The Best American Short Stories 2011

The Best American Short Stories 2011
ISBN-10
0547719299
ISBN-13
9780547719290
Category
Literary Collections
Pages
386
Language
English
Published
2011-10-04
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Authors
Geraldine Brooks, Heidi Pitlor

Description

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord. The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers’s “To the Measures Fall” is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical “The Sleep,” Caitlin Horrocks puts her fictional prairie town to bed—the inhabitants hibernate through the long winter as a form of escape—while in Steve Millhauser’s imagined town, the citizens are visited by ghostlike apparitions in “Phantoms.” Allegra Goodman’s spare but beautiful “La Vita Nuova” finds a jilted fiancée letting her art class paint all over her wedding dress as a poignant act of release. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wryly captures the social change in the air in Lagos, Nigeria, in “Ceiling,” her story of a wealthy young man who is not entirely at ease with what his life has become. As Brooks perused these richly imagined and varied landscapes, she found that it was like walking into the best kind of party, where you can hole up in a corner with old friends for a while, then launch out among interesting strangers. The Best American Short Stories 2011 also includes contributions from: Megan Mayhew Bergman · Tom Bissell • Jennifer Egan • Nathan Englander • Ehud Havazelet • Bret Anthony Johnston • Claire Keegan • Sam Lipsyte • Rebecca Makkai • Elizabeth McCracken • Ricardo Nuila • Joyce Carol Oates • Jess Row • George Saunders • Mark Slouka

Other editions

Similar books

  • A Concordance to Conrad's Victory
    By Todd K. Bender, James W. Parins, Robert J. Dilligan

    ossession:-amā'the “oise: , ś head'ail but lying under her as deadly, ... seemed to undes stand, exactly how to deal with conceited death 's head.

  • Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann: Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature
    By Karen Achberger

    Similarly , Nadja in " Word for Word " is reluctant to call Mr. Frankel by his first name , Ludwig , an act which would signal an acceptance of his appropriateness for her , since Ludwig — like Robert , Ernst , Fritz , Erich , Franz ...

  • Bluegrass Cavalcade
    By Thomas D. Clark

    Ellen went to Mrs. Donahue's house for help and Pius was soon hurrying to St. Lucy to telephone for a doctor. When Pius returned he brought the Carriers who remained all night. Bill and Pius helped the doctor set the bone and bind in ...

  • Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance
    By Karen Tei Yamashita

    The mother was on Donahue. 60 Minutes did the doc and they'll repeat the news at ten. People dying, people killing, people crying— you can see it all on TV. Reality is really on TV. It's just another way to see— starvation in North ...

  • Byron: The Erotic Liberal
    By Jonathan David Gross

    Philip P. Wiener . New York : Charles Scribner's Sons , 1973 . Plato . Plato : The Symposium . Trans . and ed . Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff . Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Company , 1989 . Plummer , Kenneth , ed .

  • Evening Street Review Number 5
    By AMANDA ADAMS, ANDREA BATES, CYNTHIA BELMONT

    When the credits started to roll and Carmen, needing her meds and cigarettes, handed Ryan her car keys, Mary Ellen stared in disbelief. “She's giving him her keys!” she thought, eyeing Pepe, trying to catch his attention because he knew ...

  • The Science of Herself
    By Karen Joy Fowler

    Here she debuts a provocative new story written especially for this series.

  • The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology
    By Karen Joy Fowler, Alexander McCall Smith, Francine Prose

    We make our way slowly into the assembly hall, where 26 identical pillars cut from one rock line the sides. A fat stupa cut of the same rock stands at the innermost part of the hall; 20 feet high, it's shaped like an overturned bowl ...

  • Ancient Israelite Literature in Its Cultural Context: A Survey of Parallels Between Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Texts
    By John H. Walton

    ... 126 , 134 174 , 203 , 211 , 212 , 216 Theodorides , Aristide , 93 Wiseman , D. J. , 50 , 51 , 67 , Thomas , D. Winton , 170 , 84 , 85 , 89 , 93 , 170 , 200 171 , 200 Thompson , R. Campbell , Wolf , Herbert , 126 22 , 47 , 113 Wright ...

  • Selected Letters: Nicholas Hagger's Letters on His 55 Literary and Universalist Works
    By Nicholas Hagger

    Everyone seems to have got something out of the speeches, the Metaphysical Revolution was declared, and Shelley's wind is now scattering “sparks, my words among mankind” (the passage Kathleen Raine quoted). We now hope it translates ...