The Best Short Stories from the Heart of the Country

Donna Baier Stein Picks Her Midwestern Favorites, from Campbell to Dybek

On March 29, 1976, the New Yorker ran a now-iconic cover called “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” This illustration by Saul Steinberg showed the Midwest—that land of flat vowels, grain silos, and repression—as a condensed strip of Kansas Corn, Nebraska, Kansas City, and Chicago as its only landmarks. Maybe it was this mindset that, too often, led folks who grew up in the no-man’s land between the coasts to mistakenly assume their home wasn’t worth writing about.

My first realization that my hometown of Kansas City was a worthy subject for literature came when I read the novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. The 1990 movie that combined these two books by Evan Connell was filmed in a house right down the street from my parents.

It’s not just novelists like Connell, Gillian Flynn, John Greene, and Jane Hamilton who have turned their attention to the so-called flyover states. Short story writers have, too. Here are some collections of note.