THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1974

Foley dedicates her thirty-third ""Yearbook of the American Short Story"" to William Saroyan, includes one of his most recent pieces and also features his recipe for writing a story in the editor's foreword: ""Think of America. . .The whole thing. . . . Let this be your purpose: to suggest this great country."" Which is what this great melting pot of selections from the big (Playboy, Ms., Atlantic, The New Yorker) and the little (The Southern Review, The Colorado Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Salamagundi) turns out to be -- a non-parochial eclectic survey of folks as distinctively ours as momism and her apple pie, a roundup that will especially please the detractors of the Eastern Establishment conspiracy/tendency to publish each other. Agnes Boyer writes about ""The Deserter"" who has fled to Canada but still has the mountain highlands of central Pennsylvania clear in his voice; Eleanor Clark's ""A Summer in Puerto Rico"" is a diarist's vivid portrait of that neglected corner of the United States; Lewis B. Horne's ""Mansion, Magic and Miracle"" brings a bit of Hollywood and illusion to the life of a farm boy in an isolated valley of simple church-goers; John L'Heureux centers ""A Family Affair"" on the amours of a white-trash pre-adolescent with the soldiers at a club called the Blue Spider; ""The Tide and Isaac Bates"" by Stephen Minot takes us up to Yankee Maine; Beverly Mitchell's ""Letter from Sakaye"" out West to a de facto segregated American/Japanese community before the Second World War; and Alice Walker's ""The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff"" describes the bitterness of a black woman refused welfare by a blonde moppet in the Depression era South. There are lots of newcomers, and notable selections too by Maxine Kumin, Mary Lavin, John Updike. Foley has a strong bias for traditional realism but as always produces an honorable representation of the fiction writing circuit.