Synopses & Reviews
“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “Its the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.”
The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world.
In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the “Magic Man.” Kirstin Valdez Quades “Nemecia” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickershams “The Tunnel” is a tragic love story about a mothers declining health and her daughters helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Winks “Breatharians” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents estrangement.
“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of ones writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.”
Synopsis
The Best American Short Stories is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction, guest edited in 2012 by Pultizer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.
Synopsis
Edited by the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout, this years collection boasts a satisfying “chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative” (Wall Street Journal). With the masterly Strout picking the best of the best, Americas oldest and best-selling story anthology offers the traditonal pleasures of storytelling in voices that are thoroughly contemporary.
About the Author
HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.