100 Years Of The Best American Short Stories - Best American

Publisher Marketing: "The Best American Short Stories"is the longest running and best-selling series of short fiction in the country. For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls all its wildnesses of character and voice. These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write as an aid to love-making. Nancy Hale s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver s minimalism, a term he disliked, and Grace Paley s secular Yiddishkeit. Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Diaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American. Moore writes that the process of assembling these stories allowed her to look thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux. "100 Years of The Best American Short Stories"is an invaluable testament, a retrospective of our country s ever-changing but continually compelling literary artistry. LORRIE MOORE, after many years as a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Moore has received honors for her work, among them the"Irish Times"International Fiction Prize and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. Her most recent novel, "A Gate at the Stairs, "was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her most recent story collection, "Bark," was short-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O Connor Award. HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor of"The Best American Short Stories"since 2007. She is the author of the novels"The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage." " Review Citations:

Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2015 pg. 72 (EAN 9780547485850, Hardcover)

Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2015 (EAN 9780547485850, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Pitlor, Heidi Heidi Pitlor grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and got her BA at McGill University and her MFA at Emerson College in Boston. She was a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for nine years before she became the series editor of "The Best American Short Stories." She has worked with Salman Rushdie, Alice Sebold, Richard Russo, Elizabeth Strout, and others. She is the author of the novel "The Birthdays "and her fiction and essays have appeared in "Ploughshares, "the "Huffington Post, " and "Labor Day: True Stories by Today s Best Women Writers." In Fall 2015, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish "100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, " which she coedited with Lorrie Moore. Heidi lives outside Boston with her husband and twin son and daughter. Contributor Bio:  Moore, Lorrie LORRIE MOORE is the author of the story collections "Bark, " "Birds of America", "Like Life", and "Self-Help" and the novels "Who Will Run the Frog Hospital"? and "Anagrams". Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award.