Is this the post-9/11 era or the Trump era? Or maybe we’re really in what will one day (I hope) be labeled the Misinformation Era. It can be hard to tell what historical era you’re actually living through, as its happening. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year after the publication of Dear Life, in 2013 the Swedish Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story.” No shit. She writes: “I believe they are the first and last-and the closest-things I have to say about my own life.” They too are wonderful. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.” The collection also includes a few semi-autobiographical sketches-“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”-we are told. This is despite the fact that, as Michiko Kakutani pointed out, with age, Munro has gotten a little bit sharper in her portrayals of the common man. These stories and characters are not flashy, there’s little in the way of high concept it’s simply that Munro knows people, and represents them so accurately, so wisely, and so humanely, that you can’t help but be moved. (I guess what I really mean is that it’s not really fair to other writers that Munro is such a goddamn genius.) Most of the stories in Dear Life were previously published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Granta they all display Munro’s uncanny ability to take a lifetime-or even generations of a single family-and shrink it into a thirty-page text-not by spinning out event after event, but by delivering a character so textured, and a series of moments so precise, that we can’t help but feel we know all about them. I mean, any Alice Munro collection published in any given period of time has to automatically be on the list of best collections of said period. They were thick and fierce, rolling like a thunderstorm in your head.” It’s remarkable to come across a debut collection in which the voice, the vision, is so fully formed, so assured, but that’s what Watkins has achieved with this exceptional work. In his reverie he remembers how nature marked the season it happened: “Late that Spring, a swarm of grasshoppers moved though Beatty on their way to the alfalfa fields down south. In one particularly aching story, a man finds a bundle of letters amid the strewn wreckage of a car crash, and proceeds to carry on a therapeutic, and increasingly revealing, one-sided correspondence with their owner, onto whom he superimposes the identity of a desperate neighbor he killed decades previous. Her landscapes are exquisitely drawn, full of lush sensory detailing and characters stalked by the sorrows and violence of their pasts, the parched desperation of their presents. There’s an enviable fearlessness to Watkins’ writing, a refusal to look away from the despair that lies within the hearts of her lost and weary characters, to give them tidy trajectories or tidy resolutions. *** The Top Ten Claire Vaye Watkins, BattlebornĬlaire Vaye Watkins’ searing, Nevada-set debut collection-which includes a sixty-page novella that takes place during the 1848 Gold Rush and a dazzling, devastating opening tale in which Watkins audaciously blends fiction, local history, and myth with the story of father’s involvement in the Manson Family during the late ’60s-is as starkly beautiful, as lonesome and sinister and death-haunted, as the desert frontier through which its stories roam. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten-so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. We began with the best debut novels of the decade, and now we’re back with the best short story collections of the decade-or to be precise, the best collections published in English between 20. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website-though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task-in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We’ll take our silver linings where we can. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches.
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