The Best American Short Stories 2016

Junot Díaz

Oct 2016 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

“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.” —USA Today

“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 literary ‘Oscars’ features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” —Shelf Awareness

“Its strongest installment yet . . . Díaz’s compilation is the most diverse and inclusive entry to date of any of the major annual story collections—reason enough to get it in the classroom, and a good vehicle for readers to see what’s up in neighborhoods they may not be familiar with. 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.” —The National Book Review

Ratings and reviews

Love as usual from this author!

About the author

Pulitzer Prize–winner JUNOT DÍAZ's first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with “the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet” (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year by Time magazine and spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself—with more than a million copies in print—as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.