King of the hill

When, a friend asked recently, does Stephen King sleep? Not only does he routinely crank out two or more novels a year, he also performs various ephemeral tasks of the 21st century man of (popular) letters: giving talks and readings, contributing blurbs, writing a column for Entertainment Weekly and playing with his writers' band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, at book festivals nationwide.

King's latest side project is editing "The Best American Short Stories 2007" (Houghton Mifflin: 428 pp., $14 paper), a job previously undertaken by, among others, Raymond Carver, Jane Smiley and E.L. Doctorow. That's rarified company, and King's participation says something about his aspirations to transcend the arbitrary limitations of genre. At the same time, he's also gleefully unapologetic about his love of genre writing, suggesting that what's important is not so much what we read but that we read at all.

You might expect that such a sensibility would inform "The Best American Short Stories 2007," that King would try to blur the boundaries, much as Michael Chabon did with the anthologies he edited for McSweeney's a few years back. Yet what's striking about this collection is how little genre is part of the package, how traditional its contents are. Here, you’ll find Alice Munro and Louis Auchincloss, Ann Beattie and Richard Russo. Fine writers all, but where are the outsiders: the Poppy Z. Brites, the Kelly Links? The closest King comes is with stories by Roy Kesey and the woefully under-read Jim Shepard, whose "Sans Farine" is typically adventurous, narrated by an executioner during the French revolution.

Shepard — not unlike King or Chabon — eclipses the line between literature and popular fiction; he's written stories inspired by science fiction trading cards and old movies, including one from the perspective of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In "The Best American Stories 2007," however, his vision represents the path not taken, which is the last thing you’d expect from King.

David L. Ulin