Anthologies

“With so many great authors contributing to this fiction collection . . . it doesn’t take detecting skills to discover the gem. And every story dazzles . . . These stories, in prose both elegant and compelling, get to the heart of why people do what they do.” — USA Today The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 will be selected by “writing powerhouse” ( USA Today ) Laura Lippman. With her popular Tess Monaghan series and her New York Times best-selling standalone novels, Lippman has greatly expanded the boundaries of modern mystery fiction and psychological suspense.

From the editor of the celebrated anthology Goodbye to All That : Writers on Loving and Leaving New York , comes a new collection of original essays on what keeps writers tethered to New York City. The “charming” ( The New York Times ) first anthology Goodbye to All That —inspired by Joan Didion’s classic essay about loving and leaving Manhattan—chronicled the difficulties and disappointments inherent in loving New York, while Never Can Say Goodbye is a celebration of the city that never sleeps, in the tradition of E.B. White’s classic essay, “Here Is New York.” Featuring contributions from such luminaries as Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, Nick Flynn, Adelle Waldman, Phillip Lopate, Owen King, Amy Sohn, and many others, this collection of essays is a must-have for every lover of New York—regardless of whether or not you call the Big Apple home.

Thirty-six major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided America—including Anthony Doerr, Ann Patchett, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Hector Tobar, Joyce Carol Oates, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Russo, Eula Bliss, Karen Russell, and many more America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city, and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. From Appalachia to the Rust Belt and down to rural Texas, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest stretches to unimaginable chasms. Whether the cause of this inequality is systemic injustice, the entrenchment of racism in our culture, the long war on drugs, or immigration policies, it endangers not only the American Dream but our very lives. In Tales of Two Americas , some of the literary world’s most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people.

Spanning politics and art, music and baseball, Cuba on the Verge is a timely look at a society’s profound transformation—from inside and out Change looms in Cuba. Just ninety miles from United States shores yet inaccessible to most Americans until recently, Cuba fascinates as much as it confounds. Images of the Buena Vista Social Club, wild nights at the Tropicana, classic cars, and bearded rebels clinching cigars only scrape the surface of Cuba’s complex history and legacy. As the US and Cuba move toward the normalization of diplomatic relations after an epic fifty-six-year standoff, we find ourselves face-to-face with one of the few places in the world that has been off limits to most Americans. We know that Cuba is changing, but from what and into what? And what does this change mean for the Cuban people as well as for the rest of the world? Standing on both sides of the divide, twelve of our most celebrated writers investigate this period of momentous transition in Cuba on the Verge . These essays span the spectrum, from Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s story of being among the last generation of Cubans to be raised under Fidel Castro to Patricia Engel’s look at how Cuba’s capital has changed through her years of riding across it with her taxi driver friend; from The New Yorker ’s Jon Lee Anderson (who traveled with President Obama on the first trip to Cuba by an American president since the twenties) on being a foreigner in Cuba during the Special Period to Francisco Goldman on the Tropicana, then and now, to Leonardo Padura on the religion that is Cuban baseball. Cuba on the Verge is the definitive account of—and a unique glimpse at—a moment of upheaval and reinvention whose effects promise to reverberate across years and nations.

The May/June 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review includes the fourth annual "Nature's Nature" special feature edited by David Baker, KR Poetry editor. Authors in this issue include: Dilruba Ahmed, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jill Bialosky, Liz Countryman, Marsha de la O, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Patricia Engel, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Sylvia Legris, Dana Levin, Paul Lindholdt, Charley Mull, Alice Notley, Debra Nystrom, Kathleen Ossip, Bruce Smith, Monica Sok, Tess Taylor, Erin O. White.

Now celebrating its centenary, this prestigious annual anthology gathers the twenty best new short stories published in the previous year. An Anchor Books Original. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019 --continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence--contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. The winning writers are an impressive mix of celebrated names and new, emerging voices. Their stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Jamaica, Houston, and Hawaii to a Turkish coal mine and a drought-ridden Northwestern farm, and feature an engaging array of characters, including Laotian refugees, a Colombian kidnap victim, an eccentric Irish schoolteacher, a woman haunted by a house that cleans itself, and a strangely long-lived rabbit. The uniformly breathtaking stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. List of 2019 winners: Tessa Hadley John Keeble Moira McCavana Rachel Kondo Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Stephanie Reents Alexia Arthurs Valerie O’Riordan Patricia Engel Kenan Orhan Sarah Hall Bryan Washington Isabella Hammad Weike Wang Caoilinn Hughes Souvankham Thammavongsa Liza Ward Doua Thao Alexander MacLeod John Edgar Wideman Prize Jurors 2019:  Lynn Freed, Elizabeth Strout, Lara Vapynar