The Best American Short Stories anthology series began in 1978 and has featured a who's who of guest editors, including Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Raymond Carver and Stephen King. This year, Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge) dons the judge's robes to render her literary verdicts.
In the introduction, Strout tells us her choices "had a great deal to do with voice," that "sound... has authority." The subject matter of her 20 selections varies greatly: trips to A.A. meetings, aging parents who require care, job losses, mortgage crises, divorce, computers and cell phones in the classroom. There's Steven Milhauser's "A Voice in the Dark," about a boy first hearing the story of Samuel, or Jim Shepard's "The World to Come," about a farm wife's only friend, who's forced to move away. These are mundane topics--until a voice brings them to life. As a short story, moreover, "the ride is quicker, the response heightened." Nearly half of the anthology's selections come from just two magazines--six stories from the New Yorker, three from Granta--yet Alice Munro's story has a very different sound from the George Saunders selection, or Junot Diaz's, or Joan Wickersham's. (This book is so selective that stories from great authors like Ann Beattie, Harry Crews, Colum McCann and Paul Theroux didn't make the cut.) Winners all, to capture a reader's ear. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher