The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. The guest editor then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected – and most popular – of its kind. This special e-book sampler contains eleven selections from the 2011 editions. From The Best American Short Stories® edited by Geraldine Brooks: Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman Phantoms by Steven Millhauser From The Best American Essays® edited by Edwidge Danticat: Chapels by Pico Iyer There Are Things Awry Here by Lia Purpura From The Best American Mystery Stories edited by Harlan Coben: A Crime of Opportunity by Ernest J. Finney From The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Mary Roach: The Killer in the Pool by Tim Zimmermann, Jr. The Whole Fracking Enchilada by Sandra Steingraber From The Best American Sports Writing edited by Jane Leavy: The Surfing Savant by Paul Solotaroff New Mike, Old Christine by Nancy Hass From The Best American Travel Writing edited by Sloane Crosley: My Year at Sea by Christopher Buckley Miami Party Boom by Emily Witt
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Brooks married author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup, France, in 1984. They had two sons– Nathaniel and Bizuayehu–and two dogs. They used to divide their time between their homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Sydney, Australia.
