The Best American Short Stories 2010

by Richard Russo, Heidi Pitlor (Editor)

Overview

Edited by the award-winning, best-selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying “chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative” (Wall Street Journal). With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America’s oldest and best-selling story anthology is sure to be of “enduring quality” (Chicago Tribune) this year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547055329
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/28/2010
Series:	Best American Short Stories Series
Pages:	421
Sales rank:	865,240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

RICHARD RUSSO is the author of seven novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous screenplays. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls in 2002.

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, The Daylight Marriage, and Impersonation.

Hometown:

Gloversville, New York

Date of Birth:

July 15, 1949

Place of Birth:

Johnstown, New York

Education:

B.A., University of Arizona, 1967; Ph.D., University of Arizona, 1979; M.F.A., University of Arizona, 1980

Editorial Reviews

Starred Review.

Russo (Empire Falls) and Pitlor (The Birthdays) deliver an exceptional group of carefully crafted stories focusing on family, loss, self-discovery, aging, love, and friendship. Danielle Evans's "Someone Ought to Tell Her There's Nowhere to Go," covers the war-torn life of Georgie, an army vet struggling to maintain his sanity after witnessing brutality and devastation in Iraq, while Wells Tower's "Raw Water," showcases this young writer's remarkable gift for description: "She was sixteen or so, with a face like a left-handed sketch." Some welcome usual suspects appear (Jennifer Egan, Charles Baxter, Jim Shepard) alongside notable newcomers Téa Obreht and Karen Russell, leaving ample room for lesser knowns like Maggie Shipstead ("The Cowboy Tango") to show what makes their writing unique: "Where's your dad?" "Wyoming." "What's he do?" "Chickens." Russo likens selecting 20 from the roughly 250 submitted stories to "literary waterboarding" and evokes a metaphor from one of his favorite picks of the collection: stories are like jars of bees, and "we choose the tales that sting us good, leaving us surprised and sore... wide awake and alive."
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Publishers Weekly

Even by the consistently high standards of the venerable annual, this one's a treat.

Since the year's guest editor has the final selection, this volume reflects the penchant of novelist Russo for storytelling rather than postmodern experimentation or self-conscious wordplay. Offering a dictum from Isaac Bashevis Singer in the introduction that the purpose of literature is "to entertain and to instruct"—in that order—Russo has compiled a collection of consistently entertaining fiction that engages itself with this world (rather than conjuring its own world or reducing the world of fiction to words). "There are no triumphs of style over substance, and the language, while often beautiful and sometimes absolutely electric, is always in the service of narrative," he writes. Yet the 20 stories are a varied lot, from lesser-knowns such as Maggie Shipstead (whose "The Cowboy Tango" suggests a narrative kinship with Annie Proulx) and Wayne Harrison (whose "Least Resistance" finds a young man caught in a romantic triangle with the wife of his mechanic boss and mentor) to mainstays including Charles Baxter and Jill McCorkle. It's hard to resist a story that begins, "He wasn't even a good lion tamer, not before you showed up" ("My Last Attempt To Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer," Brendan Mathews) or, "The day after Arty Groys and his wife retired to Florida, she was killed in a head-on collision with a man fleeing the state..." ("The Valetudinarian," Joshua Ferris). Though the foreword by series editor Pitlor admits, "It is indisputable that American literary journals are in danger," with even the few of the newsstand magazines that publish fiction publishing less of it, the stories themselves seem as vital as ever.

Any reader will likely discover a new favorite writer here, or more.

Kirkus Reviews