuong (a poem published by the New Yorker in 2015 that later appeared in Vuong’s debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press)
Very late to the party here, but once you let this poem into your mind, you can’t get it out. Vuong has the ability to make you feel so warm and so cold at once.
“Paper Dancers” by [full disclosure: Epiphany Editor-in-Chief] Rachel Lyon (a short story published by the Southampton Review in 2019); “Say Uncle” by Becky Mandelbaum (a short story published by One Story in 2019)
Lyon and Mandelbaum both used their considerable talents this year to risk sympathy for complex, troublingly flawed male characters who, in this case, both turn out to be pedophiles. The characters Lyon and Mandelbaum create couldn’t be more different, but the fact that we feel even a shred of sympathy for them is no easy task.
Zack Graham’s writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Believer, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Emerging Critics Fellowship from the National Book Critics Circle, and is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
