A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor.

Andrew Sean Greer, “an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy” (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Lauren Groff follows a mother fleeing an abusive marriage with three young children in an old Dodge before morning roll call.

In Istanbul, Kenan Orhan follows a sanitation worker who secretly rescues banned violins from the rubbish to assemble an attic orchestra. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Dual Timeline: In Erin Somers’s “Ten Year Affair,” a suburban mother splits her days between kitchen routines and a vivid imaginary romance, charting the friction between domestic duty and private longing.
• Forced Proximity: Two partners in Houston navigate the fragile boundaries of family in Bryan Washington’s “Foster,” when an estranged brother in prison sends them an imperious stray cat.
• Unreliable Narrator: In Sanjena Sathian’s “Mr. Ashok’s Monument,” a cave guide begins turning to basalt rock, confronting media scrutiny and state officials eager to claim him as a living relic.
• Small Town Setting: An eccentric former athlete turned painter discovers, in Greg Jackson’s “The Hollow,” an inexplicable hidden void inside an old upstate farmhouse.
• Also by This Author: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.