The Case of the Disappearing Genres

The Case of the Disappearing Genres Hugh Ferrer The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 Edited by Joyce Carol Oates Houghton Mifflin http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 352 pages; paper, $14.00 Michael Chabon introduced McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003) with a crisis worthy of one of his Escapist volumes: the short form had been rendered anemic, and a transfusion from somewhere was desperately needed. Genre could help, but could literary fiction break out of its isolation? In its sketchiness, literature's sprawl can seem dichotomous: the moment-of-truth story, a gated community; pulp, a neglected inner city ripe for plasma centers and gentrification. But the territory isn't really so divided. Chabon a little later quotes himself for comic effect: '"All short stories...are ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past'"—which suggests, among other things, that the literary short story, instead of merely standing apart from genre, has already swallowed one. Joyce Carol Oates (aka Rosamund Smith, aka Lauren Kelly) was a curious omission from the Treasury (alternate title, "May I please have some plot, please!"). Is there another living author with her literary chops who has forged a parallel (stunt?) career in genre? The Treasury seems as if it should have been right up her alley. As an editor, too, she has always striven to bring "high" and "low" forms together. The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 is her seventeenth anthology. That's a lot of canonical work: from volumes of Lovecraft, "nocturnal" literature, and gothic fiction, on the one hand, to The Oxford Book ofAmerican Short Stories (1992) and The NortonAnthology ofContemporary Fiction newfrom ZEPHYR PRESS Darkness Spoken: CollectedPoems ofIngeborg Bachmann translated by Peter Filkins ISBN O-939OIO-84-4 $24.95 688pp [biLiNGUAL German/English] ... -we must be immensely grateful that PeterFilkins has now given us thefullest and the best translations we have in English ofthis magnificent poet. — Charles Simic Darkness Spoken gathers Ingeborg Bachmann's two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. This new, expanded edition contains 129 poems recendy released from Bachmann's archives and which have never before been translated. Twenty-five of these poems also appear in German in this bilingual edition for the first time anywhere, making it the most complete edition of her poetic output in English and German. ZEPHYR PRESS | 50 KENWOOD ST. BROOKLINE, MA 02446 6i7.7r3.28i3 VOICE & FAX I editOrS@ZephyrpreSS.Org www.zephyrpress.org (1997), on the other. Her eclecticism shines clearest in Telling Stories (1998), a writing textbook that plumps literary classics next to horror, and fiction next to narrative poetry. BAMS 2005 is a natural place for her to update these juxtapositions. From the start—2005 marks the ninth year under series editor Otto Penzler—BAMS volumes have tapped The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, Zoetrope, and the like. Of the fifty finalists in 2001, twenty-three were published in ostensibly literary journals, and two of this year's winners (Dennis Lehane's amazing "Until Gwen" and Edward P. Jones's "Old Boys, Old Girls") appear as well in The BestAmerican Short Stories 2005 (edited, serendipitously enough, by Michael Chabon). But parsing these overlaps is complex (much more complex than asserting a schism). Why do so few BAMS finalists appear as BASS finalists? If some "mystery" stories qualify as literary, what discounts the majority? BAMS 2005 is a robust and intriguing collection thatgoes some way in recovering the Mystery, both in mysteries and in the shortform in general. Questions like these are at the heart of BAMS 2005, and the anthology is made more nuanced by the fact that series editor Penzler (as proposer) and Oates (as disposer) do not see eye-to-eye on classification . According to Penzler, treating BAMS as a collection of "mystery" stories will only confuse, because whodunits have faded out: Few of these stories are detective fiction, a tale in which an official police officer, a private eye, or an amateur sleuth is confronted with a crime and pursues the culprit by making observations and deductions . It has been my practice to define a mystery story as any work of...