Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year’s Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction.

I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,  writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018,  but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.

The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher - all characters and circumstances that show us what we need to know about the lives of others.