Short Stories Included
| Author | Story | Where story previously appeared |
| T. C. Boyle | "Admiral" | Harper's Magazine |
| Kevin Brockmeier | "The Year of Silence" | Ecotone |
| Karen Brown | "Galatea" | Crazyhorse |
| Katie Chase | "Man and Wife" | The Missouri Review |
| Danielle Evans | "Virgins" | Paris Review |
| Allegra Goodman | "Closely Held" | Ploughshares |
| A. M. Homes | "May We Be Forgiven" | Granta |
| Nicole Krauss | "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky" | Harper's Magazine |
| Jonathan Lethem | "The King of Sentences" | The New Yorker |
| Rebecca Makkai | "The Worst You Ever Feel" | Shenandoah |
| Steven Millhauser | "The Wizard of West Orange" | Harper's Magazine |
| Daniyal Mueenuddin | "Nawabdin Electrician" | The New Yorker |
| Alice Munro | "Child's Play" | Harper's Magazine |
| Miroslav Penkov | "Buying Lenin" | The Southern Review |
| Karen Russell | "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" | Zoetrope |
| George Saunders | "Puppy" | The New Yorker |
| Christine Sneed | "Quality of Life" | The New England Review |
| Bradford Tice | "Missionaries" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| Mark Wisniewski | "Straightaway" | The Antioch Review |
| Tobias Wolff | "Bible" | The Atlantic Monthly |
Read more about this topic: The Best American Short Stories 2008
Famous quotes containing the words short, stories and/or included:
“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
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“Under the one word “house” are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)