Every time I read another perfectly written, duller than dirt, short story in my favorite magazine of all time, The New Yorker, I take a deep breath, revert to a momentary zen-like state, and remember two things. One, at least The New Yorker still publishes short stories. Two, three of my favorite short stories from contemporary authors are part of their archives. After I read Tobias Wolff’s “All Ahead of Them,” in the latest issue, I went back and read “Another Manhattan,” by Donald Antrim. Not only is this story hilarious and sad, it does what a short story, or all good fiction, should do, in my humble opinion: Make reality tremble with Brownian motion, engage the reader at a heightened state of awareness, and give us a roller coaster ride that pushes the envelope of physics, exhilaration, and fear.

One way I like to judge a short story is to think about what an oscilloscope screen would look like monitoring my brain waves while I’m reading it. “All Ahead of Them” flat-lines. “Another Manhattan” sends that green wave indicator off the freaking screen! It packs the energy of a pound of uranium. Two couples meet for dinner. Each woman is having an affair with the other guy. One of the husbands buys an outrageous bouquet of flowers for his wife, and tries to pick up the young girl in the shop. They’re all present or future members of alcoholics or pills anonymous. It’s life in Manhattan in the modern age of pharmacology and narrowly defined neuroses. It’s “Annie Hall” and the 1970s on doses of steroids prescribed for much larger mammals. It makes “All Ahead of Them” read like taking enteric-coated aspirin.

The other two stories in my trilogy of favorites are “The Spot,” David Means, and “The Cold Outside,” John Burnside. One of these days I may do an extended post on all three of these stories, which could not be more different from each other ( I wrote a short piece on “Another Manhattan” in a previous entry here). One characteristic all of these authors share is that their names do not show up in writers workshop faculties, or as blurb writers for other authors. Well, until recently. David Means blurbed Jamie Quatro’s collection, I Want to Show You More. After I finally read one of her stories which was worth the time, “1.7 to Tennessee,”  a truly heart-wrenching tale, I hoped upon hope that this was the story which convinced Means’ to surface on a back cover.

Writing a good short stories is like leading the league in triples, much harder than hitting home runs, or taking the batting title with singles. Great short stories are rare. Having one in a published collection is a feat, in my opinion. So, I try not to fault The New Yorker for publishing mediocre to awful ones issues after issue, but instead sing the praises of the great ones the publication has exposed me to over the years.