Langtext

Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year's Best American Short Stories , the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction. "I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed," writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018 , "but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world." The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher-all characters and circumstances that show us what we "need to know about the lives of others."

BASS 2016: "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 "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 BASS 2015: New York Times Bestsellers List Oct. 25 #13 "Confrontational and at times confounding, these are stories to get lost in, then gratefully chart a path homeward." - Kirkus