The Best Short Stories 2021

INTRODUCTION

When I first read these stories, my beloved father had just died. It is still difficult to write died. Grief was a cruel kind of education. It made life become both unbearably pointless and unbearably precious, and I wish I could say that reading these stories brought succor. Nothing did my grief was raw and raging but these stories brought a reminder of how the emotions I was feeling had all been felt before. I briefly wondered whether reading through sorrow would scar my choices, cause me to be drawn only to the darkest stories, or, in an emotional revolt, to the lightest. Almost all the short-listed stories I read were accomplished, and in thinking of which to select, I asked myself: which story has remained with me?

I am drawn, in general, to stories that feel genuine, that leave me convinced. Gimmicks bore me, as does cleverness for its own sake, for we can get that in other, better-suited forms than fiction. I am drawn to a quality I call heart, a sense that the story matters and has meaning. But matters to whom? To the writer, to the story s own imaginative world.

I think of the best fiction as art that sometimes brings news. The stories here succeed as art, in their ability to be both timeless and also of the moment, in their care with language, and they all also bring news.

When I was first published in the United States, I was wary of readers who told me that my work brought news, because I chafed at the way that fiction by people like me, people from Africa and Asia and Latin America, from the parts of the world on the periphery of economic power, was often read as anthropology rather than literature. The idea of fiction bringing news can still be diminishing, in particular contexts and specific power relationships, but I understand now that all good fiction brings some kind of news, even if news we have heard before.

I was particularly charmed by Things We Worried About When I Was Ten by David Rabe, which felt so

Daphne Palasi Andreades
“Brown Girls"

David Means
“Two Nurses, Smoking"

Sindya Bhanoo
“Malliga Homes"

Crystal Wilkinson
“Endangered Species: Case 47401"

Alice Jolly
“From Far Around They Saw Us Burn"

David Rabe
“Things We Worried About When I Was Ten"

Karina Sainz Borgo, translated by Elizabeth Bryer
“Scissors"

Jamel Brinkley
“Witness"

Tessa Hadley
“The Other One"

Adachioma Ezeano
“Becoming the Baby Girl"

Anthony Doerr
“The Master’s Castle"

Tiphanie Yanique
“The Living Sea" 

Joan Silber
“Freedom from Want"

Jowhor Ile
“Fisherman’s Stew"

Emma Cline
“White Noise"

Asali Solomon
“Delandria"

Ben Hinshaw
“Antediluvian"

Caroline Albertine Minor, Translated by Caroline Waight
“Grief’s Garden"

Jianan Qian
“To the Dogs"

Sally Rooney
“Color and Light"

Edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Jenny Minton Quigley, Series Editor

"Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction." --The Atlantic Monthly