Reviews

The Best American Short Stories 2020 by Curtis Sittenfeld

karencarlson's review against another edition

challenging emotional medium-paced

5.0

Given how miserable 2020 was, I don’t think I could’ve handled it if this volume had been mediocre. Thankfully, I didn’t have to find out: it was a fine edition. And, I think, a special one. It read like a carefully curated collection, with four common themes – Misbehaving Men, Mythology, Biography, and Identity – appearing in various clusters of two or three in each story. The combinations kept it from being a “theme edition” – something I wouldn’t particularly want to see in BASS – yet made it more cohesive than twenty unrelated stories by a wide variety of authors would normally be.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
https://sloopie72.wordpress.com/category/writingreading/what-ive-been-reading/bass-2020/