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The Best American Short Stories 2024

"This abundance led to a volume of robust stories with the nerve to push against narrative expectations. The Best American Short Stories 2024 boasts a collection of twenty stories that 'buzz with their own strange logic.' A man becomes a tourist in his own hometown. An unemployed jeweler sails in an antique slave ship. A therapist decides to call an ex-patient years after their last session."-- Provided by publisher

The Best American Essays 2024

Wesley Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and acclaimed New York times critic, selects 20 essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Our Evenings

"This piercing novel from "one of our most gifted writers" (The Boston Globe) is a portrait of modern England through the lens of one man's acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with race and class, art and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence. Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I'd lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice. Dave Win is thirteen years old in 1961, when he first goes to stay with the wealthy Hadlows, who sponsor his scholarship at a boarding school where their son Giles is his classmate. This weekend of board games with complicated rules, multicourse meals, and conversation about theater and modern art--so different from the quiet life he and his mother share in their small apartment--opens up heady new possibilities for Dave, even as it exposes him to Giles's envy and brutality. As Our Evenings unfolds over the next sixty years, the two boys' lives will diverge dramatically, Dave a talented actor, whose queerness and Burmese heritage move him in and out of the margins, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous right-wing politician. This novel is Dave Win's account of his life: as a schoolboy and student, discovering love, sex, and gay culture while his single mother navigates her own secret affair with another woman; as a lovely, young actor in 1970s London and on the road with an experimental theatre company; and as a married man, whose late-life romance infuses his older years with a new sense of happiness and security, even as Giles' conservative vision for England starts to poke perilous holes in that stability. This is "one of the best novelists at work today" (The Wall Street Journal) tracing a luminous line from our past to our present through one beautiful, painful, joyful, deeply observed life."-- Provided by publisher

Women in the Valley of the Kings

"The never-before-told story of the women Egyptologists who paved the way of exploration in Egypt and created the basis for Egyptology. The history of Egyptology is often told as yet one more grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and the precious artifacts for their competing homelands. But that is only half of the story. During the Golden Age of Exploration, there were women working and exploring before Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Before men even conceived of claiming the story for themselves, women were working in Egypt to lay the groundwork for all future exploration. In Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Kathleen Sheppard brings the untold stories of these women back into this narrative. Sheppard begins with the earliest European women who ventured to Egypt as travelers: Amelia Edwards, Jenny Lane, and Marianne Brocklehurst. Their travelogues, diaries and maps chronicled a new world for the curious. In the vast desert, Maggie Benson, the first woman granted permission to excavate in Egypt, met Nettie Gourlay, the woman who became her lifelong companion. They battled issues of oppression and exclusion and, ultimately, are credited with excavating the Temple of Mut. As each woman scored a success in the desert, she set up the women who came later for their own struggles and successes. Emma Andrews' success as a patron and archaeologist helped to pave the way for Margaret Murray to teach. Murray's work in the university led to the artists Amice Calverley's and Myrtle Broome's ability to work on site at Abydos, creating brilliant reproductions of tomb art, and to Kate Bradbury's and Caroline Ransom's leadership in critical Egyptological institutions. Women in the Valley of the Kings upends the grand male narrative of Egyptian exploration and shows how a group of courageous women charted unknown territory and changed the field of Egyptology forever."-- Provided by publisher

Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

"For decades, American politics has been plagued by a breakdown between the Democratic and Republican parties, in which victory has inevitably led to defeat, and vice versa. Both parties have lost sight of the political center of the American electorate, leading to polarization and paralysis. In Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira reveal the tectonic changes shaping the country's current political landscape that both pundits and political scientists have missed. The Democratic party, once the preserve of small towns as well as big cities and of the industrial working class and the newly immigrated, has abandoned and even actively alienated many of these voters. In this clarion and essential argument for common sense and common ground, Judis and Teixeira reveal the transformation of American politics and provide a much-needed wakeup call for Democrats and Republicans alike."-- Provided by publisher

Well Beings

"James Riley returns with another incisive and thought-provoking cultural history, turning his trenchant eye to the wellness industry that emerged in the 1970s."--inside flap

Vox Ex Machina

"By documenting how voice synthesis developed over the course of the 20th century, as well as the cultural imagination that emerged around new talking machines as they were introduced, this book shows how synthetic voices index the complicated and sometimes paradoxical relationships that people have with increasingly lifelike digital technologies."-- Provided by publisher

Stolen Pride

"An exploration of the "pride paradox" that has given the right's appeals such resonance."-- Provided by publisher

Rust Belt Union Blues

"The publicly displayed political and associational loyalties of today's workers are far different from the proclaimed affiliations of their predecessors. As Herman, an 80-year old retired steelworker, explains it, "[it's] totally different than it was back then." He continued, "you could not go to the steel mill or mine and find a guy who would vote for a Republican. It was just a given. [Workers back then] figured that there wasn't a Republican in the world who took care of the working guy." Herman's belief about politics is not unique. Through interviews and analysis of local media dating back to the 1950s, Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman find that these solidifying sentiments capture the overall picture of decades long shift in political loyalties among many kinds of American rural, white, blue-collar workers, including those who are still members of unions. What factors lie behind the realignment of political loyalties of many of today's union members? That is the fundamental question that Skocpol and Newman seek to address in Rust-Belt Union Blues. Adding new evidence and lines of argument to earlier efforts to make sense of such sharp shifts in the unionized blue-collar world, they ground their analysis of changing political loyalties-including among still-unionized workers-within a richer analysis of shifting social identities and community-based social ties. By studying one of America's most fabled twentieth-century industrial regions-the 20-county stretch of western Pennsylvania from Erie to Pittsburgh and Johnstown to Aliquippa where steel manufacturing and associated industries were once king-Skocpol and Newman attempt to understand the new conservative-inflected identities and ties that have flourished in growing vacuums left by the receding local and community presence of unions. Rust Belt Union Blues takes the focus from aggregate and national trends down to the places where life and work proceeds day by day."-- Provided by publisher

Off the Books

"A captivating debut following a cross-country road trip that will make you believe in the goodness of people, Off the Books sheds light on the power in humanity during the most troubled of times. Recent Dartmouth dropout Mei, in search of a new direction in life, drives a limo to make ends meet. Her grandfather convinces her to allow her customers to pay under the table, and before she knows it, she is working as a routine chauffeur for sex workers. Mei does her best to mind her own business, but her knack for discretion soon leads her on a life changing trip from San Francisco to Syracuse with a new client. Handsome and reserved, Henry piques Mei's interest. Toting an enormous black suitcase with him everywhere he goes, he's more concerned with taking frequent breaks than making good time on the road. When Mei discovers Henry's secret, she does away with her usual close-lipped demeanor and decides she has no choice but to confront him. What Henry reveals rocks her to her core and shifts this once casual, transactional road trip to one of moral stakes and dangerous consequences. An original take on the great American road trip, Off the Books is a beautifully crafted coming of age story that showcases the resilience of the human spirit and the power of doing the right thing. The spirit of Frazier's characters will stay with readers long after they have arrived at their destination."-- Provided by publisher

The Movement

For lovers of both Barbie and Gloria Steinem, The Movement is the first oral history of the decade that built the modern feminist movement. Through the captivating individual voices of the people who lived it, The Movement tells the intimate inside story of what it felt like to be at the forefront of the modern feminist crusade, when women rejected thousands of years of custom and demanded the freedom to be who they wanted and needed to be. This engaging history traces women's awakening, organizing, and agitating between the years of 1963 and 1973, when a decentralized collection of people and events coalesced to create a spontaneous combustion. From Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, to the underground abortion network the Janes, to Shirley Chisholm's presidential campaign and Billie Jean King's 1973 battle of the sexes, Bingham artfully weaves together the fragments of that explosion person by person, bringing to life the emotions of this personal, cultural, and political revolution. Artists and politicians, athletes and lawyers, Black and white, The Movement brings readers into the rooms where these women insisted on being treated as first class citizens, and in the process, changed the fabric of American life.

The Message

"Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories -- our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking -- expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist -- and named for Nubian pharaoh -- Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the "steampunk" city of "old traditions and new machinery," meeting with strangers and dining with local writers who quiz him in French about African American politics. But everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and touches the ocean that carried his ancestors away in chains -- and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream. Back in the USA he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he explores a different mythology, this one enforced on its subjects by the state. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates's own books and discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalized by the stories they discovered in the "racial reckoning" of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths and stories of the community -- a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. In Palestine, the longest of the essays, he discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we've accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians -- the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him -- and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating."-- Provided by publisher

The Instrumentalist

"A stunning debut novel of music, intoxication, and betrayal inspired by the true story of Anna Maria della Pietà, a Venetian orphan and violin prodigy who studied under Antonio Vivaldi and ultimately became his star musician--and his biggest muse."-- Publisher description

I Have No Enemies

"Perry Link and Wu Dazhi present a wide-ranging intellectual biography of Liu Xiaobo, the deceased Nobel Peace Prize winner, alongside a recent history of dissent in China. Link and Wu follow Liu's upbringing among early Republican intellectuals, to his deep immersion in classical Chinese poetry and philosophy in graduate school, to his involvement in prodemocracy movements in China, to his persecution, imprisonment, and death in captivity. They also provide an absorbing and up-close, inside look at the second major undulation of contemporary China's democracy movement-the "Citizens' Movement" of 2002-2008, culminating in Charter '08-which has not yet been chronicled and explained either inside or outside of China in a comprehensive way. Most accounts of dissent in China, to date, of course, have concentrated on the street demonstrations of the late 1980s that ended with the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. This book carries the story forward in absorbing detail up until recent times. In this respect, the book is a history of a generation of Chinese intellectuals as much as a history of one man's influence. It is a fascinating portrait of Liu Xiaobo's iconic life and times in a rapidly changing and increasingly authoritarian Chinese state."-- Provided by publisher

Homeland

"A groundbreaking argument on how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of democracy down to what we watched on TV--by an acclaimed n+1 writer."-- Provided by publisher

Frighten the Horses

"A textured, sharply written memoir about coming of age in the fourth decade of one's life and embracing one's truest self in a world that demands gender fit in neat boxes. From the outside, Oliver Radclyffe spent four decades living an immensely privileged, beautifully composed life. As the daughter of two well-to-do British parents and the wife of a successful man from an equally privileged family, Oliver played the parts expected of him. He checked off every box-marriage, children (four), a white-picket fence surrounding a stately home in Connecticut, and a golden retriever. But beneath the shiny veneer, Oliver was desperately trying to stay afloat as he struggled to maintain a facade of normalcy. And between his hair falling out and incapacitating mood swings, Oliver realized the life of a trapped housewife was not one he was ever meant to live. Embarking on a fraught, challenging journey of self-discovery, Oliver navigates the end to the beautiful lie of his previous life-a life he could not continue if he wanted to survive. The story of a flawed, fascinating, gorgeously queer man, Frighten the Horses introduces Oliver Radclyffe as a witty, arresting, and unforgettable voice."-- Provided by publisher

Dr. Calhoun's
Mousery

"It was the strangest of experiments. What began as a utopian environment, where mice had sumptuous accommodations, all the food and water they could want, and were free from disease and predation, turned into a mouse hell. Science writer and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin reintroduces readers to the bizarre and compelling work of rodent researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. In this enthralling tale of Calhoun and his work, Dugatkin shows how an ecologist-turned-psychologist-turned-futurist became a science rock star embedded in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s, courted by city planners, written about in everything from Tom Wolfe's hard-hitting novels to the children's book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, invited to meetings with the Royal Society and the Pope, and taken seriously when he proposed a worldwide cybernetic brain. Readers see how Calhoun's experiments-rodent apartment complexes like "Mouse Universe 25"-led to his concept of "behavioral sinks" with real effects on public policy discussions of his day. Overpopulation in Calhoun's mouse complexes led to loss of sex drive, absence of maternal care, and a population of automatons, in Calhoun's words, "capable only of the most simple behaviors compatible with physiological survival." Calhoun-and the others who followed his work-saw this mouse population collapse as a harbinger for an overpopulated human world. Calhoun saw future rodent experiments on culture and cooperation as one solution. Including previously unpublished archival research and informed by interviews with Calhoun's family and former colleagues, Dugatkin offers a probing, fast-moving account of an intriguing scientific figure and in so doing, examines the changing nature of scientific research and the lasting impact of Dr. Calhoun's mousery."-- Provided by publisher

Do Something

"An evocative coming of age memoir -- the story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demi-monde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s."-- Provided by publisher

Alexander at the End of the World

This biography of Alexander the Great's final years focuses on his seven-year journey through the unknown eastern borderlands of the Persian empire to reach Afghanistan and fulfill his quest to rule the world.

The Volcano Daughters

"A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador's brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren't yet done telling their stories. El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country's wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she's been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator--a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She'll help foresee the future of the country. In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she's never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator's regime, but they're no match for El Gran Pendejo's cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she's unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment. Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations."-- Provided by publisher

Tablets Shattered

"From esteemed journalist and scholar Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in."-- Provided by publisher

The Sons of El Rey

"Ernesto and Elena Vega arrive in Mexico City where Ernesto works on a construction site until he is discovered by a local lucha libre trainer. At a time when luchadores-Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes-were treated as daredevils or rockstars, Ernesto finds fame as El Rey Coyote, rapidly gaining name recognition across Mexico. Years later, in East Los Angeles Freddy Vega is struggling to save his father's gym while Freddy's own son Julian is searching for professional and romantic fulfillment as a Mexican American gay man refusing to be defined by stereotypes. The once larger-than-life Ernesto Vega is now dying, leading Freddy and Julian to find their own passions and discover what really happened back in Mexico. Told from alternating perspectives, Ernesto takes you from the ranches of Michoacán to the makeshift colonias and crowded sports arenas of Mexico City. Freddy describes life in the suburban streets of 1980s Los Angeles and the community their family built as Julian descends deep into the culture of hook-up apps, lucha burlesque shows, and the dark underbelly of West Hollywood, The Sons of El Rey is an intimate portrait of a family wading against time and legacy, yet always choosing the fight."-- Provided by publisher

The Seventh Veil of Salome

"1950s Hollywood: Every actress wants to be Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary woman whose story has inspired artists since ancient times. So when the film's mercurial director casts an unknown Mexican ingenue in the lead role, Vera Larios quickly becomes the talk of the town. She's also the object of envy of Nancy Hartley, a bit player whose career has stalled and who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves. Two actresses, both determined to make it in Golden Age Hollywood, a city overflowing with gossip, scandal and intrigue, make for a sizzling combination. But this is the tale of three women, for it is also the story of princess Salome, consumed with desire for the fiery prophet who foretold her stepfather Herod's doom: a woman torn between what duty decrees and the yearning of her heart. Before the curtain comes down, there will be tears and tragedy aplenty in this sexy Technicolor saga."-- Provided by publisher

The Road Is Good

"The Road Is Good is a memoir of Black immigrant identity, the coming-of-age story of Nigerian American actress Uzo Aduba, one of the stars of the television series Orange is the New Black."-- Provided by publisher