The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Heidi Pitlor, Jennifer Egan (Editor)

Overview

“The literary ‘Oscars’ features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” — Shelf Awareness for Readers

The Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as “a new classic of American fiction.” Egan “possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart” (New York Times Book Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547819242
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Series:	Best American Short Stories Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	389
Sales rank:	826,857
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

JENNIFER EGAN is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling The Keep. Her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. 

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.

Editorial Reviews

2014-09-09
The latest installment in a venerable series whose origin stretches back a full century.In her slender but charming introduction, guest editor and novelist Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) recalls that she'd been publishing short stories for 21 years "before I managed to eke one into these pages!" Never mind the misuse of "eke"; we know what she means, and the fact is that there's a lottery aspect to the whole enterprise. It helps to have been published in the New Yorker, as several of these pieces have been; it helps to be Joyce Carol Oates, who appears here, of course, with a story that seems tossed off for her but that would be a major accomplishment for most other writers. Recognizing the "essential arbitrariness" of the honor, then, Egan moves on to select 20 stories that are perfectly exemplary, each in its way. T.C. Boyle does his existential ennui thing with a yarn (from the New Yorker, of course) that hinges on booze, satellites and rancor ("We'd been fighting all day, fighting to the point of exhaustion, and it infuriated me to think she wouldn't even give me this"). Continuing the boozy theme—writers and their booze!—Ann Beattie serves up a lovely slice of melancholy with a story of a former student bantering with a dying professor ("Enabler? Don't use phoney words like that") while puzzling over why her ex-husband happens to be in the bar at the same time. All are serviceable, none bad, but few of the stories are true tours de force, with one notable exception being Lauren Groff's "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners," the key word being the penultimate one, and Laura van den Berg's odd, pensive "Antarctica" and its utterly memorable closing line—fittingly, and artfully, the last in the collection. Intelligently chosen; essential for students and aspiring writers of fiction as a kind of state-of-the-art (or at least state-of-the-trend) snapshot, with a few standouts.

Kirkus Reviews