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

Quand Hannah a rencontré Lovell, elle sortait d'une rupture difficile et cherchait juste "quelqu'un de bien". Lui n'avait pas l'intention de passer à côté de la femme de sa vie. Dix-neuf ans plus tard, mariés et installés dans une banlieue résidentielle de Boston, ils sont presque devenus l'un pour l'autre des étrangers. Au lendemain d'une dispute, Hannah décide de bousculer sa routine domestique. Ayant quelques heures devant elle, elle prend sa voiture et part "à l'aventure". Sur la plage où elle s'arrête, un homme l'accoste et engage la conversation. Il l'inquiète autant qu'il la trouble. Depuis combien de temps n'a-t-elle pas ressenti cela ? A la nuit tombée, Hannah n'est pas rentrée. Puis les jours passent. Sans nouvelles. Et l'anxiété grandit. Essayant de faire bonne figure vis-à-vis des enfants, Lovell est contraint pour la première fois d'examiner la trajectoire de leur couple. Et tandis qu'il cherche à savoir ce qui a pu arriver à sa femme, nous sont révélés, à travers les yeux d'Hannah, les événements de la journée. Entremêlant avec virtuosité les misères de la vie conjugale et le mystère entourant une disparition, Heidi Pitlor livre un roman inexorable, émotionnellement complexe, qui hantera le lecteur longtemps après les dernières pages.

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"The literary 'Oscars' features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories." - Shelf Awareness for ReadersThe 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).

The Best American Short Stories 2014

"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. "It's 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 Quade's "Nemecia" depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham's "The Tunnel" is a tragic love story about a mother's declining health and her daughter's helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink's "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 one's 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."

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