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Foreword Fads often sweep the publishing world. Writers, commercial editors, and the editors of literary magazines all partake. A recent fad in fiction has been what one British magazine, in its special issue on the subject, called "dirty realism." I have also heard it called K-Mart fiction or minimalist fiction—stories about characters normally at the lower end of the economic spectrum who are out of a job or working at one they hate, alcoholic, on the verge of divorce, pale, angry, inarticulate, suffering from heart disease, being threatened with repossession of their trailers, and showing definite early signs of becoming serial murderers—often written in a prose meant somehow to mirror these "dirty" traits and circumstances. When "dirty realism" ascends to the middle class, the characters' problems tend to arise more from neuroses and bizarre personal ineptitudes. These middleclass minimalist characters, strangely narcissistic and valueless, tend to muck around in domestic confusion, making bad relationships even more dully worse. At The Missouri Review we have seen enough of these stories pour through our mailboxes that we sometimes wonder if all the novice writers in the country are not at the same moment biting their pencils and trying to think up one more nasty deficiency to put on the backs of their "dirty" confections, so that they can then raise the unfortunate souls to the level of Literature. Not surprisingly, young writers try to imitate the latest success stories. They always have and always will, and it is fruitless to suggest they stop it. Among the big success stories in short fiction at the top of the eighties were Ray Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Ann Beattie, and what may have been fresh in their writing becomes moldy in the hands of imitators. An imitator may get down the rudiments of style, technique, and "furniture," but unless he cares about his characters in some deep way, they don't live. Other fads are more difficult to understand. I sometimes imagine that writers are like whales in the ocean, singing their songs, hearing each other at amazing distances, and perhaps too often echoing what they hear. Recently we have noticed a lot of writing, across the genres, on the theme of death, indeed we have published a fair amount of it. If we published as much as we receive proportional to all submissions, however, we would have to temporarily change our name from The Missouri Review to The Mortuary Review. Death is of course a classic subject in literature; but one wonders how it is that so many writers, living all over the country, practicing different genres, have latched onto it at once. I do not know, but when one reads four randomly selected stories in a row about dying family members, as I recently did, it has the sound of a chorus. And four stories in a row is only an acute example of the larger phenomenon—stories, poems, essays about dying mothers, fathers, spouses, and siblings are flying through the mails like dandelion seeds through the air. It is of course never a subject or plot alone which defines a story, but the spin an author puts on it, the meaning he tries to coax from it through tone and style. The limitation in most of the current "dirty realism" is that its purpose, for lack of any other, seems to be to pin down characters, to pigeonhole them and put them on display, as psychological or sociological examples of the author's tough vision. In such writing there can be no revelation, no discovery, only a specious kind of anatomy. Among several fine stories in this issue, Barton Wilcox's "Ferguson's Wagon" concerns domestic turbulence and confusion, inept communications , as well as death, but all to a quite different effect than in the drab minimalist fiction that has burdened the postal system over the past few years. Beneath the turbulence in WUcox's small famUy, there is movement toward revelation, accomplishments are somehow — even if perversely—built on deficiency, and mysterious love arises from profound emotional resistance. Joanna Scott and Alice Denham are two other storytellers featured in this issue who are singing their own songs...

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