I started loving this book from the very first story by Louis Auchincloss (who I had never heard of) entitled 'Pa's Darling'. What a great title. Four of the first six stories made me say 'Wowww' out loud when I finished them. If I saw Stephen King I'd kiss his feet to thank him for selecting these great stories.

Twenty stories from the New Yorker and other periodicals. All these stories are good, all are soundly written, all feel drawn from the same well. This last will not make sense to most, and that's fine, but there's a similarity that left me underwhelmed with the collection while retaining an appreciation for individual story and author.

I'm extremely wary of 'literature' as it is defined in the 21st Century. Too many wankers, too many people writing to impress other wankers, too much navel gazing and 'stylish' writing standing in for, you know, something actually happening. But with Stephen King at the helm of this thick book of literature, I thought I might actually find some stories like grandfather used to make. Profound and entertaining instead of turgid, fulsome and tedious. What I got was a rather strange mix. The ones th...

I always dive into anthologies prepared for a mixed bag. This one, which I must have picked up at some moving-out-of-the-country-come-raid-my-bookshelves sale, was not like that. I'm flipping back through the contents and can't think of even one story I disliked. Some of my favourites (which, of course, will not be yours, de gustibus etc.) were Lauren Groffs' "L. DeBard and Aliette", Roy Kesey's "Wait", and Bruce McAllister's "The Boy in Zaquitos".Going through the volume, I kept thinking how ni...

This is the first disappointment I've gotten from the Best American Short Stories Series. Stephen King proved to be a heavy-handed editor to say the least. While no story could be classified as out-right horror, they almost all contained horrific elements: a girl with her face shot off propped up in an abandoned farm house, a suicide pact, castration, biological warfare, girls raised by werewolves... even the obligatory Alice Munro story (she's been included in almost every year I've read) has m...

This is the first edition with Heidi Pitlor as the series editor. Her introduction gives credit to Katrina Kinnesen who was the series editor before her. She has big shoes to fill. In Stephen King’s introduction, he comes off quite arrogant. Typically the series editor reads stories from various publications and provides her selections to the guest editor to choose the ones he thinks are best. King went out and bought his own publications to make his own choices as if Pitlor was not qualified to...

blech. i did wonder why the series editor kept going on and on about the "so-called death" of the american short story in her introduction. and then assured the reader that, um, it was going to get better. i didn't realize she was actually warning us that this crop was kind of crap! i DID wonder whether the anthology suffered because stephen king selected for it this year. i mean, i really like him, actually, but i don't think he's got lots of TASTE. whichever, i couldn't help but be disappointe...

I love the idea of Stephen King editing this collection, but I had a really hard time mustering any interest in the majority of these stories. Alice Munro's story is brilliant. Besides that, there were a few that were okay, and then there were some that I was completely disappointed by. Eileen Pollacks' story "The Bris," for example, is based on an interesting idea--a son goes to tend to his dying father, only to find out that in fact his father is not Jewish, as he had always believed, and that...

I asked a friend if he had read anything by Karen Russell and he responded by giving me two of the Best American Short Stories anthologies, one of which is this one from 2007. Unfortunately, most of the stories in here are pretty bland. I don't know if that's due to Stephen King being a poor editor or 2007 just being a mediocre year for short stories; either way, most of the stories in this collection are not bad but not astounding, either. The problem with this anthology is that almost all of t...

It’s difficult to review a collection of unrelated short stories, which is why I usually don’t. This is one of the better ones, oddly despite King’s upping the number of fantasy/horror offerings. I thought the addition of fantasy-tinged stories in Amy Tan’s 1999 outing is what made it one of the better collections, but here it didn’t quite work for me, despite my usually enjoying Stephen King’s own fantasy and horror.What King may have brought to this collection that worked, however, was a sense...

Having Stephen King rate the best short stories is like having a baby build a skyscraper. In his introduction, King laments the waning popularity of the short story, noting his own books' existence at the front of a book store, while short story anthologies are relegated to the back, away from where they could possibly be noticed. On some level, King is humiliated, even embarrassed by this. He has probably realized, in doing research for this collection, that his works pale in comparison to the

I borrowed this book from the library for a short vacation. I usually find that I’m the first person up in the morning during family vacations, so it’s nice to have a short-story book on hand to occupy myself while I wait for the rest.Well, this book was a real disappointment. I read about 8 short stories before I completely gave up. All of these stories could be characterized as “dysfunctional-family stories”. What a bunch of weird people! How about the dad who’s a famous judge who refuses to a...

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2007 EDITED BY STEPHEN KING: International bestselling author Stephen King takes the stage with a different kind of performance: instead of being the creator and writer, he is the director, selected as the editor for the 2007 edition of the ever popular Best American Short Stories series. But don’t pick this book up expecting to find blood and gore, or a sense of horror and a feeling of terror that you are more used to when reading the editor’s own work; in this c...

Three stars for the best stories... not for the average quality of the book as a whole!At first, I thought I'd figured out what a Best American edited by Stephen King was going to look like: straightforward told tales, with a point of drama or literary shock that would catch your attention, and hopefully cover over for other awkwardnesses in the writing. That was my impression for the first half of the book. By the end though, it was yet another year (now 2 past!) of Best American Short Stories....

I'm about 1/2 way through this, but wanted to jot down some of my thoughts so far.It's been a long time since I read a collection of short stories, so I'm not sure what I was expecting. With that said, I'm finding the stories very "academic" - meaning, I keep waiting for my 10th grade English teacher to show up at the door with a thematic test for me on these, which I fear I would fail miserably. I get the feeling there must be more meaning to these stories than I see right away, otherwise why w...

This really didn't click for me until about the sixth story, My Brother Eli by Joseph Epstein, but after that they were pretty great with two exceptions. Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You by William Gay which I really wanted to like for the title alone and Sans Farine by Jim Shepard, a more boring story about the rise of the guillotine I cant imagine.Lauren Groff's L. Debard and Aliette: A Love Story and Stellar Kim's Findings and Impressions pack more punch into 25 pages or le...