Description

Since the series' inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY, published in 2000 brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century.

In this SDG we will read all of these stories and discuss what makes them the best, how each explored aspects of the human condition, and whether each story continues to speak to us in the first 20 years of the 21st Century.

Weekly Topics

Week 1: Zelig by Benjamin Rosenblatt, The Silver Dish by Saul Bellow, My Dead Brother Comes to America by Alexander Godin, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers by Stanley Elkin.
Week 2: A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell, Christmas Gift by Robert Penn Warren, The Hitch Hikers by Eudora Welty, and Miami-New York by Martha Gelhorn.
Week 3: Here We Are by Dorothy Parker, That in Allepppo Once... by Vladimir Nabokov, Crazy Sunday by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Golden Honeymoon by Ring Lardner.
Week 4: That Evening Sun Go Down by William Faulkner, Verona: A Young Woman Speaks by Harold Brodkey, Roses, Rhododendron by Alice Adams, and Wild Plums by Grace Stone Coates
Week 5: Little Selves by Mary Lerner, Double Birthday by Willa Cather, Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan, and The German Refugee by Bernard Malamud
Week 6: The Other Woman by Sherwood Anderson, Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver, Gestering by John Updike, Janus by Ann Beattie.
Week 7: The Farmer's Children by Elizabeth Bishop, The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall, The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick and In the Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark
Week 8: Birth Mates by Gish Jen, The Killers by Ernest Hemingway, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates, and Theft by Katherine Anne Porter.
Week 9: Blood-Burning Moon by Jean Tomer, Bright and Morning Star by Richard Wright, Proper Library by Carolyn Ferrell, Gold Coast by James Alan McPherson
Week 10: Soon by Pam Durban, The Half-skinned Steer by Annie Proulx, The Interior Castle by Jean Stafford, The Second Tree From the Corner by E.B. White
Week 11: The Peach Stone by Paul Horgan, The Resemblance Between a Violin Case ad a Coffin by Tennessee Williams, The Country Husband by John Cheever, You're Ugly, Too by Laurie Moore
Week 12: I Want to Live by Thom Jones, Greenleaf by Flannery O'Connor, The Rotifer by Mary Ladd Gavell and How We Live Now by Susan Sontag
Week 13: Defender of the Faith by Philip Roth, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Death of a Favorite by J.F. Powers and The Best Girlfriend You Never Had by Sam Houston
Week 14: The Key by Isaac Beshevis Singer, City of Churches by Donald Barthelme, How to Win by Rosellen Brown and Meneseteung by Alice Munro