Best American Short Stories 2026

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and many more. He is a professor at the University of Southern California Nicole A. Lamy was the books editor of the Boston Globe, where she expanded books coverage, including a reader advice column called Match Book, which she subsequently wrote for the New York Times Book Review. In addition to book reviews and features she has written about food, photography, and parenting among other topics for the Globe, the Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, and the American Scholar.