All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.
Pitlor ushers in her final installment as series editor of this long-running staple showcasing the year in short fiction.
Of all the kids at the literary lunch table, the anthology might have it the hardest. Wearing plaid with stripes, unpacking the random items in its lunch box—it’s hard for a cohesive personality to shine through, unlike those cool-kid single-author collections. But if readers are prepared for eclecticism—and since Best American Short Stories was established in 1915, we must be—these 20 stories have something for everyone. Guest edited by Groff, a seven-time Best American author, the collection includes some nods to short story royalty: Jhumpa Lahiri, Lori Ostlund, the late Laurie Colwin, and Jim Shepard are all represented. But as both Pitlor and Groff discuss in their introductions, Groff sent back Pitlor’s initial batch of stories asking for something “rawer, meaner, spikier”—stories with their own “weird logic.” (Groff’s description of this aesthetic preference lands better than her diatribe against the first-person point of view, which precedes 12 of 20 stories in first-person.) In finding weird, spiky stories, Groff leans hard—and often thrillingly—on early-career writers. There is Katherine Damm’s sparkling and funny “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” featuring a young husband freewheeling into drunkenness at a wedding reception for his wife’s ex-boyfriend. In Suzanne Wang’s inventive “Mall of America,” AI narrates a tale of corporate (and all-too-human) woe when an elderly man spends time after hours in the mall’s arcade. Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” recounts the tense relationship between two neighbors with a complicated history. In Steven Duong’s “Dorchester,” a young writer has a poem go viral after an anti-Asian hate crime.
All hits and no skips is a tall order, but this strong, solid compilation is well worth a short story lover’s time.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275959
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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