Reviewing short story anthologies, it is de rigueur to state that, based on the current selection, the short story is alive and kicking in Australia – which sounds like special pleading for a form on life support. Unlikely to knock survivor memoir off its perch anytime soon, short fiction nevertheless retains its place on our shelves. In rebadging the current anthology, Black Inc. is presumably seeking to broaden the audience beyond the overtly ‘literary’. A predecessor might be The Picador Book of the Beach (1993), edited by Robert Drewe, an anthology also positioned for holiday reading. While Drewe included a cocktail of high-profile local and international authors, Tuffield has chosen exclusively Australian writers. Despite the title and glossy image of a young woman reading Proust on a beach, the current anthology has few stories set in summer or on a beach.

Tuffield’s is very much a twenty-first-century collection, with writing from, and addressing, a culturally diverse Australia. Names such as Elliot Perlman, Paddy O’Reilly, Danielle Wood, Tony Birch, and John Kinsella will be known to many readers, but Tuffield has also included lesser-known authors whose stories stand up well. Nineteen of the twenty-eight contributors are female.

While the classic Australian settings of beach and bush feature rarely in these stories, the small town or non-specific city/town fringe continues to be a site for explorations of identity, alienation, and conflict. The collection has its share of clapped-out cars, of pill-popping and other intimations of substance abuse, and of hetero couples whose relationships are threatened or are in disarray. (The lesbian couple in Kinsella’s ‘Pushing Back’ are, by contrast, highly companionable.) Fathers are often distanced from their children. This is not to say the anthology wallows in adversity. Stories generally require, after all, tension, something at stake, in order to hold our attention. Many contributions here explore familial themes and characters with sensitivity, insight, and sometimes wit.

A number of stories are told, convincingly, from the perspective of youth, most often by a female narrator. These are also often set in the suburbs, which is welcome given the majority of Australians live in them. Allee Richards and Chris Womersley provide outstanding examples. The narrator of Richards’s ‘The Ones with Love and the Ones with Hate’ has cancer, and the story brilliantly charts the changed order in family life when sickness arrives. We get a tender and funny portrait – never maudlin – of mother, father, and two sparring sisters dealing with anxiety and grief. ‘Your face looks like a foot,’ one sister tells another, while we learn that it is best to take your own gossip magazines to hospital when having chemo, as, ‘Theirs will be out of date’. The narrator, Grace, might be a tribute to the many erudite ‘Graces’ adorning the pages of legendary American short story writer Grace Paley, but a more appropriate comparison might be the darkly humorous and moving stories of another major American writer, Lorrie Moore.

Womersley’s ‘Petrichor’ is a wonderful portrait of a youth with a hunchback and a crush on his beautiful neighbour, who sunbathes by her family pool. We learn of the difficulties arising from the narrator’s physique – the brace, the strangers rubbing his humped back for luck – and the implied abuse of the neighbour by her father, who has a face ‘like that of a fallen priest’. Set in Melbourne during the heatwave and dust storm of 1983, it is a compelling story of heightened passion in extreme circumstances.

Other stories have similarly delicate depictions of hardship. Only a few lapse into sentimentality or offer one-dimensional types (think grandmother who has done it tough but with a heart of gold), as if the reader might not be trusted with complex representations. Some are reminders of the effects on individuals of global population movements. Mirandi Riwoe’s ‘Dignity’ touchingly portrays an exploited foreign servant working in the United Arab Emirates. Demet Divaroren’s ‘What Dreams May Come’ sees a young Indian student and middle-aged Turkish man coming to understand each other in a Sydney café.

Aviva Tuffield (photograph by Black Inc.)Most, but not all, stories in this anthology are realist. Elizabeth Tan’s ‘Shirt Dresses that Look a Little Too Much Like Shirts’ is a delightful, futuristic, and absurdist portrait of office life, in which senior management fails hopelessly to understand its staff, corporations fall in love, and android pigeons relay messages. Marlee Jane Ward’s speculative ‘The Walking Thing’ features a town in which the habitants begin walking themselves to death. In Mikaella Clements’s ‘Magpie’, a young woman literally steals her boyfriend’s mouth. And Beejay Silcox’s ‘World Service’ stands out as explicitly metafictional. Opening with, ‘If this were a story, it would start with an argument’, this self-referential schema weaves through the story to serve a brutally honest, unsentimental, and persuasive narration up there with the best in this new, and welcome, ‘Best’ compilation.