This is not to say that fiction must be all happy endings and puppy dogs, but a little light amid the darkness would have been appreciated, and surely would have been more representative of Australian life. Chris Womersley must be thanked for at least sparing several kittens in his excellent story ‘The Age of Terror’, one of the collection’s highlights. Others who skilfully weave their sobering visions of the apparently unlucky country are Joanne Riccioni (a beautiful Irishwoman is brutally mashed in a car crash); Sherryl Clark (a man loses his job, digs a hole, his wife leaves him); Nam Le (gang warfare by the Yarra goes sour); Michael McGirr (two fallen philosophers share a room in a boarding house); Robert Drewe (a boy prone to tantrums goes off the rails as an adult); Paddy O’Reilly (a polite Indian salesman plies his wares in a terrifying suburb); Josephine Rowe (a mother flees an abusive partner with her kids); David Francis (an expat returns to the farm and is forced to deal with its simmering problems); and, in the collection’s best story, Anna Krien (floodwaters conceal a man’s misdeeds).

These contributors exhibit a depth of understanding of the short form that is so convincing and complete that they end up making everyone else look bad. Their consummate skill serves to highlight deficiencies in too many of the remaining stories, some of which are, to be kind, incongruous, and to be brutal, undeserving of such a masthead. In particular, there is a run of previously unpublished stories in the middle of the collection that are comprehensively outclassed by those around them that have already passed under the hands of several editors. Those that have previously appeared in the Griffith Review, Brothers and Sisters and Readings and Writings: Forty Years of Books (2009) are uniformly excellent, as one might expect, given their extensive peer review. It is when Kennedy strikes out on her own that matters go awry. While she must be congratulated for daring to choose Joanne Riccioni’s second-placed Age short story contest entry over the winner, and for printing Josephine Rowe’s ultra short story from poster-zine Small Room (Rowe manages to say more in five hundred words than most of her fellow contributors fail to say in several thousand, A.S. Patric’s ponderous, smug final story being the worst offender), the absence of any stories from Meanjin and lesser-known but well-established fiction sources such as Kill Your Darlings and The Lifted Brow is puzzling.

Kennedy states in her introduction that it was those tales that lingered in her mind enough to prompt re-readings that she favoured. It is worth remembering that these are not the ‘best’ Australian stories of 2010. They are simply Cate Kennedy’s favourites, in a collection that proves to be one of the more depressing reads of the year.

Kennedy appears again as a contributor in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, along with six other writers who appear in both collections. This anthology is a different proposition entirely. Aviva Tuffield, fiction acquisitions editor at Scribe, brings her experienced eye to bear in choosing thirty-six stories that are much more representative of modern Australia than Kennedy’s dour selection. Ironically, Kennedy herself pens the best of these. ‘Static’ is a stunning portrait of a family Christmas replete with heartbreaking minutiae, proving beyond doubt that when she is on form, Kennedy is the nation’s foremost short fiction writer.

There are many other writers in this collection snapping at her heels, however. Apart from a bad run of mawkish, jarring stories a quarter of the way through, Tuffield offers up an embarrassment of delights. It is a rare pleasure to read such a consistent collection of short fiction. Tuffield successfully juggles genres and styles without ever sacrificing quality, though credit must also go to the writers, many of whom are not well known, for their willingness to experiment with and incorporate that most common of Australian qualities sorely lacking in Black Inc.’s collection – humour.

Jane Sullivan sets the ball rolling with her excellent tale of trapeze artists, a taster of her forthcoming novel, sure to be anticipated after this. The subsequent five stories are a dazzling example of the talents on offer in Australian fiction. After reading these short works by Sullivan, Ryan O’Neill, Jacinta Halloran, Melissa Beit, Debra Adelaide, and A.G. McNeil, one emerges clear-headed and schooled in the art of fiction.

O’Neill, in what is becoming a trademark tic, breaks his narrative down into eight parts, each named after a pejorative, explaining how the son of a boorish Scotsman first encountered such words. His skilful use of humour is echoed by Jacinta Halloran, who somehow, via realistic, witty dialogue, manages to make a chemotherapy story upbeat. Beit’s extraordinary tale of Siamese twins is, if anything, too short, though disappointment is rapidly curtailed by Adelaide. ‘Writing [in] the New Millennium’ is a scathing satire of the industry that exists to exploit hopeful writers and is itself, ironically, a masterful lesson in writing humorous fiction that any budding writer would be well advised to read.

It is at this point, two-thirds of the way through the collection, that Tuffield hits the reader with a body blow worthy of a heavyweight boxer. McNeil’s ‘Reckless, Susceptible’ raises the bar. His narrator recalls a mural on the ceiling of his brother’s childhood bedroom, depicting chimerical creatures that now haunt him in adulthood. McNeil succeeds in capturing the internal life of an ordinary Australian without ever resorting to the clichés too often found in Australian fiction. This would easily have been the collection’s highlight had Cate Kennedy not come along fifty pages later to deliver a knockout punch.

Trim back the half dozen weak stories to reduce the number to thirty, and New Australian Stories 2 would be the best collection of Australian short fiction in recent memory. Even with those, it is still a diverse, hugely enjoyable compendium that knocks the strangely maudlin Best Australian Stories 2010 out of the park. Honours this year to Scribe.