I am just writing this story CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS, 

BATTLEBORN
2012
Claire Vaye Watkins’ searing, Nevada-set debut collection—which
includes a sixty-page novella that takes place during the 1848 Gold Rush
and a dazzling, devastating opening tale in which Watkins audaciously
blends fiction, local history, and myth with the story of father’s
involvement in the Manson Family during the late ’60s—is as starkly
beautiful, as lonesome and sinister and death-haunted, as the desert
frontier through which its stories roam. There’s an enviable fearlessness to
Watkins’ writing, a refusal to look away from the despair that lies within
the hearts of her lost and weary characters, to give them tidy trajectories or
tidy resolutions. Her landscapes are exquisitely drawn, full of lush sensory
detailing and characters stalked by the sorrows and violence of their pasts,
the parched desperation of their presents. In one particularly aching story,
a man finds a bundle of letters amid the strewn wreckage of a car crash,
and proceeds to carry on a therapeutic, and increasingly revealing, one-
sided correspondence with their owner, onto whom he superimposes the
identity of a desperate neighbor he killed decades previous. In his reverie
he remembers how nature marked the season it happened: “Late that
Spring, a swarm of grasshoppers moved though Beatty on their way to the
alfalfa fields down south. They were thick and fierce, rolling like a
thunderstorm in your head.” It’s remarkable to come across a debut
collection in which the voice, the vision, is so fully formed, so assured, but
that’s what Watkins has achieved with this exceptional work. –Dan
Sheehan, Book Marks Editor
 
 
 ALICE MUNRO, DEAR LIFE
2012
Well, this one’s not really fair. I mean, any Alice Munro collection
published in any given period of time has to automatically be on the list of
best collections of said period. (I guess what I really mean is that it’s not
really fair to other writers that Munro is such a goddamn genius.) Most of
the stories in Dear Life were previously published in The New
Yorker, Harper’s, and Granta; they all display Munro’s uncanny ability to
take a lifetime—or even generations of a single family—and shrink it into
a thirty-page text—not by spinning out event after event, but by delivering
a character so textured, and a series of moments so precise, that we can’t
help but feel we know all about them. These stories and characters are not
flashy, there’s little in the way of high concept; it’s simply that Munro
knows people, and represents them so accurately, so wisely, and so
humanely, that you can’t help but be moved. This is despite the fact that,
as Michiko Kakutani pointed out, with age, Munro has gotten a little bit
sharper in her portrayals of the common man. “Though Ms. Munro has not
become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness,
irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.” The collection also
includes a few semi-autobiographical sketches—“autobiographical in
feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”—we are told. She
writes: “I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have
to say about my own life.” They too are wonderful.
Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year after the
publication of Dear Life, in 2013; the Swedish Academy called her a
“master of the contemporary short story.” No shit. –Emily Temple, Senior
Editor
 
 

GEORGE SAUNDERS, TENTH OF
DECEMBER
2013
It can be hard to tell what historical era you’re actually living through, as
its happening. Is this the post-9/11 era or the Trump era? Or maybe we’re
really in what will one day (I hope) be labeled the Misinformation Era.
Honestly, though, this is probably the “we had a chance to save the planet
but did nothing” era, in which case, there probably won’t be historians
around in 200 years to call it anything… How ever you choose to see the
last decade of life on Planet America, it is likely some version of it appears
in George Saunders contemporary classic, Tenth of December.
This collection is as remarkable for its range of emotional registers as it is
for its formal variety. From the aching, class-conscious pathos of “Puppy,”
in which two families intersect around the possible purchase of a dog, to
the grim, neo-futurist allegory of “Escape From Spiderhead,” in which
clinical drug trials go way too far, Saunders sets his characters down in a
series of bespoke narrative dioramas, a wry and loving god forever
suspicious of the disappointments his creations engender, yet unable to
resist setting little boobytraps to see how they’ll react. With a tenderness
and generosity that catalyzes satirical clarity rather than the cloudiness of
sentimentality, Saunders lets his characters puzzle their way through the
confines of their own fictional lives, as wounded and joyous and
magnificently broken as any among us, the living.
It is a dark timeline, in which reality has outpaced satire, but at least it is a
world we have seen before, in the short stories of George Saunders.  –
Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief
 
 
 CLARICE LISPECTOR, TR.
KATRINA DODSON, ED. BENJAMIN MOSER, THE COMPLETE
STORIES
2015
It’s complicated to include a “complete stories” collection in our list for
the best of the decade, not least because Clarice Lispector has been
considered Brazil’s greatest writer more or less since 1943 when her
revolutionary debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was first published (she
was 23). But in 2012, publisher New Directions began releasing new
translations, from four different translators, of Lispector’s novels, a
concerted effort to bring her remarkable work to the attention of an
English-speaking readership. In 2015, the novels were followed by these
“Complete Stories”—86 in all, originally published between 1952 and
1979. Translated by Katrina Dodson, the collection received dazzling
reviews, establishing Lispector firmly in America’s consciousness as one
of the preeminent writers of the last century.
A Clarice Lispector story is not easy to describe; they are feminist and
absurdist, charting familial drama, love affairs, and existential surrealism,
wheeling through the preoccupatio