Islands have often proved fertile ground for fiction. From Prospero's conjured dreamscape to the allegoric atoll of "Lord of the Flies," remote shores can be ideal test sites for the vagaries of human behavior. Utopian, dystopian, fantastic or mundane, they rise from the sea less as landmasses than as literary metaphors. Yet the island in Paul Yoon's "Once the Shore" manages to be both: a rich, fully realized place and a common thread that links its residents through history and time.
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted his hair. “There was a time,” the woman said, “when he bathed for me and me alone.”