The Best American Short Stories 2001 [Paperback]

This year’s Best American Short Stories is edited by the critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver, whose latest book is Prodigal Summer. Kingsolver’s selections for The Best American Short Stories 2001 showcase a wide variety of new voices and masters, such as Alice Munro, Rick Moody, Dorothy West, and John Updike. “Reading these stories was both a distraction from and an anchor to the complexities of my life — my pleasure, my companionship, my salvation. I hope they will be yours.” — Barbara Kingsolver

This year’s Best American Short Stories is edited by the critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver, whose latest book is Prodigal Summer. Kingsolver’s selections for The Best American Short Stories 2001 showcase a wide variety of new voices and masters, such as Alice Munro, Rick Moody, Dorothy West, and John Updike. “Reading these stories was both a distraction from and an anchor to the complexities of my life — my pleasure, my companionship, my salvation. I hope they will be yours.” — Barbara Kingsolver

Foreword

IN THE 1942 VOLUME of The Best American Short Stories, the anthology’s new annual editor, Martha Foley, attempted to define the form. “A good short story,” she wrote, “is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling he has undergone a memorable experience.” Over the past eleven years, during my own tenure as annual editor of this eighty-six-year-old series, I’ve run across numerous other writers’ attempts to come up with some sort of standard by which to measure the short story. Few have managed to add much to Ms. Foley’s democratic and rather obvious criteria.
At symposiums and writers’ conferences, I’ve learned to duck and weave around the inevitable question “What do you look for in a short story?” lc&