New Stories from the South 1999: The Year's Best

As any good Southerner knows, literature written on the sunnier side of the Mason-Dixon is every bit as diverse as literature anywhere else. Doubters need look no further than the latest edition of New Stories from the South, the acclaimed annual anthology edited by Shannon Ravenel. This year's version features well-known names such as Richard Bausch, Rick DeMarinis, and Clyde Edgerton right alongside up-and-coming talents such as Laura Payne Butler and Heather Sellers. Looking for monkeys? We got your monkey right here, ordered from the back of a comic book in Andrew Alexander's bittersweet short-short, "Little Bitty Pretty One." ("My father, a doctor, would pretend to examine the monkey when we asked him to. 'Have you been a good little boy?' he would say to the monkey over and over, and then answer in a high monkey-voice, 'Yes, I've been a good little boy.'") Naturally, there's a fair selection of Southern-style humor, from Clyde Edgerton's "Lunch at the Piccadilly," about persuading an elderly relative not to drive, to George Singleton's "Caulk," about a painting job taken just a little too far.

"Lookit: I swear it doesn't get 90 degrees at dawn in South Carolina during October.... One time my grandmother on my father's side said it reached 110 and rained simultaneously on Christmas day, 1950, but at that point she'd gone through both radiation and chemotherapy--she liked to pull the top of her dress down and show the cavity where one breast had existed, then say how smoking is bad for you."

Both the darkest and the most powerful story in this collection turns out to be Tom Franklin's Edgar Award-winning "Poachers," in which a legendary game warden turns the tables on a trio of half-wild backwoods boys who like to hunt out of season. African parrots and Crimson Tide football, circus animals and reattached feet: so many wild and wonderful tales, and not a stereotype among them. Southerners, the next time someone makes a Bubba joke in your presence, give 'em a copy of this anthology and tell them politely where they can place it. --Mary Park