A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor.
Andrew Sean Greer, “an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy” (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
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“These twenty stories capture beautiful and devastating human experiences and the tales we tell to persevere. Contributors’ captivating prose and incredible storytelling will plunge readers into fascinating worlds and challenge them to take on new perspectives.”
— Booklist (starred review) on The Best American Short Stories 2021
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Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers Less and The Confessions of Max Tivoli Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007 and the editorial director of Plympton, a literary studio. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Ploughshares, and the anthologies It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers.
Adenrele Ojo is an actress, dancer, and audiobook narrator, winner of over a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2018. She made her on-screen debut in My Little Girl, starring Jennifer Lopez, and has since starred in several other films. She has also performed extensively with the Philadelphia Dance Company. As the daughter of John E. Allen, Jr., founder and artistic director of Freedom Theatre, the oldest African American theater in Pennsylvania, is no stranger to the stage. In 2010 she performed in the Fountain Theatre’s production of The Ballad of Emmett Till, which won the 2010 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best Ensemble. Other plays include August Wilson’s Jitney and Freedom Theatre’s own Black Nativity, where she played Mary.
Cindy Kay is a Chinese Thai American narrator and educator who grew up in the California Bay Area and lives in the Rockies. Her work has been described as listening to a “cozy best friend.” She narrates fiction and nonfiction, and has studied Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and Japanese.
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, and the Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York.