The Best American Short Stories 2024

by Lauren Groff, Heidi Pitlor

Overview

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, and series editor Heidi Pitlor.

“There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now,” proclaims guest editor Lauren Groff in her introduction. This abundance led to a volume of robust stories with the nerve to push against narrative expectations. The Best American Short Stories 2024 boasts a collection of twenty stories that “buzz with their own strange logic.” A man becomes a tourist in his own hometown. An unemployed jeweler sails in an antique slave ship. A therapist decides to call an ex-patient years after their last session. Daring and resonant, the stories in this volume invite in Groff “a feeling that both the author and I were simultaneously discovering something together.”

The Best American Short Stories 2024 includes JAMEL BRINKLEY • ALEXANDRA CHANG • LAURIE COLWIN • MOLLY DEKTAR •  TAISIA KITAISKAIA • DANIEL MASON • JIM SHEPARD • AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI • PAUL YOON • and others

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063275959
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	16,492
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lauren Groff is the author of five novels: the instant New York Times bestseller The Vaster Wilds, and two National Book Award Finalists, Matrix and Fates and Furies; as well as Aradia and The Monsters of Templeton. Her story collections include Florida, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Delicate Edible Birds. She has twice been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, as well as for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.

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, The Daylight Marriage, and Impersonation.

Hometown:

Gainesville, FL, USA

Date of Birth:

July 23, 1978

Place of Birth:

Cooperstown, NY, USA

Education:

BA English and French Literature, Amherst College, 201: MFA in Fiction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006

Website:

http://www.laurengroff.com

Editorial Reviews

This strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2024-09-13
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.

Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.

All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.

Kirkus Reviews