Roxane Gay

Heidi Pitlor

Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year's Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction. "I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed," writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018, "but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world." The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher--all characters and circumstances that show us what we "need to know about the lives of others."

The Best American Short Stories 2018

Junot Díaz

Award-winning and best-selling author Junot Díaz guest edits this year's The Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction.

The Best American Short Stories 2016

Lorrie Moore

For the 100th anniversary of "The Best American Short Stories" series, a retrospective of stories selected by master of the form Lorrie Moore. The stories, along with one hundred years of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and decade-by-decade analysis, tell the history of American short fiction, showcasing representative moments in the series as well as literary moments in time.

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers TOGETHER, THEY MAKE THE PERFECT FEMINIST MOTHER Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. Years of navigating her own and America’s cultural definition of motherhood have left her a lapsed idealist. Lana Breban is a high-profile lawyer, economist, and advocate for women’s rights with designs on elected office. She also has a son. Lana and her staff have decided she needs help softening her image in the eyes of the public and that a memoir about her life as a mother will help. Allie struggles to write Lana’s book as obstacles pile up: not enough childcare, looming deadlines, an unresponsive subject, an ill-defined romantic relationship on the verge of slipping away. Eventually, Lana comes to require far too much of Allie and even her son. Allie’s ability to stand up for herself and ask for all that she deserves will ultimately determine the power that she can wield over her own life. With the satirical eye of Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher and the incisiveness of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion, acclaimed writer Heidi Pitlor tells a timely, bitingly funny, and insightful story of ambition, motherhood, and class.

Impersonation

Meg Wolitzer

Best-selling author Meg Wolitzer guest edits the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction. "If you know exactly what you are going to get from the experience of reading a story, you probably wouldn't go looking for it; you need, in order to be an open reader of fiction, to be willing. To cast a vote for what you love and then wait for the outcome," writes Meg Wolitzer in her introduction.The Best American Short Stories 2017 casts a vote for and celebrates all that is our country. Here you'll find a man with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, naval officers trapped on a submarine, a contestant onAmerica's Funniest Home Videos,and a gay man desperate to be a father--unforgettable characters waiting for an outcome, burning with stories to tell. The Best American Short Stories 2017includes T. C. BOYLE * JAI CHAKRABARTI * EMMA CLINE * DANIELLE EVANS * LAUREN GROFF * ERIC PUCHNER * JIM SHEPARD * CURTIS SITTENFELD * JESS WALTER and others

The Best American Short Stories 2017

T. C. Boyle

Award-winning and best-selling author T.C. Boyle guest edits this year s"The Best American Short Stories," the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction."

The Best American Short Stories 2015

“A page-turning exploration of unexpressed love and unnecessary loss. Riveting and heartbreaking.” —GERALDINE BROOKS, author of Caleb’s Crossing She still had time before work. She could go food shopping. She could fold the kids’ laundry and get the car washed and return some library books. Or Hannah could do something else. She could do something that she had never done--drive to a part of town where she had never been, pretend to be someone that she was not. Hannah was tall and graceful, naturally pretty, spirited and impulsive, the upper-class young woman who picked, of all men, Lovell--the introverted climate scientist who thought he could change the world if he could just get everyone to listen to reason. After a magical honeymoon, they settled in the suburbs to raise their two children. But over the years, Lovell and Hannah’s conversations have become charged with resentments and unspoken desires. She has become withdrawn. His work affords him a convenient distraction. And then, after one explosive argument, Hannah vanishes. For the first time, Lovell is forced to examine the trajectory of his marriage through the lens of memory. As he tries to piece together what happened to his wife--and to their life together--readers follow Hannah on that single day when a hasty decision proves irrevocable. With haunting intensity, a seamless balance of wit and heartbreak, and the emotional acuity that author Heidi Pitlor brings to every page, The Daylight Marriage mines the dark and delicate nature of a marriage. “In The Daylight Marriage, there are two mysteries--the whereabouts of a missing woman and the vagaries of the human heart. Heidi Pitlor explores both of these enigmas with equal mastery, merging a shocking crime story with an incisive portrait of a failed marriage. The result is a novel that is fast-moving, emotionally complex, and ultimately heartbreaking.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Nine Inches “Pitlor brings forth the emotions that surge beneath the surface with the precision and power of a conductor . . . This powerful analysis of how dreams become nightmares will make readers want to hold their loved ones close.” —Booklist, starred review

The Daylight Marriage

Min Jin Lee

“Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of short fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A lifelong friendship may become a casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war. Rejected by his lover, a man seeks to reconcile with his family. Twitter users miraculously muster enough empathy to help a lost cat find a forever home. Enlightening, poignant, and undeniably human, the stories in this anthology bravely confront societal darkness and offer, in Lee’s words, “our emotional truths, restoring our sanity and providing comfort for the days ahead.” The Best American Short Stories 2023 includes Cherline Bazile • Maya Binyam • Tom Bissell • Taryn Bowe • Da-Lin • Benjamin Ehrlich• Sara Freeman • Lauren Groff • Nathan Harris • Jared Jackson • Sana Krasikov • Danica Li • Ling Ma • Manuel Muñoz • Joanna Pearson • Souvankham Thammavongsa • Kosiso Ugwueze • Corinna Vallianatos • Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi • Esther Yi

The Best American Short Stories 2023

Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year's Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction. Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay brings her "signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth" (Harper's Bazaar) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2018.

Birthdays

A collection of the year's best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor. Andrew Sean Greer, "an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy" (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

The Best American Short Stories 2022

Reuniting to celebrate their father's seventy-fifth birthday, the Miller siblings, each of whom is expecting first children of their own, struggle with difficult life challenges, from the eldest's confinement in a wheelchair after a devastating accident, to the middle son's anticipation of twins, to the pregnant youngest daughter's single status. Reprint.

The Birthdays

Elizabeth Strout

Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

The Best American Short Stories 2013

Stephen King

Presents a collection of stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada

The Best American Short Stories 2007

Geraldine Brooks

Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines

The Best American Short Stories 2011

Andrew Sean Greer

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor. Andrew Sean Greer, “an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy” (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Alice Sebold

The Best American Short Stories 2009

T.C. Boyle

The Best American Short Stories 2015 Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines

The Millers, an ordinary American family, are travelling to a small island off the coast of Maine where they will celebrate their father's 75th birthday. All three adult children are expecting children of their own and at the same time find themselves at major crossroads in their lives. As the Miller family gathers, an unexpected incident shatters the celebrations and it seems that nobody will emerge quite the same. Written with great emotional and psychological insight, The Birthdays is a journey into the harrowing and redemptive heart of family life.This story of marriage and impending parenthood is certain to establish Heidi Pitlor as a rare new voice in fiction.

Heidi Pitlor

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