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Books : Literature & Fiction : World Literature : Canadian : Collections & Readers
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Edited by critically acclaimed, best-selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year's collection serve as a provacative literary "antenna for what is going on in the world" (Chicago Tribune). The collection boasts great variety from "famous to first-timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best-selling Best American.
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Best-selling novelist Jeffery Deaver edits this latest collection of the genre's finest from the past year. Featuring "gritty tales told with panache," this is a "must-read for anybody who cares about crime stories" (Booklist).
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Selected from a survey of more than 200 English professors, award-winning short-story writers, novelists, and fiction workshop directors, a remarkable collection of North American literature written since 1970.
Sherman Alexie • Margaret Atwood • Toni Cade Bambara • Russell Banks • John Barth • Donald Barthelme • Rick Bass • Richard Bausch • Charles Baxter • Madison Smartt Bell • Amy Bloom • Kate Braverman • Robert Olen Butler • Ethan Canin • Raymond Carver • Sandra Cisneros • Michael Cunningham • Junot Diaz • Stuart Dybek • Tony Earley • Louise Erdrich • Richard Ford • David Gates • Tim Gautreaux • Ron Hansen • Amy Hempel • Denis Johnson • Edward P. Jones • Thom Jones • David Michael Kaplan • Janet Kaufman • Jamaica Kincaid • David Leavitt • Reginald McKnight • Lorrie Moore • Bharati Mukherjee • Alice Munro • Joyce Carol Oates • Tim O'Brien • Cynthia Ozick • Annie Proulx • Mark Richard • Lee Smith • Susan Sontag • Amy Tan • Melanie Rae Thon • Stephanie Vaughn • Alice Walker • John Edgar Wideman • Joy Williams
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"Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village-not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but a dull, oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.This moving, darkly funny novel is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of her eccentric, touching family as it falls apart, each member on a collision course with the only community they have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer poised to take the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.
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The Best American Series First, Best, and Best-Selling
The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes
Dennis Lehane • Tom Perrotta • Alice Munro • Edward P. Jones • Joy Williams • Joyce Carol Oates • Thomas McGuane • Kelly Link • Charles D'Ambrosio • Cory Doctorow • George Saunders • and others
Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best-selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.
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"Simply compelling."--Mordecai Richler. "A cautionary tale of scholarly merit."--William S. Burroughs. "Chilling...will keep you up nights turning pages."--Peter Gorner, The Chicago Tribune. In 1845, Sir John Franklin set off, determined to "penetrate the icy fastness" of the Arctic. But he and his 129 men never made it. For the next 35 years, more than 20 major rescue parties searched fruitlessly for the vanished expedition. In this updated version of a bestseller that sold over 118,000 copies, a top forensic anthropologist and a historian tell the dramatic tale of excavating three sailors from the Franklin party. The bodies, well preserved by the permafrost, gave up their secrets to 20th century science, and the researchers pieced together a story of horrific starvation, scurvy, and cannibalism...Absolutely unforgettable--with photos in both color and black and white. The authors both live in Alberta, Canada. 192 pages, 43 color illus., 5 x 7 3/4.
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"Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous." In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture's deep ties to storytelling. With wry humor, King deftly weaves events from his own life as a child in California, an academic in Canada, and a Native North American with a wide-ranging discussion of stories told by and about Indians. So many stories have been told about Indians, King comments, that "there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations." That imaginative Indian that North Americans hold dear has been challenged by Native writers - N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Robert Alexie, and others - who provide alternative narratives of the Native experience that question, create a present, and imagine a future. King reminds the reader, Native and non-Native, that storytelling carries with it social and moral responsibilties. "Don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now."
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“While a single short story may have a difficult time raising enough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about,” writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006.
This vibrant, varied sampler of the American literary scene revels in life’s little absurdities, captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. In “The View from Castle Rock,” the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors’ emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander’s cast of young characters in “How We Avenged the Blums” confronts a bully dubbed “The Anti-Semite” to both comic and tragic ends. In “Refresh, Refresh,” Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart-wrenching look at a young man’s choices when his father -- along with most of the men in his small town -- is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li’s “After a Life” reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in “Tatooizm,” Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple’s relationship that has run its course.
Ann Patchett “brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness [to The Best American Short Stories 2006],” writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, “and she is, surely, every story writer’s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.”
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“A must-read for anyone who cares about crime stories.”—Booklist
The award-winning author and Emmy-nominated television writer George Pelecanos serves as editor of the twelfth installment of this genre-expanding anthology, featuring twenty of the past year’s most enthralling, suspenseful, and slyly illuminating mystery stories.
A cut-and-dried case for a wily crime-scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly’s “Mulholland Dive.” A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro’s masterful “Child’s Play.” James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in “Mist.” And in Holly Goddard Jones’s “Proof of God,” a young man’s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he’d never willingly reveal.
As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty “original and unique voices” in this collection pay homage to the genre’s forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. “But make no mistake,” he says, “we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.”
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Contemplating the appeal of the short story, Lorrie Moore writes in her introduction, "A story's very shortness ensures its largeness of accomplishment, its selfhood and purity. Having long lost its ability to pay an author's rent (in that golden blip between Henry James and television, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for one, wrote stories to fund his novels), the short story has been freed of its commercial life to become serious art, by virtually its every practitioner. As a result, short or long, a story lies less. It sings and informs and blurts. It has nothing to lose." The twenty stories in this year's volume sing to and inform the reader with honesty, intelligence, and often humor. Charles D'Ambrosio's story, "Screenwriter," explores romance in a mental hospital. In "Limestone Diner," Trudy Lewis lays bare one family's strained history in central Missouri. Angela Pneuman's hilarious "All Saints Day" gives readers a child's-eye view of religious fundamentalism. And in John Edgar Wideman's profound story, "What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence," friendship leads to a meditation on freedom and fairness.
Lorrie Moore has selected twenty stories that rejoice in the absurdities of life, consider the hard truths, and arrive at potent moments of understanding. With The Best American Short Stories 2004 "Lorrie Moore has done writers and readers a great service," Katrina Kenison writes in her foreword, "for her own love of the form and keen sensibility have resulted in a volume that fairly hums with life."
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The best-selling author Carl Hiaasen takes the reins for the eleventh edition of this series, featuring twenty of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.
Laura Lippman introduces us to a suburban soccer mom who moonlights as a call girl and who has a fateful encounter with a former client at her son’s soccer game. Ridley Pearson traces a famous author of horror tales who becomes trapped in a real one after his wife vanishes while jogging. Joyce Carol Oates travels to a New Jersey racetrack where the animals that break down are of the two-legged type. Lawrence Block tells the story of Keller, a hitman for hire who happens to live in Greenwich Village, loves spicy food, and collects stamps as a hobby. And Scott Wolven plunges us into the world of an ex-con who takes a job at a private and very illegal Nevada racetrack where each day millions are won and lost. Mostly lost.
As Carl Hiaasen notes in his introduction, “The stories in this collection would do honor to any anthology of short literature. More than transcending the genre of crime, they blow away its nebulous boundaries.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 is a powerful collection certain to delight mystery aficionados and all lovers of great fiction.
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A collection of witty, irreverent essays on subjects running the gamut from the space program to airport bans on smoking are included in this anthology. Written by Spider Robinson, The Crazy Years takes its name from Robert A. Heinlein's designation of the last years of the 20th century and contains essays from Robinson's tenure as op-ed columnist for The Globe and Mail and from Galaxy Online. Environmentalists that place the survival of earth before the survival of humanity, the idiocy of computer designs, and the downsides of the Internet are among the subjects Robinson uses to take the world to task.
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A much-loved Canadian classic, LEGENDS OF VANCOUVER takes the reader back to a time long ago, before the city of Vancouver was built, when the land belonged to the Squamish people. These legends tell the stories behind many prominent natural features in and around Vancouver.
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"[Most of] these stories are portraits, in styles ranging from sly to harrowing, of how crimes occurred ... If you like all your characters living at the end of a story, this may not be the book for you." -- from the introduction by Scott Turow
Best-selling author Scott Turow takes the helm for the tenth edition of this annual, featuring twenty-one of the past year's most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.
Elmore Leonard tells the tale of a young woman who's fled home with a convicted bank robber. Walter Mosley describes an over-the-hill private detective and his new client, a woman named Karma. C. J. Box explores the fate of two Czech immigrants stranded by the side of the road in Yellowstone Park. Ed McBain begins his story on role-playing with the line "'Why don't we kill somebody?' she suggested." Wendy Hornsby tells of a wild motorcycle chase through the canyons outside Las Vegas. Laura Lippman describes the "Crack Cocaine Diet." And James Lee Burke writes of a young boy who may have been a close friend of Bugsy Siegel.
As Scott Turow notes in his introduction, these stories are "about crime -- its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character." The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 is a powerful collection for all readers who enjoy fiction that deals with the extremes of human passion and its dark consequences.
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"From the classics of Welty, Oates, and O'Connor to the latest stories of Mason, Erdrich, Atwood, and Le Guin, this anthology shows the astonishing range of contemporary women's fiction in North America," writes Elaine Showalter. For all the diversity of the stories -- in subject, in style, in setting, in mood -- they have one thing in common: every one is a joy to read and an outstanding example of the fiction writers's art.
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This year"s Best American Short Stories is edited by the critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver, whose latest book is Prodigal Summer. Kingsolver"s selections for The Best American Short Stories 2001 showcase a wide variety of new voices and masters, such as Alice Munro, Rick Moody, Dorothy West, and John Updike. "Reading these stories was both a distraction from and an anchor to the complexities of my life — my pleasure, my companionship, my salvation. I hope they will be yours." — Barbara Kingsolver