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posted: December 13, 2025
tl;dr: Lauren Groff well-deservedly becomes the first guest editor of the O. Henry and BASS series...
With the inclusion of a story-in-translation in The Best American Short Stories 2024 (BASS), the evolutions of the formats of the BASS and O. Henry anthologies have ended up in the same place: stories that are published in North American but written anywhere, that may have originally been written in a language other than English, with final selections made by a guest editor. In general, in the past, I preferred the O. Henry series when it was edited by Laura Furman, who consistently held to a high quality standard. Now that the formats are the same I suspect my preference will vary from year to year. This year, 2024, I’d rate them about the same: both are worth reading.
Lauran Groff also becomes the first guest editor for both series, having edited last year’s volume of the O. Henry series. She is a worthy choice. Not only has she written short stories that I’ve enjoyed in prior anthologies, such as 2010’s BASS, but as an editor she judges stories on their merits as literature, rather than exhibiting strong bias, political leanings, or genre preferences in her selections. You can’t tell much about her from her selections other than that she loves the short story form.
Here are my favorite stories in The Best American Short Stories 2024:
“Seeing Through Maps” by Madeline ffitch: My favorite story in the 2024 BASS was also my second-favorite story in the 2024 O.Henry volume, a rare example of overlap between the two. 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.
“Mall of America” by Suzanne Wang: Technically this is a science fiction story, as it utilizes technology that mostly exists now but which hasn’t yet been deployed in quite the manner described in the story. But it is really a story about the immigrant experience in America, loneliness, and cultural clash. It is at times humorous, poignant, and tragic, and it kept my interest heightened throughout.
“Privelege” by Jim Shepard: This story is a based-in-truth imagining of how certain people may have experienced a very real event, the Johnstown flood of 1889. Class differences definitely played a role in that disaster, especially the events leading up to it. The author brings those differences to light in compelling fashion in this story.
Other short stories that I enjoyed included Allegra Hyde’s “Democracy in America” and Daniel Mason’s “A Case Study”.