The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz (Editor), Heidi Pitlor (Editor)

Overview

“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 2016 will be selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz. He brings "one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonderfully eclectic" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) to the collection.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544582897
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Series:	Best American Short Stories Series
Edition description:	2016 ed.
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	954,299
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz had established himself as a major writer with Drown before his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named Time's #1 Fiction Book of the Year and spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.
 

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.

Editorial Reviews

"This terrific and surprising collection of tales by a diverse group of writers lives up to Diaz’s “rah-rah” (his term) rallying cry for the form... Count on them to transport you." —USA Today "Its strongest installment yet... Díaz’s compilation is the most diverse and inclusive entry to date of any of the major annual story collections... Essential for every student of the short story form." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "This year’s collection brings together fine stories by famous fiction writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Karen Russell... [while] a great deal of the magic is generated by the appearance of less familiar names... Each of these outstanding stories is, as Diaz observes, a chance to listen 'to some other lone voice struggling to be heard against the great silence.'” —The National Book Review —

From the Publisher

★ 2016-08-23
A renewal of the longtime prize-volume series, perhaps its strongest installment yet.Leave it to guest editor Díaz, of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao fame, to make a cogent, even urgent claim for the primacy of the short story without resorting to academic fancy-pantsness: “Novels might be able to summon entire worlds, but few literary forms can match the story at putting a reader in touch with life’s fleeting, inexorable rhythm.” Vita brevis, so ars brevis, then. Díaz opens with a wonderfully self-effacing memoir concerning his own checkered successes as a short story writer before turning over the stage to a fine roster of writers, most in midcareer. If there’s a shared preoccupation here, it would be that very vita-brevis business; many of the pieces touch on death, sometimes head-on, as with John Edgar Wideman’s perfectly paced “Williamsburg Bridge” (“Dawns on me that I’ll miss the next Olympics, next March Madness, next Super Bowl. Dawns on me that I won’t regret missing them”), and sometimes a touch more obliquely, as with Louise Erdrich’s eccentric but chilling “The Flower” (“Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held her foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth”). When not outright cemeteries, the settings of many pieces are clinics, dark woods, and rec rooms where 9/11 is the theme of conversation. These are, in the main, then, sober-minded pieces, marked by tears and angst and confusion, the stuff of life indeed. There’s no whiff of political correctness to the choices, which stand out entirely on their own, but even so it has to be said that Díaz’s compilation is the most diverse and inclusive entry to date of any of the major annual story collections—reason enough to get it in the classroom, and a good vehicle for readers to see what’s up in neighborhoods they may not be familiar with. Essential for every student of the short story form.

Kirkus Reviews