Best of Tin House

“Tin House shows with this stunning collection that it has many rooms, all of them astonishing, full of the best writers in the country. To see what is going on right inside the front door of American letters, open this book.”
—Ron Carlson, author of A Kind of Flying

“You find in Tin House what you hope to find in life. People who give the best of themselves in poems and stories and essays, who offer great conversation in the form of interviews, and who even set the table with recipes for food and drink. Around that table, you hear voices new and old, fresh and forgotten, lionized and overlooked. At dinner once, Frank Conroy raised his glass and offered this toast: If we feel the pain so acutely, why not the pleasure? A Tin House anthology is the glass raised, the guests honored, and a celebration for writer and reader alike.”
—Charles D’Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish Museum

“Like many people, and most writers I know, I read every issue of Tin House, from cover to cover, for three reasons. One: Because it makes me believe that we still live in a world in which people care about writing, language, literature, and art. Two: Because there is nothing else like it. And three: Because it’s so consistently smart, surprising, and so amazingly good.”
—Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man

Contents

Foreword by Dorothy Allison
8

Steve Almond
The Break Up Vows
13

Aimee Bender
End of the Line
26

Pinckney Benedict
Mudman
34

David Benioff
Zoanthropy
53

Amy Bloom
I Love to See You Coming, I Hate to See You Go
73

Robert Olen Butler
Severance
83

Deborah Eisenberg
Revenge of the Dinosaurs
88

Ryan Harty
Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down
105

Howard Hunt
Sovietski!
123

Frances Hwang
The Old Gentleman
139

Denis Johnson
Xmas in Las Vegas
165

Marshall N. Klimasewiski
The Third House
193

Ellen Litman
Dancers
212

Howard Luxenberg
The Photograph
229

Martha McPhee
The Anthropology of Sex
242

Steven Millhauser
Dangerous Laughter
262

Lucia Nevai
End of Messages
277

Mark Jude Poirier
I, Maggott
290

Natasha Radojcic
Shades of Mango
300

Stacey Richter
Christ, Their Lord
318

James Salter
Such Fun
336

Jim Shepard
John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me
345

Anthony Swofford
Will They Kill You in Iraq?
378

Julia Slavin
Squatters
364

Elizabeth Tallent
Eros 101
400

Amanda Eyre Ward
The Way the Sky Changed
420

Jung H. Yun
Han Gahp
430

Excerpt from Dorothy Allison's Foreword:

If one believes in a world of story, a terrain in which short stories, novels, and memoirs intersect to create a reality as powerful and as full as human history itself, then being part of that creation offers a sense of validation and purpose that subsumes awards bestowed or money paid. You want your story to meet all other stories, to become part of the great human narrative, to shape how people think about themselves and their history. I truly believe that human change takes place through story, that we can only become what we can imagine, and that imagination is constantly in the process of being augmented, enlarged, or diminished. Small narratives, reductively cruel stories, and mean-spirited tales diminish us. Large-souled narratives—attempts to fully understand individuals and communities, to portray us fully and with compassion—enlarge us, making us more than we have been seen to be before. It is how we imagine ourselves that can be changed, and no political slogan, no matter how catchy or rhythmic, is as powerful as a narrative that takes us inside someone we have never imagined before or pulls us inside someone we have always dismissed or held in contempt and makes us see that person in new and deeper ways.

A short story opens the door to a brightly lit room. It calls us out of darkness, makes sense of what cannot be explained, and validates the most commonplace choices of our daily lives. Of course every now and then a story does another thing entirely. It stops us cold and leaves us sitting stunned. But there are lifetime truths to which sitting stunned is the only response—certainly preferable to burying ourselves in distraction or loud noisy babble.