Best American Short Stories 2011 - Award-Winning Fiction Collection | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literature Lovers

I recently purchased The Best American Short Stories 2011, a collection of the cream of the literary short stories, published in the most prestigious American and Canadian magazines, and edited by Geraldine Brooks. Written in a close third person limited point of view, this story is a great example of how a writer can manipulate tone and voice using technique. I bought the book on the advice of my creative writing professor at the University of Nevada Reno, Christopher Coake. Once again, I must give this exemplary instructor credit for pointing me, an aspiring author and teacher, in the right direction.I skipped around in this short story collection and became totally absorbed in "Property," written by Elizabeth McCracken, chosen from Granta magazine. The story grabbed me from the first line, a hook that was styled as a hypothetical classified advertisement for a rental house. Perhaps I was immediately immersed in the story because I have experienced the unfortunate reality of having to accept a rental agreement for an abode that was less than sanitary.I think that my empathy for the widower who has not come to terms with his wife's untimely death may also have played into the emotional attachment I developed for this story. Stony Badower misses his wife, Pamela Graff, the way an amputee misses a limb, or the way an aging person misses the gift of hearing or sight as those senses deteriorate. Stony realizes he is no longer the same person without the missing sensitive parts of his psyche, personality, emotional support system, all of which Pamela provided. Stony is lost, drifting, and indifferent about where or how he will live.The house Sally rents him motivates Stony to care about his living space. The place is filthy and disorganized, harboring gaudy antiquated furniture and interior decorations. Stony begins to make the space he must live in for nine months his own, unconcerned about whose property he is displacing or defacing.The ending brought tears to my eyes. As Sally and Stony interact in the house, she recalls her home and her space. Sally communicates subtly the hurt and loss she feels when she discovers that most of her sacred possessions, saturated with sentimental remembrances of a life she can no longer claim, have broken or crumbled from moldy neglect. Sally's marriage ended several years before Stony arrived on the scene and destroyed the few souvenirs she thought made her feeling of 'home' complete.Stony believes that Pamela would have known about Sally's needs and understood the state the house was in when he arrived. "Pamela was the one who taught him that a bed on display is never just furniture, it is the spirit portrait of everyone who has ever slept in it, had sex in it, died in it" (209).Stony had not understood the relationship between inanimate objects and the people attached to them. He had always traveled light, but realized that his attachment was embodied in Pamela, and that Sally's home life "was already broken" (209).This story is a precious find, one among many in this collection, an exemplary assortment of quality short fiction.