100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is the centennial anthology of the long running Best American Short Stories series, published in 2015 to mark a century of the annual publication. Lorrie Moore served as the editor of the volume, with Heidi Pitlor as the longtime series editor of the Best American line, and the two of them faced the genuinely difficult task of selecting forty stories from a hundred years of American short fiction.

The anthology is structured chronologically, with selections from each decade of the twentieth century and into the twenty first. The result is a tour through the development of the American short story across the period that, more or less, the form became central to American literary life. Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore herself, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many others appear in the collection. Each selection includes a brief introduction explaining why Moore and Pitlor chose it and what it represents in the larger story of the form.

Lorrie Moore’s introduction to the volume is one of the more interesting pieces of writing about the short story written in recent decades. She is one of the major short story writers of her generation, and her discussion of how the form has changed across the century, what it has been used for, and what kinds of stories have been left out of the original Best American series, is well worth reading on its own.

For anyone interested in American short fiction, in the editorial history of one of the most influential annual publications in American letters, or in the evolution of literary taste across a century, this anthology is essential. It is a long book and rewards being read slowly, a few stories at a time, across many evenings.