“Like democracy, when it works, the most compelling fiction often responds to the deeper implications of world events slowly, sometimes taking years to articulate the incomprehensible, the unsaid—perhaps even the unsayable,” writes editor Lex Williford in the foreword of the second edition of this short story anthology. The first edition published in 1999 captures the world at the end of a millennium, while this 2007 edition includes voices that “have just begun to articulate the new questions arising from the first decade of this new millennium.” Featuring the work of writers such as Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Edward P. Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, and Leslie Marmon Silko, this excellent range of fifty stories was selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists, making this an essential anthology for all readers and writers of contemporary fiction.
