Synopses & Reviews
The Best American Short Stories is the longest running and best-selling series of short fiction in the country. For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.”
These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver’s “minimalism,” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley’s “secular Yiddishkeit.” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.
Moore writes that the process of assembling these stories allowed her to look “thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history — the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux.” 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories is an invaluable testament, a retrospective of our country’s ever-changing but continually compelling literary artistry.
LORRIE MOORE, after many years as a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Moore has received honors for her work, among them the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her most recent story collection, Bark, was short-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor Award.
HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.
Synopsis
The best-selling and award-winning Jennifer Egan guest edits this year's The Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction.
Synopsis
"The literary 'Oscars' features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories." -- Shelf Awareness for Readers
The Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as "a new classic of American fiction." Egan "possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart" (New York Times Book Review).
Synopsis
“The literary ‘Oscars features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” — Shelf Awareness for Readers The Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as “a new classic of American fiction.” Egan “possesses a satirists eye and a romance novelists heart” (New York Times Book Review).
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
A centennial retrospective selected by master of the form Lorrie Moore that showcases representative stories in the series as well as literary moments in time One of our most beloved short story writers, Lorrie Moore introduces and chooses from more than two thousand stories the forty-one writers collected here. From Edna Ferber to George Saunders, and everyone in between: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cheever, Munro, Lahiri, Alexie, Diaz, to name just a few. Heidi Pitlor, in turn, recounts behind-the-scenes series anecdotes and gives a decade-by-decade examination of the trends captured by the series over a hundred years. The earliest stories ushered in a new and unflinching realism, the Depression saw the reign of Southern writing, and a post-war trend toward sentimentality was upended by the likes of Philip Roth. Soon after, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates began to probe the dark side of their era’s mythic happy family. The 1980s proved to be a golden age for short stories, and in the age of the Internet and the blogosphere, the tone is relaxed and its writers diverse. Taken together, the stories tell the history of American short fiction.
About the Author
JENNIFER EGAN is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling The Keep. Her latest book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. 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.