The Best American Short Stories, 2021 Edition – Live Readings at the Peter Jay Theater
by Nina Ferraz
I don’t know if it's the same for other flawed mortals, but I love to know what people think about a book because they almost always reveal themselves through their readings and understandings. Paraphrasing Baudelaire, it’s a matter of what you want to be drunk on: wine, books or virtue. I prefer books. And I feel alive in these moments of revelation and awareness.
As I was writing this commentary on the live readings of The Best American Short Stories that took place on October 20th, I was asking myself: how do my writings and my life relate to these stories? What is my stance when I talk about these characters?
I have met these characters before: a Native American woman taking care of her white father-in-law, an Islamic boy in Kabul, a lonely teenager in high school learning about his sexuality. But here they are different: they are not silenced, nor held captive in the position of “the other.” They are the main characters, multidimensional, complex.
This shift in perspective is what makes these stories so contemporary, and so urgent. The world is evolving, the writers are chronicling these changes, and yet a question still prevails: how do the dynamics of hate, misconception and segregation rule over our relationships? For me, “Paradise,” by Yxta Maya Murray, reexamines this question and sets it in a domestic scenario. The two protagonists are paradigmatic (the white man / the native american woman). Throughout the story they embody their particular answers to that question as they are leaving a small town also named Paradise. In that sense, their drama is artfully enhanced by the title/name of the place they live, which evokes heaven, sin and banishment.
From the domestic and idyllic California to Kabul. Jamil Jan Kochai's story, “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” is about war, an imaginary war in a video game. I know nothing about war. I confess that I see only absurdity and madness where people see a nationalist dream or a religious cause. Besides, I have never had to cope with war losses, this “phantom pain” that comes from a part of you that is no longer there. Kochal showed it to me through his character’s quest and struggles, and also through his heartfelt words, where even the sunlight “bleeds off into the dark mountains.”
I am Latina and a foreigner in the US. For some ancestral reasons, maybe these two previous stories should have resonated with me more than “Biology,” by Kevin Wilson. But this story of a US teenager’s love for his recently deceased teacher bewitched me. I grew up in a small town in Pernambuco, Brazil, where I thought intellectual isolation made people treat sameness and conformity as an asset. Now, many years later and having traveled around the world, I learnt that everywhere sameness is unfortunately treated as an asset. But “Biology” uncloaks the human imperatives of liberty and diversity. In the last pages the characters play a card game that makes it possible for them to live many lives, many different lives, without other people’s censorship and without the fear of death or punishment. At the end of this reading I cried, maybe because I felt the unveiling of something I already knew and couldn’t see. Like magic.
These three short stories recast the point of view, shift things around and make a poignant social commentary. The Native American, the outsider and the homosexual. These characters are dealing with their particular pain, but they are also holding ancestral burdens, oppressions that were passed down through generations: racial hatred, xenophobia and homophobia. As Heidi Pitlor, the series editor, pointed out: “The reluctant inheritance of another’s pain is a common theme here.” But literature, again borrowing from Baudelaire, is a sublime liquor, and that night, as we listened to these moving stories, we also laughed, we were delighted. AsJesmyn Ward, guest editor for 2021, said: “The best fiction offers the reader a sense of repair.” I guess we all felt it.
NINA FERRAZ is a Brazilian writer based in NY, a mother of two, and a medical doctor who holds a master’s degree in Literature. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at NYU, and a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her story The Hot Pitch Under was nominated for Best Small Stories 2022. Read her debut story in English at https://www.westchesterreview.com/nina-ferraz