Hosted by Matthew Love of Selected Shorts, it was a night to
celebrate “The Best American Short Stories 2014,” with selections by Pulitzer
Prize Winning Author Jennifer Egan. Egan
offered insights into this edition’s common themes – despair, hope through the
support of others, wild animals – along with her own list of prerequisites for
inclusion, most notably an ability to engage the reader in surprise and current
truths. I closed my eyes and escaped into worlds created by Lauren Groff and
T.C. Boyle – and performed by actors Amy Ryan and Dylan Baker, respectively.
(Golden rule: You are never too old to be read a story.)
Matthew Love was all wit.
As part of his commentary, he riffed off of what other, more modern-day writing
collections, might look like. He
postulated that in our short-take society we might want to see, “The Best
American Paragraphs,” “The Best American
Sentences,” or even “The Best American Tweets” – adding that maybe they would
be pamphlets instead of tomes. I thought
I could contribute another trilogy, “The Best American Hashtags,” “The Best
American Emoji Sentences,” “The Best American Selfies.” I bet they would sell (attention any agents
out there wanting to get it on this, l’m #allears).
