George Saunders’ “Civilwarland in Bad Decline” is the story, and the book, really, that had the most personal and literary influence on me. I remember finding the book in some used bookstore and thinking, bad decline, that’s a really interesting phrase. I think I bought it on the title alone. At the time, I had finished a novel, a Daniel Woodrell-inspired/ripped-off rural noir thing called Fresh Fruit and Ammo, which is still sitting in my closet somewhere, and I had just started writing stories. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of the way most people do it, which is to write stories and then, once you kind of know what you’re doing, start working on a novel. The stories I was writing were all these very straightforward, realistic takes on folks I’d grown up with and around in Central Pennsylvania. They were no good, these stories, and I kind of knew it, but I also really didn’t know what else to write.

And then I read “Civilwarland” and it was like this whole thing, the idea of the short story and what it could be, just opened up. Wow, these things can be surreal and funny and they can exist in these alternate universes, and all the while they can still say way more about the actual world that we live in, and specifically that world of real, working, striving, good hearted but not necessarily brilliant people who I was trying to write about in the first place.

You can’t help what you love. So in advance I’d like to make no apologies for the stories I’ve picked for my dream anthology. I claim no exhaustive review or attempts at even-handedness in my choices, if such claims are even worth making. I didn’t consider who wrote these stories—in about half the cases I couldn’t remember who wrote them, or I couldn’t remember the title, or both.

But I did remember a moment, an image, an ache. I closed my eyes and these things came to me and then I wrote down, “That one I think it’s called bird about this crazy pilot” and “the girl whose father is in prison and one of his former cronies gets her out of town and there’s something about a fire.”

Even if I couldn’t remember the story’s title or author, I was pretty sure I could find it, because I’d probably first read it in an anthology like New Stories from the South or O. Henry Prize Stories or Best American Short Stories. In a few cases I’d found favorites in an author’s story collection. In all cases, tripping across a story I loved led me to seek out more of the author’s work.

While I drew from contemporary sources, only four out of the eleven stories I chose were published after 2000. The most recent was originally published in 2004, and the earliest one appeared first in 1989, the year I graduated from high school. I guess I needed at least a couple of years to realize that a story had stayed with me.

So here is my love letter to these eleven stories, which I listed in alphabetical order by the author’s last name (though it’s nice to see the list arbitrarily sandwiched by pieces first published more than a decade apart in The Greensboro Review, where I was an assistant editor for a year while working on my MFA). I won’t try to write with any authority about their literary quality or what I think the writer was trying to do or whatever. I’m just going to talk about what they did to me.