Enlarge book cover

The Best American Short Stories 1999

Katrina Kenison

448 Pages

On-Sale Date: 29/10/1999

ISBN: 9780395926840

Trim Size: 5.500in x 8.500in x 1.300in

Format:

$24.95

Shop now

In choosing this year’s best American short stories, guest editor Amy Tan found herself drawn to fiction that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she once loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. The result is a vibrant collection in which truth and fantasy coexist in new works by writers such as Rick Bass, Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, and Pam Houston, as well as in startlingly accomplished stories by new writers. The Best American Short Stories is the only volume that annually offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best-selling author.

RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his memoir, Why I Came West, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

George Harrar is the author of several novels and numerous short stories, one of which was chosen for the 1999 edition of The Best American Short Stories. Harrar lives in Wayland, Massachusetts, with his wife, Linda, a documentary filmmaker.

JHUMPA LAHIRI, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani (Roman Stories). She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz had established himself as a major writer with Drown before his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named Time's #1 Fiction Book of the Year and spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.

“An annual . . . heartening and fascinating.” Christian Science Monitor —