I can’t recommend this movie enough. It has everything: a murder mystery, a love story, comedy, tragedy, a novelist… Set in Argentina, the premise is a retired police detective decides to write a novel about this murder that happened 25 years ago. The narrative seamlessly moves back and forth between now and then to create a rich, fulfilling story. It basically does everything you’d want a novel to do. Think Crime and Punishment meets Love in the Time of Cholera.

Sycamore Review has put together an anthology of interviews from their pages. Due out this summer, it includes my and Ben Kolp’s interview with Kate Bernheimer.

This one was edited by Edward P. Jones, and while there’s not quite the same tonal shifts that you see with different editors of Best American Stories, Jones’s picks tend to be longer and bit grimmer than usual (for instance, two stories with dead dogs, one story with a parrot run over by a lawn mower, and at least one rape). While some of it was even more brutal than I care for, there were quite a few highlights:

• James Lee Burke, “A Season of Regret” — this is just a great suspense story set in Montana, about an old guy in conflict with some bikers
• Joshua Ferris, “Ghost Town Choir” — about a country music singer’s breakup with a single mother; the child, in need of some kind of male role model, keeps visiting the singer. What’s neat is the shift in POV — two first-person narrators (the singer and the kid) with nothing but a space break to signify the shift. Ferris pulls it off well.
• Tim Gautreaux, “The Safe” — a locked safe is delivered to a junkyard, and the story is the mystery of what’s inside.
• Cary Holladay, “Hollyhocks” — she had a story in the 2009 anthology, which was interesting enough, but this story is about some of the same characters. What I like about novels is that you get more than just a glimpse, and Holladay seems to be working on a series of stories about the Fenton family, in rural Virginia in the 1920s, and I love the way the two stories are linked.
• Daniel Wallace, “A Terrible Thing” — a man has a history of dating disfigured women (one missing a hand, one with burn scars, etc.); his wife, who is not disfigured, finds out, and begins obsessing over what could be wrong with herself.

The GEICO cavemen were inspired by a George Saunders short story:

The brief from the client had been short: “Make people understand that GEICO.com is simple.” Both Lawson and Noel Ritter, the art director, had just finished reading a short story, “Pastoralia,” about people who have to play Neanderthals in a theme park. After a synaptic sizzle or two, a slogan was born: “GEICO.com: So easy a caveman can do it.”

I’m inconsistent when I read anthologies. I skip around, set them aside, read a story here or there. After finishing the 2009 edition, I went back and read the 2008 New Stories from the South cover to cover. I’ve written about some of the writers before (here, here, and here). Other highlights include:

• Pinckney Benedict, “Bridge of Sighs.” A kid and his father are going farm to farm and slaughtering cows to prevent the spread of disease. Strange and disturbing.
• Stephanie Soileau, “So This Is Permanence.” A teenage girl has a baby, and doesn’t know what to do with it. At one point she locks it in the closet and going out with friends. I was skeptical when I began the story, having no interest in teenage girls or babies, but this story really won me over. Very memorable.
• David James Poissant, “Lizard Man.” This won Playboy’s college fiction contest a few years ago.  This is about two friends driving to collect remains from one of their fathers, who just passed away. They have a compelling adventure with an alligator.
• Bret Anthony Johnston, “Republican.” The teenage son of a pawnshop owner gets a job delivering food for a Mexican restaurant. His mother has abandoned him and his father, and his father gives him a Cadillac with a torn-up roof. Nothing like a good story about a teenager’s first job.
• Kevin Brockmeier, “Andrea Is Changing Her Name.” Wow. This story is about a girl, and a few pages in there’s this POV twist: the narrator is actually Brockmeier, going omniscient into the girl’s head. He says things like, “It was the first time she could remember speaking to me outside of class.” The first time this narrator popped in, I worried it was just a stupid gimmick, but the story was really affecting. Very well done.

It’s coming faster than we think. Alex at Marginal Revolution pointed to this: they’ve created a self-replicating synthetic bacteria cell.  (Not everyone is impressed.)

I finally read through this anthology, which I received at Christmas (thanks, Brian!). There’s always some good stories here, and some of my favorites were:

• Katherine Karlin, “Muscle Memory” — An 18-year-old girl working at a Gulf Coast shipyard is trying to learn to weld from this old guy musician. Good descriptions of the work.
• Geoff Wyss, “Child of God” — A teacher at a Catholic school narrates the scandal of a pregnant student. Wyss makes a teacher’s life interesting, which I think is hard to pull off these days since most writers are teachers.
• Kevin Wilson, “No Joke, This Is Going to Be Painful” — A young woman living with her sister and her sister’s husband goes out with some of their friends and creates a scandal when she hooks up with this married guy. Both the protagonist and the married guy are kind of dim, and in a hard psychological place, yet Wilson never judges them, instead makes us sympathize.
• Jill McCorkle, “Magic Words” — This was probably my favorite story from the collection. It’s about a woman who drops off her teenage daughter at the movies, and is then on her way to have an affair at a Days Inn. Stuff happens. Go read it.
• Michael Knight, “Grand Old Party” — I think this is a contender for my second favorite story, about a guy who shows up at his wife’s lovers house, scares the lover away, then eats Chinese food. Knight’s in cliche territory, but keeps the material fresh.
• Elizabeth Spencer,” Sightings” — A half-blind divorced man’s teenage daughter has run away and shown up at his house, and his ex-wife and her fiance show up. This is the first I’ve read of Spencer, and I’m looking forward to reading more.
• George Singleton, “Between Wrecks” — George is as zany as ever, always worth reading. Two guys stuck at a roadside diner because the highway is blocked with a wreck on both sides. A drunk roams from table to table saying, “Ford ate” (four to eight hours until the wreck clears), and evangelists are selling gold teeth and muscadine wine.