Ben Marcus, one of the most innovative and vital writers of this generation, delivers a stellar anthology of the best short fiction being written today in America. In New American Stories, the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story. In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Nothing less than the American short story...

In a parched southern California of the near future, Luz, once the poster child for the country’s conservation movement, and Ray, an army deserter turned surfer, are squatting in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Most “Mojavs,” prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water, and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise. For the moment, the couple’s fragile love, which somehow blooms in this arid place, seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. Heading east, they...

Winner of the 2013 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” fiction writers of 2012 NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more… Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the...