American short fiction has always thrived on intensity. Within a few pages, it can capture a lifetime, a heartbreak, or a national mood. The following pieces (tragic, witty, haunting, and strange) ...

SOMETHING has gone wrong of late with short-story writers. Something has happened to them; and what that something is, still more why it is, are worth considering, short stories being now, as they ...

The Best American Short Stories 2022 (Mariner 2022), selected and edited by fiction writer Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2003), presents as strong a selection of writing as the ...

This year’s “Best American Short Stories” collection features New England-based editors, authors, literary journals, and ...

I’ve been reading the Best American series. To be exact, I’ve been reading it for 35 years, since high school, when I found a copy of the “Best American Short Stories” 1986 (edited by Raymond Carver) ...

Actors Ivan Hernandez (And Just Like That...), Richard Masur (The Girls on the Bus), and Cynthia Nixon (The Gilded Age) honor the 2025 Best American Short Stories, curated and edited by bestselling ...