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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
The Best American Series
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane • Tom Perrotta • Alice Munro • Edward P. Jones • Joy Williams • Joyce Carol Oates • Thomas McGuane • Kelly Link • Charles D'Ambrosio • Cory Doctorow • George Saunders • and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best-selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Rotten Selections for the Most Part July 21, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

Chabon is much over-rated and he shows it with his taste for this selection. Always selected Alice Munro (yawn), the idiotic Cory Doctorow (must be a "friend" of Chabon), and several others ruins otherwise good choices of Perrotta, Lehane, McGuane, and Jones.

5 out of 5 stars

Redraw the Boundaries April 12, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

As guest editor, Michael Chabon sets entertainment as the standard for good writing. Because for Chabon, entertainment is nothing less than human connection. If we derive pleasure from this connection, it is because through it we experience something real, visceral, and intellectual, albeit vicariously.

His mission, therefore, is to restore the fallen status of entertainment. To do this, he casts a wide net over water "serious" writers and readers often find too shallow. He trawls the waterways for writing that reeks of ghost stories, science fiction, detective novels, action movies, and folklore. Anything that leads to new and unusual forms. (Not surprising for the man who wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.)

To avoid an exhaustive list, I'll contain myself to quick descriptions of seven stories inside.

"Until Gwen," by Denis Lehane, has the feel of a detective thriller, or film noir. It's a murder story told in the second person, with an accurate rendering of characters who have fallen so far, there's no bottom left to hit.

"Eight Pieces for the Left Hand," by J. Robert Lennon, is a series of eight folktale-like vignettes that have continuity in recurring themes.

"Death Defier," by Tom Bissell, is war story with an inescapable, catastrophic ending.

"Anda's Game," by Cory Doctorow, is almost sci-fi. It's the story of a child's online role-playing game with real-world consequences.

"The Secret Goldfish," by David Means, tells the story of the disintegration of a marriage from the perspective of the family goldfish.

"The Cousins," by Joyce Carol Oates, tells, in letter form, the story of two cousins separated by World War II and the Holocaust.

"Hart and Boot," by Tim Pratt, mythologizes the partly true, partly fictional lives of Wild West figures Pearl hart and John Boot.

Perhaps the best way to judge the quality of an anthology such as this is to measure how successful the guest editor has been in achieving the goals he or she set forth in their introduction. If that suits you, then this is a high-quality product.

4 out of 5 stars

The Best American Short Stories 2005 (The Best American Series) March 9, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Very entertaining. Wide range of subjects. An easy way to read many different authors.

5 out of 5 stars

As always, a pleasure from start to finish January 9, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

It's hard NOT to love this series, and this provides another great opportunity to catch up and sample contemporary authors.

5 out of 5 stars

Great collection January 2, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This collection is great. I enjoyed every story to some degree, and a couple are fantastic. Tom Perrotta's (ELECTION) "The Smile On Happy Chang's Face" is absurd and hilarious. Thomas McGuane's "Old Friends," "Death Defier" by Tom Bissell, "Old Boys, Old Girls" by Edward P. Jones, "The Secret Goldfish" by David Means and "Natasha" by David Bezmozgis are all excellent reads. But my favorite two are Dennis Lehane's (MYSTIC RIVER) "Until Gwen" and J. Robert Lennon's "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand," an excerpt from his book 100 Pieces for the Left Hand, a series of short vignettes that somehow hold together as a novel. Overall, this entire collection feels more cohesive than most, at least in tone if not in theme. I look to these collections to find new authors to read, and I found several here.