The Best American Short Stories 2013

Years ago, my mom used to receive the full series of Best American writings at work (one of the perks of working in a university English department!) and would pass them along to me. My source dried up when she changed jobs and I can honestly say I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading these anthologies.

The title, of course, says it all. This is a collection of the best short stories published in 2013. The style and setting of each varies, from those set centuries ago to those that border on the dream world. My favorite was the very first, which is set in an unnamed South American country, in a dusty, forgotten town, in the aftermath of a patriarch's death, in which the protagonist finds himself wrestling with promise and prosperity and unfulfilled ambitions.

The beauty in all of these stories is the writing, though. Few pleasures in life are greater than immersing oneself in truly fine writing and that, above all, is what Best American Short Stories offers.

The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

There is so much potential in Myra MacPherson's The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age. Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin make fascinating protagonists who led amazing lives. As the book notes, Victoria and Tennie were "two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics, and business threatened the white male power structure of the nineteenth century and shocked the world." Or, as the saying goes, well behaved women rarely make history.

In the opening chapters, my hopes were high that Scarlet Sisters would be similar to the Hetty Green biography I read last year. Unfortunately, fairly quickly Scarlet Sisters bogged down in nitty-gritty (largely political) details such that the potential was largely unrealized. Too often I felt that the larger story was sacrificed to what I felt was MacPherson's personal agenda (writing Scarlet Sisters as a counter to the current "war against women"). This is unfortunate because I assume almost anyone reading this book is firmly in her corner already, and would have appreciated a good story more than dozens of detailed pages on the competing factions of the women's suffrage movement, the hypocrisy of the church (we're looking at you, Mr. Beecher) or the possible motivations of the overzealous Anthony Comstock.

In the end, I struggled to finish Scarlet Sisters, which is a shame, as it would have been a good forerunner to Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.

When the World Was Young

Elizabeth Gaffney's When the World Was Young defies easy categorization. Essentially, it is the coming of age of Wally Baker. After the death of her glamorous mother, Stella, Wally, lives with her grandparents, but is largely raised by their black maid, Loretta, in the years after World War II. Gradually, Wally comes to see the complexities unfairness of life in a gradual stripping away of innocence.

When the World Was Young is beautifully written, with prose that transports the reader into Wally's world: Brooklyn, circa 1950. The characters, too, are distinct and sympathetic, even the wildly unstable Stella whose life has been marred by a series of disappointments and tragedies. This is a lovely read, a book that is hard to put down, and one that any lover of fiction should enjoy.

The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America

Electricity is such an ingrained part of our lives that we rarely think of it, unless we happen - temporarily, God willing - to be without it. So it's hard to imagine the entire world before electric lights - the sheer and utter darkness that enveloped everyone and everything from sundown to sunup. Obviously, then, the arrival of electricity was the one of the seminal events of their lives for millions across the world.

Ernest Freeberg works hard to make the reader feel the excitement caused by the electrification of America (with the occasional visit across the pond to England, France, and Germany). He traces the arrival of light from the various oils to gas to, finally, the incandescent light bulb. (Sidenote: Thomas Edison was 32 when he invented the incandescent light bulb.  I learned this in the opening pages of Freeberg's The Age of Edison and spent the rest of the book feeling only slightly inconsequential.)

Electricity was not without controversy as the electric companies, in the era of robber barons, worked to part individuals and municipalities alike from their money as quickly as possible, often while stringing miles of dangerously hung wires. Americans of the day were treated to regular news headlines of men, children, even horses electrocuted by a dangling or fallen wire.

The Age of Edison is an interesting read, though slightly dry, and rather too technical at times. Freeberg notes at one point that, "Few in the public could follow the heated, technical, and contradictory claims made by the rival companies...or the bickering between city inspectors..." I know the feeling.

The Fortune Hunter

I am disappointingly ambivalent about Daisy Goodwin's The Fortune Hunter.

Charlotte Baird is soon to be the richest woman in England - once she reaches her majority and inherits the Lennox fortune, that is. And so, as might be expected in Downton Abbey-era England, Charlotte has no shortage of suitors, even once they discover her quirks, such as a love of photography and disdain for fashion. Unfortunately, she's falling in love with Bay Middleton, a cavalry captain deemed utterly unsuitable by her older brother (and guardian) Frank, and his insufferable fiancee, Lady Augusta Crewe. Bay, however, has been drafted to pilot the Empress of Austria around England for the hunt season, and with each hunt seems to fall further under her spell.

All of the characters are real people: some, such as the Empress, achieved lasting fame (and infamy) in their lives. Others, like Bay Middleton "the hardest rider in England" have fallen into obscurity, before Goodwin plucked them out and brought them back to life. Her writing is rich, and the research painstaking. She transports her readers into the era and events depicted on the page, without anything feeling forced. I simply had a difficult time caring too much what happened to the characters, perhaps because they are real and Lady Mountbatten and the Countess of Carnarvon have provided a glimpse of what their lives actually looked like.

All Fudged Up

Last week was ice cream and this week was fudge. Sounds like my last vacation. In any case, my local library was highlighting this book for its Michigan flavor: a murder mystery set in a Mackinac Island fudge shop.

That is, Allie McMurphy has just inherited a Victorian inn and attached fudge shop from her recently deceased grandfather when she opens a closet door to find one of the island's longtime denizens dead on the floor. Since her grandfather had an open and long-running feud with the dead man, and since he certainly didn't die of natural causes, she finds herself at the center of a murder investigation that threatens to derail everything she's worked for.

Okay, so, it's a bit over the top. Honestly, everything about All Fudged Up is over the top - I mean, the author has chosen the pen name of Nancy Coco, which caused my husband to groan audibly when he saw what I was reading. Also, the recipes - which appear to be somewhat randomly inserted throughout the book - are rather awkward. I would have preferred a recipe collection at the end, although I don't typically pick up a mystery in order to improve my cooking (or candy making). I struggled with the prose for the first 50 or so pages as well: these are not beautiful, flowing sentences with vivid descriptions and there is nothing subtle about the writing or word choice. Still, the mystery was well constructed and this was a quick, fun read without any emotional investment.

Nancy Coco may not be Agatha Christie, but I am already on the waiting list for the next book in the series, To Fudge or Not to Fudge. Happy eating...er, reading!

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

As a general rule, I tend to read much more non-fiction than novels, but I've been on a roll with fiction this summer and Susan Jane Gilman's The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street definitely falls in the category of great fiction. (Villa Triste and Elizabeth Is Missing are the other wonderful novels I've read recently.)

Five-year-old Malka Treynovsky arrives in New York in 1913, one of the huddled Eastern European Jewish masses yearning to breathe free. Her family wasn't even supposed to come to America, but now that they're here, Malka is determined to find her happy ending. Three months later she's crippled in an accident with an Italian ices peddler and abandoned. Taken in by the peddler's family, Malka becomes Lillian and forges a new identity and life for herself.

Lillian marries the handsome but illiterate Albert Dunkle, and the two of them build an empire of ice cream shops starting with a single truck. Soon, Lillian is the head of an ice cream empire and a celebrity in her own right, which is wonderful for her right up until it isn't: when she finds herself on trial for both tax evasion and assault. In the midst of this double ordeal, Lillian has decided to share her ordeal with us, darlings, and her voice is what makes Ice Cream Queen the masterpiece that it is. Part Jewish immigrant, part Italian immigrant, and with more than a touch of megalomania, Lillian's gravelly, no-nonsense voice is still ringing in my ears.