Book Review: Readings

New Stories From the South: 2007 – The Year's Best

edited by Edward P. Jones
Algonquin, 372 pp., $14.95 (paper)

I've made a little specialty out of teaching Texas literature, and it troubles me. A good third of the writers whose stories I teach either aren't from Texas or left long ago, probably in disgust. So it's no surprise that the folks behind the latest edition of New Stories From the South chose Edward P. Jones to edit the latest edition. Jones grew up in Washington, D.C., and wrote the short story collection Lost in the City, which you should run out and buy. Now. I mean immediately. In his introduction, Jones has trouble with this designation, too. His people are Southerners, he finally says. His mindset is Southern. OK. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The stories he chooses may say a lot about the difficulty of putting writers into little geographical boxes – lots of Californians here – and even more about what is perceived to be Southern. The book opens with pieces by two Houston natives who both now live in Montana. In "Goats," Rick Bass tells us there's a lot of fact behind his story of two bumbling boys who aim to buy some cheap horses and resell them for a profit but instead hook up with some odd outcasts. James Lee Burke, who as a writer is forever tied to the Texas-Louisiana border, gives us the loneliness of an older man faced with brutality and his own memories in the standout piece, "A Season of Regret."

Isolation, family dysfunction, dogs, brutal weather, and, yes, regret. These, in the end, are what define the Southern ethos in this volume. Among the best: Allan Gurganus presages Hurricane Katrina with "Fourteen Feet of Water in My House," about an aging man seeing his complacency flooded away along with his hometown as he steers his little boat through the neighborhood picking up survivors; Philipp Meyer, a current Michener Fellow at the University of Texas (and Austin Chronicle contributor), gives us a man trying to reconnect with his estranged father in "One Day This Will All Be Yours"; Stephen Marion puts us in the mind of a woman who must kill the stray dogs left at an animal shelter in "Dogs With Human Faces"; Moira Crane portrays the scars of insanity in "The Ice Garden."