Author name: Daniel Haeusser

Ten years ago marked the centennial anniversary of The Best American Short Stories annual series of anthologies, first published by Small, Maynard & Company and now released by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It took one hundred years, but that anniversary was also the birth of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (BASFF) spin-off series under the editorialship of John Joseph Adams. (In contrast, the crime/mystery/suspense genre had already gotten its own series starting in 1997.)  The decade of volumes since its inception has seen a diverse range of annual guest editors for BASFF, starting with Joe Hill in 2015 through Nnedi Okorafor for the latest 2025 volume. Each year the guest editors bring their own unique perspectives and tastes to the collection but work within a system with Adams to fit the overall series. And that overall series has a particular perspective itself, one attuned to the more mainstream literary auspices of The Best American Short Stories parent series. Thus, as with any “Best of” anthology, a reader is going to get a rather limited and by necessity somewhat personalized collection of stories that align with the editor’s tastes and the artistic viewpoints of the publisher/series. This is all to say that though there are a host of various “Best of” anthologies each year, it really does pay for short fiction fans to read a wide range of them, particularly if one isn’t keeping up with all the short fiction publication outlets through the year.