Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.The Best American Short Stories 2012 includesThe last speaker of the language / Carol Anshaw --Pilgrim life / Taylor Antrim --What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank / Nathan Englander --The other place / Mary Gaitskill --North Country / Roxane Gay --Paramour / Jennifer Haigh --Navigators / Mike Meginnis --Miracle polish / Steven Millhauser --Axis / Alice Munro --Volcano / Lawrence Osborne --Diem Perdidi / Julie Otsuka --Honeydew / Edith Pearlman --Occupational hazard / Angela Pneuman --Beautiful monsters / Eric Puchner --Tenth of December / George Saunders --The sex lives of African girls / Taiye Selasi --Alive / Sharon Solwitz --M&M world / Kate Walbert --Anything helps / Jess Walter --What's important is feeling / Adam Wilson

    What if life was neverending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the pope were a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia E. Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut, alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, you'll find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the New Wave, and more. Learn about the secret history of science fiction, from titans of literature who also wrote SF to less well-known authors from more than twenty-five countries, some never before translated into English. In The Big Book of Science Fiction, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Immerse yourself in the genre that predicted electric cars, space tourism, and smartphones. Sit back, buckle up, and dial in the coordinates, as this stellar anthology has got worlds within worlds. Including: . Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin. An unearthed sci-fi story from W. E. B. Du Bois. The first publication in twenty years of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch. A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Cixin Liu Plus: . Aliens!. Space battles!. Robots!. Technology gone wrong!. Technology gone right!"

    I pretended to be asleep.”Time 40:39

    They stay with you like a significant memory.”—Roger Rosenblatt“Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.”—Fred VolkmerThe Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

    Four prized selections by one of America's greatest writers: "The Open Boat," based on a harrowing incident in the author's life: the 1897 sinking of a ship on which he was a passenger; "The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," reflecting Crane's early travels in Mexico and the American Southwest; and the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a galvanizing portrait of life in the slums of New York City.

    Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit.A widow, surrounded by a small menagerie, comes to terms with her veterinarian husband's death; a young woman entertains her dying friend with trivia and reaffirms her own life; in the aftermath of an abortion, a woman compulsively knits a complete wardrobe for a friend's baby. Buffeted by rude shocks, thwarted by misconnections, the characters recognize that anything can finally become a reason to live.

    A man travels to his son’s school to deal with the fallout of a violent attack and to make sure his son will not lose his college place. But what exactly has his son done? And who is to blame? A young woman trying to make it in LA, working in a clothes shop while taking acting classes, turns to a riskier way of making money but will be forced to confront the danger of the game she’s playing. And a family coming together for Christmas struggle to skate over the lingering darkness caused by the very ordinary brutality of a troubled husband and father.These outstanding stories examine masculinity, male power and broken relationships, while revealing – with astonishing insight and clarity – those moments of misunderstanding that can have life-changing consequences. And there is an unexpected violence, ever-present but unseen, in the depiction of the complicated interactions between men and women, and families. Subtle, sophisticated and displaying an extraordinary understanding of human behaviour, these stories are unforgettable.

    Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more. In its place Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains. In these stories, Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible. The debut of a writer who is out to redefine the contours of the American West, American Masculine is a deeply felt and fiercely written ode to the country we left behind.

    Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.Written in 1980 and anthologized in a number of collections, this is the first time Recitatif is being published as a stand-alone hardcover. In the story, Twyla's and Roberta's races remain ambiguous. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?Morrison herself described this story as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.

    With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.In "Boys Go to Jupiter," a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.

    Pure Drivel is a collection of pieces, most of them written for the New Yorker, that demonstrate Martin's playful way with words and his unerring ability to create a feeling of serendipitous improvisation even on the printed page. Here's a passage from a piece that announces a shortage of periods in the Times Roman font: "Most vulnerable are writers who work in short, choppy sentences," said a spokesperson for Times Roman, who continued, "We are trying to remedy the situation and have suggested alternatives, like umlauts, since we have plenty of umlauts--and, in fact, have more umlauts than we could possibly use in a lifetime! Don't forget, umlauts can really spice up a page with their delicate symmetry--resting often midway in a word, letters spilling on either side--and not only indicate the pronunciation of a word but also contribute to a writer's greater glory because they're fancy, not to mention that they even look like periods, indeed, are indistinguishable from periods, and will lead casual readers to believe that the article actually contains periods!" Although some of these pieces flirted with topicality when they first appeared, Martin is most successful when he leaves the real world behind and gives his wit free rein. This collection preserves the best (so far) of his glorious improvisations. --Simon Leake

    Morbid, cynical, eerie, they take you to a twilight region of flesh and spirit — and into the darkest recesses of the human mind. These are unusual constructions of terror and grim irony, reminiscent of Poe, the Gothic novel, and the Romantic short story, but having the unmistakable individual stamp of a man who knew first-hand something of the fears and specters which haunt men.In this volume you will come across a number of old favorites: "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," "The Eyes of the Panther," "The Death of Halpin Frayser," "An Adventure at Brownville," and such classics as "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," "The Damned Thing," and "Moonlit Road," a minor masterpiece in which events of the story are told from three different points of view, including that of the victim as spoken through a medium. You will also find some less familiar, but equally fascinating stories and pieces not available elsewhere, including "Visions of the Night," in which Bierce gives us a rationale for his "reverse holiness" and the surrealistic morality that permeates these writings. Bierce's characters — possessed poets, shabby aristocrats, grimy professional men, revived corpses, haunted malefactors — live in a spare, perverse world. Patricide, the revenge of the dead, inexplicable disappearances, dreadful ironies, hypnotism and second sight, and the like, form much of the substance of these unsettling tales.

    Featured writers include Ellen Hart, Judith Guest, William Kent Krueger and Carl Brookins. This is a must-have for mystery buffs.

    This volume collects exquisite and poignant tales of true beauty, selfless love, generosity, loyalty, brilliant wit, and moral aestheticism, such as "The Birthday of the Infanta," "The Selfish Giant," The Nightingale and the Rose," and "The Happy Prince," among others.A true classic of wonder for all ages.

    They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times."The Hunt" was short-listed for the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.