Introduction

If you don’t like these stories, you should’ve read the ones I
didn’t take.

Even though that’s not accurate, it’s probably the only thing I could say in this space to truly arrest the attention of the curious soul bent on simply reading a few good stories (which, in fact, he/she will find here). But, after spending months reading, and wrestling with one’s “tastes,” splitting one’s own hairs, urgently writing friends to send their work or the good work of their students, mulling self-importantly over the state of the American short story, the American literary magazine, the combined fate and character of the young American writer-in-training, plus one’s own dubious fate, enmeshed as it precisely is in all these just-mentioned occupations — after doing all that and actually coming up with quite a few good stories to show for it —
to then face the “need” of an introduction, seems, well . . . slightly awkward. Perverse, even. Unnecessary. A bit like putting a wiseguy vanity plate on a rental car: humdingers!

But, what
should one say? Should I yammer on about what’s good about these stories “taken together” — concoct some obscure,
ad hoc category they either fully satisfy or invent anew, flattering thereby myself, the closet critic, and possibly also tripping up the stories themselves by making them bend even more lowly to my will? Good stories want only to create their own special terms each by each, satisfy them richly, and be done with it. A category of one.

Or maybe I should plot out my own well-burnished definition of what a good story Platonically
is. Though that immediately risks ruling out something unforeseen and wonderful: a fresh new Donald Barthelme, for instance. So that wouldn’t be a good idea. (The critic’s job
is a hard job.)

It’s squeamishly tempting, only for the “sake” of the anonymous young writer, of course, to offer a short treatise on why stories (such as the ones I didn’t choose) failed. How they attained what I saw as their inadequacies (lack of authority, lack of clear narrative voice — whatever that is — on and on and on). But who cares? Plus, as soon as I got my famous treatise all laid out neat, the last story I rejected — the classic of all unsuccessful stories — would show up in
The New Yorker, win an O. Henry Award, and I’d start getting smirky letters with Iowa City postmarks, “thanking” me. Once, when I was teaching at Williams, a poet colleague and I thought about offering a course in which we would anatomize bad novels for an entire semester — again, all for the benefit of our writing students. For some reason, this seemed likely to be instructive. Only, we couldn’t make ourselves read through our own syllabus, which
was instructive, and we quickly forgot about the whole idea, following the wisdom that only good work counts.

Another possibility might be to enter mincingly into my own autobiographical mantra of the young writer “out there”; to recall my meatless days in heatless garrets in Chicago (while my wife was, of course, pulling down a handsome living for us), of dashes down to the mailbox, of envelopes ripped open, form rejections hungrily scoured for encouraging nuances in phrasing, or the slapdash “Pls try us again” appended by some work-study math grad student with a heart of gold, who at two a.m. and deep into reefer, begins to “feel for me” far away in the Windy City doing God’s work unheralded and alone — and how all that made me work harder and get better while staying humble and uncynical. It wouldn’t even be true. Moreover, it would be cloying and insulting to anyone actually trying to do God’s work. Sad life stories, even pathetically sad life stories played for jokes, never offer much comfort to the truly serious.

Still another introduction topic might be the simultaneously-thriving-yet-still-somehow-beleaguered university writing program industry. Perhaps now would be the time and here the place to give it a good flagellating, put on my jeweler’s loupe and scope out its flaws and corruptions. The French, after all, think we’re a bunch of sillies for trying to “teach” writing. They, of course, think the way they do everything is the best way, and that becoming a writer is a gnostic, quasi-Zen, for-mandarins-only process that mustn’t be spoken of in publicuasi-Z0or-ocu8r=1.3.ed , of coursfamous treatise all laid out neat, the last story I><21; writing. They