207. The Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore
The main purpose of reading this short stories anthology The Best American Short Stories 2004 (Houghton Mifflin, 2004; 462) edited by Lorrie Moore was to complete the 100 Shots of Shorts . The anthology, of twenty short stories, had both interesting and less interesting stories, some of them almost novella-length. Intransigently American, there are several of the stories whose appreciation is linked to the appreciation of the American culture and other sub-cultures. It reminded me of what Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, said in 2008, that "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature...That ignorance is restraining." I'm not a student of literature and so cannot say for certainty that these words are true but reading the stories, this statement crossed my mind. Nevertheless stories like What You Pawn I Will Redeem , Tooth and Claw, ...