Short Story Collections

THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2022 edited by John Joseph Adams and Rebecca Roanhorse (Black Sun) offers their choice of twenty outstanding science fiction and fantasy stories for the year. I was excited to sample several authors who were new to me and also to note the number of female authors who were included, like Elizabeth Bear, Meg Elison, Peng Shepherd (The Cartographers), and Maria Dong (whose forthcoming book titled Liar, Dreamer, Thief is already getting much buzz). The stories, like “I was a Teenage Space Jockey” or “The Cloud Lake Unicorn” or “Let All the Children Boogie” were entertaining and imaginative and often rather literary. If you like the science fiction genre, be sure to also look for past collections gathered by Gardner Dozois annually since the mid-1980s.  

THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE 2022 edited by Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins) and Steph Cha contains twenty short stories published the previous year which they consider the best examples of mystery and suspense. Topics range from a girl detective to a serial killer sociopath to crime/time travel. Authors include Chicago native Tracy Clark, S.A. Cosby, Lauren Groff and many others. The tales I sampled were a bit dark relative to the cozier mysteries which I usually read, but they had me guessing and engaged. A long list of Honorable Mentions as well as some descriptive Contributor Notes are included. Either of these collections is worth perusing, particularly if you are someone who is looking for a well-written, but short, contribution to a favorite genre. As Cha notes in his introduction, “we read to get educated and feel connected as well as to escape and forget.”