Third, as with any A-list group, half the fun is wondering about those who aren't here. Elder statesmen of letters are conspicuously absent. So are a few writers you'd expect to be included: Melissa Bank, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss. Were they asked? Did they miss the deadline? Finally, not to be slighted, are the stories themselves. Although uneven in quality, this is a great way to get a taste of an author before committing to a whole book.
The conceit behind Smith's volume is character. Each of the 23 stories is named after a made-up character. These range from the somber to the crazed and include, in addition to people, Eggers's sweet mountain monsters and George Saunders's puppy.
There are several standouts. In Edwidge Danticat's quietly resonant "Lélé," the narrator, who's followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps as justice of the peace in a Haitian river town, feels torn between the life he's always known and forging new paths. When his older sister, finally pregnant after 20 years of marriage but with a doomed baby, leaves her husband and moves back home, he worries about the river, which threatens to flood their house. But most of all he worries about his sister's attempt to retreat into a childish past.
In Colm Tóibín's "Donal Webster," an Irishman teaching in Texas recalls his mother's death in Dublin six years earlier, addressing the rued ex-lover he last saw at her funeral. The story is a gorgeous meditation on the "need and hollowness" and "sad echoes and dim feelings" that remain after attachments are severed.
David Mitchell and Hari Kunzru both write about unhinged women utterly lacking in self-perspective. Mitchell's "Judith Castle" is an initially funny, ultimately sad portrait of a desperately overbearing "tragic menopausal hag" who thinks she's snagged a soulmate on the Internet.
