A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee and series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of short fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A lifelong friendship may become a casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war. Rejected by his lover, a man seeks to reconcile with his family. Twitter users miraculously muster enough empathy to help a lost cat find a forever home. Enlightening, poignant, and undeniably human, the stories in this anthology bravely confront societal darkness and offer, in Lee’s words, “our emotional truths, restoring our sanity and providing comfort for the days ahead.” The Best American Short Stories 2023 includes Cherline Bazile • Maya Binyam • Tom Bissell • Taryn Bowe • Da-Lin • Benjamin Ehrlich• Sara Freeman • Lauren Groff • Nathan Harris • Jared Jackson • Sana Krasikov • Danica Li • Ling Ma • Manuel Muñoz • Joanna Pearson • Souvankham Thammavongsa • Kosiso Ugwueze • Corinna Vallianatos • Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi • Esther Yi

Best American

The Best American Short Stories 2023

Longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award • Finalist for The Story Prize • Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction • Finalist for the California Book Award • Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award ""Ruben Reyes Jr. is a wonder."" — Héctor Tobar An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own. An ordinary man wakes one morning to discover he’s a famous reggaetón star. An aging abuela slowly morphs into a marionette puppet. A struggling academic discovers the horrifying cost of becoming a Self-Made Man. In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices—choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans. Blazing with heart, humor, and inimitable style, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven subverts everything we think we know about migration and its consequences, capturing what it means to take up a new life—whether willfully or forced—with piercing and brilliant clarity. A gifted new storyteller and trailblazing stylist, Reyes not only transports to other worlds but alerts us to the heartache and injustice of our own.

There is a Rio Grande in Heaven

""Excellent....Taken as a whole, the volume moves beyond food’s sensory pleasures to investigate it as a cultural vessel, a symbol of inequality, and more. It’s a standout addition to the series."" —Publisher's Weekly (starred review) A collection of the year’s top food writing, selected by prolific food writer and author of How to Cook Everything Mark Bittman. ""In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture. From the link between salt and sex, to Syrian refugees transforming ancient Turkish food traditions, to the FDA’s crusade on alternative non-dairy milk options, to Black farmers in Arkansas seeking justice, the scope of these essays spans nearly every aspect of our society. This anthology offers an entertaining and poignant look at how food shapes our lives and how food writing shapes our culture. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2023 INCLUDES JAYA SAXENA • LIGAYA MISHAN • MARION NESTLE TOM PHILPOTT • WESLEY BROWN • ALICIA KENNEDY CAROLINE HATCHETT • AMY LOEFFLER and others

The Best American Food Writing 2023

We all need help centering ourselves to serve ourselves and our world. In this small, beautiful book, the Kogi—a remote and ancient tribe in the mountains of Colombia—offer their learnings. They pose nine thought-provoking questions to help us live harmoniously with the earth and in turn find happiness and purpose in every moment. “Just as we are both sitting here and talking, this is how we can live well. All of this you will write in the book.”—Mama Jose Gabriel, a spiritual guide of the Kogi tribe, to author Lucas Buchholz For centuries, the Kogi have lived in seclusion in Colombia’s remote Sierra Nevadas, known as “the heart of the world.” But in recent years, concerned by the environmental degradation they have experienced in their villages and forests, a few emissaries from the tribe emerged to bring an urgent and loving message to the West—advice on how to live in harmony with the earth. Buchholz was invited to their home to receive and transcribe this message. A Book of Balance takes us on a journey into a startlingly beautiful landscape and into a sacred space: the traditional fireside circle held regularly by the tribe. In this circle, members consider key questions essential to their community. In this slim volume of spiritual introspection, they ask us to share in their practice, posing nine questions that focus our minds and hearts on who we are, who we can become. Throughout we hear the words of the Kogi elders, wisdom that offers revelations, inspiration, and direction for our everyday lives. A beautiful book to own, to share with friends, and discuss in community.

A Book of Balance

Award-winning writer, columnist, and journalists Carl Zimmer selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2022. “What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us. From a hopeful portrait of a future for people with Alzheimer’s disease, to a fascinating exploration of the rise of nearsightedness in children, to the heroic story of a herd of cows that evaded a hurricane, these selections reveal how science and nature shape our everyday lives. With tremendous intelligence, clarity, and insight, this anthology offers an expansive look at where we are and where we are headed. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023 includes JESSICA CAMILLE AGUIRRE • VANESSA GREGORY • SABRINA IMBLER FERRIS JABR • MARION RENAULT • ELIZABETH SVOBODA NATALIE WOLCHOVER • SARAH ZHANG and others

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

In this rare account from within ICE detention facilities, fourteen children are followed from their arrest by U.S. Border Patrol to the day they exit facilities for unaccompanied minors. Preschoolers and teenagers, the kids offer a range of evocative backstories: a deaf and mute fifteen-year-old Mayan girl; a teen from India who has walked three thousand miles; a Guatemalan girl who has escaped domestic slavery and is on the run with her young siblings. Each child offers an account of their chaotic journey from Guatemala, India, Honduras or Mexico, and the situation that drove them to enter the U.S. illegally. We get an intimate view of their long, difficult quest for release to U.S. relatives and a rare, first-hand view of daily life within U.S detention shelters. The author, a therapist within a major children's detention facility, offers a vivid, and often surprising, first-hand description of daily life within our immigration shelters; the complicated, often heroic efforts of shelter workers; and the processes and politics that decide if a child is deported or allowed to join family. In the epilogue, the author explains that due to Homeland Security restrictions, sharing information about the internal workings of migrant shelters forfeits any future employment. The author believes this to be the principal reason there are no other published accounts from within facilities for unaccompanied minors.

Shelter

The Good Lessons "A necessary read for anyone serious about personal transformation and peace in our communities." Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and author of "Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." A provocative, inspiring, and highly original take on the education and healing of troubled, alienated and gang involved youth. These are beautiful, harrowing stories of transformation as both a high-crime urban and a reservation Indian community decide to throw out convention and rethink what it means, and what it takes, to raise their most alienated and difficult children. Raised in East Los Angeles and also a professional musician, Hernandez-Sametier has been a teacher, counselor and principal in some of the most difficult urban and rural school environments across the U.S. and Indian Country. He recently served as a therapist for high-trauma, unaccompanied minors detained by U.S. immigration. In 2006, he was honored as the "national educator of the year" by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education.

The Good Lessons

Este libro narra dos historias de Bogotá. La de cinco hermanos colombianos que enfrentan la orfandad y la miseria con valentía. Y la de una niña huérfana que hará cualquier cosa para conocer al misterioso chico inmortal. El momento en que sus vidas se entrelazan jamás te dejará.

The Immortal Boy

Two intertwining stories of Bogotá. One, a family of five children, left to live on their own. The other, a girl in an orphanage who will do anything to befriend the mysterious Immortal Boy. How they weave together will never leave you.

A lush, nostalgic barrio romance reminiscent of Marquez and Allende. An orphaned boy with long hair to cover scars and a bewitched glass eye is raised by a collective of mariachis in East Los Angeles. Since childhood, Jimmy Ojotriste (sad eye) has busked the teeming Mexican restaurants of the Eastside with violinist Ray Chin and green-eyed tenor Victor Salcedo. At twenty, all three boys are in love, stuck, and one of them is dying. What follows is a lyrical quest through the Latin music underground of Los Angeles that will eventually take them from Tijuana to Andalusia. Steeped in the music of mariachi and flamenco, and the “brujeria”, sensuality, and street life of disco era Los Angeles, Jimmy Ojotriste is an intense, musical romp through a vanishing world in the company of characters you will miss dearly when it’s over. “Gave me the feeling of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first time.” Amazon Review “Romantic in the biggest sense of the word.” Goodreads Review “Lovely novel about young mariachis finding their place in the world, soaked in a vibrant sense of place and time. Somehow captures that feeling of being twenty and seeing the world spread before you in a way I've rarely seen portrayed well.” Goodreads Review “Wrapped in the sights and sounds of 1970s Los Angeles, vibrant and nostalgic, Hernandez explores the complex intersections of race, love, poverty and coming of age…and through it all we are serenaded by his lyrical descriptions of the life and music of the mariachi.” Tate Hurvitz, Phd. Grossmont College Literature Dept. “…Definitely for music lovers and romantics. Lyrical scenes - odd and memorable characters. Anyone interested in flamenco, mariachi, and Hispanic culture will be immersed. I learned of the book through "Las Comadres" a Latino lit reading group at our bookstore.” Goodreads Review

The Music of Jimmy Ojotriste

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