A collection of the year’s best stories selected by celebrated two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn WardIn her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2021, guest editor JesmynWard says that the best fiction offers the reader a “sense of repair.”The stories in this year’s collection accomplish just that, immersing the reader in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Ro...

Co-written by a New York Times best-selling author, this moving story of a Muslim boy’s exile from war-torn Bosnia to the United States offers a riveting refugee saga.Kenan loves drawing and playing soccer with his friends. He wants to be a famous athlete, hates it when his classmates trash his buck teeth by calling him “Bugs Bunny,” and fights with his big brother, who’s too busy and cool for him lately. Sometimes his parents drive him crazy, but he feels...

This timely, moving debut novel follows a teen's efforts to keep his family together as his parents face deportation.Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and the...

A moving middle-grade mystery about a boy dealing with long-repressed memories of his father as he learns about his Mexican and Haitian heritage while spying on a mysterious stranger during the first weeks of COVID lockdown.Lalo Lesperance lives with his older brother and Mexican American mother in a low-income apartment building in Fort Myers. They moved there from a subdivision after the family lost Lalo’s Haitian American father. At school, Lalo is known as the ...

To All the Boys I've Loved Before meets Morgan Matson in this effervescent romance about childhood best friends reconnecting that's full of sunny days, warm nights, first kisses, and mended hearts.Luisa (Lou) Patterson grew up across the street from Sam Alvarez in the small, quirky town of Port Coral. They used to be inseparable—spending every holiday together, shooting silly YouTube videos, and rescuing stray cats. But then middle school ...

**"A sweetly charming love story that leaves the reader with a lasting sense of hope.” —Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star"The perfect novel to snuggle up with.” —Emily Henry, New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read**A heartwarming and thoughtful enemies-to-lovers rom-com about two teens—one trying to save his family's failing pinball arcade, the ...

“To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time,” recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. “They were windows into emotions I had and hadn’t had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.” Decades later, Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year’s edition. The result is a striking and nuanced collection, bring...

When a girl overhears a guy getting verbally destroyed by his friends for being catfished, she jumps in to save the day—and pretends to be his online crush. A young adult romance from the critically acclaimed author of Places We've Never Been.Wren is used to being called a control freak. She doesn’t care; sticking to the list of rules she created for herself helps her navigate life. But when a cute guy named Asher walks through the door of her neighborhood...

Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse and series editor John Joseph Adams select twenty pieces that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year and explore the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today.Today’s readers of science fiction and fantasy have an appetite for stories that address a wide variety of voices, perspectives, and styles. There is an openness to experiment and pus...

Like Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End and Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, Early Departures by Justin A. Reynolds, author of Opposite of Always, is a powerful and deeply moving YA contemporary novel with a speculative twist about love, death, grief, and friendship.What if you could bring your best friend back to life—but only for a short time?Jamal’s best friend, Q, doesn’t know that he died, and ...

The story of an uncovered voyage as colorful and momentous as any on record for the Age of Discovery—and of the Black mariner whose stunning accomplishment has been until now lost to historyIt began with a secret mission, no expenses spared. Spain, plotting to break Portugal’s monopoly trade with the fabled Orient, set sail from a hidden Mexican port to cross the Pacific—and then, critically, to attempt the never-before-accomplished return, the vuelta. Fou...

The craft of writing offers countless potential problems: The story is too long; the story's too short; revising presents a huge hurdle; writer's block is rearing its ugly head.In HELP! FOR WRITERS, Roy Peter Clark presents an "owner's manual" for writers, outlining the seven steps of the writing process, and addressing the 21 most urgent problems that writers face. In his trademark engaging and entertaining style, Clark offers ten short solutions to each problem. Out of ideas? Rea...