Without having read the collection, I chose it for a fiction workshop I'm teaching this winter. I regret that choice. We'll still learn from reading these stories and discussing them, but I wish there were more stories I'd want my students to emulate.

Back on my Best American bullshit! I used to dream of owning a complete set of these and I'd bought back editions from the 70s. Then I actually tried to read 1971, and turns out there is little I can learn from reading what was "literary" 40 years ago (very white, very male). Just reread Visit From the Goon Squad and was in the mood for stories, not novels, so picked this up from my 1987-onward stack. Like all Best Americans, this had some incredible standouts and some of the worst sentences I'v...

For the most part this collection grabbed me from the first story and wouldn't let go. I subtracted a star because one story left me completely baffled.

My husband has been giving me a copy of this short story anthology for Christmas every year since 1990.(Wow! 25 years of the same gift...we are predictable and faithful to our traditions). It's the book that sits on my bedside table throughout the year. I pick it up and read a story or two when I've just finished a big, meaty novel, but don't feel ready to dive into another. I take it with me on vacations as my "back up read" in case whatever novel I've brought doesn't pan out, and finally I spe...

These are not saccharine coated formulaic stories.A while ago I read a talk by Dr Tim Keller about the search for happiness. He said that there are basically three types of people: the (young &) naive who think that happiness is inevitable, the cynics who think that happiness is impossible and those of us who are too busy running the rat race because we think that happiness is just around the corner. Keller says that the cynics are often our best thinkers, our most successful people. This book l...

The 20 stories in this collection range from merely very good to outstanding. The curating hand of editor Jennifer Egan feels tangible to me, both in the gender balance of writers, which is pretty much 50-50, and a skew toward longer, more experimental writing toward the back of the collection.If the stories have anything in common, it is their distinct settings. Reading the collection end to end, I got a feeling of travelogue, of visiting a broad range of places, times, and subcultures: a lonel...

I love reading the annual Best American Short Stories anthologies.They’re a great way to keep up with current writing, see what your favourite authors are up to and discover new ones who are publishing in little magazines and journals.Inclusion in the book can be a huge boost to a young or emerging writer’s career. I remember reading an interview with the great Raymond Carver in which he said he was so excited with his first BASS publication in the late 1960s that he took the volume to bed with

A solid collection of short stories, most of which either have no resolution or are utterly depressing, or both. Standouts for me were Nell Freudenberger’s Hover, about a mother going through a period of dissociative episodes; Nicole Cullen’s Long Tom Lookout, about a woman stealing her husband’s child into the Idaho mountains and her own past; and Brendan Mathews’s This Is Not a Love Song, about a shooting-star musician and her friend and photographer.

This year's Best American Short Stories is a fairly solid collection, but I have to admit, it struck me as a little too monoculture. I would have liked to see a greater assortment of stories from non-white authors. I have to admit, too, that I'm getting a bit weary of New York stories about failed relationships, and there is an example of just such a story here. Even when well written, as this one is, they feel far too familiar. Those critiques aside, several stories here rocked my socks.My abso...

This collection of short stories has some very good work in it and some stories that were difficult to get through because they were either boring or poorly written. I am not a great fan of Jennifer Egan's writing and, since she is this year's editor, that may be why the collection did not resonate very well with me.There is one story included that makes the whole book worthwhile. It is entitled 'Long Tom Lookout' and is by Nicole Cullen, a writer new to my radar. There is a lot going on in this...

Along with drinking too much, walking on the beach and teetering along the fault lines of family relationships, reading Best American Short Stories (AKA BASS) is my much-loved Christmas tradition. Every year I kid myself that I will do what at least one reviewer does and read only one story each day – like a gorgeous prolonged literary Advent calendar. But every year I dive into this book and eat it up fast.So, 2014 – edited by Jennifer Egan, whose book (A Visit from the Goon Squad) was a great

I really enjoy short stories. A few years ago I came across my first edition of this series. I don’t even remember what year it was from because I donated it back to the book sale I originally bought it from. I’ve made it a goal to catch up reading each edition up to the current year. As with most story collections I do not expect to love them all and am happy if at least half of them affected me. In this year’s edition, Jennifer Egan made the selections as guest editor. Although editor Heidi Pi...

The reviews suggesting that this particular volume of the "Best American" series is dark and sad and maybe even (gasp!) depressing are onto something. Death and decay factor into nearly every single story here. And this is a GREAT THING, if you ask me. I doubt this thematic consistency was intentional on Egan's part, though it is clear from her introduction that she is a firm believer in fiction's ability to do important things. In 2014, death is still a very, very hard thing to talk about-- in

My thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an eARC of this book to read and review.If this is the best America can offer, we're doomed. Or I have a shot at becoming the best short story writer this country has seen in a year at the least. So yes, we're pretty much doomed.I made it about 91 pages into this book when I realized that the running theme of the book this year was "let's-see-if-we-can-make-the-reader/s-attempt-suicide". I am not making light of suicide, it is a very sad a...

I read a lot of short story collections. For one reason, short story collections are easier to read in short bursts. It always takes me a second to pick up a novel at some random stopping point and remember where in the narrative I am, whereas short stories are self-contained. For another reason, I think it is a real skill to distill a plot and characters into the confines of a short story. My problem with many short story collections is that they tend to be mixed bags – handfuls of outstanding

A good collection of diverse stories. My favorites include:"Charity" starts as a narrative of what happened to Quinn the days before he disappeared, his money and health problems are intertwined and lead to a drug dealer and he is afraid of asking his boyfriend in Seattle for help--the story then shifts to a first person account by the boyfriend who tries to find and help Quinn, the shift in narrative gives different perspectives to both characters--and certainly different relationships with Qui...

The Best American Short Stories series uses a different guest editor each year, so there's some significant variation from year to year in the sort of stories that are selected for the volume. This year's guest editor was Jennifer Egan, and by my tastes she did a great job, with excellent stories far outweighing the ones I found lacking.Below are my mini-reviews of all the stories in the anthology.In "Charity" by Charles Baxter, a gay man doing volunteer work in Ethiopia returns home with a debi...

I liked earlier collections of this series and discovered some great new voices, but it is clear that the editors of this volume and I do not share the same taste. There are quite a few stories here that I do not care for at all and there is not a single one that I would call excellent.

I've read this series long enough to know that the selections are usually going to be very well-written stories by authors performing at their peak form. Often I've followed up by reading a collection of stories by an author with a great story in one of these anthologies but almost every time the one story I encountered in the anthology was far better than the rest in the author's collection. The fun of reading stories like these is that in spite of huge differences in style, characterization, p...

Though it's a half dozen years old, the angst that these stories capture are with us still, witness a line from T.C. Boyle's story "The Night of the Satellite" ("I got out, mounted the three steps to the concrete walkway where the ATM was, and waited the requisite six feet six inches away from the middle-aged woman...who was just then feeling in her card.") and all you would need is both characters to be masked to bring it up to contemporary speed. Most the stories entertained, some more than ot...