Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize

by Sarah Lyn Rogers (editor), Summer Farah (Editor)

The essential annual guide to the newest voices in literature

Selected by Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz

Best Debut Short Stories is an annual celebration of the most promising short story writers today. Selected by a panel of distinguished judges, these twelve stories are the 2023 winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes each writer’s outstanding debut in a literary magazine.

The stories in this anthology encompass fraught family gatherings, death, inheritance, reproduction and birth, translation, secrets, and betrayals. They show us what we would rather not a grandmother’s repeated resurrection, the loss of a child, a family’s excuses for a predator. They direct our attention away from fluorescence and to the natural iguanas climbing into beds, a reflection in an orange, sweat like rain drops, gossamer petals, a child named Ant. They question how well we can ever know other partners reconsidering each other on the brink of divorce, an imaginary roommate. They remind us that some questions have no perfect Why pretend not to understand someone in need? What can anyone do with anxieties over becoming a parent?

This year’s stories were selected by judges Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz, innovators of the short story form. Each story is accompanied by an introduction from the journal editor who first published it, providing insight about what’s exciting in fiction right now, and recognizing the vital work literary magazines do in nurturing new voices.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 2023

About the author

Sarah Lyn Rogers is an NYC-based writer and editor from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her editing credits include books for Soft Skull Press, short stories and personal essays for Catapult magazine, fiction for The Rumpus, and serving as series co-editor for the annual anthology Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Inevitable What (Sad Spell Press, 2016) and Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” (Ghost City Press, 2021) and she wrote a column for Catapult called Internet as Intimacy. She was the 2014 winner of the Academy of American Poets' Virginia de Araujo Prize, as well as a finalist for the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award. Her debut full-length collection, Cosmic Tantrum, is available now from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.

For more of Sarah's work, visit sarahlynrogers.com.

Reviews

[Clara Mundy · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m biased

[Krys]

Picked this up at the library on a whim and stumbled upon a few gems that had voice and verve.

Them Bones by CK Kane
The Chicken by RZ Baschir
The Cacophobe by Seth Wang

There’s a secret buried in this letter. What I’m about to tell you isn’t it: I am deathly allergic to ugliness, I have been since I was a boy, and by the time you read this, this affliction, which has so exquisitely disfigured my life, will, at last, have finished me.

[...] Ugliness of the milder variety induces ostrich-leather hives, iambically throbbing headaches, a lavish swelling of the tongue. Moderate ugliness brings on blue lips and audiovisual hallucinations, themselves too hideous to describe. In the presence of moderate-to-severe ugliness, I—like a much-pawed statue of the Madonna—weep tears of blood. And in the severest cases, this weeping turns to sweating—to the point of fatal exsanguination, even, should the ugliness not be removed.

[Justin Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a short story collection given to me by a friend and I am glad he passed it a long because I wouldn't have probably picked it up otherwise. I am not super into short story collections but end up reading a handful every year as one does. They are hard to review as well because its not a WHOLE book you are reviewing but a curated collection. This book had the most intense editor notes sections I have ever seen and I think that actually took away from the collection as a whole for me. I think I may be in a minority on this but it felt like they were selling the author and stories a little too much. Wanna fight about it? This book did have a very cohesive selection and I really liked that. It didn't wander too far from familial and interpersonal relationships and that was great.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An emotional rollercoaster in 12 acts. These debut stories will move you to the core. Full of emotionally gritty tales, lyrical prose, and surrealist scenes; the short stories in this collection are myriad and unique. Not for the faint of heart (trigger warning: suicide, sexual exploitation, and brutal murder), some stories are darker. Other tales paint vivid emotional landscapes and furnish inner worlds with dressed down thoughts and self-doubt. A few stories are revelatory humorous slice of life and one surrealist science-fiction/gender equality commentary narrative has the cruelest of cliffhangers. A spectacular little gem for anyone searching for up-and-coming authors to follow or for an easy book to pick up and put down for short reading bursts.

[Andrei Dumitrescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good. I’ve especially enjoyed (in order of their appearance):

(1) Delroy and the Boys by Stephenjohn Holgate;
(2) Allen by Ren Arcamone;
(3) Standing Still by Faire Holliday (my favorite of this collection & one of the best I have read this past year);
(4) Schism in a Soul So Tender by Clara Mundy;
(5) Magic, or Something Less Assuring by Mengyin Lin;

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

so hard to give an overall rating to a collection lile this - some stories were 5 and some were 1…

[Elijah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprised by some of these. I thought a lot about my life during this.

[Reb Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

most of these stories were all 4.5-5 star reads!!!!!

[reymundo ramos jr · Rating 5 out of 5]

there is some incredibly new talent in this book. it’s exciting to know this is the beginning of the road for these authors. it’s going to be a fun ride!

[Amanda Jacobson]

Creative writing class read, some good, some not as much.

[Christina Pitchford]

Love this series.

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two of memorable stories:

My Grandmother's Feline Soul - Annabelle Ulaka
Magic, or Something Less Assuring - Mengyin Lin

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is far superior to the 2022 edition - multiple stories in here blew me away and I spent lots of time underlining and annotating things on my quest to become a better short story writer myself. Among my favorites: “My Grandmother’s Feline Soul” by Annabelle Ulaka, about a family whose dead grandmother keeps returning to life; “Allen,” by Ren Arcamone, about a couple who creates an imaginary roommate on whom they blame everything that goes wrong, “Schism in a Soul So Tender,” by Clara Mundy, about a young girl who is on bed rest while her family hunts down her doppelgänger, and “Magic or Something Less Assuring” by Mengyin Lin, about a Chinese couple on the verge of divorce who take one last trip to Morocco.

Brilliant, these and many of the others too.