On the Best American Short Stories 2024

This is an outstanding collection. I’d previously read The Best American Short Stories 2021 and been impressed by Jesmyn Ward and Heidi Pitlor’s selections, but I was blown away by Lauren Groff’s (Pitlor co-editing again). I was especially taken with Jamel Brinkley’s “Blessed Deliverance,” Katherine Damm’s “The Happiest Day of Your Life,” Molly Dektar’s “The Bed and Breakfast,” Madeline ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps,” Allegra Hyde’s “Democracy in America,” Taisia Kitaiskaia’s “Engelond,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “P’s Parties,” and Suzanne Wang’s “Mall of America.” For a collection of only twenty stories, an unusually large number of them got to me, and if I had to narrow it to a short list, the top four would be Brinkley’s, with its quiet passage of time; Damm’s, where the narrator’s increasingly drunken, almost Dionysian state builds the tension; ffitch’s, which holds decades of resentment alongside togetherness; and Wang’s “Mall of America,” a striking take on technology, migration, and aging. The whole thing is strengthened by Groff’s introduction, which has so much energy that you rarely see — entirely unlike the withdrawn, scholarly introductions that open so many other anthologies. I’m so glad I read it, and I hope you will too.