BASS 2012: "North Country" by Roxane Gay

I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, and am only holding out until March to get my hands on some more (I cannot resist the lure of Karen Russell, particularly after Michael Shaub called Vampires in the Lemon Grove "magnificent" and "flawless.") and I am loving it. I've never gorged myself on short fiction, but I've always enjoyed it. I think one of the things that really strikes me is that with good short fiction, I can get everything I get out of a good novel, but in concentrated form. Perhaps this is why, as a huge Stephen King buff, I love the novels but adore the short fiction. The last novel I read of his was Under the Dome, and I was massively impressed as usual by his talents as a world builder, but there is something to be said about a writer who can spend a few hundred pages setting up an elaborate literary ecosystem and can also do it in a single-serving chunk.

Currently I'm working my way through The Best American Short Stories 2012, which gets me out of my comfort zone a little since I'm not picking and choosing authors, or even subject matter--I pretty much go into the stories blind, with the exception of a couple that have since become title stories in anthologies of other works by their authors.

How I Gave My Teeth to Art

A little backstory about myself is necessary for this post: teeth freak me out. In coming days you'll see me post about horror films, shows, and books, but but the one thing that I really can't abide, and that will get me to avoid watching something, is stuff happening to people's teeth. I have never seen Marathon Man, and I never will. I shudder at the thought.

So recently, as I've been trying to get over my fears, I decided that there was no better way to work through this issue than by embracing my teeth and giving them up to be used in a work of art.