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posted: October 26, 2025
tl;dr: An above-average collection whose overall narrative arc I was unable to detect...
Both of the short story anthologies I read every year, the O. Henry Prize Winners stories and the Best American Short Stories, use a guest editor to make the final selection of which stories to include. Sometimes those guest editors overtly warp the selections to satisfy their own political, ideological, genre, or identity biases.
That bias is thankfully not detectable in the selections made by guest editor Amor Towles in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners. This is an above-average collection of short stories which starts out with three very good stories and one great story. I thought I was headed towards the best short story anthology ever, but some of the stories included did not resonate with this reader. The volume does close with five strong selections, so the overall average is higher than usual.
In the introductory remarks the point is made that Amor Towles has ordered the stories so that they have a narrative arc that approximates a novel. This reader was unable to detect what drove the ordering however. When it was explained by the series editor at the end, it was news to me: I completely missed it. For this reader, ordering by alphabetical author’s last name would have been fine.
That said, here are the stories I enjoyed the most:
“Orphans” by Brad Felver This is the best short story I’ve read in several years. It’s a wonderfully melancholy story about grief and loss, and three people who ultimately find what they need, which is each other. It turns out that it is a companion to Felver’s story “Queen Elizabeth”, which I enjoyed in the 2018 O. Henry Prize Stories. I think I need to seek out more works by that author.
“Seeing Through Maps” by Madeline ffitch: I doubt (hope?) there aren’t people who live like the two main characters portrayed in this story, but there very well may be. I give the author much credit for dreaming up these characters and a storyline that forces them to interact with each other and the rest of society.
“Mobilization” by Allegra Hyde: I’m a sucker for a good, dystopian, end of the world story, and Hyde delivers a magical, mystical one. Were the catastrophe that underlies Hyde’s story to actually happen, the events would not unfold in the manner described, but that’s what makes art interesting.
With the O. Henry Prize stories anthology series now using a guest editor, the final point of differentiation between its format and the BASS format is the inclusion of stories in translation in the O. Henry Prize series. There is only one translated story in the 2024 O. Henry volume. If the BASS series were to include translated stories, then the main differences between the two anthologies would be their names and histories. I still recommend both series.