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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."

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BASS 2016 "This terrific and surprising collection of tales by a diverse group of writers lives up to Diaz´s "rah-rah" (his term) rallying cry for the form... Count on them to transport you." -USA Today "Its strongest installment yet... Díaz´s compilation is the most diverse and inclusive entry to date of any of the major annual story collections... Essential for every student of the short story form." -Kirkus Reviews , Starred Review "This year´s collection brings together fine stories by famous fiction writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Karen Russell... [while] a great deal of the magic is generated by the appearance of less familiar names... Each of these outstanding stories is, as Diaz observes, a chance to listen ´to some other lone voice struggling to be heard against the great silence.´" - The National Book Review BASS 2015 New York Times Bestsellers List Oct. 25 #13 Vulture , "Can Short Stories Still Shock?" "Confrontational and at times confounding, these are stories to get lost in, then gratefully chart a path homeward." - Kirkus

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ROXANE GAY, guest editor, is the author of the bestsellers Bad Feminist , Difficult Women, and Hunger, as well as the books Ayiti and An Untamed State . HEIDI PITLOR, series editor, is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage .

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