Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses (2016)

As the cliché goes, an anthology is like a good party where guests meet friends old and new. At this party, new friends include Christian Kiefer and his story "Hollywood and Toadvine," about Ronald Reagan reading Danielle Steel and Cormac McCarthy novels sent to him by Mikhail Gorbachev. In the essay "Constance Bailey in the Year of Monica Lewinsky," Sarah Vallance details her time as a Harvard University student researching health care access for the poor, and the friendship she developed with 88-year-old Connie and an attack cat named Inky. The old friends here include "Map-Reading," Richard Bausch's tale about fiftysomething Benton meeting his twentysomething stepsister, whom he hasn't seen since she was three. Joyce Carol Oates relates her childhood reading experiences at a vegetable and fruit stand in Millersport, NY, in "The Childhood of the Reader." Poetry entries feature "The Autistic Son," a heart-tugging work by Scott Morgan, and Keetje Kuipers's "Migration Instinct," which begins with the haunting line: "Today the wife of the last man who made me lonely is having a baby."