The Best American Short Stories Of The Century

So who got in? There are a good number of cut-and-dried classics here, including Hemingway's "The Killers," Faulkner's "That Evening Sun Go Down," and Philip Roth's acidic spin on religious connivance, "Defender of the Faith." In other cases, major authors are represented by relatively minor works. Yet it's hard to quibble with the inclusion of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, J.F. Powers, Eudora Welty--particularly when you take into account that their second-tier creations are fully the equal of anybody else's masterpieces. And the final third of the book really does constitute an honor roll of contemporary American fiction, with brilliant entries by Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov. (For the latter, Updike actually succumbed to his own idolatry and bent the rules for admission--but nobody who reads the hallucinatory "That in Aleppo Once..." will regret it.) It goes without saying that fiction fans will be complaining about the editor's sins of omission well into the next century. But no matter how you slice it, this remains an elegant and essential advertisement for the short form. --James Marcus

For the 100th anniversary of The Best American Short Stories series, a retrospective of stories selected by master of the form Lorrie Moore. The stories, along with one hundred years of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and decade-by-decade analysis, tell the history of American short fiction, showcasing representative moments in the series as well as literary moments in time.

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Witness the ever-changing history and identity of America in this collection of 40 stories collected from the first 100 years of this bestselling series. 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 DÃaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.

Facilitator: Paula Watson

Description: The seven deadly sins are back!!! The Great Books Foundation has issued a new collection of short stories on this deliciously engaging topic. Wickedly entertaining stories by authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are included in the new book called Even Deadlier. Readers who know that good and evil are not black and white concepts will find these stories will provide considerable food for thought and provoke lively conversation.

The manuscript must be a collection of short stories in English of at least 150 word-processed, double-spaced pages. We do not accept e-mail submissions. The manuscript may include a cover page, contents page, etc., but these are not required. The author's name can be on every page but this is not required. Stories previously published in periodicals are eligible for inclusion. There is no reading fee; please do not send cash, checks, or money orders. Reasonable care is taken, but we are not responsible for manuscripts lost in the mail or for the return of those not accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. We assume the author retains a copy of the manuscript.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. In the Gloaming, a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post,and many anthologies. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.

The story of Lorrie Moore is a good campfire tale of precocious literary talent: at the age of 19, she had already won an award for her fiction (given by Seventeen magazine but still impressive), and in her mid-20s she sold her debut, the still-popular short story collection "Self-Help," to no smaller potatoes than Knopf. Most of her novels and collections that followed have beamed from the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and one of her short stories, the wonderfully titled "You're Ugly, Too," is included in John Updike's "The Best American Short Stories of the Century."

Moore's best stories are grandiose. Her women are sarcastic and tragic, at the mercy of fate: they look at something for a long time as if it were one thing, then realize (too late!) that it has turned into something else, an adulterous partner or a cold stranger. These new stories, without the stronger jokes and the deeper waters of her other work, are not exciting. They're certainly not mad visitors. Insidiously, they make glibness into a depressing inevitability. Take "Wings," where our protagonist evaluates her boyfriend like so: "Unlike some of her meaner friends, who kept warning her, she believed there was a deep good side of him and she was always patient for it. What else could she be?" But no, he's just a jerk, we find out in more ways than one, and sourly their union dissolves, in spite of her hope and faith. It doesn't feel good.

pam houston's first collection of short stories,

Cowboys Are My Weakness, won the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages. She edited an anthology for Ecco Press entitled

Women on Hunting and wrote the text for a photography book called

Men Before Ten A.M. Her second book of fiction,

Waltzing the Cat, will be published by W.W. Norton this fall. She is currently at work on a book of essays.

vicki lindner is a fiction writer and essayist whose stories have appeared in

Fiction, Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, Witness, The Little Magazine, The Kenyon Review, New York Woman, Ploughshares, and other magazines and anthologies. The recipient of an NEA fellowship-as well as two grants from New York State-for her short fiction, she teaches at the University of Wyoming.

Bynum's first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, was published by Harcourt in 2004, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her short stories have appeared in Triquarterly, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and in Best American Short Stories. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

One of the best-known stories in American culture, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has stirred the imagination of young and old alike for over 100 years. Best Actress nominee Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married, Alice in Wonderland, The Dark Knight Rises) lends her voice to this uniquely American fairy tale.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature....

Have we arrived at a post-racial future?Many visionaries of the twentieth century predicted a future in which race and ethnic distinctions would be eliminated through technology. Mainstream science fiction in the mid-twentieth century often confirmed this idea or reinforced racial stereotypes in novels, stories, and films. Yet not all speculative fiction has elided questions of race. Afrofuturism is a movement in literature, music, art, and film that has developed alternative visions of the future from the perspective of the African diaspora, as in the recent blockbuster film Black Panther.Other authors and artists have also articulated alternative futurisms including Latina/o, indigenous, and Asian American futurisms in novels, stories, music, comics, films, and the visual arts.

1) Please tell us a little bit about the genesis of your short story collection and feel free, if you are so moved, to weigh in on the increasingly popular notion of "linked stories"?

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