100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

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A STORY IS A noise in the night. You may be lying there quietly resting in the international house of literature and hear something in the walls, the click and burst of heat through pipes, a difficult settling of eaves, ice sliding off the roof, the scurry of animals, the squawk of a floorboard, someone coming up the stairs.

This is life itself, surprising and not entirely invited. And yet we come to short stories seeking it. Or at least some vivid representation of it: a dark corner that is either turned and gone around or fixed with a light in order to discover what is lurking there. In a civilized society there arrives in a person’s day a pause long enough to allow for the reading of it — the corner, the pause, the day, the society: the exquisite verbal bonsai of a moment, of another’s life and consciousness, presented with concision and purpose — from a certain angle, in a certain voice, fashioned from a frame of mind that is both familiar and strange, recognizable and startling as a pinch.

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