3.5
The Best American Short Stories 2018
ByPublisher Description
Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year’s Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction.
“I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,” writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018, “but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.” The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher—all characters and circumstances that show us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”
“I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,” writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018, “but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.” The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher—all characters and circumstances that show us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Best American Short Stories 2018 Reviews
3.5
“I’ll be fair in my review: some stories I honestly couldn’t finish.
I read Roxanne Gay’s Opinions book, so I kind of knew what to expect in this. However, it’s not for those looking for a “nice, casual read”. These stories may be fictional, but they touch on the real lives and stories of people in America. They’re dark, gritty, and oftentimes uncomfortable. Some believe the best in people, but I have a habit of seeing the worst. We are all human, and sometimes that is disgusting. Our failures and faults are shameful, sometimes hidden away to the world and exposed in these stories. Our histories are our own, and the people we cross paths with don’t care. They shouldn’t care! You’re nobody to them. These stories reveal that in ways I found depressing but necessary.
If you are deciding on whether or not to read this book based on reviews, I’ll say READ IT. Just read it. You don’t have to finish the book or all the stories, but read it.”
“Some stories are okay, some are not. 🤷♀️”
About Roxane Gay
ROXANE GAY, guest editor, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger, which received the NBCC Members’ Choice Award; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. She is also the editor of the New York Times best-selling Not That Bad. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation, among others. She is the author of the World of Wakanda series for Marvel.
Other books by Roxane Gay
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