"A treasure. Each story is a gem." — Dallas Morning News
"Dollar for dollar, pound for pound, story for story, readers can't beat the Best American Short Stories series . . . Each year, it offers the opportunity to dive into the current trends and fresh voices that define the modern American short story." — Chicago Tribune
"Consistently what it claims to be: the best." — Seattle Times
"These stories arrived in my life at an odd time," Sue Miller writes in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2002. "I'd been working for six months on a nonfiction book, my first ever; then, seconds after I turned that in, I was sent on the road to flog the novel I'd finished months earlier. By the end of the tour I hadn't written fiction in almost a year, and sometimes I thought that if one more sweetly inquisitive aspiring writer asked me where I got my ideas from, I'd cry out, 'Oh God, I don't know. How would I know?' and exit offstage left. I didn't do that. I hope I wouldn't do that; but it felt as though these stories arrived in the nick of time to make me believe again in that place — the place where ideas come from — and to teach me once more what we read fiction for. I am grateful."
Miller's enthusiasm and affection for the short story are evident in her selections. With Katrina Kenison's help, she has chosen a wonderful mix of stories for this year's volume of our most beloved and best-selling short fiction anthology, featuring such masters as Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arthur Miller, and Alice Munro, as well as exciting new voices.
Sue Miller is the best-selling author of The Good Mother, Inventing the Abbotts, Family Pictures (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah pick), and, most recently, The World Below.
|
