100 Years of The Best American Short Stories

A centennial retrospective selected by master of the form Lorrie Moore that showcases representative stories in the series as well as literary moments in time One of our most beloved short story writers, Lorrie Moore introduces and chooses from more than two thousand stories the forty-one writers collected here. From Edna Ferber to George Saunders, and everyone in between: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cheever, Munro, Lahiri, Alexie, Diaz, to name just a few. Heidi Pitlor, in turn, recounts behind-the-scenes series anecdotes and gives a decade-by-decade examination of the trends captured by the series over a hundred years. The earliest stories ushered in a new and unflinching realism, the Depression saw the reign of Southern writing, and a post-war trend toward sentimentality was upended by the likes of Philip Roth. Soon after, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates began to probe the dark side of their era's mythic happy family. The 1980s proved to be a golden age for short stories, and in the age of the Internet and the blogosphere, the tone is relaxed and its writers diverse. Taken together, the stories tell the history of American short fiction.