Good Short Stories: Three Boxes of First Collections and One Volume Whose Editor I Disagree with

Another box of books arrived today! That makes three of them, all containing short story collections up for the Danuta Gleed Award which is administered by the Writers' Union of Canada. Last December I agreed to be one of the three judges for this year's competition (the other two are Ivan E. Coyote and David Bezmozgi) and the books began arriving shortly thereafter. Since the competition closed February 1, I imagine that this box will be the last.

Because of my own projects, I haven't had a chance to start reading the submissions. Indeed, I probably won't get around to it until late March when the deadline for Making Waves comes up. But one of the carrots I am holding out to myself as I struggle with the project is the prospect of spending a couple of weeks doing nothing but reading short stories. What a pleasure that will be!

I'm afraid I can't say the same for the Best American Short Stories of 2009, edited by Alice Sebald. It is the one book I hope that someone gives me for Christmas, and usually I ration the stories out, one a night, for the post-holiday period. But this time I found myself quite unengaged in most of them: too much information and not enough heart, I think. There is no accounting for taste, which is why it's good to make sure that prize juries are rotated frequently.