About our Project

We are the students in the American Short Story course (English 372) at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh in the spring 2010 semester. For this course, we read The Best American Short Stories 2009 (www.bestamericanshortstories.com) and discussed the short stories and their literary value. With the guidance of Professor Susan Nuernberg, we chose six of those stories that some among us particularly enjoyed (“The Anniversary Trip,” “Magic Words,” “Modulation,” “Sagittarius,” “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” and “Yurt”), and wrote critical reviews of them for our class blog. We are revising those reviews and will be posting them here in the coming weeks. We encourage feedback from anyone who has read any of the stories in the collection, in particular the six stories we reviewed.

The Best American Short Stories is a yearly anthology. It began in 1915 with Edward O’Brien. When O’Brien died in 1941, Martha Foley took over as editor. After Foley died in 1978, the publisher (Houghton Mifflin) decided to take a guest editor for each year. Recent guest editors have included Michael Chabon (2005), Ann Patchet (2006), Stephen King (2007), and Salman Rushdie (2008).

2009's guest editor is Alice Sebold. She is the author of 3 books: Lucky (1999), The Lovely Bones (2002), and Almost Noon (2007). Her novels encompass her experience with rape and explore rape's detrimental effects in the lives of young women. Time pronounced her novel The Lovely Bones “the breakout fiction debut of the year” and it was made into a movie of the same name in 2009.

This is the third year for series editor Heidi Pitlor. She was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and is the author of the novel The Birthdays (2006). She’s also had fiction writing published in Ploughshares. People said her novel "Offers sharp insights into simmering resentments and misunderstandings among relatives."

Coming Soon:
"The Anniversary Trip” by Victoria Lancelotta
“Magic Words” by Jill McCorkle
“Modulation” by Richard Powers
“Sagittarius” by Greg Hrbek
“Them Old Cowboy Songs” by Annie Proulx
"Yurt” by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum