A dazzling selection of short fiction spanning all of American history, from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Ursula K. Le Guin and Danielle Evans, curated by a contemporary master of the form.

"There are things in life that it pays to contemplate with the sheen of magic rather than with cool sensible logic. A short story is a matter of the heart." -from the introduction

For Rion Amilcar Scott, author of the prizewinning collections The World Doesn't Require You and Insurrections, the short story is a quintessentially American art form. It has found some of its highest use in the hands of writers of a young nation struggling to define itself: writers who have explored questions of identity and meaning in a rich tapestry of work, a kind of unfinished, and unfinishable, collage.

From America's first generation of masters-William Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne-to today's Kirstin Valdez Quade, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Stephen Graham Jones, and many more, Scott shares some of the gems that have moved and inspired him over years of reading, writing, and teaching. Each story is a marvel of narrative beauty, a brilliant window into human emotion and experience in spite of (or in fact, because of) its brevity.

Taking up the mantle of Milton Crane's classic volume, Scott offers an entirely new selection of stories, ranging from America's earliest history to the present and featuring more women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ writers, as well as a wider array of genres (fantasy, science fiction, horror). The result is a truly great selection of the best writing America has to offer.