Viet Thanh Nguyen Guest-Edits 'The Best American Short Stories 2026': 20 Stories of Love and Longing Chosen From Thousands, Published October 20
The Best American Short Stories 2026, the latest volume of the long-running annual anthology, was published on October 20 by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, with Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen as guest editor. Nguyen chose 20 stories from thousands published over the past year. Contributors include Aimee Bender, Nathan Englander, Louise Erdrich, Sigrid Nunez, George Saunders, Akhil Sharma, Vu Tran and Paul Yoon. The publisher says love lies at the heart of the volume — stories Nguyen calls "so good that they may be bad for you," with characters who feel "heartbreakingly true." The paperback runs 352 pages and is priced at $18.99; Nicole A. Lamy is the series editor.
Nguyen's public body of work has largely engaged war, memory and the refugee experience; for this anthology he went looking for something else: love and longing. A San Francisco newspaper profile published on October 25 noted a Bay Area homecoming angle: Nguyen earned both his undergraduate degree and his doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of the English classes of 1992 and 1997.
Nguyen was born in 1971 in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam. His family arrived in the United States as refugees in 1975 and eventually settled in San Jose, California, where his parents ran a Vietnamese grocery store. He is now a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015), won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into an HBO limited series; he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：阮文清（右）2024年8月24日在 Washington 出席国会图书馆全国图书节对谈（资料图，中为作家 Ayana Mathis、左为主持人 Eric Deggans）。照片：Elaina Finkelstein／国会图书馆，CC0，经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: Viet Thanh Nguyen (right) at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., August 24, 2024 (file photo; center: Ayana Mathis; left: moderator Eric Deggans). Photo by Elaina Finkelstein / Library of Congress, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
