WTF in BASS

[Keith Snyder]

So I just started the 2007 Best American Short Stories (edited by Stephen King, series editor: Heidi Pitlor). His introduction (reproduced here) is great. Nice start. I figure he's got to be at least as non-genre-snobby as Michael Chabon, who edited the 2005 edition and put a Dennis Lehane story front and center.

So I flip back and skim the table of contents. The stories are from The Yale Review, Fiction, Boulevard, The Paris Review, West Branch, The Hudson Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review...aha!--there's Fantasy and Science Fiction... and then it goes on again with The New Yorker, Subtropics, Granta, Harpers, and Ploughshares again.

No crime. But F&SF's there, so at least he's reading genre fiction. I guess there weren't any crime stories this year that quite made his cut. Fair enough.

So I flip to the back and look through the 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2006.

Same magazines, plus Zoetrope and Glimmer Train, and a few others like that. McSweeney's. Harper's.

Not a single crime fiction magazine.

No Ellery Queen's. No Alfred Hitchcock's. No Demolition. No Crime Spree. Nothing.

So now I'm starting to wonder what's up.

So I look in the back at Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories, and EQMM isn't listed. Hitchcock's is, but that's it.

Did the guy MWA awarded the title of Grandmaster to this year not read any crime stories when he was editing BASS?

Or did he think not a single one of the crime stories published in 2006 deserved to be in the top 100?

Or what?

[I. J. Parker]

Great point! And this may just be another anthology that publishes the editor's special friends.

[Patricia Abbott]

I guess they think the genre is covered in "The Best Mystery Stories" volume each year. Not fair but not completely overlooked. No sci-fi or horror or fanstasy either.

[Daniel Hatadi]

Titles like this should have disclaimer subtitles, like, "But Not Crime Stories" or "Stories From The Editor's Friends" or "Seriously Folks, Crime's Already Covered In Another Book, So Go Buy That One".

Tee hee.

[I. J. Parker]

Perhaps so, but many of the anthologies seem to be submission by invitation only. (While the Edgars have to deal with all short stories published in a given year).

[Keith Snyder]

But we wanted to slander him NOW!

I think Patricia Abbott's probably right. They figure crime is covered in BAMSS.

As a writer, I don't like that. I think BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES should be exactly what it says it is.

As somebody who reads short story anthologies...I wouldn't want to spend money on two collections that overlap significantly.