The Best American Short Stories 2026: A Collection of Twenty Short Stories Selected by Viet Thanh Nguyen

by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nicole A. Lamy

Desire. Longing. Tenderness. Passion. In this year’s volume, love lies at the heart of the stories that guest editor Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “so good that they may be bad for you”: a sixteen-year-old moves into town and effortlessly falls in love with a classmate who he knows he must abandon; a grandmother stitches together the hurts of her past when she connects with her granddaughter in the present; a young lesbian attempts to launch her sexuality with comically mixed results. In these stories and many more in this year’s volume, it’s easy to get lost in the yearning of characters who feel so heartbreakingly true and whose lives resonate with the weight of inevitability.

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2026 AIMEE BENDER • NATHAN ENGLANDER • LOUISE ERDRICH • CALVIN GIMPELEVICH • SIGRID NUNEZ • GEORGE SAUNDERS • AKHIL SHARMA • VU TRAN • PAUL YOON • AND OTHERS

Genres: Fiction

346 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication October 20, 2026

About the author

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of “The Sympathizer,” awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His most recent book, “To Save and to Destroy,” explores the idea of being an outsider. He is also the author of the short story collection “The Refugees;” the nonfiction book “Nothing Ever Dies,” a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book “Simone” along with illustrator Minnie Phan; the sequel to “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed;” the nonfiction book “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial,” longlisted for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, “The Displaced,” as well as a co-editor of “The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.” He is a University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll break down my reviews per story in the collection:

1. The Tailor and the King by Aimee Bender
★☆☆☆☆
This one just did not work for me. It's a quasi-fairytale story, with modern attributes about a tailor being recruited by a King to mend a rift in space-time. Just got absolutely nothing from it.

2. Here Now by Nathan Blum
★★☆☆☆
This was cute, albeit very predictable. This is about a teenaged boy who moves all the time (due to his mother's job as a deer epidemiologist) and his first relationship. I'm not sure how well the mother's job/chronic wasting disease of deer really tied in, felt a bit forced.

3. The Writer Writes from Prison by Ayşe Papatya Bucak
★☆☆☆☆
The reader is reading this story. The reader is having a terrible time; she does not like the story! The story beats the reader over the head!

4. What are We Doing, What Have We Done by Nathan Englander
★★☆☆☆
I personally hate stories that involve therapists or therapy, so this story is already at a disadvantage. It's about a city boy who fled to NH to get away and now is wracked with fear over an oncoming beetle infestation as well as his wife's pregnancy. It was fine, not really offensive or interesting.

5. Love of my Days by Louise Eldritch
★★★★☆
This one was great, a nice little story set in the American West which slowly builds up the characters by expanding the context as it goes along. Just a really elegantly written story. This plot is a bit harder to describe, but it's a sequence of events starting from a sheriff attempting to arrest a man.

6. The Horror by Carolyn Ferrell
★★☆☆☆
This was written in a very disjointed way that others might find interesting, but I did not like it. The story itself was okay, about some failure-to-launch guys who get pulled into a strange family and unravel some unsavory history.

7. The Women's Hospital by Eliot Fox
★★★☆☆
About a doctor whose dead colleague may? be assisting her with complicated procedures. It was interesting but a bit obvious.

8. High School by Calvin Gimpelevich
★★☆☆☆
Boring and pointless. The narrator describes her early forays into trying to be a lesbian...correctly? There's one scene that's a little funny, but the rest is meh.

9. Hangman by Samantha Hunt
★☆☆☆☆
A slice of life of a mother taking her two kids to a town Memorial Day celebration. Bland and uninspired, and I didn't love the writing style.

10. The Rabbit's Foot by Sigrid Nunez
★★★☆☆
This is about a retired hotel housekeeper and bits of her past along with connections to her daughter and granddaughter. It was fairly enjoyable but just wish the author didn't spell everything out for the readers.

11. The Frenzy by Joyce Carol Oates
★★★★★
Absolutely perfect short story, exactly the type of thing I was hoping for from this collection. An older man takes his much younger mistress to the beach. Great build up and exploration of the characters.

12. The Moron Factory by George Saunders
★★★★☆
Interesting and strange. This is part of a series Saunders does as part of his story club where members try to stay under a certain word count, so he omits articles. It makes it a bit jarring, but you do get used to it. The story is a wacky office and some shenanigans that happen in a single day. Enjoyable but a little predictable.

13. Nocturnal Creatures by Saïd Sayrafiezade
★★★★★
Touching and funny and well-paced. It's about an exterminator slowly becoming close to a single mom and her son. I was sucked into this one so quickly. I think it might be my favorite story of the entire collection.

14. Ritu by Akhil Sharma
★★☆☆☆
A man remembers the only other classmate that shared his background and his limited interactions with her but how she still has an outsized presence in his mind. This is one of those stories where if this happened to you, it would feel like a big event but reading about it happening to someone else doesn't feel impactful.

15. The Devil's Broom by Jim Shepard
★★★★☆
This is about the Great Fire of 1910 (which was also called "The Devil's Broom" fire) and focuses mainly on Ed Pulaski, a US Forest Service Ranger whose actions saved a lot of lives. It also briefly touches on some immigrant firefighters. The descriptions of the fire were incredibly well done and just viscerally detailed. The rest of the story didn't quite get there. The relationship between Pulaski and his family felt shallow, and the immigrant firefighters' story felt a bit tacked on.

16. Fucking Illinois People by Josie Tolin
★★★★☆
This was good, albeit a little strange. A man works to fulfill his cancer-stricken wife's wish to sleep with her lesbian friend. The story is constructed really well and the end of it has quite the emotional crescendo.

17. The World by Ava Tomasula y Garcia
★☆☆☆☆
This is just shower thoughts from the one character without a lot of real introspection or actual depth.

18. Like Evening by Vu Tran
★★★☆☆
This is a sort of Sense & Sensibility reimagining where it's 20 years later and we're exploring what would happen if Willoughby came back to Marianne. And it's also set in post-war Vietnam. I really like the concept, but the execution was a bit lacking for me, namely the letter in the story is just too damn long.

19. Looking House by Tiphanie Yanique
★★☆☆☆
The story starts with a young boy experiencing a catastrophic event and then rejoins him several years later as he's nearing adulthood. There are some interesting aspects here, especially the setting and dialogue, but it just didn't click with me all that much.

20. The New Coast by Paul Yoon
★★★★★
I love a good dystopian story. This follows two brothers in a post-something world upended by a war or destruction of some sort. The story is told from the younger brother's perspective, and his youth and limited knowledge really give it a lot of depth and intrigue. I read in the back that this is a sorta side story to his novel Etna, so I definitely will be reading that!

The average of my scores of all the stories is a 3, but because I did learn about some new authors, I will bump it to a 4. The highs are higher than the lows, since everything is short. I'd recommend to people wanting to check out some new voices.

[Juli Stadler · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Best American Short Stories series started in 1915. The editors have changed over the years, but starting in 1978, the publisher decided to take the series in a new direction by selecting a different writer each year to work under the guidance of a series editor to select the contents and introduce the volume each year. The guest editor chooses the best 20 stories from 120 stories recommended by the series editor aka The Roving Editor Format. For the 2026 volume, Viet Thanh Nguyen selected 20 stories from the 120 recommended by series editor Nicole A. Lamy. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a South Vietnamese-born American professor and novelist who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, "The Sympathizer."

I became aware of The Best American Short Story series in 1987 and have purchased every volume since then. In addition to the pleasure that comes from reading a highly curated anthology that is certain to include stories from some of my favorite authors, I can always count on this series to introduce me to some exciting new voices. This volume was no exception. While I enjoyed almost all of the 20 stories, there were 13 that stood out to me. Eight of those 13 short stories were written by authors who are new to me. If you read just one short story anthology this year, it should be “The Best American Short Stories 2026.”

I appreciate that this anthology includes a section at the end of the book for "Contributor's Notes," which includes a short biography for each featured author, as well as a statement by each author providing some additional context for their short story. This anthology also includes a list of "Other Distinguished Stories of 2025" and a list of "American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories."

My favorite short stories from this anthology were:
"Here Now" by Nathan Blum
"The Writer Writes from Prison" by Ayse Papatya Bucak
"What Are We Doing, What Have We Done" by Nathan Englander
"Love of My Days" by Louise Erdrich
"High School" by Calvin Gimpelevich
"Hangman" by Samantha Hunt
"The Frenzy" by Joyce Carol Oates
"The Moron Factory" by George Saunders
"Ritu" by Akhil Sharma
"The Devil's Broom" by Jim Shepard
"Fucking Illinois People" by Josie Tolin
"Like Evening" by Vu Tran
"The New Coast" by Paul Yoon

Thanks to Mariner Books and NetGalley for the complimentary DRC. All opinions are my own.

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Mariner Books and NetGalley for the egalley of this collection.

The Best American Short Stories series is one of the staples of American literature, consistently providing access to wonderful writing. This collection for 2026 is no exception.

As a reader, the wide assortment of stories is simply amazing. Every year, I am impressed with the variety of voices, of narrative structure, of settings and characters, that this collection makes available. Especially stories that come from the quarterly journals that publish less well-known authors. Some of the stories may have more emotional impact than others depending on the reader, but there is no denying that all the stories are well-constructed and impactful in their own way.

One of the best things about this series is the Contributors' Notes at the end of the book. For writers and those curious about the creative process, this section gives a behind-the-scenes look at writing that is rarely seen. The many ways in which stories come to be are as varied as the stories themselves, and the authors' revelations of the background sources of the stories at times give them a richer context and depth.

The Best American Short Stories series is perfect for planes, trains, and automobiles as they say, but also for keeping on your nightstand or desk whenever you have a brief amount of time to read something that despite its length can deliver an emotional or intellectual (or both) readerly satisfaction.

[Jarrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

A big thanks to Marnier Books and Net Galley for early access to this book.

For years I used to read The Best American Series as part of my end of the year wrap up for my reading. I used to read The Best American Short Stories, Travel, Food and Sports Writing before they were all ended (The Best American Sports Writing has turned into The Year’s Best Sports Writing and is still going strong). While I continued to read the Best America Short Stories, after a few years, I gave up on reading them all together. The main reason why was due to the fact that more than half of the stories that where selected to be in the book were quite boring and not the best of that year.

When I got this ARC, I thought that things had changed. However, I was incorrect in this theory and soon realized that I was stuck in the same rut that I was in the last time that I read this book. Most of the stories were boring and didn’t keep my attention. While there were a few good ones here and there, most of them were just boring and uninteresting.

[Jifu · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Note: I received an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley)

Admittedly, what I have to say here could be applied to many short story anthologies, but that does not diminish the sincerity behind these words. The 2026 edition of the Best American Short Stories is a strong recommendation from me for anyone looking for some great contemporary fiction, especially if they currently don’t have the time or energy to devote to a full-time novel. The array of writers selected and showcased here means that no matter one’s own personal literary preferences, there’s bound to be at least a few stories that connect. On top of that, the sizable variety here could mean some unexpectedly delightful new reading experiences from writers both new and familiar.

Standouts for this reader include Louis Erdrich’s “Love of My Days,” and George Saunders’ “The Moron Factory.”

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection of short stories written by a wide variety of authors and curated by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Nicole A. Lamy. I appreciate the work the editors put into crafting an anthology of both established and newer writers. The variety was excellent and I enjoyed pretty much every story, some more than others. It's great to have a collection like this to dip into when I want a short read, and this was fantastic for that purpose. I highly recommend it to fans of contemporary short fiction.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing a review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Denice Langley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love books that feature short stories. These "best of the best" collections are among my most often recommended books. Most of them have a theme.....this one is the best American short stories written during 2025. The selections are written by authors of all skill levels and experience, with each author flexing their skills to catch readers' attention and provide a reading experience that you'll feel obliged to share with your reading circle. These books make excellent gifts to yourself or others. I rotate these when I feel stuck or just need a break from the usual. 5 easy stars.

[Christin Henke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

It took me a while to get through this collection but my perseverance was rewarded 10-fold. I laughed. I cried. I frantically googled the authors and ordered their books.

This collection’s standouts (for me) are:

The Frenzy by Joyce Carol Oats

Hangman by Samantha Hunt

Fucking Illinois People by Josie Tolin

Like Evening by Vu Tran

Looking House by Tiphanie Yanique

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only story in this collection that I liked Nathan Englander’s What Are We Doing, What Have We Done. Englander is a very talented Jewish writer, and his story really stands out in this book.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid stories. Well-written, though I wish there had been more diversity of tone and genre.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.