Best American Short Stories 2015

Read the full post at - Best American Short Stories 2015 I picked up The Best American Short Stories 2015 at a used bookstore sale. The price was right, the premise was appealing – a curated collection of the best short fiction published that year – and I’ve always been curious about the short story as a format. It was good. The stories were fine. But walking away from it, I had a clearer opinion about the format of the collection than the collection itself. What I Liked The short story form is genuinely impressive when it works. The constraint is the whole point – authors have to develop setting, character, and plot fast, and the best ones make it look effortless. Reading a strong anthology reminds you just how much craft that takes. The 2015 edition delivers on that. There are some memorable pieces in here, and as a sampler of what literary short fiction looked like in a given year, it does its job. What I Didn’t Like The problem isn’t the writing – it’s the format of the anthology…