Really enjoyed these -- read them preparatory to reading Saunders' new book on Russian authors (into that now, & excellent as expected), and the practice does seem to have toned my brain a bit!

I'm a sucker for this series of anthologies, and I've read more by a number of authors I first learned about in the short story series. This one got off to a slow start for me. I very much liked the opening story by T.C. Boyle ("Are We Not Men?"), though I've been sort of meh about a lot of his stuff. Then I didn't much love anything in the collection until "Ugly" by Mary Gordon, which I liked a lot. Apparently authors in the last half of the alphabet really did the trick for me in 2016, as I dog-eared these stories after that early drought:

- "Ancient Rome" by Kyle McCarthy
- "Last Day on Earth" by Erick Puchner
- "Novostroika" by Maria Reva
- "Gender Studies" by Curtis Sittenfeld
- "Famous Actor" by Jess Walter

None of these made me think "I must go out right away and acquire all of this author's work" but I found these worthwhile or fun. Others in the collection ranged from "pretty good" to "meh" to "well 25 minutes sure did go by while I read that." ( )

I especially liked the stories by Danielle Evans, Mary Gordon, Lauren Groff, Sonya Larson, Maria Reva, Jim Shepard, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Jess Walter. Others were wel-written by didn't cover new ground (TC Boyle, Eric Puchner, Emma Cline). ( )

I have been reading this series since 1990. I receive it each Christmas from my wife and slowly pick my way through it until June or July. I always enjoy the diversity of topics and styles. Some of the authors are old friends from previous years, others are new. I like some of the stories better than others but seldom do I dislike one. A favorite from this year was the last story in the volume, Famous Actor by Jess Walter. A woman meets a famous actor at a party. They go to her home for a one-night stand and in her thoughts she reviews his films. Another was Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain, by Danielle Evans, about an on-again off-again wedding. A third was Hog for Sorrow by Leopoldine Core. Two young women with an uneasy friendship work in a massage parlor. Other than this volume I do not read many short stories. But if novels are coffee, short stories are espresso, short, intense and flavorful. ( )

An interesting mix this year. While I liked Meg Wolitzer's intro on reading short fiction in the age of Trump, she didn't get to what struck me as most notable in the collection, which is that so many of the stories had sexual power plays at their center. Particularly interesting given the huge buzz around "Cat People," Kristen Roupenian's recent piece in the New Yorker, which was all about that—sex, but not so much the sex itself as the power dynamics, how those sands continuously shift between two people. I wonder if it isn’t tapping into a certain zeitgeist right now—granted, the stories in BASS were all written in 2016, before Trump took office and this year's outcry against sexual abusers, but if you want to see culture as a barometer for the times (sometimes I do and sometimes I don't), these issues have been simmering.

Anyway, a low-key but mainly good batch. Standouts for me were "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," "Ugly," "Gabe Dove," "Last Day on Earth," "Gender Studies." No one who's reviewed this seemed to like Jim Shepard's longish "Telemachus," but it has the best last-paragraph payoff of them all. I'm tempted to see how many of the Other Distinguished Stories listed in the back I can find, to see what else turned up on the editors' radar. ( )