Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year’s Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction.
“I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,” writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to
The Best American Short Stories 2018, “but I also love when a
story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about
the world.” The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose
for the collection transport readers from a fraught
family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric
hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a
rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian
preacher—all characters and circumstances that show
us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”
