New Stories from the South 2002: The Year's Best

New Stories from the South is now in its 17th year, and once again editor Shannon Ravenel offers a broad sampling of the region's best work. With an introduction by Larry Brown, the 2002 edition includes 19 stories by authors like Russell Banks, as well as lesser-known talents. Set as far back as the Civil War (Dulane Upshaw Ponder's "The Rat Spoon") and as recently as the present, the 2002 collection places a heavy emphasis, intentional or not, on themes of loss and reconciliation. Some stories have dark and violent outcomes reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates's work, such as William Gay's "Charting the Territories of the Red" and Brad Barkley's "Beneath the Deep Slow Motion." Others tackle spiritual encounters at the end of lives lived with good intentions, like Aaron Gwyn's "Of Falling" and Lucia Nevai's "Faith Healer." Kate Small's "Maximum Sunlight," about a young Vietnamese woman's assimilation into Washington D.C., is a particularly lyrical piece about race in the South, while Andrea Lee's "Anthropology," about two black intellectuals reconciling their heritage, takes a more playful tone. In almost all cases, the stories show men and women struggling to remake themselves in the face of their realities. Similarly, these stories reinvent the Southern short story, one paragraph at a time, much as the South they depict continues its own slow reinvention. --Jane Hodges