"As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in
many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location,
and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might," writes
guest editor Elizabeth Strout. "It's the variety of voices that most
indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us
who we are." The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an
impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their
corners of the world.
In "Miss Lora," Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage
boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair
with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as
a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she
believes is the "Magic Man." Kirstin Valdez Quade's "Nemecia" depicts
the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham's
"The Tunnel" is a tragic love story about a mother's declining health
and her daughter's helplessness as she struggles to balance her
responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan
Wink's "Breatharians" unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a
grim chore in the wake of his parents' estrangement.
"Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that
the sound of one's writing is just as important as and indivisible from
the content," writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. "Here are twenty
compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with
profound consequences."
