There is a hot new name in American short fiction in 1989 and it is Rick Bass. With his fiction debut, The Watch, Bass offers a first-rate collection of ten stories that brings fresh imagination, excitement and promise. stories from this collection have won inclusion in various "year’s best" anthologies, and in my opinion rank at the very top of this year’s short fiction.

Even his personal story ignites imagination: he quit a career in geology about five years ago and, lacking funds for a formal education, taugh thimself to write. A Southerner with roots in Texas and Mississippi, he is now a caretaker for a ranch in Montana and well on his way to a successful literary career. How many of us harbor the desire, sometimes secret, sometimes not, for such a dramatic and romantic leap into the writing world. But he did it; he took the risk, took the painful cut in material living standard; and it has paid the dividend of this new book.

Bass’s southern background shows in the settings, moods and characters: most stories are set in Texas and Mississippi, with the balance in Montana and Utah. Nature is prominent in the stories, and most are grounded in the outdoors. His experience in and affection for the outdoors shine through like a sunrise in the bayou. these are classic stories of initiation, change, freedom, bondage, madness, guilt, love, trouble. He delivers, without dialect, in the straightforward and unadorned style which is a modern hallmark, but his stories have a greater vitality, passion and sense of joy and humor than in, say, the minimalist mode of other noted contemporary short fiction writers.

A dominating aspect is Bass’s use of surprise. Frequently, this flows from the idisyncracies of offbeat characters or their unexpected actions. It gives a stimulation and a sense of anticipation to ehs tories: you’re never quite certain what surprise the next paragraph may bring. Yet, Bass makes us accept even the most bizarre of characters or circumstances as believable. Consider "The Watch," the title story, which may be America’s best story of the past year: A 77-year old man, Buzbee, and his 63-year old son, Hollingsworth, live together in a remote grocery deep in the bayou country. The store has no customers, and its shelves are stacked with ancient and rusting tins. (The men have supported themselves by selling off their land to timber cutters.) Buzbee runs away and lives like a wild animal in a deserted yellow fever community. He entices black women, who have been abused by their men, to join him at his primitive camp. Buzbee keeps them naked and feeds them alligators and catfish he catches by handf rom the bayou and strings up in trees at the camp. He has regained his virility. Hollingsworth publishes a $1,000 reward for his missing father and persuades a man, who happens by the store, to join him in a mad and obsessed attempt to capture Buzbee.

In "Juggernat," Bass surprises te readers with the identity of a masked semi-pro hockey player in Houston who, after scoring goals, beats his chest and bellows, "I am in LOVE." Bass even surprised himself with that line. He said in an interview on NPR: "I couldn’t believe that line; I just laughed when I wrote it."

In "Mexico," Kirby and his wife, Tricia, a young couple who’ve been handed oil wealth by a relative, have built a swimming pool in their front yard and dumped an old VW in it as a habitat for their pet fish, a bass named Shack.

Rick Bass is a storyteller in the southern tradition, with an eye for colorful and imaginative characters, but he has a contemporary voice and style. No doubt, that combination will gather national recognition. Read this book for reat fun and entertainment and to see the emergence of a bright new talent.

With two prize-winning novels behind her, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become a formidable voice in contemporary West African literature. She is a true storyteller with a gift for language and a literary style that is almost imperceptible; it is only after reading at a breathless pace that we become aware of Adichie’s subtle craftsmanship.  

Most of the 12 stories in The Thing Around Your Neck focus on men and women who travel between Africa and the United States. Nigeria is the place where most of Adichie’s characters live, leave and long to return, while the U.S. is a place of promise, new beginnings and ultimate disappointments.

The title story depicts a Nigerian girl who immigrates to the U.S. and quickly finds herself suffering from a suffocating sense of loneliness. Even after she falls in love with an American, she feels the pull of her homeland, and a death in the family threatens the fragile sense of place she has established. In “Imitation,” a wife and mother finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she hears that her husband has brought his girlfriend to live in their Lagos home. Both stories suggest that there is no sense of permanence for an immigrant.

The majority of Adichie’s subjects are young women who must reach beyond their social class at moments of crisis. In “A Private Moment,” a Christian medical student seeks shelter with a poor Muslim woman during a religious riot and offers her medical assistance. In “The Arranged Marriage,” an assimilated husband forbids his sheltered wife, newly arrived from Lagos, to make familiar dishes from home.  

If there is a fault in this collection, it is that some of the immigration stories seem a little too formulaic. The more successful stories are the ones where the fixed points of the immigration narrative are abandoned and the action flows in a more unexpected way. In “The Headstrong Historian,” Adichie pays homage to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, putting a provocative spin on one of Africa’s most celebrated novels about the influences of colonialism. Adichie has been called the literary daughter of Achebe and this fine collection shows how a daughter can continue the legacy of the father.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Fans of Stephen King’s short fiction should be grateful he was selected to edit the 2007 Best American Short Stories. That assignment rekindled his enthusiasm for the form, and the result is this richly varied collection of 13 tales that display his mastery of horror fiction.

Published originally in magazines as disparate as The New Yorker and Playboy, the stories touch on all aspects of the genre, from heart – pounding thrillers ("The Gingerbread Girl" and "A Very Tight Place") to tales of the supernatural ("Harvey’s Dream" and "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates"). The most moving story in the collection is "The Things They Left Behind," which describes an insurance company employee at the World Trade Center who’s lucky enough to miss work on 9/11. When belongings of his deceased co – workers begin mysteriously turning up in his apartment, he’s forced to come to terms with his loss.

There’s no writer better than King at creating a story that will prickle the hairs on the back of the neck. One of those is "N.," (previously unpublished) a psychiatrist’s account of an obsessive – compulsive patient whose discovery of a Stonehenge – like collection of stones in a Maine field leads to tragedy. Another is "The Cat From Hell," the chilling story of a murderous feline and the hit man hired to kill him. King’s stories are not without their touches of humor, at least of the dark variety: "Stationary Bike" will appeal to anyone who’s ever balked at the idea of mounting a piece of exercise equipment. King helpfully adds what he calls "Sunset Notes" at the conclusion of the volume. These capsules provide insight into the inspiration for the stories or describe the circumstances in which they were written, and they’re an entertaining enhancement for anyone interested in the creative process.

Just After Sunset is more than a volume to keep King’s fans occupied while they wait for his next novel. His zest for stories that expose the terror lurking under the placid surface of daily life is evident on every page. If you’re looking for some unsettling reading on a chilly November night, this book will serve quite well.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The single-author short story collection has its devoted fans. But The Boat – the first collection from Nam Le, who has established himself in the short fiction genre in venues like One Story and Zoetrope – is so engaging, so unequivocally well done, that it’s sure to appeal to any fan of good writing.

From the opening tale of The Boat, it’s hard not to be giddy: Wait, was that a brilliantly self-conscious and humorous slice of the writing life, which doubled as a poignant story about fathers and sons and family tragedies? Yes. Yes, it was. Things only get better from there. Nam Le is a chameleon of voices and points of view, leading the reader through the experiences of an older man, a disillusioned young woman, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, a teenage girl. The Boat takes us all over the world with fantastic verisimilitude.

“Tehran Calling” is the story of an American woman’s attempt to understand life while visiting a friend in Iran, while “Cartagena” is a sobering sketch of a teenage hit man in Colombia. “Halflead Bay” is an enviable achievement – an adolescent’s battle to find courage as his life begins to turn upside down, the story developed with perfect suspense. The vaguely panicked “Hiroshima” follows two girls trying to conduct life just before the bomb is dropped, and the title story offers urgency, poignancy and heartbreaking tragedy.

As if the stories themselves weren’t enough to make The Boat a worthy summer read, the skill of the author is a spectacle to behold. He manages to avoid so many pitfalls. He doesn’t shy away from stark and disturbing images, for example, yet he doesn’t rely on the grotesque to create effective writing. The reader can sense his personal investment in his work, but the stories aren’t even close to self-indulgent. It’s enough to give a person a literary crush.

Each story is dark and deep, exquisitely constructed and beautifully told. Nam Le is a studied, competent and graceful writer, and The Boat is both a contemporary treasure and a harbinger of good things to come.

Jessica Inman writes from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

It is easy to dislike every single character in Cynthia Ozick’s new collection of stories, Dictation. Her knack for drawing unprepossessing portraits extends even to two of her literary heroes – Henry James and Joseph Conrad – whose secretaries put their negligible heads together to become the pathetically unheroic heroines of the title story.

The truth about how art gets made is forcefully unbeautiful throughout this quartet of mordant tales. As far as Ozick’s own vocation goes, it becomes painfully clear in “Dictation” that an ardent, lifelong devotion to writing (or to the writer) can cramp more than the hand muscles.

Why, then, would a reader want to persevere through Ozick’s galaxy of graceless characters, for whom the only advantageous consequence of their folly is a miserable self-awareness? Must psychological realism really exact such a terrible spiritual cost? These questions are also constants in the worlds of Conrad and James.

But as with Heart of Darkness or The Turn of the Screw, to treat Ozick’s stories as merely “realistic” would be missing the point. An uncanny malaise redolent of those two masterpieces permeates Dictation, with a new, sharp comic edge. Like her great literary models, Ozick’s stories arefantasies (a point made clear by Ozick in a footnote at the end of the title story). They could almost be called ghost stories, except that in all four cases the poor ghosts still walk the earth, as fatally obscure amanuensis, ancient Yiddish actor, cunningly naive Italian chambermaid and lunatic linguist. The predicament in each tale is nothing more or less than a haunting, or a demonic possession, or a mischievous manipulation of events by unseen forces.

In Dictation, Cynthia Ozick literally (read the title story!) takes a page out of James’ and Conrad’s books when it comes to shedding light – a steady beam of finely wrought prose – on the dark inner lives of seemingly ordinary human beings. To hell with realism: Ozick’s wicked fancy offers a far richer reality.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

Listen up, y’all: Katie Crouch might be new on the literary block, but don’t let the pristine white gown fool you – this is one wise, witty, heartbreaking debutante. Crouch’s heroine, Sarah Walters, introduces us to Charleston, South Carolina’s contemporary culture, which still includes Cotillion (instruction in formal dance, etiquette and social skills that the South continues to hold dear, like saying hello to perfect strangers on the street) in sharp-as-bougainvillea-thorns prose.

But Sarah and her fellow “Camellia Girls” must deal with more than white gloves and sweaty boys treading on their toes while attempting the foxtrot. These modern debutantes get accepted to Ivy League schools and get involved in and addicted to alcohol, drugs and bad men. They move to New York City and party, sleep around, get sick and sometimes even get clean, but they also remember their roots, and they’re there for each other and for their families when it, inevitably, all falls apart.

Occasionally allowing us glimpses of the inner lives of her fellow debutantes, Sarah Walters has a fresh and winning voice, and Crouch easily maintains the reader’s interest in her funny, painful journey all the way to the last page despite the lack of a conventionally laid-out plot. Girls in Trucks is not exactly experimental fiction – it’s told in the linked-short-story format used in books like The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing – but it’s not your grandmother’s Southern saga either.

When Sarah returns to Charleston after tragedy strikes, nothing much has changed on the surface, but then nothing is what she thought it was in the first place, including her own mother or the other women in her life. These steel magnolias have plenty of rust, but they’re all doing their best, and Sarah discovers that her best just might have come from the very place she’s tried so hard to get away from.

Girls in Trucks is an exceptional, stylish debut from a refreshing new voice in fiction. An invitation to the ball has been issued, and I strongly suggest you attend.

Southerner Kristy Kiernan is a founder of The Debutante Ball, a blog featuring debut authors.