The Best American Short Stories 2013

&quot;As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,&quot; writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. &quot;It's the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.&quot; <i>The Best American Short Stories 2013</i> presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world.<br><br>In &quot;Miss Lora,&quot; Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the &quot;Magic Man.&quot; Kirstin Valdez Quade's &quot;Nemecia&quot; depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham's &quot;The Tunnel&quot; is a tragic love story about a mother's declining health and her daughter's helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink's &quot;Breatharians&quot; unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents' estrangement.<br>&quot;Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one's writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,&quot; writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. &quot;Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.&quot;<br><br><br>