Ampersand Minion Reviews: Best of the Web, 2010
The Best of the Web series, published by Dzanc Books, is an impressive and daunting enterprise: seeking out and giving the legitimacy of print to the best writing featured solely on the web.Digging through the thousands of great pieces published in online literary magazines may seem like a Magic Tollboth-style job, but every year series editor Matt Bell and his guest editor deliver daring and diverse collections, showcasing writing and authors you may not have stumbled across in the papernet.
Best of the Web 2010 boasts ninety-five stories, poems, and essays written by today’s best web authors. The collection is fraught with tales that are both touching and real, with characters who are not only memorable, but also relatable.
Guest editor Kathy Fish’s introduction focuses less on the collection’s vibe or content than individual lines written by featured authors. “[I’m a] huge, forever fan of beautiful sentences,” Fish writes, and she’s not kidding. The collection is crowded with them. One such excerpt reads, “the soul music on the turntable hustles a circus into her muscles and he sits watching her dance, watching the glimmer of her watch face can-can around the room” (Jac Jemc’s story “Women in Wells”). My favorite line, however, comes from “When I Say Love” by Meredith Martinez. This flash fiction story details a grieving mother who purchases turkeys the same weight as her deceased son and sleeps with them in the bathtub. In the morning, the woman wakes, covered in turkey skin and bacteria. She strikes the turkeys adamantly and “vomit[s] into [the turkey’s] cavity, and scream[s]. When I say love, this is what I mean.”
The collection is filled with genuine, flawless moments such as these. In “One Way to Cook an Eel,” Emily Bromfield tells the story of a middle-aged man living on his own after his wife leaves him for bringing home an eel. In the ex wife’s eyes, this is yet another act in a long train of eccentricities, and so leaves her husband for another, more sane man. The themes of companionship, lost and found love, and heartbreak weave around a skeleton of beautiful craftsmanship and a fresh voice.
Web writing has evolved along with our world’s increasing love of the instant, the satisfaction of now, and has nurtured and legitimized the genre of flash fiction. There’s no consensus on just how long a flash piece’s defined length, but most fans and students of the art would consider a page or less typical—which leaves the author with just a few hundred words to form a believable character, plot, and description.
Several (including the aforementioned Martinez piece) excel at one of fiction’s finest purposes: to not only entertain, but to offer up real, human moments. Another example of flash fiction’s success is the one-and-a-half page story, “Foolish Creatures” by Frank Dahai. This piece works because of a gorgeous diction and a sense of wonder perfectly matching the main characters: children and balloon animals. The relationships in this story draws attention to human nature and the beauty found there.
The longer pieces of fiction are prone to odd formats, another typicality of web fiction. Several stories are divided into sub sections, with their own heading or titles. Lily Huong’s “The Woman Down the Hall” is erratic and confusing, causing the reader to spend as much time attempting to untangle the connection between the headings and the body text as they do deciphering the narrator.
Perhaps a better example is Matthew Simmons’ “Caves,” a story about a man who dates caves. Literally. He makes them mix CDs. This sweet, off-beat piece is punctuated by a much more simple division than Huong’s long subtitles—Simmon’s uses numbers. Section “one” introduces “the man who dated caves,” while “two” details how he sends them a “short, introductory email.”
Lucas Ferrell’s prose poem “Translations of ‘My Refrigerator Light Makes its Way Toward You’ into the 34 Languages Spoken in the Many Woods of Grief” is separated by small ellipses. Some sections are one sentence long, and their brevity enunciates the poem’s poignant tendency towards strong images and repeatable lines.
In a similar manner, David Welch writes an “Instructional Ghazal.” Welch mold forms and recreates the ghazal, picking and choosing which of the ancient form’s rules he follows. While a refrain is present, the last line of each couplet has no rhyming refrain before the repeated chorus. While most readers won’t notice, it’s enough to make a poetry professor cringe.
However, Welch makes up for his modifications with an audacious ending. A ghazal rule (“ghazal”rhymes with “rhyme”)—the last line must refer to the author’s name. Welch’s last line is as follows: “[place any name you want in my mouth].” This daring line retrospectively molds the entire poem—the indifference of which name is used and leaving the choice up to the reader almost creates a second layer, as if the poem is two in itself.
Another poem worth mentioning is “Karner Blue Butterfly Hunt,” composed by Julie Piatt. I write “composed” because the flows as intricately as a jazz quartet. Piatt’s piece is full of feminine imagery, and as such, ends with two strong and dual lines—“Cotton draped our dull commerce/ and we halved a dish of figs.”
Best of the Web 2010 represents a laborious undertaking—finding a collection of well- written, thought provoking poetry and prose to represent what literature is moving into. As series editor Matt Bell writes, fiction and poetry become “objects of intellectual and emotional liberation, points of entry . . ., so capable of delivering stories and poems and essays at the moment.” This anthology as a whole is a point of entry, into a world of exciting and innovative new writing.
