The great theme of BASS 2024 is that when trouble strikes, it's okay to hide or run away

It's sort of ridiculous to try to draw themes for short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories. None of the stories in it were written with the intention of going together. They're culled from hundreds of thousands of stories published in English each year, whittled down to a list of top candidates of around a hundred or so, then whittled down again to the final twenty. They are intentionally chosen to demonstrate diversity of voices, not unity. While the O. Henry Anthology ("The Best Short Stories" collection, rather than "Best American Short Stories") does seem to give some consideration in its mix of stories to creating unity by selecting stories that share subject matter or theme and then try to place them in conversation with each other, BASS really doesn't. Even their choice of story order, always done by author last name, reflects this. If one story seems to be placed where it is because of its relationship to the story before it, that's just a coincidence.

Nonetheless, the BASS anthology is a cultural artifact, and as an artifact, it represents the culture that made it and the culture which it hopes to shape. In a thousand years, if someone happened to leaf through the digital pages of BASS, things might leap out to them that don't to us. (Man, the third decade of the 21st century was sure obsessed with their lame technology!) In spite of the piecemeal way in which is is assembled, it still presents itself, to an outside observer, as a singular object, so I'm going to look at it, just briefly, based on a reading that seeks for some kind of unity. 

The things that pops out at me most are the number of stories in which the reaction to trauma or stress is to hide or run away. Let's see:

-In "The Magic Bangle," the narrator attempts to hide in plain sight in order to be able to turn his gay-hating town into a gay paradise. 

-In "Viola in Mid-Winter," Viola uses a glamour spell to remain hidden from a romantic partner who hurt her. 

-"Blessed Deliverance" features a narrator who keeps his own name hidden, and the climax features rabbits being set free to run away. 

-"The Bed & Breakfast" features a young narrator trying to avoid her own coming of age as long as she can. 

-In "Dorcester," the narrator runs away from reading his poem when he realizes what a phony he is. 

-"Seeing Through Maps" has a son who runs away to escape his family's crazy. 

-"Engelond" is about an attempt to escape one set of circumstances followed by the desperate attempt to flee the first attempt to escape.

-"P's Parties" features a narrator who enjoys remaining hidden in the anonymity that parties provide. 

-Where do I even begin with the theme of hiding in "Baboons"? The utility of hiding as a survival mechanism is possibly the central theme of the story. 

-In "Valley of the Moon," Tongsu retreats from a modernizing society after the Korean War, preferring the presence of ghosts and moonlight on his family's secluded old farm. 

Is this a reflection of society?

Again, this is all a very tenuous thing to do because of the semi-randomness of a BASS anthology, but let's look at BASS as a product of a certain time. That time is really 2023, of course, because that's when the stories were published. And many were written, at least in part, long before that. Since the anthology says "2024" on it, though, and since it came out weeks before the 2024 election, it's hard not to read that as the historical moment of the anthology, even if the individual stories belong to a somewhat different moment. The 2024 election,  for now, stands out to me partly for the way in which so many people I know have disengaged from news since the election, because they just can't deal with it. Or the way in which some rich people who don't like Trump have moved to another country. Going underground, either literally or emotionally, seems to be a big part of the reaction of the 48 percent of us who didn't want this outcome. 

I've come to be kind of skeptical about the ability of fiction to directly change the course of political history. The BASS 2024 story that most directly addresses American politics, "Democracy in America," is easily the weakest story in the anthology. I realize there are a few examples from history of fiction that has changed politics through a frontal attack, but those example are rare and limited. Fiction is great at a limited number of things, and at those things, it's not just great, but really great. It's great for imagining different ways things could be. It's great at helping develop empathy. It's great at raising questions. It's great at helping people to become clearer thinkers about issues with no obvious right answer. It can, when a story becomes so widely a part of culture that it is on the level of myth, affect the self-image of entire groups of people. 

And it's great at helping people to escape or survive hard times. 

That's BASS of 2024. Nothing in the anthology is going to change the political course we're on. It probably won't even elevate our dumb national political discourse by the slightest nanometer. But fiction has been a part of human society for as long as we've been around because it has a useful role in our survival in a wide variety of social contexts. In the current context, that role might be to help folks batten down the hatches emotionally and prepare for the storm.