Additional information
by Heidi Pitlor (Author)
The Best American Series(R)
First, Best, and Best-Selling
The Best American Short Stories 2011 includes
Nathan Englander, Allegra Goodman,
Ehud Havazelet, Rebecca Makkai, Steven Millhauser,
George Saunders, Mark Slouka, and others
Front Jacket
In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011, Geraldine Brooks draws the comparison between a well-told joke and a good short story. She writes, Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There s generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release . . . In the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs.
The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often, like good jokes, surprising humor. Richard Powers s To the Measures Fall is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical The Sleep, Caitlin Horrocks puts her fictional prairie town to bed the inhabitants hibernate through the long winter as a form of escape while in Steve Millhauser s imagined town the citizens are visited by ghostlike apparitions in The Phantoms. Allegra Goodman s spare but beautiful La Vita Nuova finds a jilted fiancee letting her art class paint all over her wedding dress as a poignant act of release. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wryly captures the social change in the air in Lagos, Nigeria, in her story of a wealthy young man who is not entirely at ease with what his life has become.
As Brooks pursued these richly imagined and varied landscapes she found that it was like walking into the best kind of party, where you can hole up in a corner with old friends for a while, then launch out among interesting strangers.
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Back Jacket
The Best American Series(r)
First, Best, and Best-Selling
The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the 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 2011 includes
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Jennifer Egan,
Nathan Englander, Allegra Goodman,
Ehud Havazelet, Rebecca Makkai, Steven Millhauser,
George Saunders, Mark Slouka, and others
GERALDINE BROOKS, editor, is the author of the novels Caleb s Crossing, People of the Book, March (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Year of Wonders, and the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Martha s Vineyard with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz, and their two sons.
Look for the other best-selling titles in the Best American series:
THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS
THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS
THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES
THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING
THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING
THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING
THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING
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