Best American Short Stories 2026

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 INCLUDES: AIMEE BENDER • NATHAN ENGLANDER • LOUISE ERDRICH • CALVIN GIMPELEVICH • SIGRID NUNEZ • GEORGE SAUNDERS • AKHIL SHARMA • VU TRAN • PAUL YOON • AND OTHERS

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and many other awards. His other books include a sequel, The Committed, and the bestselling short story collection The Refugees. Other works are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, as well as the children’s books Chicken of the Sea and Simone. His last book was To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. Nicole A. Lamy was the books editor of the Boston Globe, where she expanded books coverage, including a reader advice column called Match Book, which she subsequently wrote for the New York Times Book Review. In addition to book reviews and features she has written about food, photography, and parenting among other topics for the Globe, the Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, and the American Scholar.