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terplay between ambition and disillusionment william pei shih contributor note best american short stories 2025 some of the stories i ve read so far in this volume have dealt with tragedies with losses beyond any i ve survived and i ve spent more than a few teary moments over these pages but none has caused me the degree of hurt that this story inflicted it s not just because i recognize the emotional landscape but because of the fury i feel at the academic malpractice displayed in the story and at the result the quenching of an artist s love for the art the replacement of creative joy with hopeless apathy the story takes place at a prestigious music festival and is narrated by a young pianist a recent conservatory graduate a record producer asks him to have coffee and discuss potential recording projects this is the kind of meeting a fledgling performer lives for a way to step into the limelight to move a career into a higher orbit also at the festival the pianist s former piano teacher in fact the head of the conservatory from which he graduated now we were all at the music festival together in new england and my piano teacher that well known and widely respected pianist with long fingers that cast even longer shadows who i had wished in all my time at the conservatory to notice me in the way that a coach might notice and pass along their expertise to a budding younger athlete must have seen me and the record producer talking together and from the corner of my eye i watched as my piano teacher made their way over across the verdant lawn as it was the height of summer toward us and come to say hello to me and i was nothing short of elated up until then my piano teacher s schedule had been too busy or full to spend any meaningful time with me at the festival and even during our three years at the conservatory together my piano teacher then saw that we were going to sit down for coffee and to my utter delight and even excitement which i had to find the strength in me to suppress asked if they could join us it was shortly before the masterclass that my piano teacher was about to give at the festival and since we had a few moments to spare i said of course because in truth in all of my time of studying with my piano teacher for one reason or another the music of other people other more important and promising students kept getting in the way oh the eagerness of the student delighted to be finally recognized by his piano teacher the hope that an endorsement might help move the record producer from query to contract we find out a lot more about the many ways the piano teacher left the student to his own devices during the conservatory years fifteen times as i count them fifteen repetitions of educational abandonment of valuing other students other projects more than our pianist ouch it gets a bit repetitious to be honest oh different reasons crop up other students were more promising more attractive better connected in terms of future fund raising but the pianist chose this particular conservatory this particular piano teacher because he favored the same kind of music rachmaninoff turns out the pianist has realized in retrospect that might not have been the wisest choice after all how many rachmaninoff experts can the concert industry support at one time this retrospect has resulted from this very meeting at this very music festival there s a particular exchange where i noted wow in the margin an undercutting so diabolical so obvious it s not really believable but it is believable i believe this is the masterclass of the story i believe the record producer has seen this kind of sabotage a hundred times and knows when to cut his losses i believe it happens every day in various performance fields in elegant academies in literary circles for that matter in high school group projects in church bake sale meetings in family reunions but as presented in this story it leads to a loss of art i happen to know a number of professional musicians none are household names even to afficionados of their particular niches they make good livings in schools and choir lofts in orchestras and local holiday celebrations most writers make their living teaching or in entirely non literary fields publishing stories and books that never make best of the year lists somehow they keep the joy of the art alive they probably have fantasies of wild success but they re also realists our pianist is not that lucky he uses the word bludgeon several times at one point his joy didn t survive that he no longer plays and that is what hurts me the final paragraphs of the story give the pianist the final word one that will only occur in fantasy but is nonetheless simultaneously accusation and self recognition of semi voluntary collaboration but wait there s more shih uses two stylistic devices that while purposeful made the story almost unpleasant for me to read both are evident in the sole quote i ve included the story is available online link below the first is the use of the singular they throughout when referring to both the piano teacher and the record producer there s really no reason why the story requires this gender is not an issue i wonder if it s a way to remove gender from the equation this didn t happen because men are like this or because that s how women are but i think it s more likely to be a tip to the future to normalizing this usage so it doesn t stand out so glaringly so it isn t such a problem when a non binary person asks for the correct pronoun address if everyone is they it s no longer a marker no longer a problem i will admit there is some benefit to gendered pronouns in a story crowded with characters since it may help distinguish one from another but i suspect there are ways around that i grew up when ms was just emerging on the scene and it was considered a huge problem as were women bosses in general all those problems seem to have worked themselves out perhaps the singular they will as well i rather doubt it but it s an interesting way to put it out there the stylistic usage more germane to the story is the repetition of the phrase my piano teacher i found this annoying as hell out of curiosity i ran the story through a text to speech reader and it was even more annoying it s not a flaw however nor a mistake to some degree it s necessary since there are no names in the story the second story like this what s going on but it s exaggerated beyond need as such it emphasizes how the piano teacher lives in the pianist s head rent free even now long after graduation long after the end of his music career when he s given up piano altogether it s not a healthy habitation but as the pianist says yes it was you it was always of course you i have similar voices living rent free in my head they too are not healthy yet i can t seem to oust them the best i can do is recognize when i m acting on them and put a stop to it i wonder how many negative forces in the world are caused by such arrangements people still angry years later over some failing some cruelty acting out against others or against the world at large and then i wonder how many pianists writers artists inventors creators of all kinds let their expressions be censored by the rent free inhabitants i wonder if there s any way to evict them for the good of us all the story is available online at los angeles review visit the author s website to find out more about his work share this share print opens in new window print share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading 3 comments posted in bass 2025 what i ve been reading writing reading tagged william pei shih bass 2025 julian robles third room from the drift 12 posted by karen carlson on december 14 2025 the drift art by brooke bourgeois this story holds and hides a mexico i fled from incomplete names titles birdsong the word for things i relinquish these to the man in the third room julian robles contributor note best american short stories 2025 it s not terribly unusual that i don t feel like i get a story in bass it s more unusual however that i feel like i don t get a contributor note but let s put that aside for the moment fortunately the story is available online link below so readers here are welcome encouraged begged to let me know what i m missing the contributor note is alas not available but we ve put that aside so stop thinking about it the availability of the story also allows me to dispense with any summary beyond it s about a strange guest in the third bedroom even that doesn t sound right is it about the guest about the lawful tenant what about the landlord the other visitors whose story is it anyway ah the question i come back to when i m lost but i m not sure i have an answer here in november my landlord and her family left the city to celebrate the abrupt cessation of her husband s paralysis the night before they embarked on their trip the landlord invited me to dinner her family lived in the apartment directly above mine the husband was honduran she was mexican their two year old daughter was i supposed honduran mexican or perhaps mexican honduran or simply mexican since mexico was the country we lived in she was white like her parents we ordered italian food from the restaurant around the corner the landlord s husband now healthy i judged it appropriate to at last bring to her attention certain features of the apartment in need of repair low water pressure in the shower a loose doorknob flickering lights and naturally the issue in the third bedroom but out of respect for their solemn dinnertime recollections of the husband s illness and after witnessing their elation in describing the morning of his recovery i again postponed broaching these issues i wrote dozens of short paragraphs about all kinds of things i saw in the story gender class economic disparities race self absorption personal distance choices of relationships professional purpose communicative style story structure particularly the landlord s place as the opening and closing with an additional appearance in the middle maybe i ll let them stand maybe i won t fact is this is a hypnotic story that seems to go off on tangents but those tangents seem terribly important somehow i don t know how they all add up but it s mesmerizing let s start with the first person narrator nameless which is ironic since nameless protagonists is one of the recurring complaints in the story but no one has names so everyone is identified by their relationship to the narrator the girlfriend the writer the landlord the landlord s husband the man in the third room while we re at it let s look at gender identifiers the landlord is a woman yet the narrator refers to her as a landlord this could simply be contemporary convention the term landlady does seem outdated or it could be either a subtle remark on gender fluidity or on class she is the lord the owner and the narrator has a wary view of landlords i spent some time looking at gender identifiers for the narrator and didn t find any my read is male but there are certain places where the text leans female kissing the baby hugging the landlord s husband plucking eyebrows this could be a deliberate if subtle presentation of gender fluidity in which case this is the first time i ve read a non binary character who wasn t specifically presented as such as part of the characterization but i think it s just part of the overall vagueness of the story the hypnotic sense that lets us read what we want to read for convenience i will refer to the narrator as he since there s too much going on to worry about the singular they can you see why i say i don t get this story i haven t even gotten into the story yet and i m awash in detail they can t all matter can they like why the title is third room and not the third room yet for all that detail the story was a very smooth first read in fact i didn t make a single mark on the pages my first time through that s very unusual for me i just kept reading like i was being lulled to sleep by the rhythmic sound of a railroad car covering a long flat distance at the top of the list was the man who had been living in the third bedroom of the apartment since at least september my reaction upon spying him through the kitchen window was less fear and more akin to fatigue yet another chore i was in the middle of cooking breakfast and i had an omelet to attend to then i had to clean the bathroom and later that afternoon i had an appointment with the archivists at a rare book library i ll deal with him later i thought when i came home that evening he was still in the room still seated at the desk and still writing the only difference in the scene was that the bedroom s overhead light had been turned on the third room suffered from poor exposure to natural light its solitary bulb had likely been emitting that dull whitish glow since the early afternoon i find it curious that the narrator never goes into the room to inquire what the man is doing there maybe that s a good thing since it seems that those who do go in never come out it s sort of a black hole that room since information never escapes i went down more than a few rabbit holes one of them is the writer not the writer in the third room but the writer with whom the narrator has coffee and then invites to see the writer in the third room this writer was fifteen years older than me spoke little spanish and had recently moved to mexico for reasons that remained unclear the writer was from new york and had written books about nameless protagonists who abandon their lives and flee to comfortably defamiliarized places their sites of refuge weren t exotic in the traditional sense of the word they were cities where everyone spoke english and that people from new york recognized at least in name in the instances where names were provided the idea was that the characters lost their identities upon entering these uncanny realities or arrived at them with aspirations of nonexistence meant to comment i supposed on a pervasive homogenization and disintegration of identity in our the readers lives but the settings of these stories were so plainly removed from the world of economic and political exigencies and by no coincidence invariably devoid of non white characters that they became paradoxically comfortable and familiar to new york literary audiences and thus i often fell asleep reading this writer s books nonetheless given his experience in matters of people willfully disappeared nameless or otherwise effaced i thought he might have suggestions for how best to rid myself of the man in the third room i m betting there are those more familiar with the literary world than i am who know who thi...