My favorites were: Kevin Wilson “Kennedy”, Leigh Newman “Howl Palace”, and TC Boyle, “The Apartment”. I also enjoyed Anna Reeser “Octopus VII” and Mary Gaitskill "This is Pleasure".

A few gems, but a bit depressing overall

A few stories really captured me, and all told a complete picture in just a few pages. Yet so many left me feeling lost, with little hope for what may come for the characters after the moment I no longer had a window into their lives.

2021 PopSugar Reading Challenge: a book with fewer than 1,000 reviews on Goodreads (at this point, anyway!). 12 out of 20 of these stories vibed with me - is that good?? Anyway, 60% is probably mathematically three stars, but I’m adding on a bit extra for Curtis Sittenfeld fangirling purposes and also because I thought the top 5 (or 6) stories were pretty great. This collection would be good for a book club discussion.
Here’s my very personal Top 10 ranking (just based on my engagement and/or appreciation of craft - and honestly, since my COVID-era attention span remains for shit, these are also probably some of the *shorter* short stories, because that’s about what I can handle these days!):

1. Michael Byers, “Sibling Rivalry”
2. Kevin Wilson, “Kennedy”
3. Sarah Thankham Mathews, “Rubberdust”
4. Alejandro Puyana, “The Hands of Dirty Children”
5. TC Boyle, “The Apartment”
6. Leigh Newman, “Howl Palace”
7. Marian Crotty, “Halloween”
8. Anna Reeser, “Octopus VII”
9. Elizabeth McCracken, “It’s Not You”
10. Emma Cline, “The Nanny”

In general, I'm not a huge fan of short stories, which always seems a little silly to me because how is that even possible? (I would say I like "long stories" but that category doesn't exist, so how can "short stories.") In the last couple of months, I've been going on a tear of them and realizing why they can be so great. This was partially from Sittenfeld's own collection, [b:You Think It, I'll Say It|35961720|You Think It, I'll Say It|Curtis Sittenfeld|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1511377802l/35961720._SY75_.jpg|55226435]. So I found it confusing how much I did not enjoy this collection. I liked Michael Byers: Sibling Rivalry quite a bit, but otherwise, I don't think I enjoyed any of the stories. Some were ok, but I was surprised that I didn't even like contributions from writers I otherwise (or thought I) enjoy.

I received this book as birthday gift from a friend a year or two ago (thanks, Morgan!) before I had really tried short stories out. After reading Her Body and Other Parties as my first collection, I was excited to give this one a go! It was certainly a different experience reading a collection that was not united by genre or author, but I think that's what I like the most about the BASS books. There's something exciting about having no idea what sort of story awaits you next - how long it will, happy or sad, who the protagonist is, the location, etc. I really enjoyed how the protagonists would change in my head as more details were revealed about them throughout the story. There was lots of show not tell storytelling for many of the pieces.

As for favorites, the one that stand out in my memory are:
- Sibling Rivalry by Michael Byers
- Something Street by Carolyn Ferrell
- This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
- In the Event by Meng Jin
- Howl Palace by Leigh Newman
- The Hands of Dirty Children by Alejandro Puyana
- Octopus VII by Anna Reeser
- Kennedy by Kevin Wilson

Now that I've dipped my toes into BASS, I'm excited to try a few of the others, especially since I saw some authors I enjoy on the editors list!

Some of the stories were better than others. A bit uneven. One of the first collections of stories I have read by multiple authors. I may have a preference towards short story collections by the same author.

Collection of short stories.

Found some of the stories very interesting. I got to look through the eyes and experiences of people different from me.

If you are looking for a collection of short stories, you will find a few well worth your time.

What a wealth of stories! I really enjoyed these. I’d say my idiosyncratic tastes align with Curtis Sittenfeld.

A few stories in particular really struck me. They are:
“Sibling Rivalry” by Michael Byers
“In the Event” by Meng Jin
“Howl Palace” by Leigh Newman
“The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains” by Jane Pek

The stories in this collection are all very well written. So the best writing, maybe? However, even taking into account the subjective aspect, it's surprising to me they'd be considered the best stories.

Most of the pieces in this anthology were simply lacking in compellability, in one fashion or another. To take a couple of examples, The Nanny by Emma Cline, It's Not You by Elizabeth McCracken, and Howl Palace by Leigh Newman, were all terrifically written, but I really didn't care much about the characters. (In the former, a naive and vain nanny embroiled in a media scandal after being seduced by and falling in love with her exploitative employer. In the latter, an independent, feisty older woman in Alaska -- a frontierswoman -- confronting her mortality and lost love. In the middle was perhaps the best written story in terms of sheer clever lines and astute observations about an immature woman consoling herself following a failed romance, meeting a much older radio talk host). Sure, the stories told of unique lives that might be lived, worlds we don't inhabit, but it still felt they lacked a transportive quality. Yet they were better than those which depicted the fairly cloistered life of the upper middle class, which seemed to predominate.

The two writers best-known to me, TC Boyle and Kevin Wilson, both produced stories that were enjoyable, however they didn't stand out in any way, I thought.

Maybe a coincidence but the stories that really grabbed me the most were written by authors born outside the United States. Sarah Thankam Mathews' story Rubberdust (Kenyon Review), about the malleable morality and socializing of young children, a familiar road (the cruelty of school kids is old fodder) but which ends on a side street here, made the most emotional connection for me. And there was the imaginative The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains by Jane Pek (Witness) of a modern "mail-order bride" who happens to be an eternal demon jumping from soul to soul. Finally there was the heart-breaking piece that felt as if it might have been a well-honed journalist's account of street children in Venezuela, The Hands of Dirty Children by Alejandro Puyana (American Short Fiction).

In its own special category was the only piece that I enjoyed for its stylistic writing as much or more than the story, Tiphanie Yanique's The Special World (Georgia Review).

Overall, a solid collection, but not enough gems. In reading other contemporary short fiction anthologies, I've sometimes bemoaned how the editors have tried so hard to diversify with underrepresented voices that the quality seemed secondary. So it's ironic (to me) that here the quality seemed to correlate to those underrepresented voices.