The Best American Short Stories 2016 - by Junot Díaz & Heidi Pitlor (Paperback)

About the Book

Award-winning and best-selling author Junot Díaz guest edits this year's The Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction.

Book Synopsis

"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.

From the Back Cover

The Best American Series(r)

If the novel is our culture s favored literary form, upon which we heap all our desiccated literary laurels, if the novel is, say our Jaime Lannister, then the short story is our very own Tyrion: the disdained little brother, the perennial underdog. But what an underdog, writes Junot Diaz in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2016. From a Nigerian boy s friendship with his family s former houseboy to a sweatshop girl s experience as a sister wife, from love and murder on the frontier to a meltdown in the academe, these stories, for Diaz, have the economy and power to break hearts bones vanities and cages.
The Best American Short Stories 2016 includes
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI, ANDREA BARRETT, SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM, TED CHIANG, LOUISE ERDRICH,
LAUREN GROFF, KAREN RUSSELL, JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
and others
Junot Diaz, editor, is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.

Heidi Pitlor, series editor, is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.
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Review Quotes

"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 --

About the Author

JUNOT DÍAZ is the author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.

HEIDI PITLOR is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.