The Best American Short Stories 2008 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 061878876X ISBN 13: 9780618788767

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

The Best American Short Stories 2008 gathers an array of inventive and unforgettable stories. Favorite and newcomer writers explore contemporary topics such as cloning, literary envy, cults, and teenage sex, as well as timeless subjects: love, sibling rivalry, immigration, and religion.
In Kevin Brockmeier’s stunning The Year of Silence,” an unnamed city must face the absence of all sound, followed by an excess of noise. Katie Chase’s bold and unsettling story, Man and Wife,” her first one published, brings to life an arranged marriage between a nine-year-old and a grown man. In A. M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven,” two brothers’ rivalry undoes their marriages and eventually their lives. Nicole Krauss writes of an inherited desk that comes to represent the burden of memory for a poet in her beautiful story, From the Desk of Daniel Varsky.” And Stephen Millhauser’s ingenious The Wizard of West Orange” imagines Edison and his colleagues inventing machines dedicated to the sense of touch.
In his introduction, Salman Rushdie writes, Some of these stories are immense, the so-called grand narratives’ of nation, race, and faith, and others are small: family stories, and stories of elective affinities, of the friends we choose, the places we know, and the people we love; but we all live in and with and by stories, every day, whoever and wherever we are.” The cultural relevance and intellectual potential of the short story are on display in this year’s volume of the best-selling collection.

About this title

About the Author:

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 Birthdays and a forthcoming novel titled The Daylight Marriage.
^No Bio

Review:

"Always a sure bet for gripping, emotionally challenging reading." (San Diego Union-Tribuen )

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 061878876X
• ISBN 13: 9780618788767
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 358
• Editor: Rushdie Salman, Pitlor Heidi