Books in The Best American Series ® series

The Best American Short Stories is the longest running and best-selling series of short fiction in the country. For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.” These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver’s “minimalism,” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley’s “secular Yiddishkeit.” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American. Moore writes that the process of assembling these stories allowed her to look “thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history — the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux.” 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories is an invaluable testament, a retrospective of our country’s ever-changing but continually compelling literary artistry. LORRIE MOORE, after many years as a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Moore has received honors for her work, among them the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her most recent story collection, Bark, was short-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor Award. HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.

Praise for The Best American Infographics “Represent[s] the full spectrum of the genre—from authoritative to playful.”—Scientific American “Not only is it a thing of beauty, it’s also a good read, with thoughtful explanations of each winning graphic.”—Nature “Information, in its raw form, can overwhelm us. Finding the visual form of data can simplify this deluge into pearls of understanding.” —Kim Rees, Periscopic The most creative and effective data visualizations from the past year, edited by Brain Pickings creator Maria Popova The rise of infographics across nearly all print and electronic media—from a graphic illuminating the tweets of the women of Isis to a memorable depiction of the national geography of beer—reveals patterns in our lives and the world in often startling ways. The Best American Infographics 2015 showcases visualizations from the worlds of politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more. From an elegant graphic comparison of first sentences in classic novels to a startling illustration of the world’s deadliest animals, “You’ll come away with more than your share of . . . mind-bending moments—and a wide-ranging view of what infographics can do” (Harvard Business Review). “This is what information design does at its best – it gives pause, makes visible the unsuspected yet significant invisibilia of life, and by astonishing us into mobilization, it catapults us toward one of the greatest feats of human courage: the act of changing one’s mind.”—from the Introduction by Maria Popova Guest introducer MARIA POPOVA is the one-woman curation machine behind Brain Pickings, a cross-disciplinary blog showcasing content that makes people smarter. She has more than half a million monthly readers and over 480,000 Twitter followers. Popova is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow and has written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, The Huffington Post, and the Nieman Journalism Lab. Series editor GARETH COOK is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and the editor of Mind Matters, Scientific American’s neuroscience blog. He helped invent the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section and served as its editor from 2007 to 2011. His work has also appeared in NewYorker.com, WIRED, Scientific American, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Science writers get into the game with all kinds of noble, high-minded ambitions. We want to educate. To enlighten,” notes guest editor Amy Stewart in her introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016. “But at the end of the day, we’re all writers . . . We’re here to play for the folks.” The writers in this anthology brought us the year’s highest notes in the genre. From a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay on the earthquake that could decimate the Pacific Northwest to the astonishing work of investigative journalism that transformed the nail salon industry, this is a collection of hard-hitting and beautifully composed writing on the wonders, dangers, and oddities of scientific innovation and our natural world.The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 includes Kathryn Schulz, Sarah Maslin Nir, Charles C. Mann, Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Kolbert, Gretel Ehrlich, and others Amy Stewart, guest editor, is the award-winning author of seven books, including her acclaimed Kopp Sisters novels and the bestsellers The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. She and her husband live in Eureka, California, where they own a bookstore called Eureka Books. Tim Folger, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines. He lives in Gallup, New Mexico.

The premier anthology of contemporary American poetry continues with an exceptional volume edited by award-winning novelist and poet Sherman Alexie, now with a new essay by Alexie on reactions to the 2015 publication.Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry has become a mainstay for the direction and spirit of American poetry. Each volume in the series presents the year’s most extraordinary new poems and writers. Guest editor Sherman Alexie’s picks for The Best American Poetry 2015 highlight the depth and breadth of the American experience. Culled from electronic and print journals, the poems showcase some of our leading luminaries—Amy Gerstler, Terrance Hayes, Ron Padgett, Jane Hirshfield—and introduce a number of outstanding younger poets taking their place in the limelight. A leading figure since his breakout poetry collection The Business of Fancydancing in 1992, Sherman Alexie won the National Book Award for his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. He describes himself as “lucky enough to be a full-time writer” and has written short stories, novels, screenplays, and essays—but he is at his core a poet. As always, series editor David Lehman’s foreword assessing the state of the art kicks off the book, followed by an introductory essay in which Alexie discusses his selections. The Best American Poetry 2015 is a guide to who’s who and what’s happening in American poetry today.

Now available in a fully revised and updated third edition, The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History offers an authoritative and accessible introduction to the history and enduring legacy of the Cold War. Thoroughly updated in light of new scholarship, including revised sections on President Nixon's policies in Vietnam and President Reagan's approach to U.S.-Soviet relations Features six all new counterparts sections that juxtapose important historical figures to illustrate the contrasting viewpoints that characterized the Cold War Argues that the success of Western capitalism during the Cold War laid the groundwork for the economic globalization and political democratization that have defined the 21st century Includes extended coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous confrontation of the nuclear age thus far

Children's book about Theodore Roosevelt.Michelle doesn’t know it, but her cousin and best friend David has a special secret. He owns a magic coin that makes it possible to travel through time. David has used it to visit famous explorers, artists, and kings. And he’s about to use it again. On a trip to the American History Museum in New York, Michelle gets embarrassed when David grabs a feather and starts dancing around a statue of a Native American Indian. She tells him she’d only dance with real Indians. Well, when your friend can travel through time, you have to be careful what you say. Wishing on his magic coin, David transports them back to a Sioux Indian camp on the border of North and South Dakota. There they learn about the Native Americans and their way of life. They also befriend Washta, a young Sioux who teaches them about the many animals his people hunt and live with. A chance encounter brings the children into contact with President Teddy Roosevelt, the legendary Buffalo Jones, and the famous Sioux chief Sitting Bull. Everything’s going fine—until David hears gunfire at the edge of the Sioux camp. What’s going on? And can David keep his new friends safe?

Randolph Marcy’s detailed guide must have seemed a godsend to nineteenth century Americans contemplating the long, hazardous journey to a new life in the west. Imagine their questions—and fears. What if we are attacked! Where will we find water? Will I run out of supplies? This volume answers it all. It describes all the needs for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and even necessities the prospective traveler might have overlooked. It includes a landmark-oriented chart with mileage between points and resources, hazards, and such at each point and in-between. Reading the details, one wonders how anyone could have survived the journey without this critical information. For the modern reader, this is not necessarily survival reading; it’s really fascinating stuff. You begin to appreciate what our ancestors endured in completing the expansion of the American nation to the Pacific shores. And for the historians and novelists among us, what an incredible resource!