The Best American Short Stories, 1991 - Hardcover

Adams, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395544106 ISBN 13: 9780395544105

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991

Synopsis

Presents a collection of stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada

About this title

About the Author:

Katrina Kenison has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 1990. She currently resides in Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

The first sentence of the first story in this collection--"We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights"--lures the reader with its promise of a strange and unfamiliar world. The selection, by Rick Bass, does not disappoint, taking us on a tour of "backwoods nightspots" where an aspiring fighter trains for a career in the big city. Story after story--there are 20 in all--matches Bass's opening gambit, with a dazzling mix of telling details and poignant character portraits. There are Charles D'Ambrosio Jr.'s 13-year-old protagonist who must escort his mother's drunken friend to her home; the woman in Siri Hustvedt's tale who enters a hospital because of a months-old migraine and whose neighbor, an old woman, one day climbs in bed with her and begins kissing her passionately; the sullen teenager, created by David Jauss, whose father is fired for embezzling, then hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Ashamed, the son blurts out to a friend that his father died of a brain tumor; years later, a father himself, the son reflects, "I had always loved my father, though behind his back, without letting him know it. And in a way, behind my back, too." Adams wrote Second Chances.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0395544106
• ISBN 13: 9780395544105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Editor: Kenison Katrina