The Best Short Stories of 1920, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

1920 was a year America forgot its sorrows and reached for something new. This collection, edited by the era's most discerning anthologist Edward J. O'Brien, gathers the finest short fiction from that pivotal moment - stories written by authors who witnessed the old world die and had to invent new ways of seeing. Sherwood Anderson appears here, his deceptively simple tales of small-town longing anticipating everything Hemingway would make famous. Other names, less famous today, prove equally vital: writers experimenting with narrative voice, with the economics of attention, with what a story could hold in its brief span. The American short story was becoming, in these pages, something distinct from the European tale - more clipped, more obsessed with epiphany, more willing to end on unresolved tension. These are stories about people on the edge of change: young women leaving for the city, veterans unable to speak of what they saw, couples discovering that love has become incomprehensible. This is America at the exact moment it stopped looking backward. For readers who believe a story can contain a whole life in fifteen pages, this anthology offers a masterclass in compression and intensity.